StickerGiant Chats the Beginnings and Changes Along the Way as StickerGiant Has Grown
In this Stickers on the Mic episode, Andrew and Hamish sit down with John Fischer, the founder and CEO of StickerGiant. They chat how StickerGiant got started, transitioned from the Amazon of stickers into the custom sticker and label manufacturer the company is today, and what has helped the company and team continue to grow.
Want to Read it Instead? Check out the Full Transcription Below!
[music]
[00:00:31] Andrew: Hey there and welcome back to the sticker stories podcast here from the StickerGiant command center. I am Andrew, with me today is Hamish.
[00:00:42] Hamish: Yes, we've got a really good show lined up today. We've got John Fischer, CEO of StickerGiant, coming in to talk to us about founding StickerGiant. We're going to talk about entrepreneurship in general, some resources for startups and just how StickerGiant got to where it is today.
[00:01:00] Andrew: Yes indeed Hamish. Let's kick off our show right now with top of mind. We'll get right into it, top of mind today is?
[00:01:10] Hamish: The Tour de France. It's been going on, this bike race. We've been catching the end of the stages every day when we come into the office. I'm a massive cyclist so is Andrew. It's pretty big for us, an exciting week.
[00:01:24] Andrew: Our top of mind here we live in Colorado, we love bikes very very much. Hamish is an active cyclist, mountain biker. I love watching bike racing. I'm wearing today's yellow jersey our new shirts of course and Hamish resplendent in blue.
[00:01:41] Hamish: Yes, we just went through a rebrand. These are the new company colors. We've got the red StickerGiant, the new yellow and the new blue T-shirts but the whole website looks different as well and it looks pretty awesome, if we can say that about ourselves.
[00:01:53] Andrew: You can and you can check out our site which has a whole new look which is pretty cool. Then we have a blog post up on the site all about how we went through the process of coming to that new design which is very cool and you can check that out for sure if you want. But without further ado, let's make sure that we have our next segment ready after top of mind, thank you for doing that with us, everyone.
We definitely encourage you to check out some awesome bike racing in France. Today's Bastille Day which is the French national holiday and a Frenchman won the race so there's some patriotism going on there. But today's episode the theme is all about founders' stories and starting a company. We're talking about entrepreneurship et cetera. We have a very special guest today. We have the original StickerGiant himself, John Richard Fisher and he's going to walk around here through the command center here beautiful Longmont Colorado. Welcome John.
[00:02:50] John: Hello guys?
[00:02:51] Andrew: How's it going?
[00:02:52] John: The going is pretty good. Enjoying the command center. Having a little cup of coffee here in my StickerGiant cup.
[00:03:00] Andrew: Enjoying your command center the podcast. John.
[00:03:04] John: Yes.
[00:03:05] Andrew: Thank you for taking the time to be with us today for the show.
[00:03:08] John: This is fun. I've never done one of these podcasts before.
[00:03:12] Andrew: You haven't?
[00:03:14] John: No.
[00:03:14] Andrew: That's good. Let's talk a little bit just because you are the founder of StickerGiant, let's talk a little bit about how this all came to be. How did you-- Why StickerGiant?
[00:03:26] John: StickerGiant is 17 years old and I started it in my basement with just a handful of bumper stickers that I sold online. That handful grew into 26,000 individual pre-printed pre-designed stickers of every sort you could ever imagine, sports, cartoons, movies, politics, culture, everything. Then we slowly transitioned into printing and now we're 100% printing company. The actual sticker store is gone and that's how we started StickerGiant just one day at a time, 17 years now we're a 40 person company and it's a beautiful place in Longmont Colorado where we're at.
[00:04:15] Andrew: You started here in Longmont but were you at the little log cabin where I first started working actually.
[00:04:22] John: No, my very first, I started in my basement.
[00:04:26] Andrew: How did that go down?
[00:04:28] John: First, it was just like a little corner of the office. Then I had to keep moving my kids' toy boxes and stuff further and further back until they went up to the upstairs and the kids got completely kicked out of the basement. Then I ran out of the basement room and I took over half of my master bedroom with my desk and stuff. We ran out of room in there I had to get out because the kids got out of school and this is when they're in grade school and I'm trying to work and it's like, stop.
[00:04:58] Andrew: That was just you though, and your wife who were running the company then?
