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Spoonflower sold to Shutterfly for $225M
Shaan highlights Spoonflower, a niche marketplace where designers sell patterns that buyers turn into pillows, wallpaper, curtains, and more. Founded in 2008 and based in North Carolina, it sold to Shutterfly for $225 million.
$225M
Spoonflower acquisition price by Shutterfly · USD
“And so they sold for $225 million to Shutterfly. I thought it was really cool and just like kind of this niche product that has been around for a while that sold.”
Story
Hot or Not was Tinder in 2000, when posting a photo online was taboo
Hot or Not let people submit a photo and be rated 1-10 by strangers, a decade before Tinder. Hong notes the radical part wasn't the rating but posting a photo at all, since at the time photos lived only behind password-protected Shutterfly pages.
“And this was kind of in the day when everyone was scared to post their photo online. Like if you posted your photo online, it was behind a password-protected page that, you know, was for Shutterfly or Ophoto back in the day. So the concept of posting a photo for other people to see that you didn't have full control over who could see it was completely foreign at the time.”