You’ve waffled, pivoted, quit, and started something different. Your audience has whiplash and you don’t know if you can pull yourself from the brink. Dwelling on what your audience might think is embarrassing at best, and a total existential dread meltdown at worst.

People will label you, put you in a box, and talk about you loudly with their internal monologue (maybe their external one too, depending on how dramatic they feel).

You will lose followers over this, but it’s going to be alright.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for creative pivotitus (an impulsive desire to drain your savings account on art supplies and craft materials to chase another project you may not finish). It’s biological. You can no more get rid of it than you can the beating heart in your chest, but there are salves for pivotitus, which all start in your head.

1. Embrace the shifts in creative focus as all part of the plan and integrate a culture of change into the system.

2. Share the harrowing tales about the superhero that you want everyone to admire.

3. Build that narrative into a hero arc that inspires others to become your advocate and follow your example.

Why a superhero? Because everyone knows Spider-Man, but almost nobody really knows the 437th person they followed on Instagram no matter how good their work is.

Before we dig in, two things…

1. Save this post. You’re going to want to spend some time thinking this one over.

2. Share this with someone who is [insert thing] but is [insert fear].

Share

The Creative Generalist becomes a more powerful hero to others through your shares, and if you know someone who could really use this information, send it to them. It helps them, helps me, and it’s 100% free.

Oh, and your recommendations can earn you free stuff, just saying.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

No, I’m not above shilling lines from popular movies to get my point across, but Uncle Ben’s advice is timely even if you didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider.

The thing is, though, the responsibility you have is to yourself.

You’ve been told, by family, friends, and society, to pick a lane and stick with it, but you have so many lanes to choose from — which one is the right one? If I want to spend three months working on one project, but it inspires me to try a different type of project because I believe it will elevate my work, am I just supposed to ignore that intuition? That’s crazy talk for a creative.

Instead, choose to make your own lane, one that allows you to indulge all those wild impulses, and be okay with it. Your title isn’t a designer, or artist, or illustrator, or crafter, or maker of things. Your title is Creative Director of your own damn life, and nobody gets to tell you what to make or when to make it.

However, without some way to define you, those same people will put you in a box that makes them comfortable…

That’s why you need a super suit.

Why do heroes wear uniforms? So we can see them coming.

If you see a person flying above the city on webs, dangling from buildings and train trestles, wearing a red and blue suit, you know immediately that the good guy has arrived.

I’m not saying you should invest in several yards of brightly colored lycra, but you can adorn a uniform that lets others know that the multi-passionate creative has entered the room — and it starts with an umbrella. I don’t mean one to protect you from the elements, but an overarching concept that you share with others to give them a frame of reference for what it means to be someone who does more than one thing.

If you create a mythology around the things you do, one that gives the normies a point of reference to understand all of it, they can become invested in that mythology. That umbrella concept becomes something tangible their singular-focused minds can grasp. You’re giving them an identity they can get behind.

As an example, when people ask me what I do now, I tell them I’m a Creative Generalist. Not only does this give me the freedom to indulge all my impulses, but it also opens the door for me to explain it to them. They don’t know what a Creative Generalist is yet (like the people of Queens, NYC didn’t know what a Spider-Man was before he saved them from a burning building), but when I say it, they are instantly curious, because it doesn’t sound like any job they’ve ever heard before, and they can’t ignore wanting to know what it means.

When I first shared this idea on Substack, many people jumped in with alternative titles: multi-passionate, multi-hyphenate, multipotentialite — all of these work, but they are more obscure, and don’t reference the core of what I do. In that obscurity, they don’t entice others to want to know more.

When I tell others I’m a Creative Generalist, they immediately understand what creative means, and that’s all they need. That word opens the door because everybody loves and trusts creativity — it’s the emblem on the chest of the super suit.

In Case You Missed It:

Inspiring a societal paradigm shift

That’s word salad which I just made up to mean helping people reach an aha moment and fully grasp how it’s cool AF to indulge ALL the creative ideas.

When I tell people I’m a Creative Generalist, and explain what that means, I want to see the light bulb go on over their head. That epiphany is magic and it’s how to turn casual awareness into devotion. The more I do it, the brighter the collective light gets, outshining any limiting beliefs on the topic.

…But much money do you make from that?

It's not about the money, but how many creative ideas can I indulge — that determines success in my eyes. Yeah, money is great. I love money, but whenever I dictate my creativity around money, I'm never happy with the results. However, that idea confounds normies so much, they immediately discount us for saying it publicly. If we are not contributing to the tax base as much as them, perhaps we are useless in their eyes, but what if they better understood our values and the contribution we make to the world through our creative output?

Okay, but how?

1. Repetition

2. Examples

3. Connection

The more often we tell people what we believe and how we operate, the more true it becomes, both in their minds and our own. I’ve told exactly two normies that I’m a Creative Generalist. The first time I did it with a small amount of reservation. The second time was a little less reserved, but each time I got a seemingly positive response. So now I’m going to tell everyone I meet if they ask, because the proof of concept works. I will share my unwavering commitment to the identity with confidence because I want the normies to understand that this is a real thing.

Make all the things and share all the things. The more often I show the different projects I’m working on as all part of my core identity, the more likely they are to understand that it’s perfectly normal… because it IS normal to want to indulge our creative impulses. Keep showing up with examples and talking about them like it’s a foregone conclusion, and they will fall in line.

While you’re talking about your various projects, remind them that their own impulsive ideas are normal. Tell them how it’s okay to want to start a crazy project even if they have zero experience, because creative expression is one of the most joyous experiences a human can have. Why would we keep that to ourselves? If we can get through to them that creative generalism is normal for humans, they may find themselves in it.

Then they go down the multi-passionate rabbit hole like a Jack Russell Terrier on Adderall. You’ve blown their mind into a million popped synapses, imagining all the possible opportunities to make things. If the law of reciprocity is real (it is), they’ll recommend you to all of their equally-minded friends.

You give big — they give back.

The world puts you in a box the moment you show up with more than one idea. The difference between you and everyone else is that you know the box is there and you’ve refused to get in it.

That refusal is the super suit. The stories you tell, the projects you share, the pivots you own without apology — those are the webs you’re slinging between high-rises filled with corporate normies looking on with awe. Somewhere in your hero universe is another Creative Generalist who’s spent years thinking they were broken, waiting for someone to name the thing they are.

This is where you name it for them.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Last week, I wrote an article; a declaration, really, about how I will no longer run away from my creative wanderlust. I make what I make and I’m ok if people don’t get it.

In that article, I spoke of a person in my local circle who doesn’t fully grasp the multitudes I contain, to a point where they have a tendency to label me one way because it’s all they know how to do when confronted with understanding those multitudes.

It’s not their fault. It’s mine, because I have done a terrible job of wearing the right clothes for the job. People relate to me based on what I share online, and if I am not consistent with that message, or the concept is muddy, then their brain does the best it can to fill in the gaps by putting me in a box that makes sense to them.

Before we dig in, two things…

1. Save this post. You’re going to want to spend some time thinking this one over.

2. Share this with someone who is [insert thing] but is [insert fear].

Share

NOTE: This publication grows because of your shares, and if you know someone who could really use this information, send it to them. It helps them, helps me, and it’s 100% free.

I’m a 10+ on the Creative Impulse Scale

Because the Universe has a sick sense of humor, that person joined Substack the next day, and I don’t know if they subscribed to me or not, but they might have read what I posted. I never even considered that they may be a subscriber, but that’s what I get for being creatively attractive.

Will they be mad? Will they scorn me and talk trash at group meet ups? Will I become the social pariah, have to change my name, and leave the community?

Was what I said offensive? No, in fact what I shared was more about my own insecurities around shining like the sparkly diamond I am. It’s not their fault they don’t know how to embrace the multi-passionate side of me; it’s mine!. I didn’t let them know everything about me. I didn’t make my declaration to them soon enough, not giving them a chance to know me before they put me in a box.

But I digress, because I have learned some lessons about sharing the raw side of me; things that might have helped me get out of that little jam had I taken my own advice, but also good tactics for telling great stories that can help you look like the shiny diamond you are.

😛 Maybe, Hold Your Tongue

I broke a cardinal rule of telling personal stories; either make sure the people you’re talking about aren’t paying attention, or cowboy up and tell them to their face so they know it’s coming. That’s Rule #1, and it’s a big one because the best result is they get a little offended.

The worst possible outcome is that they name you in a libel lawsuit and take whatever meager pittance you have in your coffers.

🖍️ Embellish with Grace

You’re not going to remember all the details. It’s ok to fill in the details the best you can especially if the details make the story better, but don’t change the context of the story or your role in it.

Add all the color you want, but don’t make up things that didn’t happen. Someone you know may have been there, and if they are a good friend, they will call you on your bullshit, or they’ll look at you funny for the rest of your life because they don’t ever know if you’re telling the truth with your stories.

🥩 Good Stories Have Stakes

Ok, this one is definitely spoken often, but not often enough. If you tell a story with no tension, there’s no pay off and people will come for you with pitchforks and torches.

Maybe pitchforks are a little dramatic, but it gave you some tension, didn’t it? See how easy that was?

Tension doesn’t have to be difficult or life changing. I created tension at the beginning of this piece by sharing that the person I was writing about might actually see what I wrote even though I didn’t intend them to see it. What happens when I see them next?

By asking that question, you’re at least marginally invested because I shared the drama and you want to know what comes of it. That’s stakes.

