Lessons.biz

Andrea Lake didn't start with Lessons.biz—she started with stickers. In 1999, at the beginning of her serial entrepreneurial journey, she launched StickerJunkie, the first custom sticker website platform on the internet. Before that came a toy company (Rhythm Sticks at age 18) and anti-establishment apparel. But by the time we catch up with her in this 2016 interview, she's built six companies total, each generating recurring revenue with teams running day-to-day operations. Her frustration, however, wasn't with her own businesses—it was with an entire industry.

"I saw so many people selling products on the Internet of how to make money that were not broke as hell," Andrea explains. These courses were intangible, expensive, and taught by people who hadn't actually succeeded themselves. As someone who had owned licensing rights to Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty through her distribution company, and who built StickerJunkie into a 20-million-unit business, Andrea knew she could do better.

Lessons.biz launched as a lean, rapidly-iterating platform. The core offering: a six-week course on how to start a T-shirt company, priced at $497 for self-guided access or $1,997 for annual cohorts where Andrea and her business partner Dan Caldwell interact directly with students. Andrea describes the site itself as "crap right now"—rough, minimal design—but intentional. "The first day that you launch your website is going to be as low converting and as bad looking as it's ever going to be," she explains, noting she tweaks constantly.

The tech stack was deliberately simple: Facebook ads, HostGator for hosting, and a basic email funnel built through an autoresponder sequence. Andrea invested in learning from the best: she began working with Jeff Walker (Launch) and other growth experts to rebuild the funnel properly.

Growth came through two channels: personal networks and paid Facebook ads at approximately 50 cents per email. Within a short timeframe, she'd accumulated just over 2,400 email subscribers—small but real traction. She also appeared on podcasts including Mixergy and Entrepreneur Uprising to build awareness. One early student win proved validating: a company she'd been mentoring, Combat Flip Flops, landed on Shark Tank on Friday—showing that her course actually worked.

Andrea set a bold, audacious goal: hit $100 million in annual revenue by 2018, just two years away. "I will measure that in dollars," she said when asked how she'd know if she hit #1 status. She'd already cracked the code with StickerJunkie (potentially selling for "slightly more than five million"), owned exclusive merchandise rights to billion-dollar gaming franchises, and now was entering the booming online education space with the credibility of having actually built what she teaches.

With a book, "Build a T-Shirt Empire," launching on Amazon soon and plans to expand into restaurants, personal training, and other verticals paired with celebrity entrepreneurs, Andrea was positioning Lessons.biz as the anti-guru course platform: proven founders teaching proven methods to real students.