At the age of 22, Davis Siksnans co-founded Printful, a print-on-demand drop shipping startup. The company is quite successful now, having grown significantly in the past six years from five employees to five hundred. However, unlike some other young entrepreneurs, Siksnans tried and failed with multiple start ups before Printful, which helped him learn and develop the knowledge that he utilizes to his benefit today.

Before Printful, Siksnans started a company called Startup Vitamins, which sold motivational posters online, on demand. He found this on demand model to be productive because there was never left over inventory. After some time, he decided he wanted to take this model and apply it to something far more popular in the world of online shopping: apparel. In trying to develop such a companyk, Siksnans and his team found that there was no existing technology to do apparel print-on-demand in a quick, high quality manner with good API. Seeing this gap, they set to work to build it themselves.

Even before he worked on Startup Vitamins, Siksnans had launched multiple other businesses that ultimately had to get shut down. This would have discouraged many young, aspiring entrepreneurs, but instead of letting it impact him negatively, he took the lessons that he learned in all of the failure and kept trying. It seems that in the end it helped him to arrive at a better understanding of what people really want and how to best deliver it while making good profits that have allowed his business to expand impressively in such a short amount of time.

One of the most inspiring things to me about Siksnans’ work with Printful is the fearlessness and ambition that went into creating the new technology to achieve the goal. If I had encountered such a problem, it wouldn’t have been intuitive for me to solve that significant problem headfirst, but they did it and flourish now because of it. Siksnans is yet another exemplary model of entrepreneurial persistence that we can all learn from and appreciate.