Back in February, I got the idea to create a COVID vaccination t-shirt (now on sale!). Reflecting on my past experience, I figured it would be easy.
Step 1: Run an illustration contest on Freelancer.com, something I’ve successfully done several times before.
Step 2: Take the winning entries to Zazzle.com, design some shirts, and sell them using the same interface, another thing I’ve done several times before (albeit on a small scale).
My thinking: The whole process would be pretty fun, so I’d only need to sell a few dozen shirts to cover the cost of the contest and count the project a success. I’m still optimistic, but the process has definitely been much more aggravating than expected. A chronological list of snags:
1. One of my winning entrants warned me that the other two winners had copied their designs. Unpleasant news.
2. When I followed up, one of the accused was able to produce clear documentation that she had purchased the rights to her design. One problem solved.
3. The other accused contestant, however, seemed quite evasive about the situation. Or perhaps it was a language problem? I didn’t like the idea of paying for an unusable design, but I also felt bad about refusing to reward one of my winners. After much prodding, he finally produced clear documentation that the images he incorporated into his design were in the public domain. Another problem solved, but the conflict weighed on me.
4. I was planning on immediately announcing that the three shirts were available for sale, but I decided I ought to order test copies for myself first. And figuring I was losing sales every day, I paid for rush delivery from Zazzle.
5. A couple days later, Zazzle sent me an email canceling the order. Why? They claimed that the sole fully original design violated copyright! Hopefully I’ll work this out eventually, but apparently every drawing of a guy in a white suit at a disco infringes Saturday Night Fever. Argh.
6. I could have challenged the ruling, but instead I looked around for an alternative vendor. I figured they’d all be pretty similar, so I quickly settled on Printful.
7. Since I’d never done business with Printful, I had to place another test order.
8. After a couple days, Printful emailed with with a new problem: Printing a white semi-transparent design on a black sweatshirt yields an unwanted gray color. So I went back and revised the order.
9. Soon afterwards, Zazzle let me know my cancelled order was in the mail, rush order surcharge included! In the past, Zazzle cancelled all items in an order if it flagged any item for copyright problems. Now, apparently, it sends everything that wasn’t cancelled. Argh.
10. A week later, I checked on my Printful order, and discovered that I had somehow failed to click the final “OK” after revising the gray sweatshirt snafu, so my test order was still in limbo. Sigh. So I fixed it again, double stampies no erasies.
11. A few days later, I finally got my Printful order. The products looked good. I was ready to go. But when I went to the website to offer the products for sale to customers, I discovered that Printful – unlike Zazzle – makes selling designs a pain in the neck. To do business on Printful, I’d first have to sign up for a totally separate vendor website, and then merge the two accounts. Argh.
12. After trying this for a half hour, I realized that I would be better off going back to Zazzle. So I dumped Printful and created a new Zazzle store, #FearMeNot, minus the disapproved design. Happily, the Zazzle interface seemed to work just as seamlessly as I remembered. You can order “Fear me not! I got my COVID vaccine” shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies now. (Be sure to use the coupon code TUESDAYGIFTZ).
So at the end of this arduous and aggravating journey, I finally started selling my products to nudge the world to back to normalcy. In a week or so, I’ll try to convince the Zazzle copyright people that my third design is legit. (Even if Saturday Night Fever does have a copyright on all images of disco-dancers in white suits, my design should clearly be protected as parody). Overall, I think this will be a positive experience for me. The creative pleasure I’ve enjoyed plus the money I expect to make will probably exceed the subjective and financial cost of the dozen hassles I’ve already swallowed.
Still, a few more hassles could easily change my mind. And selling t-shirts on Zazzle is virtually the lowest-hassle business I can imagine running. Which makes me picture the horrors of creating and managing an actual business.
Indeed, I suspect that anyone who’s ever run an actual business has been rolling their eyes at my self-pity. Twelve little snags? Real entrepreneurs face more challenges every day. Unlike me, they have to coordinate a long list of products, each with their own attendant baggage. Unlike me, they have to manage a physical space. Unlike me, they have to hire and direct employees. And unlike me, they have to cope with a morass of government regulation. I don’t care if actual businesspeople do roll their eyes at me; their can-do attitude in the face of endless obstacles still fills me with awe.
