Jason Kruse always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He built his first website when he was in eighth grade and then in high school he teamed up with a friend from his math class. “We just kind of made more hobbyist type of websites that we would then sell,” Kruse said, “but I wouldn’t call it a full-time business.”
Fast forward to fall of 2010, when Jason came up with Mr. Decals. “I wanted to make a couple of decals for this table tennis club I was in, as funny as that sounds,” Kruse said. “So, yeah, I got online and searched around and tried to find a place to do it, and there were places where we could buy a hundred or more of them and that really wasn’t what I wanted. There were some places that would let you buy one where you could enter in some text, but they really weren’t that good. So I thought, ‘Why not make one?’”
Photo: Jason Kruse works on his website MrDecals.com. Photo by Kate Ellingson.
The Mr. Decals website has a JavaScript front end that uses jQuery framework, and the backend has potentially patentable software that allows for large-scale batch production of highly individualized decals. The site allows customers to create custom decals that are shipped directly to them.
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“You can upload any image, and you can make them as small as a couple of inches by a couple of inches or as big as two feet by five feet,” Kruse said. “Some people use the bigger ones for cars or walls; the smaller ones, people have been using on binders or laptops, things like that.”
Screenshot of MrDecals.com, taken April 6. The website launched on March 25, 2011.
Kruse showed me how he created my new Silicon Prairie News decals. Photo by Kate Ellingson.
Kruse is a senior at University of Nebraska-Lincoln majoring in computer engineering and minoring in business administration. On top of his regular school work and working another 10 hours a week for his honors program, the Raikes School for Computer Science and Management, he also works at the Nebraska Transportation Center, where he does websites for research projects.
To help fund his business and launch his new website, Kruse entered UNL’s Quick Pitch competition in February and won. “I got $1,000 from the Quick Pitch, and then the rest of it I bootstrapped myself,” he said. “So far I’ve bought used industrial equipment. It will work unless I get to the point that I’m doing 100 or more a day, and then I’ll need to get something a little bit better.”
Kruse said now that the website is launched it’s time to concentrate on sales. “It’s been about a week and a half, and I’m pretty happy with how it has gone,” he said. “I’ve done hardly any advertising, and somehow I’m making sales, so I’d like to put a decent amount towards online advertising.”
So far, his revenue is coming from those sales, cost per click ad campaigns and his partnerships with university Greek houses.
Kruse said that his customers seem to be happy with his product. “One of the coolest applications was for a local company that writes software,” he said. “They were going to a conference, and they were handing out flash drives. So they had a decal on top and on the bottom, and so it clearly branded the flash drive, so it was a really cheap way to do branding.”
In the future he wants to start selling custom decals to state, local and national governing bodies of sports organizations, and he also wants to team up with sign shops to help them take a more business-savvy approach to serving their customers. He expects sales to keep increasing and said eventually he’ll need to raise funds to buy bigger equipment.
For now, Jason’s happy keeping up with business and squeezing in free projects for his friends, but he also appreciates how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. “You have to be passionate about what you’re doing,” he said, “because it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort.” (Above: The finished product on my work binder. Photo by Kate Ellingson.)
