5 weeks ago, I opened my new store, Trufflepig.
There are 41 designs in the store so far. All of them have cats! I have plans to add other animals but I enjoy drawing cats.
You are probably curious how much the store has earned so far. In total, I earned $52 🙂
My best-selling design is SAY NO TO ACTIVITY.
My plan for the next few weeks is to make a lot more designs. I want to have at least 100 designs in my store.
Threadless just added new t-shirt. I am now going to enable them on all my designs. You should too.
Remember, you don’t have to edit each design separately to enable Champion t-shirts. You can manage your designs in bulk. Go to Artist Shop -> Products and filter by Men’s -> T-shirt -> Champion. Then do the same for Women’s.
I have not been sleeping well lately.
My artwork is stolen so often that I need to send thousands of DMCA takedown notices each year.
To make the process as fast as possible, I use email templates. But most websites prefer to receive takedown notices via their forms. For example, every time I email a takedown notice to Etsy I receive an email asking me to submit future notices via their form.
Do they not realize that their form takes a few minutes to fill? Sending an email takes just a few seconds. I don’t want to waste my time filling out forms. I prefer to send emails wherever possible.
I can understand that Etsy prefers to receive filled out forms. They are easier to process. But I calculated that if I keep sending forms to Etsy, I will waste over a day of my life per year. And that’s just on Etsy. There are many more websites that I need to send takedown notices to.
If you need to send takedown notices, send them via email, instead of via form. Don’t waste more time than you need to.
There are many ways of dealing with hard decisions.
For example, there’s a method called “fear setting” which Tim Ferriss is fond of. In short, he describes it this way: imagine the worst-case scenario and you will realize it’s really not that bad.
There are many more methods, of course. Here’s a collection of them.
My favorite is Homunculus. Nate Soares describes the technique, and it goes like this: imagine you are a homunculus, which is a tiny human, and you get to steer your body however you want. Now, imagine also that you are a very new homunculus, and arrive in your body for the first time. What would you change?
As a new homunculus, you have the privilege of pruning the things that obviously need pruning. Maybe you’ll look and say “Ah, yes, we’re going to cancel lunch with that person; this body was secretly dreading it. I also see that this body is currently spending a lot of cycles feeling guilty about a date that went poorly last week; we can dismiss that, it’s no longer useful for this homunculus. And also, “exercise” doesn’t seem to be on today’s schedule at all! How strange. This body definitely intended to exercise today; somehow it fell off the list. I’ll put it back on.”
– Nate Soares “Be a new homunculus”
It’s a very easy method. I’ve already imagined my new homunculus, and it made me delete 3 items from my to-do list. That’s one of my major struggles — I keep adding things to my list and have a tough time recognizing which tasks are not important. But my homunculus knew right away.
Really, I have no explanation for this design. I just thought that a confused cat would be funny 🙂
The problem is:
I don’t yet know how to deal with this — I will need to consult my attorneys. Etsy is clearly accepting fake counter even though the notices are clearly not valid — for example, they don’t contain an address.
I don’t have a solution for this issue yet. I am simply writing it here to rise awareness. I know other must be facing the same problem.
Now, that Threadless added crest and back prints, I’ve been making some modifications to my existing designs so that they can be printed as crests.
For example, this is my Winter Walk painting:
And this is how it looks printed on a navy t-shirt:
But I made a crest option — just the cat, without the snow:
I didn’t know submarines are that awesome. My brother sent me this video made by Dustin from the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel. Dustin got to visit a US Navy nuclear submarine and see how it works — except the classified stuff.
It’s the first part but there are 9 in total. I watched them all.
I was watching a presentation by David Perell, a writer, and Jack Butcher, a designer. They talked about how they started their careers, what lead them to the work they do now, what were the setbacks and failures. It was a very motivating talk. But one thing that David said surprised me. Around minute 40, he said that when he was starting his business, his friends mocked him. He even got an email from a friend who told him that some people that they both knew were making fun of David’s efforts.
I’ve never really thought about it. Maybe some of my friends were making fun of me too? My first designs were awful. My first game had a lot of problems. Did my friends think I was ridiculous? Not that it would have mattered.
Anyway, the whole video is worth watching (but I time stamped when David talked about people making fun of him):