Anthony Constantino, Co-Founder and CEO of Sticker Mule, and also founder of Stimulus, the world’s first 100% ID-verified social media network, talks about reverse engineering his first successes as a teenager, growing his thriving company from the dysfunctional wreckage of a prior business, and judging on the basis of attendance, shares his dead simple business strategy and the critical importance of nailing your initial hires, considers the challenges of taking on Twitter head-on and creating an innovation lab for social media, and ponders if privacy is overrated?

Mentioned in this episode:

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Southwestern Student Coaching

Hello, and welcome to the Action Catalyst podcast.

I'm your host Adam Outland. And today we get to interview

Anthony Constantino. Anthony is the co founder and CEO of

Sticker Mule, one of the world's most popular custom printing

companies, and also the founder of Stimulus, the world's first

100%, Id verified social media network, which replaces

advertising with giveaways. We're going to talk today about

the ideas of innovation when getting into a startup, some

counterintuitive ways to build a business as well as the modern

day Id verified social media outlet he's creating. So looking

at the just your whole story of background, your teenager and

you're even thinking about your future like most teenagers do,

not quite expecting that what you'd find yourself in is this

massive sticker business that you build that kicks off

everything, right? What were you initially thinking about with

your future?

You know, I don't have an issue with

stickers. But you know, I didn't start this because I have some

of the graduation with stickers. I just want to get into

manufacturing, I want to get on the internet. You know, I was

sort of a screw up as a kid, I guess. You know, my brother was

like valedictorian of his class, I was sort of a screw up. And I

found my first success in life and sports and events, events,

sports, I was a disaster, I wrestled and I lost my first 30

matches. I was terrible, you know, everything else. So I

wasn't really great at school, but I wasn't terrible. You know,

I eventually just decided my last year of high school to

become good at sports. And I ended up becoming, I think I'd

for best record best finish in my high school. And I said to

myself out there that, you know, if you could learn how to become

good at one thing, why not try to be on my first experience

becoming good at something? And so then I went to college and,

you know, I wasn't the brightest light. I said, Why don't you try

to figure out how to become good at college. So and, you know,

I'll be overly honest, I got into a conflict here and ended

up getting semi kicked out. And I failed upwards and went to

RPI, which is a phenomenal school, Rensselaer Polytechnic

Institute. Okay, so it's competitive with them. It's

competitive with MIT, but it does have the brand recognition

but I believe it's was founded before MIT. So as a long

engineering history, it was the first time I lived been around

really, really, really smart people. So once my first school

did well, for first time, we were doing good in school with

my second school and got totally humbled by you know, the

intellect of the engineering crowd there.

Do you know what you could trace back like the

switch point to for like wrestling?

The switch point was, the reason I said I

could do that was, you know, there's state champion kids that

are only 13. You know, some some kids come right out someday, you

know, you're and some of the Braden in first year in high

school are already state champions. And I said, if a 13

year old can figure out how to become a state champion, even

though I've sucked. I've been figured out how to get to the

finals alone. I think only two or two kids in my school's

history to make it that finals that are regional or regional

tournament.

It's so interesting to just hear these

early stories, because I don't want to superimpose, but I feel

like yeah, the proving to yourself of something that

happens as a teenager, I'm going to set a goal and see if I can

hit it. And maybe one of the first times where you really did

something that required an intense amount of labor.

Yes. Oh, yeah. tremendous, tremendous

labor. The other thing I learned through it, in my first

experience, like reverse engineering success, I looked at

a kid that was one of the best wrestlers in our area was like,

Well, you know, and he'd been interviewed to paper and explain

how he trains and I said, Jesus, I thought it would just you

know, people think people just magically got and so I was like,

well, this kid trains so much harder than me. So I started you

know, emulating his training and magically all of a sudden I'm at

that level to you know, later on life I do the same thing Yeah,

you can reverse engineer business success and and

educational success you look at what what are the people that

are instead of just saying this magical hours? Why somebody good

and I'm not good? Like, what are they doing different than you?

