Stickers to Stimulus, with Anthony Constantino – Episode 446 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

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?

About Anthony:

Anthony Constantino is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sticker Mule, one of the world’s most popular custom printing companies with millions of fans, and an operation that spans 17 countries in 4 continents with customers including Google, Facebook, Twitter and many of the world’s best brands.

He is also the founder of brand new social network Stimulus, the world’s first 100% ID-verified social media network, which replaces advertising with giveaways.

Additionally, Anthony is the creator of an award-winning hot sauce (Mule Sauce, that he created as a joke, but continues to sell tens of thousands of units per month).

Now in his 40s, he is also an active professional boxer.

Learn more at StickerMule.com and Stimulus.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
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?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
Do you know what you could trace back like the switch point to for like wrestling?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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.

Anthony Constantino
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?

Adam Outland
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…

Anthony Constantino
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?

Adam Outland
Well, we won’t have Code Red Mountain Dew sponsor this episode.

Anthony Constantino
I don’t know if Code Red Mountain Dew still exists probably.

Adam Outland
So alright, so where does Sticker Mule come into this?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
You’re doing that while you’re completely, you know, working through college simultaneously?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
That’s like your trial by fire of learning a tremendous amount.

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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.

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
It’s really incredible. 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.

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
It was just word of mouth, the marketing?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
Yeah, sometimes, like people make things too complicated.

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
Yeah, well, this is called The Action Catalyst.

Anthony Constantino
I’m right on target.

Adam Outland
How do you actually cultivate like an action oriented culture? What do you propose? Or what do you tell your team?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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…

Anthony Constantino
Yeah, yes, exactly.

Adam Outland
So Stimulus. It’s gaining attention. It’s, you know, the premise is creating a more positive environment.

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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?

Anthony Constantino
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.

Adam Outland
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.

Anthony Constantino
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.