Oct 5, 2021
The Road To $1 Billion Valuation with Printful’s Head of Marketing, Raitis Purins
How to tap into an eager audience and why content and education is the key to increased LTV
There is no shortage of ecommerce companies popping up everywhere you look, especially in the U.S, where the culture of having a side hustle is making more and more people into entrepreneurs. Most of those companies sell products, and a lot of them also create or sell merch. That’s where Printful comes into the picture. Printful offers on-demand printing and dropshipping so that companies of all shapes and sizes can design and deliver customized products all over the world.
“It was much more complicated five, 10 years ago that you had to basically contact the guy, get a merch, and then invest some money,” Raitis Purins, the CMO of Printful said. “Now the only thing you need is just your computer. And you can start selling anything you want in any place of the world, almost. By just having an idea, you can test it. If it’s not going to work, lost your time. If it works, we can scale up to a thousand items, as you wish.”
But, according to Purins that’s not the main aspect of the company that has allowed it to grow to a $1 billion valuation.
“It’s trying to find audience, maybe which are very often beginners who could potentially be interested,” he said. “And we are doing that with ads, influencers, and affiliated marketing. So we are also spending pretty big money on Google ads, on Facebook, Instagram ads to actually find and continue growing. But that’s actually the easiest part, to find those customers and then comes the challenge to onboard them. Because for you to start an e-commerce store, it’s not like to buy something online from a mobile phone. A lot of decisions has to be made, starting with your niche. What do you want to sell? Do you have designs? Those are even the basic questions. And that’s why we invest a lot of resource in actually educating them, creating YouTube content, blog content, and putting that in front of them at the right time during their onboarding flow. So that’s the main challenge for us.”
And Printful is unique in how it thinks about influencers and people who can best influence their customer pool.
“Usually when you mention influencers, you think about Instagram and then pretty images there,” Purins said. “So we have tested that, but it’s really hard to measure that and see the result. In our case, the best working influencer is the ecommerce influencer, the person who creates those YouTube videos, educating content about how you can launch your side hustle, launch your business…The most successful are those who actually educate their audience and then guide them through the process of how to launch their store. And those are the influencers we want to work with, and we have seen the best success in the past.”
To hear more about how Printful is using content and education to build its brand even more while helping ecommerce companies, tune in to Up Next in Commerce.
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