🎭 Humor Cures

Years ago, a local radio DJ on a morning zoo show talked about how he was able to get lots of dates (and sex) with women out of his league. His straight-to-the-matter response when asked how he did it was, “If you can make them laugh, they’ll make you breakfast.”

Perhaps a crass hot take, but few things cure what ails your mental state like a good laugh. Find the humor wherever you can because even a subtle chuckle over a single statement in a longer monologue can change the temper of your harshest critics.

If you don’t know what other people find funny, then just make yourself laugh. I laugh at my own jokes all the time, whether someone gets them or not. Not everyone gets my humor, but I’m not writing for the ones that don’t. I’m writing the jokes for the weirdos like me.

Your unique stories are the fastest way to gain the trust and solidarity of readers who don’t know much about you. Personal stories are the fastest way to the heartstrings of the unconverted, and no matter how many times I try to get away from it, the truth comes at my head like a 9 lb. hammer, and I’m tired of the concussions.

In a weird twist, the story I mention at the beginning has one of my lowest open rates lately, but the Note I posted that truncated the original concept is one of my most popular in more than a year.

The disparity of attention between the article and the Note tells me three things:

1. My article headline could have been better

2. I’ve tapped into something interesting here

3. Do not sleep on Substack Notes!

I’m not trying to become a Substack growth coach, but there’s something to be said about Notes and how most of my new attention is coming from that part of the platform.

As I write this, I’ve added over 50 new subscribers, and that’s after a steady decline over the past several months.

I’m spending significantly more time on Notes than any other social platform now because it’s filled with smart, creative people sharing smart, creative things, and I’ve found so many people I resonate with there.

The hope is that others find me the same. And of course, all my stories go there. Here’s some recent stories you might have missed.

I had this idea for a micro-series of shirt designs all revolving around classic record shops that just by looking at them would stir emotions in the people who saw them. Honest Jon’s, Hyde Park, Bleecker Bob’s, Amoeba Records in Berkeley, and Hollywood Tower Records; if you ever had the luck of stepping foot in any of them, you know how they look, smell, and sound. Each shop evokes a vibe that would be hard to mistake, but could I capture that in an image without infringing upon any intellectual property?

Short answer: No.

Tower Records was my most favorite record shop, and though I rarely got to visit the one in Hollywood, I can still feel what it’s like to walk in the door, smell the mustiness of the ceiling tiles tinted by smog and mildew, and the squeak of my shoes on the linoleum tiled floor. The walls were covered with handcrafted, 3-dimensional, foam versions of popular albums that stood floor to ceiling, and of course, there were rows upon rows of albums and CDs that presented an orgy of choice.

The music was often of popular music from the day, but occasionally you’d hear classics, or something from a local band you didn’t know about until you saw the Now Playing station at the register.

Before I sunk myself into any of the music, I would hit the magazine stand with it’s unmatched collection of mag, comics, and zines that dwarfed even the big-box bookstores. It was a magazine designers heaven, and it’s possibly I miss that more than the music itself.

I chose to start my illustrated tributes with Tower Records, copying the linear angles of the building, adding a bit of extreme perspective to add depth, but the more I worked on it, the less I felt like people would get the reference. This idea wasn’t working.

This was a rough attempt, and though not finished and plenty of details to be added to potentially resemble the original shop, I just knew it wasn’t going to work. Maybe someone more talented than me could make it happen, but I decided to go a different direction, and though completely different, I’m happy with the result, which also leaves the door open for more opportunity

This is what’s next…

• The inspiration behind the shift in the design

• The illustration process and why it took longer than expected

• How I’m using the design in my latest micro-collection, and a sneak peek at what’s coming.

• How I plan to carry this concept over to new work

Read more

While enjoying some well-deserved, pricey lattes at a coffee shop and vigorously chatting through WhatsApp with a friend overseas, I talked about what I felt was my best era, and surprise; this ain’t it.

The internal battle in my head says something to me like, “What are you talking about, Dave? You’re always going on about how things are great, and you’re a superstar!”

That might be true (tongue firmly planted in my cheek), but there was a stretch from 2013 to 2016 where I was absolutely on fire regarding growth, creativity, and influence.

Then, I took thirteen gallons of kerosene to my achievements and ran off in a different direction because my artistic inspiration was more important at the time. 🙄

Why I turned my back on all the success I had achieved is still a mystery to me and others, and had I stuck it out, I assume I would have reached that superstardom much sooner.

Despite all the missteps and mishaps, this current stage is still the second-best era of my online life, with the potential to rocket my way past my previous experiences. I’ll be on Mars before Elon, and these are the lessons I learned about rebuilding my online presence. The tools have changed a little, and so have the rules, but this is what I’m doing differently.

Record everything and share it online.

Whether you prefer writing, video, or audio, document everything and share it online. I don’t mean every aspect of your life needs to be shared, but the inspired moments you have about your work, inspiration, business, and creativity all have value that you and others can benefit from.

Write a blog, start a YouTube channel, or kick off a podcast where you talk about the things that make you tick. All of these things carry weight and add to the lexicon of your online life. Maybe that’s scary to some, but if your goal is to grow a substantial presence online, this is how it starts.

Post everything to a blog.

If you have a blog on your website, it’s a good idea to put all those things above into your blog. Although SEO isn’t the marketing machine it used to be, having the archive for people to view lends credence to your time and experience. People seen doing the work are typically considered as authorities, whether they believe it or not.

Also, do not delete anything ever (unless it’s evidence of you being associated with P-Diddy). My shortsighted belief that nobody would ever read or watch my old posts is a false flag. If I stuck to my goals and purpose, I would have a catalog rivaling Pat Flynn and Mark Manson.

**Sidebar:** Keep copies on external hard drives and double-check their health regularly. I’ve lost multiple book manuscripts because I let a hard drive fail with no other backup.

Maintain a healthy email list.

This might be my biggest regret and why I’m so intense about it here because your email list is by far the most powerful tool you have in your kit to stay relevant and connected to your audience.

Keep the list healthy by reaching out with messages at least once a month, and find elegant ways to reengage or remove cold subscribers (people who don’t open your emails) regularly.

A healthy list is powerful and filled with people who have chosen to stick with you. Make sure you do the same for them.

Be active in communities

In 2013, I joined an online training that maintained a vibrant Facebook group (and several unsanctioned sub-groups). The training was a valuable investment, but the community became the most vital aspect of that investment. I learned more from the discussions and experiences of others than I did from the training, and I also made life-long friends I still talk to regularly today.

Also, because I ran a blog, podcast, and YouTube channel, the community was a constant source of content ideas and inspiration. Guests were hoping for any attention they could get.

The landscape of communities has changed a lot, but if you can find one or two communities built for your interests, they can become a solid replacement for what many falsely credit as community…

Stop relying on social media

When I let everything go, I did so because of the false promise of what social media could do for me. Yes, I built up some decent followings on different social media channels, but over time, all those channels grew more challenging to develop and maintain.

Now, engagement is down across the board from small accounts to prominent influencers, and let’s be honest; there’s nothing social about social media anymore. Conversations and collaborations don’t happen like they did, and most of our efforts to maintain a dialogue for more than a few seconds are impossible as people have moved on to other posts to interact with.

Most importantly, you don’t have access to reaching out to your entire audience on social media. There are connections to be made, but unless you have a solid strategy of pulling those people off your social media platforms and onto your email list, you will eventually lose touch with most of them.

Stay the course

Burnout happens. In 2016, I was tired and needed a break, but instead of taking some time off to rejuvenate, I bailed on everything. Now, I schedule breaks during the year to spend time with my family and give myself space to recharge, and because I can plan things I share online, people often don’t know when I’m on a break.

I can’t deny that in 2016, I needed to stretch myself and indulge my creativity and artistic expression. Now, when I desire to make art, I embrace it, but I don’t let it distract me from my goals. Instead, I use that energy to refill my creative tanks and push through to sharing more stories to inform and inspire others.

Recently, I shared a Reel talking about how Blake of Today is one of my favorite storytellers on Instagram, but despite his talent, he’s missing a huge opportunity because he has nothing to sell me. The most obvious choice would be a book I would gladly buy if he published one. If he had a small merch line, I’d probably buy a shirt, but alas, there is none.

When I shared that video, a few people told me they had gone down the rabbit hole of Blake’s content, acknowledging how good he is at his craft and admonishing me for making them lose thirty minutes of their lives deep-diving into Blake’s content.

It’s not high-production value, and most of his visuals are basic shots of him doing things around the house. The combination of the visual and warm tones of his voice-over pulls you in and keeps you captivated for long periods.

That’s what good storytelling does.

Quick poll, and tell the truth; how many different creative projects are you juggling right now?

Leave a comment

Currently, I have two creative projects with another one bouncing around the back of my head looking for an exit. However, there have been times where I’ve had several going at the same, many of which were completely different than others.

I’m an artist, writer, graphic designer, and at odd times, a crafter. I work with paint and canvas, paper and glue, and typography and grids. I’ve made paintings, collage, zines, books, t-shirts, mugs, stickers, hand-carved stamps, custom notebooks, and a mountain of client projects ranging from logos and branding to video montages and websites.

And I could start doing any of those things again in an instant (except the client work — YUCK!). In fact, the hardest part about being a Creative Generalist (I’m coining the phrase; you heard it here first) is only sticking to a few projects at once.

If you could see inside my brain, you’d know it’s no small feat to stick to one or two core projects for anything longer than a Netflix series that was cancelled after a single season.