Yeah. And then it sounds like maybe a repetition

to that a little bit. When it when it came to the academics in

college. You're like, cool, if I can reverse engineer wrestling,

I can reverse...

Exactly. Start studying. I lived in the

library. You know, I did a bunch of things I never did before. I

got really out of shape was I got comically out of shape,

because somebody introduced me to Code Red Mountain Dew. And I

started drinking 10 Code Red Mountain Dews a day. You know, I

didn't realize so many calories I gained 40 pounds. I was like

in phenomenal shape my whole life. And then all of a sudden

Code Red Mountain Dew and I was like, my friends saw me. Are you

okay? No. What do you mean?

Well, we won't have Code Red Mountain Dew

sponsor this episode.

I don't know if Code Red Mountain Dew

still exists probably.

So alright, so where does Sticker Mule come

into this?

Well, in full transparency. I didn't

actually graduate. I had one class left to take, which is

computer programming. And I didn't take it because I don't

usually tell this because it's like, it's such a long story.

But you know, I felt like business that way until, you

know near bankruptcy situation in college. So I spent a summer

of college, sort of digging it out of that even you know, I

didn't know what the hell I was doing. But I figured some stuff

out and got out of college and then went back into a terrible

situation again. So I spent a good chunk of my life free

sticker mill working in a dysfunctional family business. I

don't usually talk about this, but young my dad started the

company passed away when I was eight years old. 12 years went

by without, you know, him being president, and it became totally

dysfunctional. And so I had to do a restructuring wasn't a

pleasant situation, I spent X number years of my life doing

that. And then towards the end of that sort of stumbled into

the idea crane, sticking it off the IV ever stick mail came out

of frustration of like growing up until a manufacturing company

where traditionally manufacturers don't have control

of sales. So part of the problem was, we were very dysfunctional.

And the other part of the problem was, we had no easy,

there was no easy levers to grow sales, it was purely like we

didn't sell we made stuff. And we had a very small sales force,

right. And then we had partners that sold the stuff. Yeah, and

so if the partners, you know, we have partners go bankrupt, we

have product lines die, very small Salesforce that you

couldn't really do much with. And so we had no control over

sales. And so it was dysfunctional sales were

plummeting, I had no levers to pull, and I got frustrated that

situation, I said, you know, it would be very nice to be on the

internet, where you could connect manufacturing directly

to customers, you know, I couldn't make any guarantee, you

know, I was like, you want to have an agreement with your,

with your factory staff that, like, if you guys perform,

everything will be good for everyone. But there's, there was

no guarantee, in traditional manufacturing, that guarantee

doesn't exist.

You're doing that while you're completely, you

know, working through college simultaneously?

I started that in the middle of college, I

just I stopped because the people think it's easy to get

somebody to run a company. And it's not, especially a failing

company, you know, the talented CEOs of the world don't want to

go join a failing company.

That's like your trial by fire of learning a

tremendous amount.

At the time I hated it, but yeah, it gave me

a great foundation, I wouldn't, you know, people like sticking

up again, so successful because of this experience,

unfortunately, but I hated it. You know, everyone was out all

my friends, and I couldn't relate, you know, you on a date

with a girl when you're like, 23. And so what do you do for

work, you know, she's working in marketing or something, or, you

know, whatever, starting illegal, whatever they're doing,

and you're like, Oh, I'm, you know, restructuring our company

as in bankruptcy. And they're like, sure you are, you know,

it's like, don't get somebody else to do that. For you. We

look like a kid. Luckily, like the employees all supported me.

I think they felt badly. You know, like, I've always was

friendly with them.

You hated this whole thing that you had to do,

but somehow you think it's a great idea to start a business

from scratch.

I never found it stressful, I was

frustrated that I couldn't have the same fun that my friends

were having. You know, aside from that, I didn't have a lot

of faith in us being able to save lots of money. And I had

great relationships with people and a small community. I wanted

to have a backup plan for for people, you know, for Pete for

myself, you know, but also for for people that I had developed

relationships with the ownership structure of sticker metal in my

family's company was different. And eventually, I think five or

six years in the sticker mule ended up buying that company out

and just absorbed all the people.

