Supliful’s Lasmanis is Helping Struggling Creators to Monetize Their Content with Their Own Private Label CPG Brand
I had the pleasure of interviewing Martins Lasmanis, the founder and CEO of Supliful. Supliful helps creators launch their own private label business without the hassle. Previously, Martins had worked in the VC industry for more than 10 years. But having found the need to earn some street credit, he launched his own ecommerce brand — Grafomap.com — together with Supliful’s co-founders. The team bootstrapped and scaled from 0 to $1.5m in revenue and successfully exited to a strategic buyer. Supliful is Martins’ next big venture aiming to disrupt how private label brands are created and distributed to thousands of consumers in the US.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to launch your startup?
After exiting our first company, we as a team wanted to do something together again, because we have really good synergy and complementary backgrounds, which is a massive asset when starting out a new business. The main motivation is to challenge ourselves to the next level — we built our first company which consisted of just the three founders, whereas now we want to build a company that is a great place to work in, that has exciting challenges and where people are valued. I just want to be able to say at some point that Supliful employs thousands of people with great salaries, which eventually means that we’re supporting the livelihoods of thousands of families. That is my biggest motivation.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
I think that the most exciting thing is that we’re enabling a lot of creators (influencers, dropshippers, hustlers, freelancers, etc.) to launch their own private label business with easy product selection, automated ecommerce setup and order fulfilment, into one single digital platform with no upfront costs. Because until now, if a creator would want to launch their own private label business, they would need to spend months to find the right product partners, invest a lot of money up front (~$30k) in stock, find distribution partners and probably hire more people just to run the whole operation.
One of our creators was able to choose his products and create a store in just a few days. Three months into partnership with Supliful, he’s made more than $100k, all while enjoying his life in Miami and creating awesome content for his followers. And this is possible because of Supliful acting as a silent partner on his behalf.
It’s exciting that by using process automation at scale we can enable thousand of creators to launch their own private label businesses effortlessly.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
Well it’s similar to what all the other startups go through, i.e. finding product-market-fit. Even though we’ve already helped creators generate almost $500k in revenue only five months into our beta launch, we’re still struggling to find the right approach to the market, and then efficiently scaling that approach.
What are your future plans for your startup?
We are still in the beta stage so we tend to plan no longer than 6–12 months ahead as we are dynamically progressing and things just change rapidly. Nevertheless, we’re looking to onboard more and more creators and develop features that will help them effortlessly launch their own brands with no upfront cost whatsoever.
That being said, we’re aiming to have helped creators generate more than $4M in revenue by the end of 2022.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
There are no shortcuts. It is a very though environment to be a founder and a lot of sacrifice is demanded from a founder. When the going gets though, sometimes you just need to keep digging, focusing on one shovel at a time and eventually you’ll stumble onto the golden nugget.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
In case you are looking for insights on the creator economy, productivity and just generally running a startup please follow me on the networks below.
LinkedIn Martins Lasmanis
Twitter @lasmanis_m
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