To Them, I am an Artist

My teenage son is an athlete, and if you have children who do school or club sports or activities, then you’ve likely established casual friendships with at least a few other parents in the group.

There’s another dad from my son’s team who I’ve gotten to know reasonably well to where I actually allow him to call me on the phone (I mean, anyone can call, but the chances of me picking up depends on how much I like you… and I really gotta like you).

Nice guy, always cordial and friendly; totally easy to get along with, but always refers to me as the artist. He knows I am also a designer, and he knows I’ve written multiple newsletters, books and other things, but because he cannot bear the weight of trying to understand all of that, he titles me an artist.

He’s not wrong, but at the same time, he’s so totally wrong. It’s to the point now that I almost dislike hearing it because it diminishes everything I know about myself to be true.

Some refer to this this disposition as being multi-passionate, which is a cute, fluffy term, and in the minds of the people hearing it, reduces us down to our impulsive emotions. Although my intent to try different projects is often based on impulse, emotion is rarely at the crux of it. I move into new project based more on curiosity than passion.

I want to learn from one project so that I can take that knowledge into the next, and do this into infinity. “What happens if…” is the most common thought I have in my creative pursuits, but normies in their colorless world see this and it breaks their brain. I regularly defy their notions of who I am and what I do.

I am a Creative Generalist and I will not apologize or make exceptions for it any longer.

I used to call myself a DowhateverthefuckIwantist, which is still true, but aside from the crassness, it was also too much of a mouthful. I still might put it on a shirt, though.

The Creative Generalist Checklist

I made a decision this week to stop hiding behind the mask of a single project. Lost Mixtape is still very much part of the picture, and will remain that way. I am committed and focused on that project, but if I want to talk about other project ideas that come to mind, I’m going to do that.

I know that not all creative people are gifted with the same creative generalism, and if you happen to be one of those with only one or two creative pursuits, we are still kin. At the same time though, maybe this will give you the confidence and courage to embrace those random projects that have been rattling around in your prefrontal cortex (or maybe it’s the cerebellum — I don’t know, I’m not a brain surgeon… yet).

If you believe you are a generalist but you’re unsure about the designation, let me share some names to help you understand that you’re in good company

• Leonardo da Vinci — painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, inventor. The original.

• Benjamin Franklin — writer, inventor, politician, diplomat, scientist. Founding Father as side project.

• David Bowie — musician, visual artist, actor, fashion provocateur, art collector. Reinvention as a creative system.

• Frida Kahlo — painter, writer, fashion icon, political activist, cultural philosopher, all before she hit her 40s.

• Janelle Monáe — musician, actress, producer, visual artist, activist, author.

• Virgil Abloh — Trained as an architect, became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, founded Off-White, DJed internationally, collaborated with IKEA and other brands.

• Aaron Draplin — designer, author, storyteller, founder of Field Notes notebooks, which you probably have many.

• Donald Glover — Actor, writer, director, musician (Childish Gambino), producer, comedian. Created Atlanta — one of the most critically lauded shows in recent memory

• Amanda Palmer — musician, writer, performance artist, community builder. Wrote the book — literally — on the artist/audience direct relationship.

• Pharrell Williams — Producer, musician, visual artist, fashion designer, filmmaker, and current creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear.

In other words, it’s cool to not just dabble, but embrace the dabbling and kick ass at it in public. If you’re somehow not sure if you belong in the club, ask yourself about these defining characteristics.

R E A D T H I S N E X T:

You might be a Creative Generalist if…

✅ You’ve started more projects than you’ve finished, and you’re weirdly proud of both numbers

✅ You can’t answer “what do you do?” without using the word “also”

✅ Your title has never fit on a business card without switching to a condensed font

✅ Your browser has seventeen tabs open and they’re all research for different things you’re building simultaneously

✅ You’ve been told to “pick a lane” by someone whose lane bores you to tears

✅ Every hobby eventually becomes a business idea whether you want it to or not

✅ You’ve introduced yourself differently at every networking event you’ve ever attended

✅ “I got bored” has ended more chapters of your life than failure ever has

✅ Your résumé looks like three different people applied for the same job

✅ You don’t have a five year plan, you have five one-year plans running concurrently

✅ Learning a new skill scratches the same itch other people get from finishing things

✅ The most dangerous phrase anyone can say to you is “have you ever thought about…”

✅ You’re not scattered. You’re just operating on a radio signal most people can’t pick up.

That’s a largely unscientific list, but let’s just say that if you said yes to more than two, you probably are a Creative Generalist — welcome to the club. We meet every Monday; please bring snacks.

Some Things I Found

• Maybe like you, has been around long enough to see the coming-up of social media and it turning into the attention juggernaut it is now, and she’s rebelling against it with 3 ways to get your creativity back from the algorithm.

• The 7 Most Important (And Counter-Intuitive) Things I Know About Building a Meaningful Life by is a thoughtful and personal take on how to find purpose in a life where it often may feel elusive.

• I’m not sure if you’ll consider ’s article, I turned a mail club into my full-time job a success story, a cautionary tale, or both, but her journey to create a physical mail club with her poetry is a story fraught with both peril and inspiration.

I have a friend who sells handmade goods on both Etsy and Amazon. Whenever we chat, she tells me how frustrated she is because one platform or the other has changed the rules on her again; a new fee assessed, a new rule implemented, a new feature stripped away — slow death by a thousand cuts.

No matter how many times I’ve tried to convince her that she deserves to own her shop outright, she continues her dedication to these platforms that see her as nothing more than a tiny data point in their shareholder report.

She was forced to change the image aspect ratio and resolution on her entire catalog of products (hundreds of listings because Amazon changed their mind on what works for their needs.

She was forced into mandatory off-site advertising to the tune of 15% of her annual revenue by Etsy because sellers weren’t buying in, but Etsy shareholders wanted to see more profit.

• Does she get access to all of her data?

• Does she get the email addresses of her customers so she can continue the relationship?

• Is she shielded from thievery by overseas sellers who steal her designs and replicate her shop using AI?

• Does she have the security of knowing that her store cannot be threatened by malicious competitors reporting her shop to the gunshy corporate overlords ready to ban anyone who threatens their legal status?

Those are rhetorical questions because you know the answers.

Etsy, Amazon, or any other marketplaces do not have her best interests at heart, yet when I suggest she start a Shopify store to build something on her terms, she shrugs it off because her perception of the sunk costs in these platforms outweigh the potential. Too many SKUs to manage, too many potential customers to lose, and Shopify is too expensive.

Is it though?

Confession Time

Two facts about my current situation with Shopify* and Lost Mixtape.

1. I’ve made precisely $348 dollars in gross sales since I opened in November.

2. Because I’m not making sales yet (more on that in a moment), everything I do behind the scenes is filled with second-guessing and self-doubt.

Neither of those things will stop me from switching away from Shopify. I’ve done it before; went looking for greener pastures, but, this valley is the richest around, even if I’m still waiting for the Spring melt.

The money I spend on my Shopify fees right now are the investment I make until I build out my promotional efforts. I’ve shared before that I’m not satisfied with my product catalog yet, and part of that was because I wasn’t comfortable with the items I was making. That’s shifting right now and soon I’ll have enough items in the shop to feel good about promoting it.

– RELATED READING –

I know others who have bailed on Shopify because it was too expensive, too difficult to manage, and not bringing in the sales. Let’s talk about all of those.

↦ No Sales

You are correct, Shopify will not help you with sales at all. Every dollar earned is done through your own efforts. That means advertising, promotion, social media engagement, etc. It’s work, but that’s business. Only those who believe in miracles, magic, and the manipulative marketing of corporate marketplaces believe differently.

Your time, energy, and money will dwindle at first. You may have to sit in the hole for a bit while you build up the brand, which is exactly what any brick-n-mortar business does at first in order to eventually get you as a customer. This is the job and believing any different is a fairy tale.

↦ Difficult Technology

There is a learning curve, and Shopify is so robust, it can be overwhelming, but if you find yourself hyperventilating in the dashboard, let me grab you a paper bag and some reassurance. If you’ve used any selling platform ever, the basics of Shopify are the same.

The interface may be different, but the simplicity of connecting your bank account, adding a product, add shipping options and then turning on the OPEN sign is not that different from any other platform you’ve seen.

NOTE: I will share my thoughts on best practices within the Shopify dashboard in future updates, but there are so many great tutorial videos on YouTube, it’s impossible to remain uninformed on the topic.

↦ Too Expensive

In a word, STOP! You can test Shopify store for free for two weeks,* and then the next three months for $1 a month. There’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t have several items for sale and promoting them to potential customers in that period.

After the trial period, the monthly fee is $29 (basic tier) plus less-than 3% processing fees. If the margin on your product is $10, can you sell three or more items per month to cover those costs?

Whether you sell several or dozens of products each month, your profit margin stays consistent and you’re not subjected to any random fees or advertising you have no control over.

However, if we compare to Etsy; they have their initial .20 cent listing fee, then each sale comes with a 6.5% transaction fee + a 3%+ processing fee. Also add on the 15% offline ads fee. That $10 profit just fell to $7. Sell more than ten items on Etsy at that margin and you’ve lost more than what Shopify costs.

But really, the point isn’t whether Shopify is inexpensive or not, but that the objections were NEVER about money. They were about fear.

• Fear of not knowing what comes next because you somehow believe that any of us know that.

