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StackSocial's Venice Beach offices, formerly home to Robert Downey Jr.
If you were to visit the StackSocial website, your inner geek would definitely thank you for it. Most of the gadgets you see on the tech e-commerce platform are early stage and unique, from indie maker products and Kickstarter gadgets to software and web apps. A dedicated team of four curators from StackSocial searches out these gadgets through blogs, websites and sometimes via recommendations from their publishing partners who may have just stumbled upon something great.
Venice Beach-based StackSocial launched a little over two years ago with the objective of creating an online marketplace for tech enthusiasts. It started out as a typical marketplace for tech enthusiasts and then CEO Josh Payne stumbled upon another business model. He noticed that most of their traffic was referral from publishing sites. This struck an idea to not just advertise the StackSocial marketplace on publishing platforms, but to actually integrate the platform with publisher content, which led to the Stack Commerce solution. This solution drove even more traffic to StackSocial and gave publishers a way to make extra money by actually giving readers the ability to purchase the types of interesting products they were reading about.
With integrated and non-integrated publisher solutions, StackSocial aggressively sought out the perfect technology-driven publishing content that would lead people to then purchase from StackSocial. Today, they have about 30 integrated publishing partners, including AOL and Venture Beat. They also have approximately 200 non-integrated partners that include tech-focused companies like CNET and Gizmodo.
"Besides the referral traffic from publishing partners, StackSocial has really survived on email lists and word of mouth," said Payne. StackSocial currently has an email list of approximately 400,000 subscribers and a few hundred thousand followers attached to various social media channels.
Despite no heavy traditional advertising in their strategy, StackSocial has become a self-sustaining, profitable company. They raised a $800,000 seed Round in May 2012 and have given thought to a Series A, which will likely be discussed early next year.
For the shopping experience, StackSocial just finished a new website that is fully responsive and released an iPhone app three months ago in preparation for releasing an iPad and Android app later this year.
The StackSocial team grew from 20 employees to 28 in 2013 and they hope to be at 40 employees by the end of this year. Given the swanky Venice beachfront location, they won't have a hard time attracting people; they could even open up a New York office location or another in order to work closer with national publishers at the end of the year in preparation for international expansion in 2015.
