Justyna Dorsz

Design ideas tutorial

Today I watched Michael Essek’s talk “How to come up with ideas that buyers love”.

There are two things that surprised me:

  • Michael has a much more professional attitude towards making designs. I sort of always just draw what I like. Michael, of course, likes to draw. But he also runs a business. I think I should learn from him.
  • I thought I had a lot of designs. I have now about 240 designs but not all of them are completely unique. Some are just different versions of the save design. Michael has over 2000 designs! He said that maybe even up to 5000 if you include all variants. That’s insane! When did he draw all that?

The talk was very informative and motivating. Go watch it.

5 weeks of Trufflepig

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.

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.

DMCA takedown notice – form vs. email

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.

Homunculus

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.