[00:05:02] John: Yes, but at some point in that basement, we hired a woman named Maureen White who is still with the company.
[00:05:10] Andrew: Right to this day?
[00:05:10] John: Yes. She started in the basement. I would come to work with my coffee cup and my purple robe.
[00:05:18] Andrew: And your purple robe. Speaking of your coffee cup there was my favorite cup back in the old log cabin was the, "He is not my president mug."
[00:05:26] John: That actually predates StickerGiant.
[00:05:28] Andrew: What is that all about? How did that come about?
[00:05:29] John: That pre-dates StickerGiant. That goes back to a site called whatpresident.com and the way that worked was I just had an idea for a president sticker, a very common idea that happens every election cycle someone does it. He is not my president. But this election cycle that I did that was really interesting because we didn't know who the president was going to be for five weeks. They kept recounting Florida.
[00:05:53] Andrew: This was 2000 the hanging chad election?
[00:05:56] John: The hanging chad election. I worked the news cycle. At that time I didn't do internet marketing really I just had this yahoo store.
[00:06:05] Andrew: The bubble had just crashed. The Internet was a different place than it is.
[00:06:08] John: That's right. The news cycle around the election thing that was happening where we didn't know who was going to be president, there actually wasn't a lot to talk about. They were recounting and there were lots of pictures of lawyers going in and out of federal courthouses.
[00:06:22] Andrew: I had a friend who was one of the people protesting at the supreme court with the sign.
[00:06:27] John: Al Gore was being represented by Mayor Daley's brother Joel, I think.
[00:06:36] Andrew: One of the Daley boys.
[00:06:37] John: One of the Daley boys and I forgot who George W. was represented by.
[00:06:44] Andrew: A great team of lawyers that won.
[00:06:45] John: They won. Anyway, the idea was there was no news cycle because the people were scrambling for stories about this and here comes a guy with a funny bumper sticker and that always hits the local news that is perfect. I did all the local news, AP, Reuters, Knight-Ridder picked it up. I was on the Paul Harvey show. I actually got interviewed by Paul. It was hilarious.
[00:07:08] Andrew: So, you've always had it- this interview stuff.
[00:07:10] John: Yes. It's pretty fun. Then in between that gig and StickerGiant once the election was decided, for a short time I had a site that only sold political bumper stickers. I had toilet paper that had certain politicians on it. I hired a stripper and me and the stripper would go on radio shows and she would do live demos of the toilet paper.
[00:07:43] Andrew: Folks that is a new story to me. I've been working here for almost four years and we talk a lot of stories.
[00:07:50] John: There's a guy in Denver, some shoe polish or something shoe, who's that guy? Anyway.
[00:07:55] Andrew: I don't know.
[00:07:56] John: He was on some wacky, it was always the wacky morning drive time guys.
[00:07:59] Andrew: That's a good spot.
[00:08:00] John: We would fax him a picture of the toilet paper and the stripper and they'd be like, "You can get on the air right away."
[00:08:08] Andrew: That's funny.
[00:08:09] Hamish: I just want to bring you back to startups just quickly, what do you think were the biggest challenges in those first few months even years?
[00:08:16] John: Of course, one of the first challenges is I didn't have a job that was making money. I was very lucky that I had money put aside and so I was able to use that to support myself for about a year. This is when I had a pretty inexpensive house in Longmont and three little kids, overheads pretty low and I was able to do it. I ran completely out of money. I never did the credit card thing where you just load credit cards. I completely ran out of money about the time I started making money. That was before Google AdWords it was called Overture back down and I ran Overture campaigns. It was hilarious.
[00:08:56] Andrew: Digital advertising?
[00:08:57] John: Was very new. DoubleClick and Overture was all you had.
[00:09:02] Andrew: Overcoming that barrier I guess from Hamish's this question was to do that digital advertising and be really bootstrapped and also dipping into personal finance.
[00:09:12] John: I used up all my personal money and then started making money when that was gone. It's funny how that works. But that was one of the big challenges. The other challenge is it sounds great to start your own business but I went to art school. I didn't know anything about business. I didn't know about payroll. I didn't know about really anything and had to learn everything from scratch.
