GCIOSGF Newsletter:
Minted grew rapidly after founder Mariam Naficy changed her strategy.
She Raised $2.5 Million From Friends and Family — And Saw Zero Sales. Then She Leaned Into a ‘Hunch.’ Now Her Company Sells $300 Million a Year.
Key Takeaways
- Mariam Naficy is the founder and chairman of Minted, a global design marketplace.
- At the start, in 2007, Naficy burned almost all of Minted’s initial $2.5 million funding round on a failed model of selling existing stationery brands online.
- A low-budget side experiment, crowdsourced design competitions for independent artists, became Minted’s core product and ultimately unlocked overwhelming demand.
When Mariam Naficy opened the virtual doors to Minted, her stationery startup, she encountered every founder’s worst nightmare: silence. There were no customers. Back in 2008, no one was buying stationery online. Naficy had raised $2.5 million from friends and family, and poured most of it into building the business. Now, she was quickly running out of money.
But Naficy had one thing going for her. Of the $2.5 million she’d raised, she had dedicated $100,000 to building a competition for artists to submit designs, with the winners work being sold on Minted. She had pitched this “crowdsourcing” idea to investors, and none had been excited about it. They wanted her to stick to selling known stationary brands.
As it turns out, that competition ended up saving the company. Artists submitted card designs, the community voted on the best one. Instead of acting like a digital stationery retailer, Naficy reframed Minted as a marketplace and a community for independent artists. Minted grew quickly from that point, and has been reported to do $300 million in revenue.
Now the chairman of Minted, Naficy spoke with us about her journey, and how she learned to trust her instincts. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
I’m a founder and angel investor. I’ve founded three companies: Eve, the first online cosmetics retailer, which I founded in 1998 and sold to LVMH in 2000; Minted, the design marketplace, which I founded in 2007 and ran for 16 years; and Arcade, the first AI-to-physical-product design system, which I founded in 2023. With Arcade, I’m using AI as a tool for turning taste into manufacturable products.
I’m a builder at the intersection of technology, design, and creative communities. I’ve gotten here by combining systems thinking, taste and execution.
What’s your educational background and early work history?
I grew up attending American schools in 5 countries and went to Williams College (where I majored in Political Economy). I was lucky to be exposed to beautiful architecture and crafts in all of those countries, and often trailed my mom around markets and bazaars. I became accustomed to frequent change, since we moved every 1-3 years.
My first job out of school was at Goldman Sachs. Though Goldman was a great educational foundation, I quickly realized that I wasn’t inspired by finance, and wanted to be in a more creative business.
Walk me through the origin story of Minted. How did you get started?
I founded Minted alone in 2007, working late at night in the attic of my house in San Francisco at 1917 Vallejo Street. I had just left my job running e-commerce at The Body Shop, and was taking a maternity break. I wanted to start a lifestyle business that would give me the chance to spend time with my children. And I was searching for a business idea based on lessons I had learned building Eve.com. I wanted to build virality and marketing into a product rather than having to pay to acquire customers, and was seeking a no-inventory, low-cash-required business. This pointed me towards invitations and cards.
I thought that I was starting a niche business to serve a small group of customers who cared a lot about design.
At the same time, I felt that the designs on Shutterfly and other online card sites were seriously lacking. If we could find a way to attract up-and-coming designers, I thought, this would level the playing field and create better, fresher thinking. I thought that perhaps a design competition would be a great way to source. I decided to name it a “challenge” instead of a “competition”, to better appeal to designers and to underscore the growth mentality that I thought would serve as a better foundation for building a community.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I would be creating a community of artists who would become very bonded to each other, and that I (and eventually our customers) would come to care a lot about independent designers. Minted’s mission has expanded to support our community of independent artists and connect consumers to them.
How did you pitch Minted to investors?
Mostly, I pitched Minted on the business fundamentals: a large total addressable market size and strong financial attributes.
But I was also trying to make the case that crowdsourcing would create better design—an idea that was hard to convince others of. We had a very hard time raising our first round of venture financing. When sales took off like a rocket ship because of that great design, it was much easier to raise capital.
When did you become profitable?
We made it to profitability with $11 million in capital, breaking even in 2012.
What did it take to turn the silence of no one buying stationery into sales?
We pivoted from wedding invitations to holiday cards, and we pivoted from selling stationery brands to crowdsourcing artwork from independent designers who no one had ever heard of. And it took scrappy marketing to get the flywheel going.