• Fear of unknown technology because you’ve convinced yourself you cannot learn new things

• Fear of time and energy needed to get started because comfort is better than freedom

• Fear of not knowing how to grow without corporate interference

• Fear of being responsible for your own well-being

My friend above; I love her like a sister, but sometimes I feel she doesn’t want the responsibility of what happens next. Despite being well educated and incredibly enterprising, she relies entirely on the promotional efforts of the marketplaces. Switching to Shopify will put all that on her and I don’t think she wants it. I stopped trying to convert her, but I remain hopeful she’s switch it up someday.

You, on the other hand; you can do this, and I’m here to add guard rails. This space is for stories, questions, and lifting each other up.

PRO TIP: Don’t close your shop! If you’re on Etsy and considering switching to Shopify, use the testing period to try it out. Carry over your items and start sharing the new link with your audience, but keep the Etsy operating in the background to keep you floating as long as it takes.

Another Confession

Open up the booth, Padre. I’ve got my rosary and I’m spilling my guts today. It’s been seven days since my last confession.

I’ve been holding back on the promotional efforts of Lost Mixtape because I plan on running ads on Meta and Pinterest, and yet, I’m scared to lose money doing it.

I’m no different than you, but I’m changing my mindset around that, looking at this as a learning experiment that will help me grow. Again, sometimes we have to spend money and sit in the hole for a bit before the profit line starts moving up and to the right.

Which brings me back to you. Everything I do in my process, and I believe will be important for others, gets shared here. If I fail at advertising, you’ll know when it happens and why. I’m not the guy to sugar coat my experiences, and if you want to learn from my tough lessons, stick around.

So what do you say?

Tell me where you’re at in your platform journey and what’s the thing standing between you and making the move to more fre? How can I help make those fears a little less intimidating for you?

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* I’m a Shopify partner, have been for years, and any links to them are affiliate links. I only share affiliate links to businesses I’ve used and trust. By using them, you’re supporting my work here.

However, if you’re building a product based business (say for instance, a clothing brand with a certain aesthetic and niche), the feed can crush souls if faced with the reality of a brand that is similar in aesthetic and significantly more popular.

I stumbled across a UK brand I didn’t know about until last week, and when I saw what they were making, I nearly threw my computer in the Thames. Yes, I would endure the TSA, fly to England, stand on the Tower Bridge and toss the Macbook into the murky waters, giving it the ol’ double-deuce all the way down.

This stings more than it should because knowing what’s cool is way easier than the doing cool things. This brand is doing the cool work and while I’m struggling with refinement. The gap between taste and execution is the Snake River Gorge filled with self-doubt.

For about 43 seconds, I had this nagging anxiety about working in a similar niche, using a somewhere similar style, and thinking that I was a copy-cat; a bandwagoner. A coattail rider looking to snatch a piece of their excellence for myself.

Then I remembered that comparison is a bullshit reason to quit and I ain’t about that anymore. I’m not making the same type of work, but if anyone tries to make that association, they get the stink-eye, because I’ve got receipts in the form of wildly scribbled journal notes of my psychosis-turned-inspiration.

Up All Night to Get Lucky

I had this idea for showcasing loose interpretations of the Daft Punk helmets with the phrase “Only Robots I Trust.” I like the idea, but because my sketch was so bad, I didn’t have enough faith in myself to execute it well enough to put on a shirt.

Oddly enough, I was inspired to make this design after I wrote this post about Deus Customs and its influence on me:

I talk a good game sometimes, but I struggle to follow my own voice. I gave up on the Daft Punk design before I really started… until now.

The way I’m choosing to look at this now is that I’m going to make the cringy things, and they may be terrible, but the more I make, the better I get. I can always revise them and go again, right?

We weren’t put on this earth to waffle about our work. We are here to make a dent, and since the world seems to be going to hell a little more with each passing day (I paid $5.69 for gas yesterday, and that was cheap.), we might as well foist our work above our heads in pride, because at least we’re making art instead of making war.

This design is now available in the shop. The goal is to let the audience decide if they love it or not with their dollars… or find the audience that will.

As far as the anonymous brand above which shall not be named; they’ve built something cool and maybe I’ll buy a shirt in appreciation. Then I’ll never visit that site again, because it’s none of my business.

Things I’ve Seen

I Think I Know Why That Famous Entrepreneur Pivoted Her Business (And She’s Not Going to Be the Only One) -

I’ve read three articles recently talking about this same topic, how AI is radically upsetting the apple cart for content creators, coaches, and course makers. The hypothesis is the same in all three articles; people won’t pay for knowledge anymore because AI can provide it faster and cheaper. Instead, what people will pay for it experience and discernment.

Where Diels’ separates herself from the others I read is in the data and the extensive footnoting. Instead of just spitting hyperbole, she comes with proof.

How I Brought 100K+ Visitors to My Substack via Pinterest -

I’m bearish on Instagram these days; like old, angry, starving Kodiak Grizzly kind of bearish. At the same time, I feel like I need to extend my promotional efforts of both this publication and my brand into other territory. I get a lot of inspiration from Pinterest, so I thought I should dig in and do more there. Wickstrom’s article couldn’t have come across my feed at a better time.

The Internet Archive

This might be the coolest thing I’ve stumbled across in a while. Stop letting AI tell you what it thinks is cool and let your own fingers flip through thousands of pages of pure inspiration.

Yes, I’m boring!

Not an ideal way to start a story, but stick with me.

I don’t write from a villa in the south of France.

I don’t travel to exciting places in Southeast Asia.

My neighborhood isn’t as interesting as Brooklyn.

I don’t do things and I don’t go many places.

Shit’s expensive these days — I stay home and make my own coffee.

When I do go get coffee, the shops I go to are dull because I favor space and quiet with good wifi and free parking instead of bustling hot spots that play music too loud.

I sit on my couch with my computer in my lap and stare off between a ridiculously large TV that I regret buying, and an art wall that has a large painting missing because I haven’t taken the time to reset the hook.

I’m an artist, but I haven’t made any art in months.

I’m a designer but I haven’t designed anything more complex that a t-shirt in almost a year.

I get up early to make breakfast for my son before he’s off to school. I do dishes and water my lawn.

I have a studio that’s absurdly cluttered because I procrastinate about putting things back in a natural order.

I live a half-mile from a Southern California beach that I rarely go to (I’m not alone, most of my city doesn’t go either – it’s weird, I know).

I have shared many times about how storytelling is the cornerstone of building up loyalty from our fans and followers, but I struggle to find myself in situations interesting enough to turn into a story.

If this post was a hero’s arc, it would look something like this.

• Hero is a creative individual with aspirations to lead a charmed life of endless experiences that fans adore.

• Unfortunately, our hero is boring AF and struggles to find any inspiration that would make people pay attention. He’s over-burdened by dullness and rigamarole.

• Hero finds solace in his mundanity, tells stories about his sock drawer. People find it fascinating and republish everything he writes.

Writing those first two parts of the story is easy — I’m living it every single day. Finding the connective tissue that resolves the conflict is the tough part. A to B? Easy, but getting comfortable moving to C — Not so simple.

It Rubs the Irony on Its Skin

The ethos behind my brand, Lost Mixtape, is finding the pleasure in disconnecting from our digital existence and moving toward more human experiences.

In the face of AI and overwhelming social media algorithms, I believe disconnecting is more important now than ever, but yet here I am spending half my day in front of a computer, when the real human experiences are beyond the distance between my eyeballs and the Macbook on my lap.

Author Note: Writing a post like this for the newsletter doesn’t count because this feels like a conversation, albeit a mute one because you don’t leave comments on my posts!!!

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Seriously though, removing myself from the infinite scroll, although difficult on my best days, has been one of the most personally rewarding feelings. I won’t be so cavalier to prescribe it to everyone, but really, you should try it.

There’s only one choice

Get comfortable, because you’re stuck with this dull version of Dave. I may be in my boring phase, but maybe this phase is actually most interesting part about me to others (I’m incredibly hopeful about that part).

After all, when we share our humanity through lived experiences (not manufactured reality through social media), people can and will relate to us. Not all, but some, and those are the ones who matter.

I sometimes talk a lot about techy and business-y things here, and that’s cool. I enjoy that part a lot but it’s only one facet of this unpolished gemstone.

All that to say that I’m working on sharing more of these lived stories, and honestly, I blame for the inspiration. I’ve been binging her content lately, and the parallels in personal experiences are almost uncanny.

So yeah, grab your polishing stone, and let’s get to rubbing the dullness into a fine lustre and I’ll spin some yarns out of beige threads.

Things I’ve Seen

I found myself on an interesting side of Substack this week and I feel like it’s time for me to get back to sharing some of the good things that have landed in my lap.

1. Gen X was obsessed with anti-sellout culture, but maybe capitalism won after all

This was the post that turned me into an instant fanboy of Jenna Park. Relatable beyond anything else I’ve read in years – I felt seen despite the melancholy nostalgia her post gave me.

2. I Made Six Figures Then Had a Crash Out: Part 2

A couple years ago, I fired all my design clients. To be fair, some left on their own, but I chose to not replace them. It was difficult; financially painful, but also the most relief I’ve felt in a long time.

’s work is new to me, and this post about letting clients go in order to relinquish some of her soul is a little heartbreaking, but also generous in it’s honesty.

3. Chinamaxxing and the Western Gaze

Because of my feelings around this entire post, I started looking more deeply at people sharing their gritty, unpolished selves. That’s how I found all three of the ladies in this section. Imagine the upside when I found ’s Substack (the founder of Fly By Jing chili sauce — try it, it’s fantastic).