I was really lucky that early on in the business I found an adviser who loved my business and thought my energy was great and loved my entrepreneurialism and really invested an enormous amount of his own time and energy in just working with me and talking about my business and giving me ideas. He would come over and help out. His name's Bill Flagg and he's still involved with the business to this day.
[00:09:57] Andrew: Having a mentor because there's-- Especially we see today in the startup scene is like the co-founder model where you have two guys, you want a coder and a business guy and you're doing all that but then also having a mentor who's more of a silent partner to guide you through those difficult growth changes.
[00:10:15] John: Having advisers that are in similar businesses or even just in the Internet business was really important throughout. I ended up expanding my network of advisers. I joined a big mastermind group at one time that had some really -- it was actually national and we would fly to different cities a couple of times a year and all meet. It has some really big early Internet heavy hitters in it. I learned a lot from that group and [crosstalk].
[00:10:43] Interviewer: Being open to feedback and also critique and listening to other people's ideas too?
[00:10:49] John: Absolutely. This is hard. All of the things that have been brought to me over the years, just the concept of how you manage your inventory or the concept of how you manage employees and open book finance. Even our latest thing, our EOS, our Gino Wickman entrepreneurial operating system we're implementing at StickerGiant. These are all things that came from advisers.
They came from other entrepreneurs, other founders that have been through this and said, "Hey, look at this is, this is really helpful it gave us a framework on how to make decisions in our business." I advise all founders especially early-stage founders, to grow your network of people as much as you can.
[00:11:28] Andrew: I'm going to segue back to Hamish's question because there was a challenge for you. I know this story, not everyone does, but how at one point you called yourself the Amazon of stickers, you were a retail, you sold one-offs right?
[00:11:44] John: Yes.
[00:11:44] Andrew: Of an inventory in-house.
[00:11:46] John: That's right.
[00:11:47] Andrew: Then you said, "I went to custom printing," that's what you said at the beginning when you introduced yourself right. But then you mentioned open book finance so I'm trying to tie all these threads together for the folks who are listening either now or later. It was 2012, is that when that happened? There's a few things that happened at once and so I just want to make sure that I keep you on track to understand more about open book, but why retail to now custom printing and how did you do that because that was a huge hurdle for you?
[00:12:12] John: The transition took a long time and really StickerGiant reinvented itself many times over. We went from a political bumper sticker site to the Amazon of stickers I hate that term but everyone gets it.
[00:12:25] Andrew: I know.
[00:12:25] John: Everyone gets it, everyone gets. To then that we became a broker. We didn't actually have printing presses at one point early on. We just had catalogs from printing companies that would dropship and private label everything you sold. That's how we got started and we built that business up to be big enough to make sense to go start investing in an industrial facility to produce stickers and labels.
[00:12:52] Andrew: That's a capital like--
[00:12:53] John: Big we went out and borrowed over a million dollars to do our first press room. It was very very scary to do that because I had never ever taken loans out.
[00:13:03] Andrew: Up until that point right?
[00:13:04] John: Up until that point. I had never taken-- I got a personal guarantees and it was a really tough challenge but we got in there, we paid it off and now we run this business like a normal business where we know we actually have to have a certain amount of debt to keep growing the business aggressively.
[00:13:22] Andrew: I was going to say what actually made you make that decision to go from retail into production?
[00:13:28] John: I had a part-time retail employee who was going through some personal things in her life and said, "John I need to make more money than part-time sticker picking and packing. I need to figure out how to make more money." I said, "Well, I've always wondered if we could sell any of these custom stickers out of these catalogs. Here's the catalogs start answering the phone." She just would answer the phone because every day somebody or two or three people would call and say, "Do you guys print stickers?" We'd be like, no, go to- somewhere else.
[00:13:57] John: I said, "Hey, answer the phone and start selling these orders. Here's an install of Photoshop and Illustrator." She knew enough to get the files open and get them off. We didn't even have a database. She had a spreadsheet and she started keeping track of orders one at a time on the spreadsheet and entering them by hand. That's how we got started. That is day one. Then I saw it taking off so I called up Jason our database guy and said, "Dude, we've to got to start building a whole custom sticker system in our databases." That's how the whole StickerGiant database system that we have started evolving. It's pretty cool.