Note further that in this very blog post I’ve already publicly complained more about my business woes than most businesspeople ever will. Are they stoic? Do they realize that hardly anyone will sympathize with their plight? Or are they just too busy making the trains run on time to stop and reflect? All three answers make businesspeople look admirable indeed. They don’t just make the world work. They bear the suffering of the world in silence. No wonder I love them!
What motivates businesspeople? While the full answer is complex, the basic answer is clear: Money. People run businesses to get richer – and ideally, to get rich. And whenever I get a small taste of the challenges businesspeople overcome, not to mention the disrespect they endure in our society, I have to say that businesspeople earn every penny. As someone who definitely does not want your job, entrepreneurs of the world, I thank you.
P.S. Put your customers at ease with a #FearMeNot shirt!
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READER COMMENTS
Aaron
Mar 30 2021 at 10:23am
Intellectual property law is a absolute cancer on the planet. I would nuke all of it if I could. Copyright, patents, and I would even get rid of trademarks just to make sure it was all totally eliminated.
Even if there are reasonable arguments that it is a net positive (I’ve never heard one), it should still be eradicated like the plague it is. In exactly the same way that reasonable arguments that murdering Jeff Bezos would be a net positive are not sufficient justification to do it.
“Hi, I had a thought. Now you’re not allowed to have that thought. Don’t worry, this is a totally normal and sane way to run the world.”
Anonymous
Mar 30 2021 at 11:42am
“Even if there are reasonable arguments that it is a net positive (I’ve never heard one)”
Really? Incentivizing innovation? Avoiding consumer confusion?
Without trademarks, virtually everything you bought would be made in China, look identical to the real product, but actually be complete crap.
Dzhaughn
Mar 30 2021 at 3:14pm
If you succeed, I will have some Rolex watches and Prada bags to sell you at steep discounts.
Oleg
Mar 30 2021 at 4:07pm
Funny, but I won’t want the Rolex knock-off. A genuine Rolex can’t be re-produced en masse, at least not cheaply. I would make a point of confirming what I was getting was the real thing. As for the rest of IP, Aaron’s absolutely right. Has never not been a net social and economic loss.
Professor Rasmusen
Mar 30 2021 at 11:43pm
Rolex is a trademark. Trademark law is much more justifiable– it is really just fraud prevention. You don’t have to register your trademark, and all it is supposed to protect is someone falsely implying they are you– identity theft. That would be an offense even under the common law.
Copyright is the worst.
Oleg
Mar 31 2021 at 2:30pm
The Rolex mark (or “marque”) is protected by trademark law, but the Rolex watch itself is an unique “expression,” is it not (the thing is a bloody work of art)? I want my Rolex from Rolex, and am willing to pay. If someone wants the same watch that lesser craftsmen (or large, very sophisticated machines) have copied, let them get one at a suitable discount.
Aaron
Mar 31 2021 at 9:33am
And if your baseless assumption that I’m dumb as bricks is true maybe it will even work. And intellectual property law need not be invoked to call fraud fraud. Either way, the world you described is better than the one we live in, by a wide margin.
Jon Murphy
Mar 30 2021 at 4:15pm
That’s not how IP works, though. It means you cannot use that thought as your own without either attributing it to the original person or paying for the right to use it. Whether you agree or disagree with IP, it’s not thought control.
Mark Brady
Mar 30 2021 at 9:48pm
“That’s not how IP works, though. It means you cannot use that thought as your own without either attributing it to the original person or paying for the right to use it. Whether you agree or disagree with IP, it’s not thought control.”
Yes, but it’s worth acknowledging that patents prevent independent discoverers of an invention from exploiting their own creativity for the period of the patent.
robc
Mar 31 2021 at 7:42am
without either attributing it to the original person or paying for the right to use it.
And, not or. Attributing without paying will get you sued.
it’s not thought control.
I agree. Its much worse, its slavery. One of the basic premises of self-ownership is that I own my thoughts. If I cannot use my thoughts because you own them, I am your slave. As Mark Brady pointed out, patents create this regardless of whether it is independent thought or not, based on temporal(2) order. But I don’t think that should even matter. If I reverse engineer your product, that is still my thought, and I should be allowed to use my thoughts. Same applies to copyright. Obviously, that won’t be independent thought, but I already stated that it doesnt matter. You create an earworm, I should be able to use it.