I’m old and don’t understand all of these maxing trends, but I appreciate Jing’s take on how Americans have been coerced in how to feel about China and its people. We hear the word China and are drawn into feelings, mostly because of a certain fascist administration and their narrative about who are enemies are.

I don’t know Jing, never met her, but I love her business, and I appreciate her world view.

WHAT’S NEXT:

There I am, going about my business, buying vinyl records, sorting through my old CDs, and sipping pour-over coffee while in long, dark contemplation about the state of the world, when a moment of clarity hit me like the sour notes of a Peruvian blend.

Until that moment, I felt pretty good because I designed a brand around the things I love, believing that the analog nostalgia is what I appreciated…

Yeah, No

If you haven’t tried it, analog listening is a fantastic departure that I enjoy deeply. I’m listening to some deep house hits on vinyl right now, but it hit me that what I’m truly enjoying isn’t the vinyl, but the removal of my face from the blue-light on the 9:16 screen of my mobile device (I try to not call it a phone anymore, because I don’t talk on the phone much — text me if you want my attention). It’s the disconnection from my digital existence that I appreciate, for which the analog media plays a part.

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You know how sometimes you suddenly and unexpectedly start noticing specific things popping into view for you; something you saw once and now you can’t not notice them. Like when you’re thinking about a new vehicle you saw on the street, and anytime you’re on the road, you inexplicably see one?

That’s the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, or the frequency illusion, which is a cognitive bias where once you learn of something new, you suddenly start seeing it everywhere. And that’s exactly what happened to me once I had my philosophical epiphany.

I started noticing people everywhere talking about deleting social media, disconnecting from their phones, taking on new physical hobbies, and wearing clothing that embodied that sense of self. It all made perfect sense.

When I made that connection, the world opened up to me. With only the analog nostalgia by itself, I felt boxed in, like I could only make shirts about records and cassette tapes. Now I know other people are feeling the same things I think about daily, and the creative opportunities are more available to me, which brings a whole new set of daunting challenges.

This broadening of the scope required deeper analysis, and there were four areas I needed more clarity on before I pushed further.

Read more

➡️ IMPORTANT NOTE - PLEASE READ!

I’ve added a new section to Manual Transmission specifically to talk about the apps I use for creating my brand. That includes Shopify, Printify, OmniSend(ify), and others.

I’m calling this new section Shopidaddy: Fatherly advice on Shopify, Printify, and Third-Party apps for building a creative brand. Don't touch the thermostat!

If you DO NOT want to read those posts or get emails about those topics, and only get the fun-loving stories about the artist’s struggle you’re used to seeing from me, you can change your settings for Manual Transmission below.

Manage Your MT Settings

Making the jump from Etsy over to Shopify was the best decision I’ve ever made. I honestly believe there is no better online solution than Shopify and it’s my mission to bring others to the table — I’m a fanatic… drink the Kool Aid.

For real though, I want people everywhere to have the creative freedom to build a shop where they make the rules, establish real relationships with buyers, and keep all the money, but…

Making the Jump Wasn’t Easy

Back when I first got fed up with Etsy (2015, maybe), a friend talked me into checking out Shopify, while also sharing all the typical caveats you’d expect about switching from a marketplace to a stand-alone platform.

• There’s a monthly/annual fee.

• You’ll have to drive your own traffic to the site.

• There’s no recommendation engine like on Etsy.

• It’s way more robust (read as complicated AF).

• Migrating my products was an absolute nightmare.

Shopify said they would make it easy, and my products did switch over, but it was a hot mess. The image ratios were wrong, the text formatted weird, and the absurd amount of tags I had for my products completely flooded the system.

Fixing my titles was the worst part, because I didn’t have the forethought to change them before the migration.

Etsy’s SEO relies heavily on making sure the product titles and description include elements to help buyer’s search. They search by categories, react by images, but what got one product in front of them over another is often the keywords used in the titles.

Imagine popping into your favorite online shop and seeing titles like that one above.

Worse, imagine the mess it does to your shop’s SEO integration, specifically your URL (which gets created when you publish a product listing)

Also, Google does not appreciate keyword stuffing and will rap you across the snout with a rolled up newspaper for doing it. Etsy can get away with it, because they have their internal SEO, but you cannot.

But yeah, Hasty Dave did exactly that and then had to go back through all of my products, one at a time, to change the titles and URLs. I finished many days later, and was so burned out, I didn’t want to touch my shop for a while (at least not without a stiff cocktail).

Like Geese on a Mexican Vacation…We’re Migrating

First, this post is not meant to be a play-by-play on how to move away from Etsy; Shopify has an excellent article that does a much better job of helping. Bookmark it.

Instead, I want to help by sharing what I believe are the important experience tips I didn’t receive (and you won’t find in that article) to make the transition as smooth as possible for you.

Mise en Place

If you haven’t set up your Shopify* template yet, DO THIS FIRST! I do this with any new shop I create, even without migrating products. Having things in the right place will go long distances to making your international migration easier.

1. Find a good tutorial on YouTube to help you get through the initial scary tech stuff. Brendan Gillen has a great tutorial walkthrough for beginners — bookmark it and watch as needed.

2. Add two or three product listings with images to the shop before doing anything else. Don’t worry about perfection yet; just get the items in the shop so you have a visual representation.

3. Create your first collection. Make it broad, generic, and representational of your items (Art, Jewelry, Pottery, Mens, Womens, Accessories, etc.). Add your products to that collection.

4. When customizing your homepage, focus first on two things: Featured Products and Featured Collections. Add them as “sections” to your home page and fill them with the products and collection you just created.

5. Look at your images first. Do you like the images aspect ratio? If not, then you can change it. Here’s some good info on how to think about image sizes.

6. Check your product listing. Click on one of your products and see how it looks. Take in what you believe are the important things that will migrate over from Etsy. The more you familiarize with the layout of your pages, the better this will be for you.

Altering Your Export

You’re going to export a .CSV file (spreadsheet database) from Etsy and you’re going to open it. You’re going to freak the eff out because, holy crap, that’s a lot of data… I’m scared… hold me!

Then, you’re going to pull up your big kid pants, stop shaking in fear, and wipe your eyes.

1. SAVE A SEPARATE VERSION OF YOUR CSV FILE - DO IT! Do not work from your original file, ever. I mean it, only work with your newly saved version. Please for the love of everything holy and natural, do not work from your source file.

2. Go through every one of your listing and change the title to something more human. Try to think about the random customer who knows nothing about your brand. How would they like to read your listings?

3. Do not worry about descriptions yet. We’re focusing on elements that will have and effect on your shop’s SEO first, and the descriptions are third in line to titles and… you guessed it, tags.

4. Find the TAGS column in your CSV, and this will also scare some of you, but make note of how the tags are separated (probably commas), then erase/clear out all the tags.

WARNING: Do not delete the tag column in the spreadsheet!

4. Fill in the now empty cell with three to five tags (comma separated? I haven’t done this in a while—double check your work). Copy and paste them across the different products listings that make sense. Change the tags as needed for your products, but keep it simple.

5. SAVE YOUR FILE. Do NOT save over your source file.

6. Import your entire livelihood into Shopify.

IMPORTANT: If you use Printify* for your print-on-demand listings in Etsy. DO NOT IMPORT those listings — delete those rows (because you were smart enough to save as a different file, right).

You can import your print-on-demand products more smoothly within Printify’s interface (which you can now do within Shopify’s interface… more to come on that). Watch this TikTok video to see what I mean.

@hey.itsteaaHow to transfer Etsy listings to Shopify with Printify #printondemand #etsyshop #etsyshoptips #etsysecrets #etsyprintondemand #helpwithetsy #etsyshopowner #etsytiktok #etsybusiness #sidehustletips #sidehustlehacks #sidehustlemom #podshop #podbusiness #printondemanddesigns #tshirtbusiness #printifytutorial #shopify #shopifytips #shopifytutorial #shopifyprintondemand

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In order to work with Printify*, you will need to integrate the app into your Shopify. This is relatively easy, and of course, here’s a video to help you. I will also talk more about the Printify/Shopify combo in the future.

Breathe. Meditate. Continue.

Remember that technology breaks and there might be some broken parts, but if you did this well, your SEO will be intact, and I promise you, that means a lot.

You will have to adjust images. You will want to change up your product pages. You will tweak the hell out of your home page a thousand times and still never be happy with it — trust me on this.

However, you will have gained something amazing; a sense of pride for having a big, scary, online shop that nobody can take away from you. Now you can start bringing in new customers and collecting email addresses instead of having them stolen by the large corporate marketplace.

And if you join Shopify today, you can get your first two weeks free, and the next three months for only $1 per month. That’s 90 days to experiment, play, and get yourself settled.

And if stay subbed to this Shopidaddy segment, you’ll get all the info I have inside me to help you along.

* Notes affiliate links. If you use them, you’ll be helping me keep content like this free for everyone, and it never affects your costs in any way – Thanks for your support.

You know the aesthetic — looks like it was drawn on a cocktail napkin by someone who was late for something more important. Loose lines, uneven letterforms; the kind of mark-making that mutters, “I made this with my hands instead of beating it to vector submission in Adobe Illustrator.”

That’s the vibe I’m going for with my brand, Lost Mixtape, but I didn’t start with that, and no matter how hard I try to get rough with my style, I can’t stop myself from trying to tweak it into perfection.

