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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

Hey, everyone. Just want to let you know that how I built this elves are hard at work and over the next few weeks, we're going to be sharing some of my live conversations from our recent summit in San Francisco.

You'll see them every Thursday in your podcast feed.

In fact, we posted our first one last week. It's with Sarah Blakely of Spanx, and you should definitely check it out.

And we've got a bunch more on the way. Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger of Instagram, Teryk Farid of Edible Arrangements, and many, many others, so keep checking for updates.

All right, today's episode is my conversation with Maryam Nefisi. She founded a beauty company called Eve, and then the stationary company Minted, which almost died before Maryam figured out how to grow it into a multi-million dollar brand.

It first ran in June of last year. Here you go.

So April, 2008, you launched Minted, and you're like, the doors open, the shingles out, you're excited, you pop the champagne corks, and...

Nothing. Nothing. Absolute dead silence. No orders.

There was not a sale to be had. It was terrifying and horrible, horrible. And we almost, I really contemplated that moment. This is a failure. We need to shut this business down. We need to give whatever remains of the money back to investors, because it's a total failure.

From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, how Maryam Nefisi turned her online stationary store into one of the biggest platforms for emerging artists on the internet, and in the process,

this formed the business of personalized stationary.

Back at the end of the 1980s, at age 13, I was getting ready to officially become a man.

This is the age of which, according to Jewish tradition, boys enter manhood, and they have a bar mitzvah.

This is a big party. You get hoisted up on a chair and paraded around a dance floor. You serve salmon or chicken. You get the idea.

Anyway, about eight or nine months before the big day, I remember going with my mom to a stationary store to look at tons of invitation samples.

...