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Who: Nathan Butorac, CEO
When: Started in 2016
Employees: 3
What: Piñatagram is an e-commerce company that delivers piñatas with custom messages via mail.
Where: Fort Worth
Website: https://www.pinatagrams.com
Fort Worth Report spoke with Nathan Butorac about the business. This interview has been edited for content, length, grammar and clarity.
Seth Bodine: How’d you come up with the idea for Piñatagram?
Nathan Butorac: I was working for a technology device company (Internet of Things). They were touch-enabling hard surfaces. And I’ve been in the startup space for my entire career since I graduated in 2013 from TCU. At that point, it was just me and the two co-founders and we kind of had a difference of opinion of where my career with them was headed, as far as job roles. I decided to step away from that business and start my own.
I still had a consulting client on the side so I wasn’t completely out of work. But I wanted to get into ecommerce because it would allow me to start with very little capital, go cash flow positive within three months and live from anywhere. And I just went to Google search and was saying “crazy stuff that you can send in the mail,” because one of the other things I wanted to do was to have a viral component, so that I would lower my marketing costs. I wanted something that potentially could just kind of take off.
Bodine: On social media?
Butorac: Yeah. I didn’t want to do just another generic product that I was trying to build a brand around. I wanted it to be exciting, something new.
My first idea was actually mailasnail.com. Mailing real snails using snail mail. And that lasted all but one day. Had the idea in the morning, built the website in the afternoon, put it on Facebook to see if my friends liked it in the evening. It did. And then, about midnight, I had 100 snails from a California snail farm in my shopping cart. And hit three pages of FDA documentation to send an invasive species across state lines. So I was like, ‘OK, that idea’s dead.’ Pivot. Went back to Google to search even crazier things you could send in the mail and saw some mom bloggers that were sending piñatas to their kids and in college, and they were arriving outside of a box. I grew up with them at my birthday parties, and they’re fun, so why not give that a try?
Bodine: It took off from there?
Butorac: No, it did not. I sold five or six to close friends. And then my first big marketing push I went to South by Southwest with a friend of mine. And we plastered downtown Austin during South By with 1,000 flyers for missing piñatas. We started trending on Twitter. And I got a little press.
Really, it was kind of from 2017-2020 some ups and downs, but never really anything more than some side money. And then in 2020, that’s where I just kind of got lucky.
A lot of people say luck is opportunity meets preparedness. Well, I just happened to be in the right industry, ecommerce, when the world shut down.
I lived with some photographers and videographers that were out of work. They were wedding photographers. And videographers. And we just decided to make a Piñatagrams commercial. Put it on Facebook ads, and just the stars aligned and right at that exact moment was the best time to get into Facebook ads ever because people were positive media budgets and yet everybody was looking at it. So that’s what allowed us to scale that where we are today.
Bodine: What’s the biggest lesson that you learned from all this?
Butorac: Sometimes persistence is what it takes. But then also looking back, I see just how reckless I was in my 20s by not focusing. It was a risky proposition to keep chasing startups for a decade. Then on this side of things, it’s like well, yeah, of course I’d do it again. The reason why it did succeed is that I stuck with it for five years.
Bodine: What advice would you give someone who’s trying to start their own business?
Butorac: I would say if somebody wants to start a business, be sure that you are obsessively learning about what makes the other companies in that space successful.
I would have whoever that person is consider deeply how much time and money and relationships they have to make it happen and realize that most people fail at starting a successful business. It is a risky endeavor.
Seth Bodine is a business and economic development reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at seth.bodine@fortworthreport.org and follow on Twitter at @sbodine120.
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