I’ll start a sketch with all the right intentions — loose, expressive, organic (I literally cringed while typing that word, but whatever). Then I open it in Procreate or Affinity. I nudge an anchor point, or warp a line there, and another, and another.

Before I realize, I’m forty-five minutes deep into a rabbit hole of optical corrections and suddenly my hand drawn design looks like it was drafted by a very convincing robot with a specialty in calligraphy.

This Isn’t About Aesthetics

Here’s where it gets interesting, and why I think this matters beyond my own creative neuroses.

Real buyers, the ones who pull out their wallet on impulse (instead of the ones I begged or bribed to purchase) are not looking for perfect. They’re looking for honest. There’s a meaningful difference between the two, and most brands confuse them constantly.

When I think about the brands I love most; not the ones I respect at a distance, but the ones I actually feel something about; chances are, there’s rough edges somewhere. A logo that’s slightly off-center by design, a label that looks like it was painted on someone’s ‘78 Ford Econoline, or a font that has no business working as well as it does, even if only once.

Those choices aren’t accidents. They tell the buyer these items were made by a human with a point of view. That is worth more, psychologically, than any amount of visual polish.

There’s a concept in buyer behavior called benevolent imperfection — the idea that minor flaws in a product or presentation can actually increase perceived authenticity and, by extension, trust. It’s why a handwritten thank you note in your package hits different than a printed insert. It’s why the slightly crooked label on a craft hot sauce makes you trust the recipe more.

The rough edge is the receipt. It proves a person was here.

So why is this so fucking hard for me?

I’ve spent nearly thirty years being paid to make things look correct. The instinct toward precision isn’t a character flaw — it’s scar tissue from years of client revisions, brand standards documents, and the specific kind of suffering that comes from a creative director who doesn’t know what they want but will absolutely know it when they see it.

I expect every graphic designer reading this to feel that last part in their taint — yeah, I just said it, and I expect you to make a comment on this post if you know exactly what I mean.

I am technically proficient in a way that keeps working against me. Getting truly loose requires me to make decision that feel, at a cellular level, like a mistake. No fixing, no tweaking, no nudging, and definitely no squinting to make sure the spacing between the typography is balanced (Yes, I actually do that shit).

This is harder than it sounds. Ask anyone who’s tried to write badly on purpose; controlled chaos is still control.

What I’m learning, slowly, and with no small amount of resistance, is that the style I’m chasing for Lost Mixtape is a philosophy, not just a visual preference. The analog nostalgia we’re celebrating, the pulling back from digital perfection, the more-human moments ethos; it has to show up in the work itself.

You can’t build a brand about embracing imperfection while quietly perfecting everything in the background. If the medium is part of the message, the rough lines are the discourse, but damn, it is so hard to pull off.

Right now I’m slowly building out the catalog; more designs, more items, more opportunities to test this aesthetic in the wild before I start pushing hard on marketing and visibility. I want there to be enough there that when someone lands on the page, they get it immediately.

Somewhere between the initial sketch and the final file is a version of the work that feels true; real. I’m trying to learn to stop before I get there so I can see it coming, not going too far. Twenty years of muscle memory says that’s wrong, but the brand ethos says otherwise.

The harder truth is that I have designs sitting in a folder right now that I’m afraid to use. Not because they’re bad, but because they don’t yet match the thing I can see clearly in my head. I know, rationally, the only way to close that gap is to ship them anyway. Let the work exist in the world before it’s ready, and let the audience vote with their dollars, so it can become what it needs to be.

The perfectly imperfect brand won’t build itself while I’m waiting to feel ready.

If you’ve ever fought your own instincts while building something, whether that’s a design, a business, a habit; you probably know this particular feeling: The pull toward safety dressed up as professionalism.

What that looks like for you, if you want to share it?

Lost Mixtape is my premium clothing brand built around pulling ourselves out of our screens and into more human moments through analog nostalgia. You can find the shop at lostmixtape.com.

Check out the latest gear

I wasn’t going to do this again

I came back to Substack in January after a long hiatus, and the last thing I wanted to do was get involved in another membership drive. I’ve done this a few times now, and every time I start one, it ends up feeling like nobody actually wants what I’m sharing.

So I quit.

But that comes with problems because you paid to be he…

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I have a confession to make; I dream about e-commerce, and it might be a sickness.

As you likely know (because I’m no stranger to telling everyone I see about it), I use Shopify, One thing I love about the platform is the multiple ways to automate tasks you need done, where many other platforms require manual work, so much so that a lot of people don’t do them because they take too much time.

This morning, bleary-eyed and still in darkness, I had a random thought. “Can I automate creating collections based on colors or themes?” First, what was I dreaming about that caused my first waking thought to be about that idea in particular? I don’t know, but as the fog of sleep lifted, I imagined this might be a good way to put together random collections for different holidays or events.

Turns out, you can…

Three Notes:

1. This will be more impressive when I have more products listed

2. There’s a green shirt in the “blue” collection because there is a blue variant to that shirt, but it’s not front facing on the listing.

3. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does create possibility. The answer is in being thoughtful with tags because those tags allow me to create these opportunities.

Several years ago, my buddy Adam Luedicke turned me onto Shopify, and what I noticed right away about his shop is that many of his products showed up in multiple collections from his navigation. Most of his shirts are unisex fit, so clicking “Mens” or “Womens” will show slightly different selections of tees, but not entirely different.

He creates these groupings of products using Shopify’s Smart Collections that allow him to automate what products go into which collection. Once I figured this out, it changed how I operate.

I use the tagging method to create collections, where I add tags to products and then turn those tags into collections, but before today, I never considered that I could get Shopify’s Sidekick AI to do it for me.

Tags aren’t the only way to create Smart Collections, though. There are several ways to pull together interesting collections. I’m not going to get into the weeds with all of these (yet), but here’s just some of the wild ways I’m learning to create

• Create sale items by setting conditions based on compare-at price so every discounted item instantly appears

• Tag items by seasons (if that’s your jam) to instantly bring together collections for seasonal need

• One of my favorites; maintain a “New Arrivals” collection that actually stays new by using creation date conditions to rotate older items out automatically

• Spot inventory issues faster by creating collections for low-stock items, out-of-stock products, or bestsellers based on inventory levels

• Automatically spotlight your one-of-a-kind or limited edition pieces using tags or metafields

• Filter by multiple attributes at once like price range, product type, vendor, weight

• Build complex product groups like “hoodies under $60 tagged ‘vintage’ with more than 5 in stock.” Why? I don’t know, but that sounds freaking cool

Here’s the real beauty of all this. Right now, I only have 21 products in my shop (I know, I should have more by now—get off me), but I can scale my catalog to 200 without organizational fear. As long as I know the conditions each product needs to meet when I make a listing, the item will slot itself into collections automatically, creating less work and headache for me.

Or, if I decide that I want to create a collection based on parameters that I haven’t set up yet, I can use Sidekick to identify items, add the parameters, and then automatically create that new collection within minutes.

Ok, a lot of nuts and bolts happening above, and none of that may mean anything to you if you’re not trying to get on the e-commerce train, but I know a lot of people slog their way through their online sales platforms because they just don’t know about the alternatives.

I know there are a lot of artists and creatives reading this post, and I know how you operate. You want the pretty interfaces, and the WYSIWYG graphic interface that makes sites pretty, but those platforms don’t fully consider what’s really important…

HOW TO SERVE YOUR CUSTOMER BEST!

I legitimately believe Shopify is the best e-commerce platform out there, even though it doesn’t have all the fancy graphical editing interfaces that make artists drool over themselves.

You can still make beautiful websites on Shopify, but more importantly, you can make beautiful data and automations in the backend to help you sell more things to more people.

Which one matters more?

Yes, I’m a Shopify slut, for good reason — I love it. Yes, the links to Shopify are affiliate links, which allow you to test the platform for two weeks FREE, and then only pay $1 a month for the first three months. Ninety days — Three bucks!

If you’re interested in trying it out, and you believe I’ve been helpful, use that link above and you’ll be helping me out without any additional cost to you.

Imagine a sofa, dark cyan, Midcentury Modern inspired with blocky walnut legs. It’s 3:47 a.m. and a restless body tosses and turns, fighting through insomnia, and trying not to wake the entire house with coughing expectorating the gelatinous post-nasal drip.

It’s me; I’m the body on the sofa suffering through the worst head cold I’ve had in a year or more. Sleep evades me, and instead of fighting my way through it and risk waking my wife, I leave the comfort of my bed and banish myself to the couch.

I’m still not sleeping, but I am thinking, and as I drift from one random thought to the next, I remembered something. I came back to writing just a few weeks ago, and yet I’ve completely forgotten what I’m doing with it.

I haven’t told a decent story in months.

The best I’ve managed are lame anecdotes and almost cliché self-realizations (I might be on one right now).

There’s a phrase I can’t get out of my head from master storyteller, Matthew Dicks. “Good stories have stakes.” he says, and it’s been the pervasive thought around everything I write for over a year now, except I lost touch with that feeling, and I’m not sure I know how to get it back.

What sort of literary pickle can I get myself into, and drag the reader in with me, so that we can emerge from the darkness together? What is at stake for anyone reading this post?

My recent few posts had nothing at stake other than being worried you may have given up on me for abandoning the craft for so many months. You didn’t, and I thank you, but now what’s at stake?

Unfortunately, I cannot deliver on a promise I haven’t made yet; one that provides an adequate balance of risk vs. reward to the reader while still allowing me to satisfy my prosaic inclinations.