It's really incerdible. You always wonder

what like, makes people tick and motivates people, because I'm

hearing that, like, one of the big things that made you tick

was like, employing people and that you care about.

Yeah, but I put a big premium on loyalty,

both directions. I'm very loyal. And so yeah, it was funny in the

beginning, you know, I was like, Well, I gotta have security for

the people I care about. And then at a certain point signal

grew. And I said, Well, now I'm just creating security people

I've never met before. That'd be weird. But I'm like, and

initially I did want to be, I was my number one, but and I

always meet with people. And I would say, what do you guys want

to you know, I'm talking from my factory worker supervisor. I

said, What do you guys want? Where do you guys want this

company, they end up and they say, doesn't add up to you? And

I was like, well, it's gonna be a lot. It's gonna get crazy if

we want to keep growing. And my goal is just to make a nice life

for us. Yeah. And I think we've done that. But if you guys I

would say, if you guys want the thing to grow, you know, we can

do it, we can figure out how to do it. But I want to know that's

what you guys want because it's definitely two different worlds

smaller, calm situation, we're just staying in a high growth

situation, you know, the end of the day, you aren't in business

you have to keep growing because you know, I don't know who said

it but so you're either growing or you're dying. So you have no

choice. You know, I thought I had a choice all it's just a

small and calm and you know, flirt around you know, just

screw around and have fun in the long run doesn't work that way.

Real quick, but just for our audience, like what

is sticker mule? What does it do? And then yeah, jump into

like, what what kind of started putting gas on the fire when you

got that up and running?

I'd say internet's favorite custom

branding company, easiest way to buy custom branding. You know,

we started with stickers but we sell up to 10 products now. And

you know, our original innovation was just that we made

it incredibly easy to buy. Someone first started and we

started growing people said oh, you must be destroying the

competition. The reason they say well, how are you growing so

fast and you're not eating into competition? I said because the

majority people that buy from us never bought before is what

happens is people can't remember this. But you know, prior to

sticker mule prior to like the internet, it will take forever

to buy custom stickers. And so the only people that were buying

were businesses that really needed them, but when it All of

a sudden a 22nd process or a 32nd process, though the market

just explodes because people go, geez, maybe I'll get stickers on

my cat, you know, maybe I'll get stickers of my, whatever, my kid

drew something or some other products like magnets buttons,

yeah, when you make it easy to buy, all of a sudden, you lower

barrier to entry and people start buying that never would

have considered buying before. So that was our, you know, our

big innovation was, you know, just making buying incredibly,

incredibly easy.

It was just word of mouth, the marketing?

And yeah, I mean, if you do more things, you

can make more mistakes. So I call it just brute force

marketing. Just, you know, try don't don't get too attached to

ideas, we try to estimate our ideas upfront, like whether we

think they're going to be good or not, and focus on what's a

simple way to do it. Things that are easy, and seeing high impact

you should do first, and things that are difficult and seeing

all impacts you should avoid. How long would you give it all?

So I'm in work. I have a wino for conversion rate. I like

that, like the number on the amount I like about conversion

rates moving up into the right, or obviously making good

decisions in terms of design improvements.

Yeah, sometimes, like people make things too

complicated.

Somebody asked me one day, so what's your

business strategy? And they said, Well, you don't seem like

you have one. I said, Yeah, I don't know. I just thought Yeah,

so yeah, we I want to get better every day. And they said, What

the hell away? They're like, well, what's that? I don't know.

Well, I remember working in a dysfunctional company. And I

said, you know, you've probably worked in ELI, everyone's worked

in dysfunction. Most people, not everyone, but have worked in

dysfunctional companies. I said, um, you know, inside sticker

meal, I said, do you see a lot of dysfunction? I said, No. I

said, we can't. I said, everyone wants for the most part comes

here every day, and tries to do something useful to help make

the company better every day. And I said, That's not normal.

