The Idea

In 2007, Mariam Naficy started her third company alone, working late at night in the attic of her house on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She had just left her job running e-commerce at The Body Shop and was taking a maternity break. Her first company, Eve.com, had been the first online cosmetics retailer and sold to LVMH in 2000, so she knew exactly what she wanted this time: no inventory, low cash requirement, and virality built into the product instead of bought with ad spend. That pointed her at invitations and cards. She raised $2.5 million from friends and family and put nearly all of it into the sensible version of the business, which was selling established stationery brands online. Crowdsourcing was still a fringe idea in Silicon Valley, and every investor she pitched told her to drop it. She kept back under $100,000 and built it anyway, at night, with a 20-year-old college student she found on Rent-A-Coder. This was the beginning of Minted.

The Execution

• July 2008: Minted launches reselling wedding invitations from other stationery brands. Sales are basically nonexistent. Traffic is thin, conversion sits at 0.1%, the employees are sceptical and so is the press. Within weeks Naficy is seriously considering shutting down and returning what's left to investors.
• Autumn 2008: The only signs of life come from the tiny crowdsourced assortment. One order, then a few a week. Not the brands. The unknown artists.
• November 2008: She pivots twice at once, from wedding invitations to holiday cards and from established brands to community-designed work. Sales go through the roof. They shut off marketing and turn away orders because they hit maximum capacity. Staff spouses come in to help. Nobody has desks, so everyone works on the floor. Naficy, with a newborn at home, ends up on the printing line blow-drying shrink wrap, and creeps out at 1am to hand-deliver a late order across the city.
• 2009 onwards: Growth comes from scrappy channels nobody else wanted. She finds the agency selling remnant ad space at the back of women's magazines and tells them she'll be the buyer of last resort. When they ring with discounted space, she and her designer write and produce the ad in about two hours.
• 2012: Break-even, on $11 million of total capital raised.
• 2023: After 16 years running Minted, Naficy founds Arcade, an AI-to-physical-product design system, and moves to chairman.
• Today: Minted is a design marketplace with a community of around 20,000 artists, reported to do $300 million a year in revenue.

The Lesson?

Naficy's read on those first four months is the part worth stealing. Almost no traffic, a handful of orders, a team already writing the obituary, and none of it was actually enough data to conclude anything. They were reacting emotionally to a tiny sample size. The second lesson is sharper. Her biggest mistakes, she says, were the safer ones: safer product mix, safer capital planning, safer reading of early results. The upside came every time from leaning harder into the thing that made Minted unusual, which happened to be the thing every investor had told her to kill. Four percent of the round went on the hunch. The other 96% went on the plan.