Have I forgotten how to write my own story arc…

Left Turn

Have you ever joined a platform, perhaps paid the monthly or annual fee, realized it was more complicated that you anticipated, and then given up?

You’re not alone.

The other day, while working through an issue on my Shopify store, I had this moment of clarity that if I wasn’t the stubborn bastard that I am, not having the tenacity to see this problem through, I might have given up.

Then I thought about all the people who don’t push through in those scenarios, who brute force their way through platform because they don’t know any better, but never dig deeper. They miss opportunities to make their lives easier for fear of being overwhelmed by the technology.

I don’t know the number, but I know the names of several who have quit because they felt intimidated by the platform.

Shopify is an e-commerce beast that provides so much potential for people selling their wares, but without guidance, some throw up their hands and lean into what’s easy, even if it’s the long way around the problem.

With a wild hair tickling my posterior, I posed this question to the group…

My initial instinct was to separate this idea from what I’m doing here on Manual Transmission because what would people think if I turned this into a technical guide for Shopify when subscribers expect me to wax poetic about creative energy?

The truth is, I’ve struggled to find a voice for any of that stuff lately. I can’t put my finger on it, but the words won’t come. Perhaps it’s because I need momentum in order for the squeeze loose the the good prose, but I’ve struggled to find the stories.

On the other hand, I can talk about Shopify and all the third-party tools I’m using to build and grow my online business. At the same time, by sharing my insights on those tools, I’ll find the momentum I need.

The Promise I Can Make

I’m building a thing, and I’m figuring it out in real time—the platforms, the tools, the workarounds, the mistakes, and I’m dragging you along for it; not as a tech manual, but the way I’d tell a friend over coffee what I’ve learned so they don’t have to suffer through the same pitfalls I did.

You can expect the occasional dive into Shopify: What works, what doesn’t, and what the internet won’t tell you until you’ve already wasted three hours searching YouTube only to have some dude in a thick Eurasian accent tell you the wrong way to do things.

I’ll talk about the third-party apps worth paying for, the ones to skip, and the shortcuts that actually save time instead of creating more problems than they solve.

And if Matthew Dicks is right about stakes (he is), then building this shop in public (and all the uncertainty that comes with it) ought to qualify.

So the question remains, what is something about building and selling on Shopify that mystifies you?

Starting from scratch is never easy. Leaving all your past accomplishments behind to chase after a new dream, especially in a time of extreme uncertainty, is scary. Actually, scary doesn’t quite cover how much fear and anxiety comes with abandoning what we know to dive head first into relative foreign waters.

I’ve started a clothing business called Lost Mixtape; a premium brand built around the idea of celebrating analog nostalgic moments, pulling ourselves out of our digital existence and work toward more human moments. I’m an artist and graphic designer by trade, which is a decent skillset, but what business do I have starting a premium clothing company with aspirations to move into handmade wearable goods?

When shutting my eyes at night, forcing my way to slumber, the thoughts of doubt, quieted by the noise of the day, come raging forward, hitting stress receptors all at once.

Will I really be able to make enough from this project?

What does people think of me?

Do they laugh because I’m starting yet another project that will likely fail?

Where will I live once it does fail because I obviously will never be able to show my face to anyone ever again?

And yet, I haven’t quit. I’m invested in this project, absolutely, but if I’m being honest, I’m not doing enough to make it work as well as I want. I’m 90% in, largely because those doubts permeate my limbic brain, which yanks me by the collar, forcing me to ease up on the accelerator to keep me from hurting myself.

Without me, the lizard brain cannot exist, and it will do anything to survive.

I didn’t push myself harder because I wasn’t desperate enough to go that extra 10%.

Working at 90% is safe. It’s fast enough forward to get some things done, but not enough to get hurt, and by hurt, I mean bruising my ego and risking self-imposed isolation again.

My situation has always been safe. Without going into how we make ends meet, my family has always had a reasonable amount of financial security, enough to keep us housed, fed, and humming along without risk of being out on our asses tomorrow.

That was until this year where every expense we had increased, and we’re now paying at least 30% more for the same level of comfort we had last year. We aren’t buying more things—our expenses have increased, and it wouldn’t take a genius to know why.

Your project doesn’t need a hero, but a villain.

At the beginning of this year, I started a small side job to help alleviate some of the increasing financial pressure, and the first thing I learned is that I do NOT want this bridge job keeping me away from my family or my business, but I must keep it for now or risk financial peril.

Instead, I’ve chosen to make the side job my nemesis. I want it out of my life so bad, I’m willing to fight over it. I value my freedom too much to let this side job take it from me. I want my time and attention back, and if that means going extra hard during my available hours to work on Lost Mixtape, then that’s what it takes.

The sacrifice of sleep and attention normally reserved for family, friends, and personal time is necessary to defeat my enemy, but once I get to a point where I’m comfortable to let go of the side job, I’ll need a new villain, because I cannot allow myself to go backward, fighting old enemies over and over again.

There’s no plan other than calling myself out on my bullshit when I spend too much time futzing with things on my website that don’t bring sales, doom scrolling Instagram calling it research, or disregarding my chore list to play Arc Raiders with my son (that last one gets a bit of a pass—I chalk it up as father/son time).

I don’t know if others can relate to this concept, but if you feel like you’re not getting far enough ahead in your projects, maybe look for a villain to fight so that you can become the hero you need.

For clarity, I’m starting this brand using Printify, a print-on-demand service that helps me produce my designs on an as needed basis. For some, there’s a stigma around print-on-demand, as if it’s cheaper or inferior quality to other print methods like screenprinting. That used to be true, but the technology has come a long way in recent years, and I’ve shared recently how impressed I am with the current state of production.

However, the stigma exists, which is why I’m not publicly saying print-on-demand around my brand, but instead, calling it made-to-order, which it is. Perception counts for a lot when building a brand and turning features into benefits through clever copywriting is marketing 101.

I’ll pick up my Clio on my way out.

Markers on the Path

I have three milestones I want to hit within the next few years to establish this brand as something more than just another purveyor of graphic tees.

1. Build Out the Catalog

As of this writing, I have sixteen products available in the shop; mostly t-shirts, but a few other items. My current goal is to build that up to at least thirty pieces, between shirts, hats, sweatshirts/hoodies, and accessories (I want to add at least one or two bags).

After I have the current catalog built up, I will focus on marketing and advertising while also designing new products behind the scenes to prepare for two to three seasonal launches during the year. This will allow me the space to be more intentional about the pieces I introduce while also giving me the chance to tease it publicly to bring in new potential customers.

The semi-annual launches will be six to twelve (loose numbers) items in a micro-capsule collection that are all tied together with a philosophy, theme, design style, or color theory.

2. Bring the Work In-House

These drops are meant to be more exclusive and timely, being available for a certain amount of time, and then taking them down as a new collection comes to life. This also will give me a better idea of what customers gravitate toward, and I can develop future collection items with that understanding.

Those items will become signature pieces for the brand, and to capitalize on their popularity, I will stop making them via print-on-demand, and bring the printing in-house (done by a local shop in bulk). That will help me cut costs as well as giving me control over how those packages are fulfilled—more branding opportunities.

3. One-Off Originals

Something I don’t talk about anywhere is that I’ve been dabbling in customized clothing pieces. I’m not great at it yet, but I’m getting better, and soon I will offer one-of-a-kind designs.

This allows me to express my artistic nature while also offering more premium items for devoted fans. I’m not sure how this plays out yet, but I envision using some of my own designs or vintage/classic items I find to mend and alter as one-offs.

This means I will need to learn to sew, which for someone who prides themselves on diving head first into new styles and techniques; I’m as terrified as I am excited about the idea.

Does anyone have any recommendations on used sewing machines for beginners?

It’s been six months since I wrote anything on Substack, or shared anything to my list, and I will not apologize, but can I share with you the profound internal journey I’ve been on since August of 2025?

Short back story for anyone who might have joined here in the last several months only to find me absent—back in July, I took a scheduled month off so that I could spend time with my family during summer, mostly to drive my kid around from one activity to another several times a day (not even joking). Then August arrived, I started to write, but then was dealt a devastating crisis of conscience.

I won’t go to deep into it, but Substack has a hate problem, and I have a problem with that. I didn’t feel right about running a paid membership where some of the fees went to a company that allows for some of the hateful content allowed on this platform. Every time I had an inkling to come back, I remembered why I left and couldn’t bring myself back to it.

At the same time, I also checked out of every single creative project I was into. No art, no graphic design, no zines, no YouTube videos; absolutely zero creative output for months—again, with no apologies. It has been both terrible and freeing at the same time.

It’s kind of wild, but I have almost no interest in making art. I cannot explain it, because I haven’t experienced this level of disassociation from creative work in decades.

Am I done as an artist?

The things I was making felt performative at best. I made things because the hamster needs to run on the wheel while the audience watches, but I needed a break.

Even as I write this, I don’t know when I’ll ever make another piece of art again. I’m sure I will, but I don’t see it in my immediate future, which is such a foreign concept. Making has always been my life, but did I spend all my creative capital? Is my well dry?

Of course not.

A few months back, I was wallowing in my self-pity on a random Sunday evening, spending my time scrolling through on Instagram (a place I also hadn’t touched in months), filtering between political distress calls and heartfelt music-oriented content. The social discourse made me sad, but the music kept me afloat. I started sharing the ones I loved to my stories and I couldn’t stop. Before I knew it, I had dozens of stories posted, mostly music with some social commentary mixed in for spice, and I enjoyed the moment.