Did you experience that? And your IBM experienced that in my

prior life, my prior job? And I said, you probably only said no,

you're right. Like down there's, there's generally a great degree

of dysfunction inside most companies. But you know, our

secret was, we don't have dysfunction. And we just come to

work every day. And everyone's constantly trying to do

something productive. When that's your attitude, things

just and improve.

Yeah, well, this is called The Action Catalyst.

I'm right on target.

How do you actually cultivate like an

action oriented culture? What do you propose? Or what do you tell

your team?

Your first five people will will will

define the culture so you'd be very careful with your first for

department into bigger, careful, a diverse group, right. So if

you, you're gonna make mistakes in hiring, they're gonna just

kind of set the tone for new people. And they're either gonna

indoctrinate new people, right, or they're gonna expel new

people, like they're gonna, you know, if you have, once you have

a core unit, definitely just think this is the way they

think. And somebody comes in, it doesn't fit that mold. They're

either going to convince them to join, or they're going to call

me and say this person shouldn't be here. Yeah. So if you have a

department where it's like a mixed bag, right, where you have

like, your first five people, two are good, and two are in

line. And you will and you try to build on that it's confusing,

because everyone's like, there's no agreement about what our

values are, right? You have to be will this set of values, that

we will have another set of values, and water person that's

got another set of values? Yeah, it doesn't scale gracefully on

its own, you can't just like walk away. So. And then we ended

up developing a core set of principles for our guy, the

organization. And then we started doing principles for

every department articles are eight to 10 rules about what

your decision making framework should be our fundamental

principle that we kind of have in all the boxes move fast,

because time is finite. When we really put up the heavens on

that, well, you want like an example. Like if I say safety is

more important than safety is more important than quality,

quality is more boring than productivity. If you're running

an unsafe manufacturing environment, people are getting

hurt. That's ridiculous, you know, but so many, you can have

a safe environment you shouldn't have, you know, you need that

quality before you worry about productivity. You know, I just

put up like, bam play, I say judge people, manufacturing

judge people primarily on the basis of attendance, the

enterprise world, the tool we use to scale the organization.

So like, as I started growing, I had confidence. And people

thought that these principles work, and I'm successful, and so

why not follow them? Right. So like, I mean, if I can say

Judge, people prime it on the basis of attendance, which isn't

something everyone realizes to do, because in manufacturing and

manufacturing ran people, judge people on the basis of silly

stuff, like this guy, can't perform a job, this person is

slow. Actually, the big brought, you know, this one business,

this person was slow. Well, rather than like picking on

people for being slow, why don't you if you're judging on the

basis of attendance, why don't you think about how to improve

the process? So even the slow people can be faster? Curry way

of thinking, yeah. And so and everyone adopts them, people

start thinking differently. And I just got up and said, I don't

have to keep repeating myself.

Yeah, really cool. You said today, one of the

things that you're the building is Stimulus. Yep. What is

Stimulus? How'd you get to that idea?

Yeah, I was very anti social media.

