PosterBurner Turns 15

It seems like yesterday that we started PosterBurner.  

But we just turned 15 years old.

We started printing here at my old house.

At first it was one room with one printer, and then we converted the whole downstairs to a production floor.

Then we added people - most of whom are still with us today - and later moved to a real office.

We've never told the story of how PosterBurner came to be.

But we'll tell it here - in parts.

Iowa

Winters in Iowa are freezing.

It gets so cold that your eyebrows freeze within a minute of being outside.

And it was in the freezing Iowa winter that PosterBurner was born.

My brother Matt and I were in Iowa working for a baseball showcase company.

One day, a guy showed up at the office and wheeled in a giant printer. He was a printer salesman trying to pitch the company on buying a printer to make banners for their events. The demo he gave was impressive.

That same day, on the way home from work, my brother and I got into an argument.  

After two winters in Iowa, we were both ready to go home to Virginia, but we couldn’t agree on when and how to do it.

The argument escalated - as arguments amongst brothers often do.  

To this day, we still disagree on what happened next. I say he demanded to get out of my car. He says I told him to get out.

But either way, he got out of the car about a mile from our apartment building, in the freezing cold Iowan winter.

I drove back. After the anger wore off, I started worrying that he wouldn’t make it home.

But he did.

I was half expecting a punch when he walked in. But instead, he said he had an idea on the walk home.

And that idea was the starting point for PosterBurner.   

We started working on it that night.

Next email I'll cover how we took PosterBurner  from an idea to a business with customers.

We hope your new year is going great, and if you need anything or have any questions, just let us know.

And as always, we have the same popular deal we've been running since the day we started:

Movie Size Posters for 19.99.

And here is the link to Part 2 of the story of how PosterBurner was started.