[00:14:41] Andrew: Then Open Book Finance which is what you said and came from Bill and your mentor group that's a book by a guy named Jack Stack in Burlingham who came here and actually those of you saw a Forbes article Bo Burlingham wrote that. Open Book Finance and The Great Game of Business are a very cool methodology I guess you might say, but how did you start taking pieces from Open Book and introducing them to StickerGiant because you can't say, "Everybody do this. We're going to win."
[00:15:11] John: I did a version of it. I went through three, at the time I was really looking at three approaches to the same idea. Jack Stack's book, Ari's book from Zing Train.
[00:15:24] Andrew: Zingermans.
[00:15:25] John: In his I think the classic is fun flavorful finance. They teach open book finance. It's a two day class in Ann Arbor. Then there was a guy who unfortunately has passed since then is a guy named Brad Ham who wrote a book called--
[00:15:40] Andrew: Ownership Thinking.
[00:15:41] John: Ownership Thinking, that's right. I really like the Zing Train version and I like the Jack Stack version a little bit. I took little bits from all three and really when you start open book finance, you're really starting from scratch. We started at a time when the business could have gone under at that time we were struggling with some things. It was perfect timing because we were having difficulties. I was shouldering all of it on my shoulders. I wanted a way to get the team involved in solving these problems not just looking at me. We started open book finance and the very first step was what are we going to track? How are we going to track it in real time?
That was really just establishing that infrastructure alone was a big deal. We didn't even have a scorecard. I would look at sales every day and be like, "We're good." I'd look at my bank balance and be like, "I got enough to make payroll." That was it. At the beginning, that scorecard, establishing that was really important and everything falls from that because once you've got a group of people thinking a problem, you get you just the incremental changes increases so much because now you have 15, 20, 30 now 40 people all working the same set of challenges.
[00:16:58] Andrew: You're going to talk a little bit about those kinds of elements but some other parts of how we do StickerGiant open book finance at Longmont Startup Week which is happening on July 24th through 28th (2017). That'll be cool. We'll talk a little bit about that at the end of the show once John gets back to his laptop. It can't all be just stickers and labels and scorecards, what makes John Fischer tick? What do you love?
[00:17:25] John: I'm a recent empty nester. I got three adult children who are all very successful. I got a lovely wife and I have two dogs that I love spending time with. But I still am in the office every day. I have a lot of friends I spend time with. I think my biggest passion in life is all the people in my life especially in the StickerGiant community.
[00:17:47] Andrew: Right and that's the community here in Longmont that we moved into more deeply, right? When we're on hygiene we had this little log cabin. Can you tell a little bit about how the log cabin building and that sort of middle growth extension of StickerGiant those days any fun stories from those days?
[00:18:05] John: Yes we ran out of room in the house, there was a business in hygiene called Spider Tracks and they had a neat little building. It was like two guys I totally admire them because they had their own building, they had their own business and they made four wheel drive parts. They were doing really well and they moved from their building into a bigger facility across the street. I saw their building was vacating. I had always said to my wife, "I want a building just like Spider Tracks." Right there by my kid's elementary school, I could drop them off, be right there.
That building opened up, I rented it from John Fiechtner who's now our engineer at StickerGiant or one of them. I rented a tiny little corner of that large complex of buildings and ended up renting all of the buildings at one point. That's where we worked for quite a while. I think that those facilities took us up to just under $10 million in annual sales.
[00:19:06] Andrew: What was the square footage there? It was small little place.
[00:19:08] John: The total was 6,600 square feet.
[00:19:13] Andrew: Right. Everyone felt like they were on top of each other.
[00:19:15] John: They were literally on top of each other.
[00:19:18] Hamish: As the founder, how has your old role changed from building in hygiene to where we are now and what you do on a day to day?
[00:19:27] John: I've gone the full cycle from founder where I literally did everything. I scanned the stickers, I built the website, I did accounting. I literally did every component of the business in the beginning and as it grew, I delegated to people who were better at it, who had the time to figure out how to do it right and could do continuous improvement on that task.
I have slowly peeled everything away from my responsibility list to where now I actually sit at the top of the org chart. I'm the visionary. I see my role is supporting the employees, removing obstacles and making sure everyone can do their job and have the tools and the knowledge and the co-workers in the environment to thrive, and the less I do, the better. That's my whole philosophy.
[00:20:21] Andrew: Because all that's been done.
