Sometimes the right next step for your business is obvious if you take the time to listen to your customers.
This philosophy has driven the evolution of PosterMyWall from an online collage tool to the comprehensive marketing platform it is today.
<span data-metadata="">It started with a dream
Ric Goell and Jaffer Haider had always dreamed of building their own company. The two met while working together on a Silicon Valley startup, Picateers. And while Picateers ultimately didn’t succeed, the experience shaped the pair’s vision for what they did—and didn’t—want their own company to be.
The list of things the pair did want their company to be included nimble and unafraid to try new things. Meanwhile, the spot at the top of the “don’t” list was held by a key item: Jaffer and Ric didn’t want their startup to be funded by outside capital.
<span data-buffer="">Why Self-fund?
Their reason for self-funding was what they’d witnessed at Picateers–and what Ric had observed when he worked at Webvan. “The VC business model is to go after large markets with the potential for enormous valuations. They really aren’t interested in companies whose potential is less than $1B. That’s their business model–and that’s what drives their decision making,” said Ric.
Jaffer and Ric wanted full control to make the decisions they thought would be best for their company and their customers.
“That $1B or bust mentality isn’t us,” said Ric. “There are great businesses of all sizes and scales.”
<span data-buffer="">PosterMyWall 1.0
The original vision was that PosterMyWall would be an online collage tool. Ric had watched his daughters struggle for hours as they assembled their volleyball team photos, photos of their teammates, icons, and text into a poster they could reproduce and share with teammates. This was in 2009 and at the time, there was no online tool that could do this well. And no online tool that delivered high enough resolution to produce quality output at poster size.
<span data-buffer="">A labor of love
So Jaffer and Ric created the tool. Because they’d selected the self-funding route, initially Jaffer and Ric
had to do everything themselves. Coding, keeping the servers running, SEO, marketing, graphic design, product management, and recruiting. It was an exercise in maintaining a can-do mindset that PosterMyWall continues to cultivate within its team.
Slowly–and then more rapidly, customers began to discover PosterMyWall…
<span data-buffer="">The aha! moment
About a year in, Jaffer noticed something interesting happening on their site. “We’d thought the people using our site would be soccer moms and students. But what we saw was a huge number of bands and restaurants were using us,” said Jaffer.
Then, to learn more, the pair spoke with both customers and non-customers who ran bands, bars, and restaurants. What they learned was that posters and flyers were imperative to these organizations’ success. And yet, typically, these customers had little time to invest in marketing, no budget to hire outside help, and little or no design skill.
Next came brainstorming. How could they make it super simple for these customers to market themselves better? The answer was to create easy-to-use, customizable templates customers could use for schedules, calendars, and promotions.
Response to customer needs<span data-buffer="">
When Ric and Jaffer saw customers struggling to create menus, they created not just menu templates, but a menu-maker tool that automatically created beautiful layouts and stored item descriptions and prices for future use on other menu templates.
As PosterMyWall’s customer base grew to include many different small businesses, churches, educators, and nonprofits, the PosterMyWall team fulfilled its customers’ wish lists with video and social media templates.
By 2020, customer requests had shifted slightly. “With PosterMyWall we can create the graphics and videos we need, but we still struggle to create and deploy campaigns,” they said.
Once again, Jaffer and Ric listened. This time, their response was to expand PosterMyWall’s publishing options beyond print and digital files. They launched publish direct to social media, publish as a website, and embed in a website capability. They partnered with top digital signage service providers so PosterMyWall content could be exported direct to digital signage.
In 2022, PosterMyWall unveiled a responsive email editor attached to an email marketing platform that included email sends, list management, and measurement tools. It also introduced a content planner where users could schedule and monitor social media posts and email campaigns in one place.
The next chapter
What’s next? “More marketing tools,” promised Jaffer.
Now that PosterMyWall serves more than 4M unique customers per month, the question Jaffer and Ric are asked most frequently is, “Do you regret not obtaining outside investors?”
Jaffer acknowledges that outside investment would have enabled PosterMyWall to build new features more quickly. But he has no regrets. “Our customers are ultra-small businesses, churches, and mom-and pop restaurants. Organizations with minimal resources. We seriously doubt that any investor would have allowed us to continue to focus on this market,” he said.
“Small organizations and individuals have been our customers since the beginning. Their support and suggestions have enabled us to grow, and we will continue to do the same for them.”