#308: Joseph Heller, Founder and CEO of The/Studio, on Growing a Successful B2B Marketplace for Product Customization and Creating Community Around Building Better Businesses

Joseph Heller, a true entrepreneur at heart, is the Founder and CEO of The/Studio, an on-demand manufacturing platform which is also now the parent company of Supplied, creating a network of empowered entrepreneurs through their wholesale platform for small businesses. While at UC Berkeley, Joseph raised a seed round for an e-commerce platform which sparked his early interest in technology. He believes life and entrepreneurship are a journey and that journey took him to China where he later founded a successful supply chain business. Joseph was absolutely obsessed with being part of the process of consumer products being produced, but agitated by the inefficiencies endemic in the manufacturing industry, which has changed very little in over a hundred years. As a result, Joseph founded The/Studio as a marriage between his passion for technology and manufacturing. They are creating an on-demand supply chain for the 21st Century which will democratize manufacturing, and allow their customers to manage the entire supply chain on the cloud.

Topics Covered by Joseph Heller in this Episode

• Being a lifetime entrepreneur

• What Joseph’s companies The/Studio and Supplied do and how they tailor to different clients

• How they’re connecting small businesses with sourcing and manufacturing in China

• Bootstrapping to 100 employees

• Skipping angel and seed investing and going straight to raising a Series A

• Deciding to fundraise through VC and his advice on this method

• Initially trying to raise VC in China

• Why it took a challenging 18 months to raise an $11M Series A

• Why they decided not to participate in YCombinator after being accepted

• How Joseph would have fundraised differently in hindsight

• Early customer acquisition and growth and getting to 10M+ in revenue

• Joseph’s view on paid marketing and how it has shifted in recent years

• Utilizing social media for community building

• The business models for The/Studio and Supplied

• How their two-sided marketplace is solving the pain point of customizing products

• Overcoming the logistical challenges of working with factories in China

• Getting to profitability with The/Studio

• Growing Supplied 10X in 10 months

• How they’re prioritizing clients’ needs and deeply solving customers’ problems to create a successful B2B marketplace

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