However, I am okay with trademarks, as that is basic fraud prevention. In a related way, with copyright, If I resell your book, I should attribute you as the author — but that goes back to your first statement I quotes, before the or. If your statement had been correct, and attributing it was enough, I would agree with you. An attribution doesn’t prevent me from using my thoughts.
Jon Murphy
Mar 31 2021 at 9:44am
Not necessarily. There are exceptions (parody, fair use, academia) where you can use the IP without paying.
robc
Mar 31 2021 at 12:28pm
For parody, you dont have to attribute either.
robc
Mar 31 2021 at 12:30pm
All 3 of those will sometimes get you sued. You will win, but it will still get you sued.
supagold
Mar 31 2021 at 4:05pm
You should learn a lot more about IP if you’re going to have such strong opinions on it. As someone pointed out (and you only partially addressed), the correct conjunction is “or”. First, grammatically and logically speaking, there is such a thing as the “inclusive or” which implies either or both options as applicable. But more importantly there are a range of situations where copyright only requires attribution – the first one that jumps to mind is Creative Commons licensing, which grant a range of rights as long as you attribute the original work.
You also seem to have the odd conception that reverse engineering something is somehow having original thoughts? In what world does copying something involve originality? Imagine someone learning to play guitar, then going around telling everyone that “Stairway to Heaven” is his original thought. LMAO. Perhaps you’re thinking of a “Clean Room” design? Those actually are allowable developments under copyright.
Aaron
Mar 31 2021 at 9:23am
I was being hyperbolic for effect. Yes, it’s not thought control. But it is expression control. Almost as bad.
David Henderson
Mar 30 2021 at 10:42am
Very nicely done: taking your story about dealing with multiple snags and temporary showstoppers, and then extending it to the bigger world to point out that this happens all the time with normal businesses, and with much bigger stakes.
I saw this in detail in a book I reviewed years ago by one of the first people who worked at PayPal. They were heroic.
Paul
Mar 30 2021 at 11:18am
Honestly, I think this is part of the problem with people having a problem with capitalism. (Another major part is people only thing of BIG companies, and not small companies, and the everything that they do to make our society work without drawing in billions of dollars.) If more people actually tried starting businesses, they would realize how hard it is to do, and how important it is that some people are successful doing it.
Enoch A Lambert
Mar 30 2021 at 11:41am
Anyone who does any kind of project encounters scores of little snags.
If you haven’t heard a business owner complain, you don’t know any.
Business owners have much more status and privilege in society than most.
The ones who don’t end up making the money often worked just as hard through the snags.
Spare is the obvious propaganda.
Austin Vernon
Mar 30 2021 at 11:42am
I think it is more likely that business people don’t complain out of embarrassment. You have to be extremely optimistic to start a business and when you hit those inevitable snags that cost you more money and more time than you thought it feels like you made lots of embarrassing mistakes. Plus, you may not want to give the impression that everything isn’t perfect for potential customers or investors.
That is why if you do see businesses talking about mistakes, it is usually mistakes in the far past or they are very public mistakes that need addressed.
Everything is more complex than it seems. If that weren’t true, decentralized markets wouldn’t work so much better!
Professor Rasmusen
Mar 30 2021 at 11:45pm
Actually the reason you don’t hear businessmen complain is because you can’t hear them. I bet they complain to each other and would love to complain to us, but they don’t have the soapbox. And they don’t care enough to buy one.
MarkW
Mar 31 2021 at 12:50pm
One businessperson who does complain about these kinds of things (and does have a soapbox) is Warren Mayer at CoyoteBlog. Here’s a recent example. If you scroll back through earlier posts, there are lots of other posts concerning frustrations dealing with bad business service providers, complex time-consuming regulations, and recalcitrant bureaucrats.
BW
Mar 30 2021 at 1:44pm
Has this discouraged you from creating a homeschool?
Massimo
Mar 30 2021 at 3:14pm
As an entrepreneur, I do not complain. All those snags are actually barriers to entry. If you have the self-confidence, discipline and grit to go ahead, you make much more money than working as an employee.
There are no heroes in an economy. But there are the victims of absurd regulations: the consumers. Of course, most of them are their own moronic torturers when they are in the voting booth.
Mario J Rizzo
Mar 30 2021 at 3:41pm
I think that in NYC these shirts would be viewed as highly aggressive and destructive of solidarity. I am not sure that I have used the right words because this is not my view. I am trying to get into the mindset of my neighbors. It would be like wearing a MAGA hat here. Sigh.