Eventually I said, why not? Yeah, we'll explore socialism as

a channel. I didn't see it doing anything. So I set a goal for us

to get to a million followers on Twitter. I said I don't think is

worth anything but she gets a million followers. So we came up

with a plan to Get we call that a goal to get there. And we

started succeeding. And we were growing 20 30,000 followers a

month real followers. And we were one of the dominant brands

on Twitter, you don't through that process, I got deeper into

Twitter, I was just like, this place is horrible. I just I just

saw all the mad the bad design, you know, a lot of the design

decisions they made were were pushing people in a bad

direction. So I realized Twitter sort of a game. And they're the

goal of game is to become the most popular player then even

though they're playing the game, but they're playing a game,

they're trying to dominate the game. And the game is bound by

the mechanics of the game. And the mechanics of Twitter were,

you'd have to be nasty. Yeah, in order to succeed. So all these

people that want to succeed in the game, now there's a lot of

people that didn't even know they were playing the game, they

weren't even trying to when they're on there, they're

floating around. But the people that decided to play yeah, you

know, had no choice. But to play within the game mechanics of

Twitter, and the game mechanics on Twitter where you have to be

nasty, this was one of the main tools to get attention. And

Twitter bait that influence into their software is particularly

destructive for people in tech, who tend to spend a lot of time

in front of computers and don't interact, you know, tend to be

maybe more introverted. The world isn't Twitter. So yeah,

heavily influenced by this, and they had everyone convinced that

the world's terrible and I saw the levers that they built on

their platform to make people behave poorly. And then they're

blaming people for behaving poorly. And then we gotta, you

know, socially execute people. I mean, they were just chopping

people's heads off, this guy's got to get off of Twitter. He's

bad. This one's got to do well, you set up a game, telling

people to behave badly, and then all sudden, you're removing

people, you gotta go, this one's terrible. He's beyond the pale.

He's gotta go. He was trying to win the game. Yeah, I don't like

to just talk. So I was talking to our CFO, and she said, you

know, if you feel so strongly about this, why don't you try to

pay your own network, and show people that things could be

better. And we've this conversation before Elon Musk

love Twitter, I didn't know he was gonna step in and do that.

So you don't, we had to build it from scratch, we funded it

ourselves, we had to get to the domain, spin up a team and all

that. And the idea was to show that you can remove some of the

negative design decisions, people aren't as bad, we wanted

to better reflect society. And we wanted to show that this is a

game. And if you don't want to turn into Twitter, you have to

give people positive levers to succeed at the game. So give

them a lever that's positive. So we decided to integrate

integrated giveaways, it's going to be our positive lever. Do you

want to touch on any or posts on stainless it works a lot like

Twitter or Facebook giveaways are very popular on Twitter and

Facebook, but they're not integrated. So you have a fraud

problem, and you have a trust problem. But honestly, most are

fully integrated. And since we've launched, they don't have

bad behavior. It's crazy.

I guess, as user, you've got a lot of experience

with Twitter, and what well, and what they don't and that's

valuable. But I mean, you know, I get the connection between

what you were doing prior to sticker mule, and then rolling

in and sticker mule, because you'd like that, that background

of my world. Yeah, it actually played a role, right? But what a

leap, I mean, sticker mule to like total tech networking

company, I mean, what made you feel so I get the purpose and

the why behind wanting to do air? What gave you the

confidence that you could?

You know, I only created one company and

succeeded, right, and people thought it was gonna be people

thought I was nuts. When I did that, you know, people mocked it

sticker be on the beginning, you know, it doesn't sound sensible

now. But, you know, I wanted more times limited on Earth, I

want to do something more challenging, more interesting,

and see, if I could do that I tell people do the most

impactful thing you can do. And so yeah, when I scan the world,

it's like, we think about that, what's the most impactful thing

I can do with my time, but this was, you know, in terms of what

it what my skill set is, and what my resources are, I

couldn't do anything better with my time. I didn't expect Elon

Musk to step in and buy it. And now all of a sudden, I'm

competing with, you know, a totally different person. Yeah,

what can you do? He actually has a lot of similar ideas to me. So

everyone out stimuluses verified, you know, I that was a

fundamental thought. And they must know, everyone's so

obsessed with privacy, and I get it, but like, I thought through

the majority of human history, privacy wasn't a thing. If you

interacted with another human, you did it face to face, people

knew who you were, they could find you. You know, you interact

with your neighbor, you put in, like, put a mask on and go

terrorize you and insult your neighbor. And you know, and it's

the fact that we didn't have privacy for the vast majority

human history is like, why we had, you know, much more civil

interactions. All of a sudden you taking on people with

obsessive probably take away privacy. And yeah, you got

people with masks on going on harassing, so you only want

people are on Twitter, harassing on Facebook, to harass their

neighbors or friends through fake names. You could never do

that if you had to actually do it face to face. The obsessional

privacy This is good, I get it, but it's giving additional

attention of people that operate under your real name is the

right thing to do.

