[MUSIC]
>> My concept that I call Crawl, Walk, Run.
This is something that I apply to a lot of my ideas,
or pretty much any business I'm going to start today,
and the idea behind is you got to crawl before you can walk,
you got to walk before you can run.
What does that look like? Well, for me,
the crawling was getting,
say CardCraft out on Etsy.
What was really nice about doing that,
was we were able to actually find out and see demand,
and test out a theory of folks love these designs,
so 1,800 almost sales on this platform.
Well, then what do we do next?
Well, we know we want to be able to drive traffic,
and better control our user experience.
That's where the cardcraft site that,
if you've got a cardcraft.io shows
up and this is actually a Shopify site.
The idea being that the site that I'm showing you now,
this one that we were just on is actually the run.
This is the custom site, or the beta,
and it's a beta,
but it's a working beta,
meaning that I can actually A-B test my traffic.
Sends some folks here to see,
because we know that they're
converting or they're buying stuff here,
and send them there,
and then also send the other half of my traffic to my beta site.
I'm really big on that close tight integration circle,
from having customers to test,
I can ask any of these 1,800 folks to try out our news app,
new site, and then being able to incorporate that feedback in.
You might get something like, "Yes,
please add Facebook authentication in," into this like
tightly designed system that really just comes
from doing some of this groundwork before you start coding.
>> I find that really interesting because
you started with Etsy which,
for anybody who's not familiar with Etsy,
it's basically where, I
don't want to downplay this in any way which you perform,
but when most people think of Etsy,
they're thinking about somebody that
has a particular craft that they do,
and they want to be able to sell that craft.
That's really where you started almost just like, "Hey,
I'm a single person,
I've got this little thing that I like to do.
Let me just try and sell it here."
There's also then in turn
very little investment on your part with both time and money,
that it only takes just a few clicks
to start selling stuff on Etsy.
Then that's where you started,
and then you went on to Shopify,
which is one of a handful
of different services that are out there,
that basically give you a unique commerce site out of a box.
That's really just like you said,
it's then that walk of now,
we're going to pretend to be like a small mid-ish size company,
of now, we're going to use that thing out of the box,
and then that run is now,
we're going to pretend to be
a mid or maybe even like
a large size company where now we're going to
have our own custom experience on our own custom website.
Then in turn, the level of investment that you're
making there starts really small,
and then starts to grow over time.
If you realize here,
"hey, wait a minute, you know what?
Nobody is buying these things on Etsy which is obviously not true."
You've had sophist there.
But if you realize, "hey, you know what?
This really isn't a thing after all."
You didn't really lose out on
anything and again you
also have those bail up onto
your doing that constant like you said,
refinement, and getting constant feedback.
But you're also then mitigating your risk
that entire time and you're
only getting to the end if you realize,
"hey, yes, we've actually got something here."
>> Absolutely. For me once again,
I've taken the opposite approach.
I've started with, I'm going
to build the app and they're going to come.
Couple of hundreds hours later
and couple of thousands hours later,
I've learned that's not always the case.
A lot of this is built around that exactly.
Just assuaging risk or assessing risk.
What you really want to do as you're building your platform,
building your apps, building your website,
is thinking about what are
the best and easiest ways that we can get a proof of concept out,
take the feedback, learn from it,
and then get to the next stage,
or get to the next step.
Because I think for me
my experience has been that's what a lot of startup is.
Essentially surviving the day,
so you could live to fight tomorrow,
and then also learning,
and growing as your business learns and grows.