346: Kick Ass Conversation with Sticker King Anthony Constantino

Summary On this episode of Startup Junkies, hosts Jeff Amerine, Caleb Talley, and Victoria Dickerson are joined by Anthony Constantino, co-founder and CEO of Sticker Mule, the largest e-commerce website for custom stickers. Anthony is also the founder of Stimulus, a new social media platform intentionally designed to make people happy. Throughout the episode, Anthony shares about building Sticker Mule from the ground up, starting a new social media platform that doesn’t incentivize negativity, and becoming a professional boxer at forty years old.    Show Notes (0:36) Introducing Anthony and Sticker Mule (4:40) Stimulus, a Different Type of Social Network (10:22) Creating Businesses to Solve Problems (12:03) Content Moderation (15:07) Anthony’s Background (17:49) How Stimulus Gathers Feedback (20:36) How to Get Verified on Stimulus (21:52) Stimulus’s Ideal User (23:53) A Simple Formula to Succeed (31:24) Stimulus’s Giveaway Program (32:33) Mule Sauce (34:16) Anthony’s Boxing Journey (39:34) Advice to the Younger Self (41:10) Closing Thoughts    Links Jeff Amerine Caleb Talley Victoria Dickerson Anthony Constantino Sticker Mule   Stimulus    Quotes “Stimulus removes a lot of the negative design decisions that were embedded in Twitter and replaces them with more positive ones. We have a number of innovations that are unique to us, the biggest one being [that] we replace ads with integrated giveaways. So if you want attention, [the] number one tool to get attention on Stimulus is [to] run a giveaway. Everyone wants attention. That’s a positive tool to get attention, and it’s an easy tool to get attention.” - Anthony Constantino, (8:09) “I suspected that if people operated [on Stimulus] using their own identity, that would naturally push people in a more positive direction, and you wouldn’t have the negativity. I suspected a few things: If you remove the incentives to be nasty and introduce incentives to be more pleasant, you would naturally have a better community.” - Anthony Constantino, (12:34) “[We have] a simple formula that we use to succeed [that’s] basically: Make the experience incredibly good so that people that encounter us are highly likely to buy. So, you know, as an experience gets better, your ability to convert customers goes up. As your ability to convert customers increases, you can justify a large ad budget.” - Anthony Constantino, (26:11)