THE MARKETING PLAN — NO. 01
The banner is the ad. The website just takes the order.
How Varsity Banners mails every school a sample banner in its own colors and mascot — then remembers the design it prints, so next season is one click.
THE ONE IDEA
The website is the cash register, not the billboard
The market is a list, not a crowd. There are only so many schools within driving distance — a list we can actually finish, school by school. Mailing that list beats advertising to strangers, so our marketing isn’t online at all: it’s a printed sample banner in each school’s own colors and mascot, sent to the coach or the athletic director.
The old direct-mail rule says personalization is the difference between mail and trash — and a banner with their own mascot on it is an ad nobody throws away. When the school writes back “how do we order?”, the website has exactly two jobs: take the order, and remember it.
One school’s year, in three waves
“Print is our product. So print is the ad.”
01 — WHY WE WIN
Four edges a cheaper printer can’t copy
Memory — we save every school’s design, so reordering last season takes one click. No national printer knows who a school is — and leaving us means leaving your history behind.
The engine — our design engine drops a photo, a name, and a number into a locked design at print quality, instantly. It generates the personalized samples we mail today, and it’s the machine the parent portal will run on tomorrow.
The 25-parent problem — nobody has solved a whole team ordering together — coaches still collect photos and chase payments by hand. When we ship the fix, it’s a new category, not a better feature.
We answer the phone — a misprint reported on Wednesday is reprinted before Friday’s game. Schools stay with the vendor who picks up.
Upload-and-print is a commodity — somebody will always do it cheaper for a stranger. Our pitch is three words long, and no big printer can say them: we remember your school.
02 — WHAT WE REFUSE TO BUILD (YET)
The plan is defined by what it leaves out
No templates
Our schools have designers, and those designers hand us finished files. A template gallery says “make it yourself” to people who already made it. If templates ever exist, they’ll be born from our archive of most-printed designs — a by-product of real orders, not a project we guess at up front.
No self-serve setup tools
A school emails us its design, and we set the account up by hand — concierge first, the way Airbnb photographed apartments themselves before building tools for hosts. A few hundred hand-built setups will teach us exactly which tool to build, and the hours they take will tell us exactly when.
No parent portal — yet
The portal where every parent pays for their own banner is the most exciting thing on the roadmap, which is exactly why it has to wait. It gets built when real coaches ask for it, not on faith — Phase 3 below spells out the trigger.
Everything above gets built eventually — from evidence. The funnel decides the order, not us.
03 — THE FUNNEL
The whole business, in three steps
The sample lands — a banner in the school’s colors and mascot shows up at the athletic office, and the reply we want is four words long: “how do we order?”
The website takes the order — upload the artwork, pay, we print — and quietly, the design saves to the school’s account.
Next season is one click — we email the school its own saved design — “ready to re-run, reply yes” — and the reorders compound year after year.
We build features behind whichever step of this funnel breaks first — never ahead of it.
04 — THE RELEASE PLAN
Four phases, each unlocked by the last
Nothing on this list ships on faith. Every phase has one success signal, and hitting it is what unlocks the phase after.
Phase 1 — Print & remember
Upload the artwork, buy, we print — zero touch. Plus one quiet addition: every design auto-saves to a school account, and that save button is the entire difference between a print shop and a platform. The marketing is the mail: pick the 25 nearest schools and send each a sample in its own colors and mascot, one season early. A quality check at upload keeps blurry photos off the press — a modern phone photo passes easily. Success looks like one thing: schools we mailed place an order.
Phase 2 — Reorder season
The memory is already piling up in Phase 1 — this phase adds the button. One click re-runs last season from the saved account, and roster swap comes with it: the coach sends new names and photos, the engine regenerates the whole set, and nobody redesigns 25 banners by hand. Above 70% of schools re-running each season, the memory moat is real. Below 50%, we fix reordering before we chase a single new school.
Phase 3 — The team link
The coach texts one link. Each parent uploads a photo, a name, and a number, and pays about $55 — the design stays locked, the deadline is hard, a progress bar shows “18 of 25 ordered,” and everything batches into one print run. Boosters earn 10–15% on every order, which turns us into their fundraiser and makes the rebate our entire ad budget, paid only on real sales. We build this once three schools answer yes to the question we ask every Phase 1 school: “would parents paying individually through a link make your life easier?”
Phase 4 — Scale what worked
Self-serve setup tools, designed from a few hundred real hand-built setups instead of guesses. A template library born from our thirty most-printed designs, for the youth and club teams that have no designer. Photographer partnerships — they hold the good photo and the parent’s email at the exact emotional peak, and they earn a share of every sale. And sponsor fence banners that renew every fall: the only true subscription in this business.
That’s the whole roadmap — and everything after Phase 1 is provisional on purpose. If a phase’s signal never shows up, the next phase never gets built.
05 — THE THREE TOUCHES
No ad budget — a stamp, an email, and a text
None of the three touches that grow this business is an internet ad. Each one arrives from somewhere hard to ignore — the school’s own mailbox, its own saved design, its own coach — and each one leads to the same website.
#22
MADDOX
EASTSIDE EAGLES · CLASS OF 2027
Not a brochure about banners — a real printed banner, in the school’s own colors, with the school’s own mascot.
Mailed one season early — June for fall sports, October for winter, January for spring. Judged by one number: did the school order?
Eagles banners — ready to re-run for 2027
Your design is saved exactly as you approved it. Send the new roster, reply yes, and it’s on press this week.
Costs nothing to send, and lands right before the season starts. This is the recurring revenue — triggered by memory, not by ads.
Senior banner time 🏈 One link, five minutes — photo, name, jersey number.
Deadline is Friday. Don’t make me collect photos in the parking lot again.
Eastside Eagles — Senior Banners
18 of 25 ordered · closes Friday
Not built yet — and not until three schools ask for it. When it ships, the coach sends one text and never collects a photo or a payment again.
Every touch points at the same place, and the website always does the same three things: take the order, save the design, remember the school.
06 — THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER
The only three numbers we watch
25 mailed
the first list of schools — small enough to finish, personal enough to convert
70%
of schools must re-run each season — below that, memory isn’t a moat yet
Setup hrs
per school — the growth cap, and the alarm that says it’s time for Phase 4
Every phase ends with a question, not a launch.
The rule under the whole plan is the oldest one in selling: get out of the building. We mail the samples, we take the orders, and then we ask every school the same question — and their answer, not our roadmap, unlocks whatever gets built next.