Awardco co-founder and CEO Steve Sonnenberg says there's one thing that took his company from side hustle to $1 billion business: the ability to just get started.
"When it comes to entrepreneurship, my superpower is all about just beginning," Sonnenberg told CNBC last week. "It's very easy for me to start, because that's just who I am."
The Awardco Story
Sonnenberg started Awardco in 2011, shortly after the dissolution of his previous company, WholesaleMatch. While a setback like that may have discouraged other entrepreneurs, Sonnenberg got right to work on his next project, spending $5,000 to purchase the Awardco domain from its previous owner.
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"What does any crazy entrepreneur do? You always have another [idea] on deck," he told CNBC.
At first, Awardco, an employee recognition and rewards platform, was just a side hustle, something he worked on with his co-founders, Mike Sonnenberg and Tanner Runia, while holding down a day job at software company Qualtrics. It took several months and multiple evolutions for the trio to settle on a business model for the platform, before eventually settling on the digital points tracking and marketplace system the company uses today.
In May, the company closed a $165 million funding round. The new investment placed Awardco's valuation at over $1 billion.
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Moving Past No
One place employees can redeem their Awardco points is Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). But when Sonnenberg first reached out to the company looking for a partnership, he was rejected.
Instead of taking that no as a reason to scrap the whole venture, Sonnenberg persisted, signing up corporate clients anyway. And when employees wanted to redeem their Awardco points on goods from Amazon, Sonnenberg's wife manually placed the orders and had them delivered to corporate offices.
It wasn't until 2015, several years after that initial rejection, that Amazon invited Awardco to partner with its business marketplace.
"Start, [then] pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot: That's the story of Awardco, with my back against the wall," Sonnenberg said.
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A Lesson In Resilience
Building a successful company after the failure of previous ventures was no easy task, Sonnenberg says. It took plenty of resilience and confidence in his own ideas and abilities to get Awardco off the ground.
"I just keep going, he told CNBC. "I don't know what it is, but anything I've ever done it's been successful, but it's failed [first]. It's the consistency of keeping it on the track."
The CEO also said that existing knowledge of the employee awards space helped him be successful. He'd grown up watching his father make plaques and other physical awards that large corporations like McDonald's (NYSE:MCD) gave to their employees.
"I just knew the space," Sonnenberg told CNBC. "I knew that this industry is old school [and] ripe for disruption. I was 100% confident that we were going to find success."
Finally, Sonnenberg says his own naivety played a major role in his success.
"[I was] a bit [of] a naive entrepreneur," he said. "And I think that's a trait of successful entrepreneurs: They don't get in the way of themselves."
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