[00:20:22] John: Then I watch to make sure nobody's poking holes in the hull below the waterline, because holes above the waterline, you've learned something by making a hole above the waterline and fixing it. Holes below the water line, they tend to affect how fast you're going to the water.
[laughter]
[00:20:42] Andrew: Like how much water you're taking in.
[00:20:43] John: How much water is coming into the boat and I really feel I don't even have to do a whole lot of that these days, especially with this new website launch. This was the very first website launched for StickerGiant where I didn't do the majority of the testing. The last launch, I did the majority of the testing. I did Andrew's job. I built all the first pages on that first Symphony install. I have a good team, we've come a long way.
[00:21:14] Andrew: We've talked a little bit of, again, there's a lot of course, that can be said. You mentioned some stuff that we're going to talk about in the future. For those of you who are following along, he's talking about traction and Gina Whitman and EOS. Those are all parts of how we're scaling or growing from open book to the next phase. We're going to get into that so thank you for previewing that. It's a little teaser. Talk about growing your mentor network and being really open of course, and the one thing that you always would say when you talk open book is how to never lose sleep and take care of your finances.
[00:21:49] John: Absolutely, the driving motivator for me to do this, in the beginning, wasn't just growing my business. I was literally trying to save my business and I was trying to save my mental health. I was taking on so much stress. I couldn't sleep. I know it was just too much. By doing open book, I shared the insomnia, I shared the worry. Responsibility and worry is like grief. The more you share it, the better you're going to feel. That is really the early motivator for me to get everybody involved and get everybody on board.
I remember the part of the open book journey, one of those early meetings, is when you invite all the employees to your payables meeting, where you sign all the checks. I used to sign the checks with Ilene, by myself, it was just her and I every week, and I'm signing the checks. Then that first meeting where we opened it up and literally eight people showed up to the meeting I was like, I cried.
[00:22:48] Andrew: Because they were sharing.
[00:22:50] John: That makes me tear up now just say-
[crosstalk]
[00:22:54] John: I'm actually tearing up.
[00:22:55] Andrew: That's good. That's positive because you were sharing that, and now we have a weekly meeting and anyone is, of course still open to visit those findings. We have slightly different meeting structure. If anyone wants to come see a Tuesday, great huddle. If you're out there and you're interested in how the great game of business works we do schedule visits and have people come and see how we do it.
[00:23:16] John: We love the show people in the public how we run our business. The one of the reasons I like that, Andrew, is, if every business was run like that, I think that a lot more people would enjoy their jobs. There was a survey by Harris Interactive and there was an analysis of it written, gosh, the book was, I can't think of the book. Anyway, that survey was my Harris Interactive and 60% of the American workforce, they don't like their jobs, they're not happy. A similar percentage doesn't know- they don't actually know what their job is. They couldn't give you a job description.
Something like 40% of the American workforce doesn't actually know what their company is like, what their purpose is. 30% don't trust their management. Another 30% don't actually know which direction they're supposed to go with their job and what they're supposed to do. If you broke it down to a football team, three guys would be playing for the other team, two guys would be running in the wrong direction and the rest of the team wouldn't have a game plan, they wouldn't even do a huddle. They would just get together and lose.
The other thing about open book and EOS is we grow up- in almost every country in the world you grow up practicing, whether it's football or whether it's hockey, whatever sport you do, you practice and then you have game day. In business, we seem every day is game day and nobody practices. How are we supposed to get better?
[00:24:58] Andrew: That's a cool analogy to- unless Hamish, do you have any more, we could keep talking but--
[00:25:03] Hamish: I think one final thing could you summarize your top tips for somebody who might be starting out. What they should focus on? I know we've touched on planning for growth and open book and delegating and things like that but what else are you're top tips for somebody.
[00:25:20] John: I see so many people especially in Boulder County, who are just chomping for a startup, I'm going to come up with an idea. They're searching for an idea that doesn't have a problem to go with it. Make sure you actually have a reason to exist that’s compelling and differentiating.
[00:25:41] Hamish: Solve a problem. That's a good place to stop.
