Edit: From Nothing to Billion: How Steve Sonnenberg Rebuilt After Bankruptcy With a Credit Card and a Rejection Letter From Amazon

Headline *

Subtitle / Deck

Author Name *

Author Title

Category

Read Time (min)

Featured Image

Excerpt

Story Body *

Use ## for section headings · Use ## for pull quotes · Use ![alt](url) for inline images with captions

Steve Sonnenberg's father made plaques.
Not the kind you'd find in an office supply store — the kind McDonald's gives to franchise owners for thirty years of service. The kind hospitals hang on walls when someone retires after four decades. Jim Sonnenberg had spent a career in the recognition industry, manufacturing the physical objects that companies use to say thank you to the people who kept them running. Stevie grew up in that world. He understood the space. He also understood everything wrong with it.
Markups of 300 percent. Shipping costs that dwarfed the item itself. A catalog of forty options when employees actually wanted millions. And a fundamental disconnect between what companies spent on recognition and what employees actually received — or wanted.
"My dad knew the industry inside and out," Steve says. "And I could see exactly where it was broken."
In 2011, Steve Sonnenberg was thirty years old, married, and had four children all under the age of five. He had started a business in college — WholesaleMatch, an e-commerce tools company — and built it to a multimillion-dollar valuation over the better part of a decade. It was his. He'd made it from nothing.
Then the Federal Trade Commission named WholesaleMatch as a defendant in a civil lawsuit brought against one of its clients. Sonnenberg's assets were frozen. He fought the suit for months, then settled, walking away from everything he'd built.
"I had no money. I had four kids. I had nothing left."
He didn't have a plan. He just had the next thing.
"I remember walking on a trail and thinking: if I fight this, I'm going to lose my family. So I started over."
He put $5,000 he didn't have on a credit card and bought the domain Awardco.com from its previous owner.
<h2>The Pivot Machine</h2>
What Steve Sonnenberg was building, at first, was a trophy shop.
His original concept was straightforward: take his father's industry knowledge and move it online. Companies could order awards and plaques through a website. Cleaner. Faster. Better than the existing order forms and phone-in processes that dominated the recognition business.
But trophy shops don't scale. The margins are thin, the logistics are messy, and a website selling plaques isn't meaningfully different from a phone and a fax machine. So Sonnenberg pivoted: he tried making Awardco a wholesale trophy operation with a membership model — like Costco for company awards. Then he tried adding embroidery, for customizing jackets and apparel.
Each pivot was an admission that the last idea wasn't quite right. And each one kept the company alive while Steve figured out what it was actually supposed to be.
"The story of Awardco is start, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot — with my back against the wall," he says.
The real insight came when he started thinking about the problem differently: not as awards but as rewards. Not a company buying plaques for years of service, but employees earning points for good work, then redeeming those points for things they actually wanted. The recognition industry wasn't just broken in how it fulfilled orders — it was broken in what it offered employees in the first place.
Nobody wanted a plaque they'd put in a drawer. Everyone wanted something they'd actually use.
Steve brought in his cousin Mike Sonnenberg, a back-end developer, and a Qualtrics colleague named Tanner Runia to help build the platform. The idea was simple: employees earn points, redeem them for anything on Amazon. Millions of products. No markups. Fast shipping.
The only problem: Amazon didn't want to work with them.
<h2>Built It Anyway</h2>
Steve Sonnenberg approached Amazon with his concept in the early days — before they had a product, before they had clients, before they had anything except an idea and a belief that it could work. He pitched the partnership directly. He was told no.
"They weren't interested," Steve says. "We were too small, too unknown."
Most founders hear that no and stop. Sonnenberg heard it and built the business anyway.
From 2011 to 2015, Steve worked at Qualtrics during the day — a deliberate choice, he says, to learn how to sell to enterprise organizations. He took the job because Qualtrics had a world-class sales force, and he needed to understand how the sausage was made. Then he came home, put in time with his kids, and worked on Awardco from around 7 p.m. until past midnight, every single night.
"We captured all the order details, and my wife would help fulfill orders. This model wasn't scalable, but it worked."
His wife. Manually placing Amazon orders for employees who had redeemed Awardco points. She was the fulfillment system. And it was enough to keep clients happy — and keep the company alive — while Steve continued making the case to Amazon.
