Draw Attention

How did the idea of a laptop whiteboard come about?

Kyle had a small business during college cutting vinyl stickers for bands, paintball groups, skateboards, and the like, but put his equipment in storage when he became a web developer. In November 2014 he had the idea to bring his gear back out and cut a giant sticker—one that would cover his laptop lid and create an instant whiteboard. Since he often works out of co-working spaces and coffee shops, it became the perfect way to engage the community and hold truly open office hours without being that creepy guy who’s wondering what you’re working on.

Kyle posted a picture of what would become the first DrawAttention board to Facebook, and people went nuts – asking when and where can they buy them. A seasoned member of the Dallas startup community told Kyle he needed to sell these immediately, so he gathered all the free technical resources he knew of, and with a $13 .CO domain name, he built a simple yet effective online shop. Kyle reached out to another member of the Dallas startup community, Eric, to write content for the site, and a startup was launched – in just under 10 hours.

To date, DrawAttention has sold thousands of whiteboards in the US and across the world, to people creating some of the world’s best <a href=”http://www.drawattention.co/about/” target=”_blank”>companies and applications</a>.

Have you had any particular struggles you’ve had to overcome?

SCALE. After we were featured on ProductHunt the first time, we had to run really fast and hard to keep up with orders. Plus, at the time we had no international eCommerce or shipping. We’ve also had to learn how to iterate the product and continually make it better, while meeting the volume and demand in a timely way.

What about a success that you’d like to share?

The fact that 2 guys started with a $13 domain name, a little ingenuity mixing some free tools together, and turned this thing into a real business over 10 hours on a Sunday afternoon—we’ll call that a success.

How has ShipStation helped you with your business?

After we started DrawAttention, we were using Stamps.com by copying/pasting addresses because we didn’t have a large number of orders coming through. Once we were published on Product Hunt/Gizmodo/Cool Hunting, everything changed and there was just no way we could handle that much volume at once. Kyle had visited Shipstation’s booth at the Austin Startup Crawl in 2013 and still had the Shipstation stressball on his desk. We looked you up, saw you integrated with Square, and we’ve been sailing pretty much ever since then. The experience so far has been PHENOMENAL. We definitely don’t know how else we’d be doing this without you.

What’s your favorite ShipStation feature?

Integrations overall, but specifically with Squarespace (our site host) and Stamps.com. At one point during our transition, we were pulling in orders from 3 different sources, but we only needed to look at one dashboard to process orders. It makes every single part of the process simple, easy, and fast.