[00:25:44] John: That's actually really good. The other thing is if your prime motivator in the startup world as a founder is to raise money without actually doing that part necessarily first, solving people's problems, I think that a lot of that is-- I don't connect well with that business model, I don't understand it. I would much rather see businesses start out cash flow positive and grow and make money and create wealth rather than just to be some lever to raise money out of the private equity markets and exit and then go do another one. StickerGiant has always been about real business, making real money, paying people real salaries.
[00:26:30] Andrew: Do we have questions out in the world?
[00:26:32] Jesse: We do. Taylor just asked what did your old sticker production setup look like? I guess your first lineup that you had.
[00:26:40] John: We had a one WS 4500 from Hewlett Packard, which is a digital web press. I think at the time we bought it for around about a half a million dollars. We got a laser cutter. That was our first die finisher. That was north of a half a million dollars and then we got a sheeter to make the sheeted kiss cut stickers, and then our first shrink wrap was actually just a blow dryer. That's how we got started.
[laughter]
[00:27:15] Andrew: That's cool. You learned a lot of course along the way about the printing industry and sure having that degree helps you be aesthetic but that's not going to help you necessarily get a file from the internet to a pre-press machine-
[00:27:31] John: That's right.
[00:27:32] Andrew: -to a press to have someone who knows how to color. You know what I'm saying? That chain of events is really complex.
[00:27:38] John: Yes, this is actually a pretty complex business when you really think about what we do because we turn around an enormous amount of product in one day. We have a really, really low defect rate. We have super high customer satisfaction scores. It takes so many things all working together. It's like a 15 cylinder engine. They have to have an even number, right? It has to be all cylinders have to be firing, everything needs to be working together, otherwise, everybody in the whole organization feels it.
[00:28:11] Andrew: Sure. Does that make sense? Does that answer your question, Hamish?
[00:28:15] Hamish: Yes, absolutely.
[00:28:16] John: I hope that answered Taylor's question too back then.
[00:28:19] Andrew: Yes. Thank you Taylor for that.
[00:28:20] John: Thanks Taylor.
[00:28:21] Andrew: We will take follow ups, of course, and we've got some other folks to bring in. John, thank you for letting us even have a podcast.
[00:28:29] John: That's awesome.
[laughter]
How many people are watching?
[00:28:33] Andrew: They come and go.
[00:28:34] John: That's cool.
[00:28:35] Andrew: They come and go in the dozens usually.
[00:28:37] John: Then they are just available after the broadcast for people just to watch?
[00:28:40] Andrew: Great question, John. We're going to upload it to our Vimeo. We put on our YouTube. We put it on our slash podcast page, stickergiant.com/podcast. We upload it to SoundCloud, you can subscribe on Google Play. You can find it in the iTunes Store in the podcast button. We really mass publish this all of our content as you know very well.
[00:29:00] John: Good, that's nice. That’s neat how you guys do that.
[00:29:02] Andrew: That's an interesting topic for a future marketing podcast to think how we actually get out there. More on sticker stories.
[00:29:09] John: Cool.
[00:29:09] Andrew: That is also a complex operation.
[00:29:14] John: Thank you, for having me on your show and I'll be over there.
[00:29:17] Andrew: He'll be over there at his chair with his name on it in the back of our room, if you want to come see this room where we do broadcast this again. We did say that we have people in and of course, we do love to bring in the community in the StickerGiant. We do want to bring it back to the top, not the top of mind. We already did that. That was bikes and Le Tour de France.
Entrepreneurship and the big thing for us here is we sponsor a ton of Startup Weeks and Startup Weekends through a group called TechStars. We are fortunate to have our own Startup Week happening here in Longmont, Colorado. It is a TechStars branded event coming up on the 24th through the 28th and those are out there all around the world. We send really cool sticker sheets. Hamish has-
[00:30:05] Hamish: I got a couple. I got a Kiss Kat here and also a Die Kats the one in DC. This one's actually coming out of India. In terms of startup resources for anybody who is thinking about starting their own business look up the textile startup weeks because they're probably going to have tons of good information, tons of speakers and stuff like that. They have panels, lots of free resources and things like that. That's a great thing to go, they're always free, you can just sign up online and go and visit them.
[00:30:32] Andrew: Like we're saying again, we want to plug John's fireside chat will be Wednesday, July 26th at 3:00 PM. You can check that on Longmont startup week page to find the location, get some map directions. I will be running a session all about the new culture here in Colorado with marijuana being legal. It's called Cannabis Journalism and it's all about how the new media has been reporting on it. That's one of my niche topics that I'm interested in. We also do, of course, do a lot of labels for that space.