What are some lessons you learned while building the business?
When Minted launched in July 2008, reselling wedding invitations from other stationery brands, sales were basically nonexistent, and within weeks, I was seriously considering shutting the company down and returning the money we had left to investors.
The only real signs of life came from the tiny assortment of unique designs that we had crowdsourced: first one order, then a few per week, and those sales were coming from the community-designed products, not the stationery brands we had launched. I had little traffic, a 0.1% conversion rate, skeptical employees, skeptical press and a sense that the company might not work.
Then, after we pivoted to crowdsourced holiday cards in November, our sales shot through the roof and we had to shut off our marketing and turn away orders because we reached our maximum capacity. Everyone’s spouses had to come in to help process the orders. We were all sitting on the floor because we didn’t have enough time to order desks. With my newborn daughter at home, I was working on the printing line, blow-drying shrink wrap around card orders—and even crept up the stairs one night at 1 a.m. to deliver an order in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood because the order was late. Because conversion is much higher in the holiday period, and we had a robust assortment, we were able to gain a lot more signal from a modest investment in marketing.
What I learned is that, at that stage, we simply did not have enough data to draw big conclusions. We were reacting emotionally to a tiny sample size. The lesson for me was that in the earliest days of a company, you have to be careful not to confuse limited data with a definitive answer about whether something is a good idea or not.
Could you tell me a story that illustrates a lesson you learned?
Minted’s crowdsourcing was my side project. I built it at night with a college student I found on Rent-A-Coder. Today, we’re a 20,000-person creative community.
Of the $2.5 million we raised in our angel round, I spent less than $100,000 on the thing I most wanted to build. For some reason, what was calling out to me was to start a design competition that would let unknown designers submit their work, with the winners’ work sold on Minted. This was not a logical idea, and investors were understandably counseling me against it.
At the time, the playbook was simple: put established brands online and make shopping more convenient. Crowdsourcing was still a fringe idea in Silicon Valley.
I’d tell investors the designs could be better if we went with unknown artists, but it was hard to quantify. But how do you prove “better design” to someone looking at a spreadsheet?
But I couldn’t let it go. I was drawn to the idea that extraordinary talent was hidden everywhere, waiting for a chance to be seen. So after the Minted team went home, I built it at night with a 20-year-old college student in Oregon.
It’s interesting that what calls to you from a gut perspective is sometimes the right move as an entrepreneur, even if you can’t prove your hunch.
What is one mistake you made while building Minted and how did you address it?
My biggest mistakes were usually making “safer” choices — safer product mix, safer capital planning, safer interpretation of early results, safer org design — while the real upside came from leaning harder into what was unusual about Minted.
What were some of the first steps you took to get the business off the ground?
I founded this business entirely on my own, so the first thing I had to do was figure out how to build a small team but conserve cash so that we could get to breakeven. This involved finding contract and part-time help, and also hiring almost entirely people who had just graduated from college. I had to think of ways to retain people, and in one case, I even gave a finance employee a ‘co-founder’ title about two years after they started at the company.
What are some tactics you used to grow?
I realized that there were small remnant ads at the back of women’s magazines like Domino and Cookie, which reached our target customer, found out which agency sold these, and told them that I’d be the buyer of last resort—to call me if they had last-minute, heavily discounted space available. When they called, my designer and I would write and create a print ad in about 2 hours and get it to them.
What’s some hard, concrete advice you have for founders?
I’d be very cautious about starting a company unless it has some type of inherent distribution, virality, or other flywheel built into the product itself.
Also, try to shut out the distraction of caring too much about what other people think of you. I think that entrepreneurship requires you not to care about that so much.
When it comes to this specific business, what is something you’ve found particularly challenging or surprising?
One of the biggest surprises of entrepreneurship was how much it becomes a people, management, and leadership job, not just a product job. Even though I start companies to create great products, I’ve found myself thrust into the position of a leader and even a role model, someone people are looking to for clarity, help, and inspiration. At first, I really resisted and almost resented this part of the job—after all, I’m not a morning person, do I actually have to smile at everyone before I’ve had coffee?—but I have now made peace with this, and I am happy making a meaningful impact on someone’s career and life.
If you could go back in your business journey and change one thing about it, what would it be?
I have underestimated how important alignment is—on values, motives, and control—before success makes those things matter enormously. If I could do one thing differently, I’d be even more intentional at the start: about who I built with, and whether everyone was truly in it for the same reasons.
