How She Went From Zero Sales to $300 Million in Revenue

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Entrepreneurs

Key Takeaways

- Mariam Naficy is the founder and CEO of Minted, a stationery startup.

- 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 now does $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.

Mariam Naficy. Credit: Minted

Tell me more about yourself. How did you get here?

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