How Swag.com CEO Jeremy Parker grew Swag.com to $60M revenue and 10K customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is jeremy parker he's an entrepreneur and award-winning documentary filmmaker currently the co-founder and ceo of swag.com which is acquired by custom inc a couple months ago back in november 2021 swag.com is the best place for companies to buy distribute quality swag that people will actually want to keep jeremy ready to take us to the top let's do it so much swag ends up in the trash man you guys do something special what's what's the secret to swag that people keep that's actually a good question so we're very curated so we don't offer thousands of mugs or thousands of water bottles it's really the top of what's out there so the top 20 top 25 it makes sure that people actually get stuff that they want to hold on to not in the trash but it also makes the decision making a lot easier they don't have to be paralyzed by choice they can find what they're looking for design and buy it and know that the people that get it are really gonna love it so give me an example like what's the what's the top what's the number one sort of piece of swag you're recommending in 2022 as everyone comes back to conferences and real-time events yeah i'm really about not necessarily the flashy things or like the unique things i i want to offer people products that they'll actually want to keep so even like a really great backpack or a water bottle except for the bottle is a really high quality one it's not gonna you know be flimsy or break or leak i want to make sure that people are getting stuff that is actually to be held onto so and also we try to push people not to necessarily be a walking billboard a lot of people think of swag as look at me i'm promoting this brand but it's really about the recipient who gets it you want them to fall in love with it and ultimately they can become an evangelist for the brand so that's really really high quality stuff and you got going into this back in i think 2016 right yep yeah we started in 2016. since we launched we've grown over 100 every year um we're on track to do more than 60 million this year in sales and we have nearly 10 000 customers at this point ranging from amazon and facebook to a lot of smaller startups 60 million how many skus we have about 5000 skus on the site but about 80 of our products are within about 300 skus uh from three interesting 300 skus very interesting and so how many individual pieces of swag is equal to 60 million in gmb yeah it's a good question it's it's it's millions of pieces of swag yeah a lot it's a lot i'd be surprised we knew that off the top of your head but i was curious interesting and i guess a better question would be um let's do last year so in 2021 how many individual corporations bought at least one piece of swag through swag.com yeah it was nearly 5 000 companies wow wow and what do you think it'll be this year we're hoping to double every year so it's really about keeping our customers happy but also getting getting new customers well you can double either your customer account but you can still double revenue by driving expansion so you do think the strategy of just adding 5000 more customers that's where most your growth will come from not expansion i think both i think we're trying a lot of different things we have a lot of new features that are completely different than what we're currently offering that i think will help us expand um but even just the customers right now like just putting things in perspective we have about six sales people you know two years ago we had one sales person so we're very early in terms of outbound sales we have zero outbound sales people at this point all of our what's the total team size uh if you include our our dev team we're close to 80 people at this point how many engineers uh 25. oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private 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want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so 80 minus 25 minus six that leaves like where's the other what do these other 50 people do it's operations a lot of the back end after the orders are placed it's the marketing team it's um customer success you know handling the live chats on the site it's it's more of that kind of stuff interesting now from what i my research team is telling me here you guys are pretty darn even pre-acquisitioned you guys are pretty darn capital efficient what was sort of your funding story before november 2021 yeah we raised less than four million all in um and we only raised about 1.25 million in the pandemic because obviously as you can imagine the whole world fell apart especially like events and trade shows a big part of our business went away in early 2020 so we just wanted to make sure we could raise some money just to make sure that we're safe so we raised our biggest round in like the worst time but really it was kind of to sure of things so we raised about 1.25 million right when the pandemic hit um we ended up actually growing over 100 so we went from 7 million in 2019 the whole world fell apart our whole industry dropped 20 to 40 percent we ended up doing over 15.5 million in 2020. 2021 33 million this year we're hopefully on track to break 60 million um and keep growing you know we've really figured out a niche for ourselves we were very ahead of the curve so in 2017 we saw a shift of work from home culture of people trying to engage with their you know employees and teams and best customers so we built an automated distribution platform so customers can buy swag we'll hold an inventory and do individual distributions to remote addresses this was pre the pandemic pandemic kids it becomes like a need to have frankly everyone's remote everyone's disconnected so we had that kind of source to allow people to to keep connectivity happening within the company so are you paying i mean are one of your big expenses monthly literally warehouse space you're drop shipping you're storing the swag until it needs to be shipped uh sometimes so sometimes people buy swag and we ship it directly from our suppliers to their office or their home address sometimes we hold an inventory we do individual distributions we have a three pl that we work with they charge the storage fees and we pass those costs um to our customers so we make it for them to do it and we're not looking to make that a profit center that's more of just a way that we can allow people to consolidate swag bundle things up together and do that individual distribution yeah that makes sense take me back real quick to the starting days 2016. i think you had one other co-founder do you guys just split 50 50 at the start or what was that conversation like yeah exactly 50 50 at the start i was very uh front of the house um everything to do with the branding user experience um and my partner was very counting-based focused he was all the back of the house and and that has allowed us to really grow because we were never stepping on each other's toes and he believed in my vision for...