JK Brown
Mar 31 2021 at 7:45pm
Well, it’s NYC. Louis Rossman, on Youtube who has a Macbook repair story in Manhattan was just venting on a tens of thousands of dollars fine they city just hit him with for not registering with an online database for used goods purchased that police check for stolen items. But he doesn’t buy used goods. He does after a year or so, sell abandoned computers. City just offered to settle for $500 and an admission of guilt for something he didn’t do. He’s an illuminating source into doing business in NYC.
Seems to me the slogan would be more “Don’t fear for me” “I’ve been vaccinated”. The “vaccine” is only approved as being effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19. Data looks good for sterilizing immunity, but that has not been medically approved by the vaunted experts. So the vaccine simply makes someone as safe as a 20 yr old for needing medical treatment for COVID-19 and death. The emergency approval of the “vaccines” was not for them preventing someone from getting asymptomatic COVI-19 or for being able to shed virus to others.
Professor Rasmusen
Mar 30 2021 at 11:49pm
Schumpeer on the entrperenuer: “It is no part of his function to “find” or “create” new possibilities. They are always present, abundantly accumulated by all sorts of people. Often they are also generally known and being discussed by scientific or literary writers.”
“For its success, keenness and vigor are not more essential than a certain narrowness which seizes the immediate chance and nothing else.”
I think he has some better quotes on the idea that the big thing for the entrepreneur is persistence and focus: obsessively pushing through irritations and problems and not getting frustrated and discouraged.
Simon
Mar 31 2021 at 2:30am
Then after all that you get a 1 star review because you only offer t-shirts in white, or the delivery arrived 10 minutes late or some other ridiculous reason…
I’m not sure I agree with the money as main motivator theory though.
Personally, I like the challenge of solving problems, big and small. That’s what running a business is. You have the main problem, to which the product or service is the solution, then all the smaller problems along the way. I guess you have to see them as challenges or puzzles rather than irritations. It’s a great feeling when you get past them. I also think if there weren’t any obstacles someone less tenacious would probably already be doing the business, so am actually greatful for them.
All that said, it’s not like I never complain. I’m sure behind every great business mogul there’s a long suffering partner who has to bare the brunt of their exasperations on a daily basis!
john hare
Mar 31 2021 at 4:52am
One of the motivations for running your own business is freedom.
I can try out techniques that I find interesting and may profit from instead of trying to convince a boss and still not profiting. And when wrong, which is most of the time when innovating, losing credibility with the company and restricting the ability to try other ideas. Freedom from getting my creativity stifled from above, though customers have input requiring value for value.
The freedom to fire bad customers. Too many people have worked where they have had to smile and take it from jerks, and I don’t have to. Neither do my employees as our understanding is that they don’t get paid enough to deal with abuse. We average firing one a year, avoid doing work for a few, and don’t even bid to certain classes of customer.
The fastest way to tell who the owner of the company is is to see who shows up first, leaves last, and is mopping the floors on weekends while the employees are home watching the game. But still has a great deal of discretion on when and where to handle personal business. I can schedule dentist appointments and such without explaining why I need the time off.
I would like to make a lot of money, though I have successfully avoided it so far. The larger driver is the ability to take decisive action about bad situations without risking unemployment. Some people think business is risky, and they are right to a degree. I think working for a single employer is often more risky as a single small shift in the company can be a major disruption in your life.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Mar 31 2021 at 8:10am
I agree about earning every penny, but not that owners should not pay highly progressive consumption taxes to finance public goods (next generation LHC, adaption to climate change, etc.) and transfers, partially to offset the somewhat regressive effects of a tax on net CO2 emissions.
Michael Ward
Mar 31 2021 at 1:27pm
You might consider expanding items to yard signs. This would bring peer pressure to bear on neighbors who want to socialize.
krishnan chittur
Apr 2 2021 at 12:41pm
Few people appreciate what it takes to get a product to market (or sell) – also true when taking an idea (even one that is patented!) to market – the distance from getting a patent to getting a device/service to market that someone is willing to pay for it is HUGE – so many failures along the way – hard to raise investor funds or grants or contracts – so many simple say NOPE – and you have to brush it off and keep going! … It does pay to be stubborn and not lose the passion for the idea even if the world keeps sending the message to shut it down and close up!
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