100%. Yeah, it's like road rage, right? If you

cut someone off, you don't see that there's a human in the

car...

Yeah, yes, exactly.

So Stimulus. It's gaining attention. It's, you

know, the premise is creating a more positive environment.

Yeah, reminding people that humans

naturally interact in a pleasant way with each other. And so far,

we've proven that I say sort of a you know, Innovation Lab for

social media. Like we our goal was samosas to do things that

aren't doing so if you look at all the other Twitter clones,

right, because there's just no revolution and Social, we had

this idea before people went nuts. But like all the other

Twitter bonds are just bad imitations that Twitter has no

real, there's really no inner innovation. But yeah, we're

trying to be an innovation lab we're trying to do with many

things that other people aren't doing. So we were the first

network to do integrated ID verification, mandatory ID

verification, we're the only network dev integrated giveaways

first network to do image polls, no one does damage baseballs,

which is pretty cool. I don't know why no one else looked

through that first network to build spam filtering. So you can

turn them spam on and off. So you can see your spam or not see

your spam. And eventually, we're going to have the ability to

like just like email, have your own personal spam filter,

because you know, Spam is in the eye of the beholder. So you

could add through the process of saying, I don't like this, I've

used to spam, you could start having your own definition and

building your own definition of spam through machine learning

and stuff like that. Just like the way email works, yeah,

that's our goal, keep innovating, keep doing cool

stuff, influence the other networks in a positive

direction. And we wanted to remind people that the time that

we started stimulus, I think it's the world starting to shift

again, hopefully, people were very convinced that the world

was dark and horrible and, and that social media was a

reflection of real life and life just socked and we were, that

was our goal is to show people that it's not that way.

You know, it just as a way to kind of summarize

some of this conversation to kind of bring it back to you for

a second, you've learned a tremendous amount, just an

insane amount about business about, I mean, it sounds like

now you just lean in to whatever you're doing and unpack it, and

you're very interested in how things work. What would you say,

knowing everything you know, now to like, an 18 year old or 17

year old version of yourself, like what, what advice would you

give the young version of you having gone through this whole

path?

You know, I just I felt kids in general, try

stuff, try more stuff. Don't be scared to try stuff. There's not

a huge separation between you and people that seem fancy, or

seem super intelligent, like people think that there is, but

there really isn't like when you're a kid, and you're like, I

don't know what you think I'm this person. And then the

successful people are just like, super humans. That's right.

Yeah. And it's not the case there, you do have to figure out

what it is that makes them successful and take on those

qualities. But like, once you figure it out, and so I have

this problem, like whatever I do in life, I try to like, downplay

whatever I do. So I started boxing, for now, and boxing for

knockouts to an amateur to impro. But even that, it's like,

once you figure it out, it's not that hard. I mean, it's really

not that hard. But you do have to study the sport and figure

out what are the fundamental characteristics that make like

most people on boxing, and it's like, a lot like business,

everything's kind of there's a lot of similarities between

whatever you do, but like, they're just in there doing it,

and they just think they're gonna win because they're gonna

win. And it's just, it's just not that way. You're not going

to win in business, just because you think you're gonna win. You

got to look at what are the qualities that make businesses

successful? Well slash and figure out how to do those

things.

Your biggest lesson for me. And I think for

audience that that I'm distilling, I mean, there are a

lot of micro lessons and thoughts, achievements, just be

a student of the game, and just learn whatever you're into, and

you can figure it out. And I think it's a really human that

anybody can gravitate to that lesson and say, I can, you know,

that's something worth implementing in my life and

business. So a lot of cool anecdotes just from your life.

So I appreciate you being open about all that.

Thank you. This is actually one of the best

podcasts I've done. So you did an incredible job with your

questions. Yeah, thank you, Adam. That was awesome.