PosterBurner Turns 15
(Here is the link to part 1 if you missed it.)
The first custom poster we ever sold was to a guy in Boston.
It was a picture of his dog.
And I wish I could describe to you the electric thrill of that moment.
We had spent seven months building the website.
This is what the first version looked like:
We built it after work, late at night, and every weekend. Every free second we could squeeze out of the day went into making the site.
And every second of that work was instantly worth it with the first poster sale.
So we fired up our one printer, made the poster, shipped it, and prayed the customer would be happy.
And he was.
Then over the next few months we'd get a sale every three days, then every other day, and finally we got to the point where we could reliably ship a poster per day.
But what we didn't know was that each one of those posters was bringing us closer to our doom.
THE FIRST MISTAKE
When you start a business you're going to make mistakes.
You make mistakes because there is a ton of stuff you need to know, and you don't know it all yet.
But you learn.
Then there are mistakes that are just downright dumb.
And I made one of those.
I won't go into too much detail, but I messed up one line of code. That line of code set the weight of the packages we were shipping. And every poster we shipped was getting charged at the rate of 50 pounds for a couple of months.
It was a mistake that nearly ended PosterBurner before it got started.
But we survived, and made it to our first big day.
A HUGE DAY
I was at my desk working on the website when my brother bust into the room.
"You're not going to be believe this. We sold NINE posters today."
I jumped out of my chair and pumped my fist.
Nine posters! That was triple our previous record.
That was a great day.
But after that, we set our sights higher.
In the next part I'll explain how we grew enough where we needed to turn my house into a factory.
And we still have the same deal we started with when 9 posters in a day was a record.
Movie Size Posters for 19.99
And you can see how we make them here.
And if you missed part 1 of the story of how we started PosterBurner, here it is.
If you ever have any questions or need help, just let us know.
Rick @ PosterBurner
And here is the link to Part 3