Talking a little bit how that business is working and, Jesse, our marketing director and producer here behind the scenes will also be talking about digital marketing as well and he'll be on a podcast coming up. There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and activity right now. One of the coolest things that's coming out of Longmont Startup Week is this Die Cut Sticker which is also actually not just a goblet of beer. It is called the wannapreneur. It is a collaboration with a bunch of local breweries. We've got 300 Suns, Oskar Blues, Left Hand Brewery, Open Door Brewery, Skeye Brewing, Shoes and Brews, Wibby Brewing, The Pump House, Grossen Bart, Bootstrap, and St. Vrain Cidery.
Those are all local breweries here in Longmont alone that I read off that list that is a ton of local breweries. They came together which is a beer that we will be drinking. Hamish, check that out-
[00:31:54] Hamish: Yes, that's pretty cool.
[00:31:55] Andrew: It's got all the startup branding on it. We do want to make sure though that those of you who have been listening we've got our podcast page. We have a form out there. If you're listening live or you're listening later we want to hear from you about the stories of starting your own business. If you're watching us for marketing tips or interesting stories like learning about John's transition to open finance here with StickerGiant, we want to hear from you. I know Hamish gets jazzed when he hears people's stories and sees cool stickers. It's not just about the stickers. We want to hear about founding your own business.
I know folks in Longmont personally, who started a business. We'd like to hear from you. If you're out there all around the country and world we want to hear from you, especially some of our startup weekend. The coolest stories we hear is when a business from startup weekend comes back to us and says, "After a hackathon, we have this brand new product that's changing transportation in Mumbai." Stuff like that happens here in our factory and we'd love to hear those stories.
I'm going to let Hamish though take this Sticker Sheet. This is a cool Sticker Sheet. Bring it right up here in the front, Hamish, and we'll have it on the blog. That is a sheet-
[00:32:58] Hamish: Check it out.
[00:32:59] Andrew: -from our art director, Allen Peters, in collaboration with the folks at Longmont Startup Week. Hamish, describe a little bit what's on there really quick.
[00:33:07] Hamish: All right. We've got the Longmont Startup Week title right here front and center, we've got some bicycles, the usual internet WiFi box and that tech theme. I think these startup weeks are always pretty tech-focused, everything is going digital.
[00:33:22] Andrew: We love for events to have a Sticker Sheet like this just because, again, we talked about them in our last podcast but there're lots of little peel-offs that are super fun to have on there and many options for your audience, whoever that may be. Again, we want to solicit your stories and shout us out. We will be, of course, on Twitter @StickerGiant, Instagram @StickerGiant, Facebook @StickerGiant. I think you're getting the trend. Pinterest, Medium, LinkedIn. We're sharing a lot of these stories there and also we love interacting with you.
Hamish is all over our Facebook and he's always-- We're always just watching what's happening in a conversation around StickerGiant and all the great customers that we have. We'll be back in a month, right?
[00:34:09] Hamish: Of Course.
[00:34:10] Andrew: What time again?
[00:34:10] Hamish: Second Friday of every month, 10 AM, but don't worry, we'll be shouting that out all over social media as well keeping people up to date. Also, there'll be a blog post going out about this particular show. It's going to have a ton of extra resources that we have dug up around startups and really good websites and free resources you can download. Please go and check out the blog as well if you're looking for extra stuff.
[00:34:35] Andrew: John mentioned the ZingTrain and Zingerman's up Ann Arbor, The Great Game of Business. We'll get some hyperlinks out there for you to follow up on those. Of course, we will be back in a month. You can find us everyday all day on every social media platform. Of course, Google Play, iTunes Store and SoundCloud is where you can download and listen to and subscribe to the Sticker Story Podcast. Thank you very much, Hamish.
[00:35:00] Hamish: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:35:01] Andrew: I hope you enjoy riding your bikes this weekend. If you're out there try to get out for a ride. I'm Andrew, it's always great to be with you on the podcast. As we like to say, every sticker has a story.
[music]
[00:35:22] [END OF AUDIO]
Here are the podcasting services where you can find Stickers on the Mic.