By the end of 2015, Awardco had roughly forty corporate clients and was steering more than $300,000 in annual Amazon purchases through its platform. They had traction. They had proof of concept. And Amazon had noticed.
In 2015, Amazon Business was founded. The company reached out to Sonnenberg, inviting him to present at Amazon headquarters. This time, they were elated by the proposal.
"I had developed some relationships there and was eventually invited to present. This time, Amazon Business was elated by our proposal and we immediately began forming a partnership."
The automation changed everything. What had been a manual, wife-fulfilling process became a seamless integration — employees could now redeem points directly for anything on Amazon Business, with no markups and no shipping costs, fulfilled directly through Amazon's logistics network. It was everything Steve had promised from the beginning.
By the end of 2015, Awardco had integrated directly with Amazon Business. The company could finally scale. And in the same year, an angel investment from the family of a colleague at Qualtrics allowed Steve to quit his day job and go all-in on the company he'd been building in the margins for four years.
<h2>The Long Way Up</h2>
The years after the Amazon partnership were not short.
Awardco grew, but steadily. The company added clients — real ones, enterprise organizations that needed a better way to recognize employees. The pitch was clean: you're already spending money on rewards programs. Our program actually works. Your employees get things they want, not things they'll throw away.
"We wanted to improve the overall employee experience at work," Steve says. "Awardco provides the ability for companies to manage all recognition and incentive programs on one platform with advanced budget controls."
The business model worked because it solved real problems for both sides. Companies got measurable engagement data, simplified administration, and no markup on reward items. Employees got access to millions of products — everything from electronics to experiences to practical household items — with the freedom to choose what they actually wanted rather than accepting whatever the company decided to give them.
AT&amp;T became a client. Hertz became a client. Companies with massive, distributed workforces discovered that meaningful recognition at scale was genuinely hard to do — and that Awardco actually did it.
By 2021, Awardco had six million users. It raised a $5 million Series A. Then a $65 million Series B. In May 2025, the company closed a $165 million Series B round, crossing a billion-dollar valuation. Total funding raised: $235 million. The company had nearly 600 employees, with operations across the United States and internationally, integrated with Amazon in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, India, Canada, and wherever else Amazon operated.
The fastest-growing company in Utah, according to MountainWest Capital Network's Utah100 ranking.
<h2>The Superpower</h2>
Steve Sonnenberg is 44 years old. He's a co-founder and CEO. His company is worth a billion dollars.
And he thinks his superpower is something anyone can do.
"When it comes to entrepreneurship, my superpower is all about just beginning. It's very easy for me to start, because that's just who I am."
It's a line that sounds like a cliché until you understand the context. Beginning is not the hard part for most founders. The hard part is beginning after you've already failed — after you've lost everything and have four kids and an empty bank account and a reputation you have to rebuild. Beginning when you have resources is easy. Beginning when you don't is the actual skill.
"I just pivot really fast, because I know it's going to work. You just have to have that level of confidence."
Confidence isn't something Steve Sonnenberg had to manufacture. It was the thing that got him through the years when there was nothing else to lean on — no funding, no proof, no validation from the market, just a belief that the thing he was building would eventually work, and a willingness to keep working until it did.
The Amazon rejection wasn't the end. It was the beginning of four years of manual fulfillment that turned out to be the product validation Amazon needed before they'd engage seriously. The bankruptcy wasn't the end of his story. It was the end of a chapter that cleared the way for the only one that mattered.
"Anything I've ever done, it's been successful, but it's failed first. It's the consistency of keeping it on the track."
In the recognition industry his father spent decades in — the industry with 300 percent markups and forty-item catalogs and employees who threw away the plaques they'd earned — the world has changed.
Not because a startup disrupted it. But because a founder who had nothing figured out that the industry never could: people don't want to be recognized with things they'll throw away. They want to be seen. And the best reward is the one they actually chose.
Steve Sonnenberg runs Awardco from Lindon, Utah. The company serves six million users and is valued at $1 billion.

Pull Quote

Pull Quote Attribution

Status

Cancel