It’s been about a week since reddit blacked out to protest SOPA and PIPA. It seems the effect has been significant, as both bills seem to have been stopped dead in the water. But it’s good to remember that freedom on the Internet needs to be continually protected, as we’re sure that such legislation will continue to arise.

We wanted to do our part in spreading the message, so we turned to the reddit community to help us design a sticker to promote freedom on the Internet. Here’s what we came up with:

We’ll be adding one of these to every reddit sticker order for free until the end of February. To get your hands on one, visit the reddit Sticker Store and order any design to receive a free Protect Internet Freedom sticker designed by redditor thesluttymcslut.

Questions or thoughts? Tweet @stickermule.

Defend your right to privacy by purchasing stickers from our brand new DuckDuckGo Sticker Store. DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine like Google or Bing with an important difference. It does not track you. It also works harder to reduce spam and clutter, and includes a ton of goodies

The DuckDuckGo store features 18 community designed stickers (more to come!), as well as official logo stickers and iPhone skins. There’s even a reddit-inspired sticker that also serves as the logo for the official DuckDuckGo subreddit.

We couldn’t be happier to power the official DuckDuckGo Sticker Store, but we need your help to make it a huge success. With SOPA looming, it couldn’t be more important to support companies like DuckDuckGo that defend our right to online privacy. So, for a limited time, we’re giving away a pack of 10 free DuckDuckGo stickers to anyone that spreads the word about this store and DuckDuckGo on their blog.

So, we woke up this AM to find ~1000 orders in our system and this post on reddit. Our new referral system let’s anyone give their friends $10 towards their 1st order by sharing a referral link.

According to our accounting department, we can’t giveaway free stickers indefinitely so we had to make a change to our referral system. Anyone can still get a $10 credit towards their 1st order, but you can’t use the credit unless the order is greater than $50.

Since we’d still like to thank everyone on reddit for the awesome support, we’re going to giveaway another 1000 reddit stickers for free. Just fill out this form and a free sticker will be in the mail within 7 days. :-)

When we created Sticker Mule we were largely driven by inspiration from all the awesome tech companies we admire. So we couldn’t be more excited announce that we’re powering the official reddit Sticker Store.

The reddit Sticker Store includes both everlasting reddit standbys, as well as an ever-changing cast of limited edition stickers highlighting topics and events within reddit. There will also be iPhone skins, so you can have reddit on your iPhone while you reddit on your iPhone.

Find Sticker Mule on reddit as stickermule. We’re looking forward to making stickers for redditors everywhere! Got feedback? Leave a comment with your ideas on how we can make this more awesome.

We quietly started shipping custom stickers in 5 business days last month. Faster turnaround has been a major request and we're psyched to take a big step forward in that regard. It's been a long process to find & install the right machinery, learn how to run it and, hire & train a solid group of people. It feels great to have made major strides the past few months and we hope you’re happy with the change too. :-)

You might have heard we have a major update forthcoming. At this point, it’s about 80% done and we’re mostly working on finishing touches. As it turns out, sales have been growing even without releasing any major updates so we’ve been more focused on operational improvements the past 2 months. This pushed back the release of Sticker Mule 2.0, but it's not all bad news.

Our current goal is to get our internal operation running as smoothly as possible. To that end, we polished a long list of rough edges in our operation. 3 months ago we thought buying more equipment would be the end all. That was far from the truth. In the past 3 months we installed 7 new machines, but without a smooth work flow and highly trained staff machinery can’t be fully utilized. Fortunately, we finally addressed most of the major kinks in our system and hired quite a few kick ass people.

So what’s next? We’re going to take our time finishing Sticker Mule 2.0. We rushed the current version of our site out after only 1 month in development. It’s been enjoyable to be able to slowly polish the next major update. Just like we tackled most of the major kinks in our operation, we want 2.0 to address ever flaw in our site design. Hopefully you’ll find it worth the wait. :-)

After 3 months of stressing about our capacity constraints, we're finally up and running with new, kick ass machinery. We're all incredibly thankful for everyone that supported us through our growing pains. Our new machinery is a major leap forward. It represents a 10x increase in capacity and will make scaling easier so that we avoid future capacity problems. The end result is that we're finally in a position to focus 100% on improving your ordering experience.

In fact, Sticker Mule 2.0 is already in development. It will include a design refresh as well as a handful of fun new features. More importantly, our next release will provide a stronger foundation to build upon. The design is rock solid and gives us flexibility to address our long list of planned improvements.

It will be a few more weeks until release Sticker Mule 2.0, but we encourage you to sign up to get notified when we relaunch. We'll be hooking everyone up with a 20% discount during launch week so definitely tell your friends to sign up too. :-)

We printed 6 kick ass, limited edition die cut stickers just for LessConf 2011. Collect them all, post them on your Twitter & Facebook too. We really like LessConf and we'll be really happy if everyone at LessConf likes us too. :-)

Recently, we decided to switch our help desk from Zendesk to Assistly and we couldn't be any happier. Assistly is the most impressive business-y web app to come out in a long time. If email is the killer business app, then Assistly is the most significant improvement on business email since Gmail and Google Apps. Beyond that, Assistly makes it effortless to engage your customers on Facebook and Twitter too. Here's 10 reasons why we're totally in love with it:

1. Google Apps integration makes it easy to install, provision and access Assistly.
   
2. Control your email deliverability by using your own SMTP server to send emails.
3. The user interface is intuitive and power-user friendly.
4. Easily monitor, update and respond to posts on your Facebook wall.
5. The Twitter integration is so good I ditched Twitter for Mac.
   
6. Case notes are more intuitive than Zendesk's concept of private / public comments.
7. Attachments behave correctly in Assistly. By comparison, Zendesk shares attachments as embedded links which confuses users.
8. View the original email in HTML format with 1-click.
9. Control your system labels from the admin panel to enforce consistency.
10. Flex pricing allows infrequent users to have access at a cost of $1 /hr.
    

If you're looking for a help desk we highly recommend Assistly. Do you have a favorite app to supercharge your customer service? Share it in the comments or tweet @stickermule.

So we did something stupid. Capacity planning is manufacturing 101 and we forgot to do it. What's worse is I was recently interviewed by The Startup Foundry and foolishly explained that we wouldn't have trouble scaling. I was obviously wrong.

The problem is, we initially thought we'd scale by just buying more of the machinery we already own. The downside to that strategy became apparent as we started to grow exponentially. Our current low-end equipment is labor intensive (i.e. slow) which means we'd need to buy a few more machines and also hire additional people to keep up.

Our other option was to look at high-end equipment (i.e. something faster) that'd let us pump out more work without expanding our staff. That strategy has 2 problems: 1) we had not done much research on high-end sticker printing equipment 2) high-end equipment is more expensive and we have limited funds.

Obviously, this wasn't something that we wanted to rush into, but we also needed a solution ASAP. Rather than screw around any longer, we decided to get on a plane and visit a handful of machine vendors to learn what's available. It's not fun investing in equipment when you're under pressure to make a decision, but we just bought some awesome new machines that we're confident will pay off. The bad news is that they won't be operational for 8 more weeks. :-/

In the meantime, here's what we're doing to minimize disappointing our customers:

1. All products were updated to notify you during checkout that production time is 15 business days.
2. We added a warning during checkout to notify you that deliveries are not guaranteed.
3. We organized our internal operation to run 3 full shifts, 7 days a week.
   

We tend to think that the best thing we can do at this point is be honest about our situation. We definitely don't want anyone placing orders with us only to be disappointed. If you have any thoughts on how we can do better leave a comment or send us an email.