#101 – How to Execute Well and Beat the Competition with Eric Zhang of Scalable Press

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2019

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eric Zhang dropped out of school to pursue his startup, got accepted to Y Combinator, and found traction in the open source community. But when he found himself no longer excited to show up to the office, he realized something crucial was missing with his business: a workable business model. In this episode Eric and I discuss his decision to quit his startup and how he ended up helping grow a bootstrapped business to over $100MM in revenue in an industry rife with well-funded competitors.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/101-eric-zhang-of-scalable-press

Transcript

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0:00.0	Eric Zang, you are the CTO of a company called Scalable Press. Welcome to the Indecker's podcast.
0:05.5	Thanks, Cortland. Glad to have you on here. So Scalable Press, super impressive company. You guys are
0:11.6	entirely bootstrapped and you're doing over $100 million in revenue. Is that right?
0:16.0	That's right. Tell us about the company. What is Scalable Press? What do you guys do and who uses you?
0:21.3	And why do they use you? Sure, absolutely. So Scalable Press is a printing company. And we started off in apparel. So think about your screen printed T-shirts, garments, that sort of thing, like your local T-shirt shop. And since then, we've expanded to a lot more print types. we actually do all the printing ourselves and our facilities in the U.S.
0:21.5	and And since then, we've expanded to a lot more print types. We actually do all the printing ourselves and our facilities in the U.S.
0:41.1	And we build e-commerce websites on top of that.
0:44.6	So our customers are actually across the board, different markets in B2C, B2B, whoever needs
0:50.3	printing.
0:51.0	And I think they use us because we develop technology that makes that
0:54.6	printing more efficient, which means lower cost for our customers, better quality, and better
0:58.9	turnaround times. This sounds like a super complex company. On one hand, you guys are a t-shirt shop,
1:05.5	but on the other hand, you have a bunch of e-commerce sites and an API and different actual physical processes for printing
1:13.3	stuff. Give me a sense of your role at the company as the CTO. What does that entail on a day-to-day
1:18.8	basis? Sure. So I'm in charge of the engineering team first and foremost. We are building all
1:25.4	of the software that powers our actual facilities, the software that's
1:28.3	integrating with the printers and other equipment.
1:31.3	And on top of that, we build, of course, the API, which is kind of how you get orders and
1:35.1	volume into the facilities.
1:37.0	And then on top of that, the engineering team builds a bunch of different e-commerce products,
1:40.7	different brands that target different markets.
1:42.9	How big is your engineering team?
	...

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