The next day, I did more of the same, sharing music with anyone who needed an uplift, and the results were obvious. People started reaching back to me with their thoughts about some of the things I shared. It was nice to reconnect with people and help connect them to the music artists that I found interesting.

This process helped heal me, and I hope it helped heal others, but more importantly, it showed me that there is no other art form that connects people like music. There isn’t a painting in the world that instantly connect people from all walks of life like Bohemian Rhapsody, Black Hole Sun, or Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah.

Art, film, writing can touch our hearts, but they don’t have the same power to transport us back to a time and place in our lives like music, at least not on the same level.

No, I’m not starting a band

I cannot sing or play instruments, and I have no desire to hang out in bars that smell of sweat and stale beer. I’m more inclined of opening a record store than I am of starting a band, but I have recently found a renewed connection to music appreciation that I haven’t felt since streaming became a thing.

I took my son to a record store recently, his first time ever being in one. I don’t own a record player right now, but there’s just something special about flipping through new and used LPs that feels like home. My kid was in awe—the first time he’d seen the work of his favorite artists in physical form. Watching him, I had this overwhelming feeling of pride, as if I leveled up as a father. I’d done right by my son bringing him to this place, and it’s now something we can do together with mutual respect.

But what the hell does any of this have to do with what I’m doing now?

What I’ve come to realize about the last six months is how much I’ve missed a simpler, less digitally connected life. I want to listen to vinyl records all the way through.

I want to take pictures using an actual camera instead of my phone, and care less about sharing them on Instagram.

I want shop for vintage clothing for no other reason than to find pieces that remind me of how cool it was to be alive when I was young.

I want to sit in a coffee shop with cool music while I journal in a notebook instead of work on my laptop

I want nostalgia with gratitude and to remember to disconnect more often to enjoy the life in front of me.

And I want to design a brand that embodies all of that. In fact, I already have, but that’s a story for next time.

It’s good to be back. I hope you stick around despite my overdue emergence from the depths of obscurity.

This week’s update will be a short one because sometimes when life comes at you, it comes with heat.

On April 1st, we took back the keys on our furnished rental ADU (additional dwelling unit). The goal this time is to turn it into an AirBnB rental, but when we walked in and assessed the effort needed, it was a bit more than we expected.

Cutting to the chase, I’ve been absent because I’ve been moving furniture, buying new furniture, making upgrades, talking with contractors, managing the garden around the unit, and more. Some art got made, but no writing got done. I’m writing this thirty minutes before it needs to go out.

I would like to say next week will be better, but I’m not sure it will. It’s not that I didn’t have time to write, but my brain has been rewired for manual labor and the creative and inquisitive part is in sleep mode. I’ll try to reboot it next week, fingers crossed.

Is Saatchi Art Good?

Last week I spoke about Latchet, a platform with a new take on how to sell your art and handmade goods.

A reader asked if I could do the same about my Saatchi experience, which I told them I’m not sure I have enough info to talk about yet, because I’m taking Saatchi much more seriously than I would Latchet, and I don’t want to do too much shooting from the hip about my experience.

However, I have sold a few works there over the years and I have learned a bit about best practices about selling on Saatchi from several notable artists on the platform, and if you’re thinking about selling there, these are the things I’m working on the most right now.

Nail the Basics First

Before you even think about uploading your first piece, get the foundation right. Use a name people will actually remember (no mysterious usernames that look like a Wi-Fi password).

Put up a photo that makes you look like someone worth buying from — well-lit, in focus, and preferably not cropped from a group shot at your cousin’s wedding.

Then, write a bio that actually sounds like you. Tell people what you make, why you make it, and the flavor of your work, but skip the overblown art-speak.

Set Up Your Shop Like a Pro

Think of your Saatchi page like your own little gallery. That means your artwork photos need to be consistent — bright, clear, and without the “I shot this on my kitchen counter at midnight” vibe.

Include detail shots if the texture is a big part of the work. Fill in all the details for each piece — size, medium, year, and materials — because buyers actually use that info to filter searches.

And when it comes to pricing, don’t just throw numbers at the wall. Factor in Saatchi’s commission, your shipping costs, and what similar artists are selling for.

Upload with Intent, Not Just Volume

More isn’t better if it’s all over the place. Start with 8–12 pieces that actually look like they belong in the same family. They don’t have to match perfectly, but someone scrolling your page should instantly get a sense of your style.

Stick to a few consistent size and price ranges so buyers don’t feel like they’re wandering through a yard sale.

Optimize for Discovery

Titles matter. “Abstract Mixed Media Collage” is more searchable than “Untitled #4” — and you can still get creative without killing your SEO. Keep descriptions short, but give people something to connect with.

Talk about the inspiration or the process in a way that feels personal. And don’t phone in the style, subject, and medium categories — those are how you end up in the right searches.

Present Like a Gallery, Not a Garage Sale

If a piece doesn’t represent where you are now as an artist, hide it. A tight, cohesive page will always beat a random mix of experiments.

Keep your presentation consistent — similar framing or clear info about whether it’s unframed — and use lifestyle mockups sparingly. The goal is to help someone imagine your work in their space without it feeling like a furniture catalog.

Build Momentum Early

Saatchi loves fresh uploads. Instead of dumping everything at once, pace yourself — one to three pieces at a time will keep you popping up in “New This Week.” Share your profile link on your social media, newsletter, and anywhere else your audience hangs out.

And YES, interact with other artists. A thoughtful comment or a “favorite” can go a long way in getting eyeballs on your own work.

Keep the Back End in Order

Before you sell anything, double-check your shipping settings so you’re not surprised by a bill that wipes out your profit. Keep your inventory list updated and mark work as sold immediately. And pay attention to which listings get the most views or messages. That’s free market research telling you what to make more of.

Bottom line, Saatchi can work for you, but only if you treat it like a living, breathing part of your art business. Set it up right, keep it looking sharp, and show up often enough that buyers remember your name.

The platform does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s your job to make sure they’ve actually got something worth lifting.

If this is your first time here, subscribe to get more of this straight to your inbox. It’s free, and you may actually look forward to checking your email for once.

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UPDATE: Since I wrote this post in 2025, Latchet.com has ceased operations, closing all shops and deleting their social media. They have said they are refocusing their energy into a new project around curation and recommendation, but not formal announcements have been made.

Creatives are always looking for greener pastures, because there has never been a perfect solution for selling your gear, giving you full access to your customers and fans, while having an internal network that works in your favor, but maybe the wait is over.

Earlier this week, I got served an ad from a company hoping to entice me by offering a one-stop solution to selling art and handmade goods.

BUT WAIT! This site is NOT like Etsy, not even a little.

In fact, it’s more like Substack, and that’s because two former executives (and fellow creatives) who left their unvested shares behind to start Latchet, the answer to the question, “How do I sell my seashell jewelry and still have the ability to email my fans and customers?”

Now, if you know how my brain works, you’ll know that I’m all over things like this. I immediately want to understand everything about the inner workings, either to jump on board at the ground floor, or stand at the entrance warning everyone before they go in.

Is Latchet the next best thing since OG Etsy mixed with all the best of Substack?

No, it’s not, but it’s way too early to say what they are doing is wrong or bad. I believe the company is barely into its beta phase and it is trying hard to not fall prey to feature creep.

At first glance, the site looks interesting and tells a great story, but the only way to find out if this new platform would solve all our problems is to crack it open and see how the guts work when you poke at them with a metal rod.

I should note that I have not spoken to anyone at Latchet and everything shared here is based on my experience of the platform.

Latchet Unlatched

Again, the main objective of Latchet is to allow people to communicate with their audience (you can import your list) while also having direct access to art and handmade goods directly for sale on the platform and within email updates.

They also have eschewed a traditional algorithm for exposure, and instead encourage (force?) people into following other makers they like and recommending those shops to their audience. This is not a bad plan, however, it is a bit blunt and clunky, which I’ll get into shortly.

Because they’re focusing on referrals, and the network is pretty small right now, this could be a good way to get in early with other sellers and become part of their recommendation circle-jerk.

The best part is being able to communicate directly with your audience through the platform, at scale, which is a feature Etsy has no interest in giving its sellers. They look at all the customers on the site as their own, and your sales on Etsy are a product of their customer base. Latchet wants you to talk to your people as often as once a week.

Here’s the thing about Latchet newsletters, though. They are no-fluff (560 characters or less), sparse, and require you to share recommendations within them, which I think is kinda weird when you’re trying to sell to your customers, not pitch them on buying from someone else.

This also carries over directly onto all shops on the platform, where halfway through the shop page sits a list of your recommendations, just begging customers to bounce from your page onto someone else’s. That’s weird, but maybe the Latcheteers have a good reason for it.

Something else about the Latchet updates is that if you decide to write one, you have no control over when it gets published. All Latchet newsletters go out at 6 AM on Thursdays, because scheduling autonomy is for suckers.

Now imagine you’ve subscribed to dozens of Latchet shops, because you’re trying to be the recommendation king of Latchet, and you wake up to your email inbox flooded every single Thursday morning.

That makes no sense to me!

In another odd twist, Latchet’s own newsletter is actually hosted…you guessed it, right here on Substack.

Latchet Community

Sell better, together

By James Kylstra

Again, kinda weird, but I’ve never built an online platform before, so what do I know.

But what really matters is whether Latchet is a real-deal option, or just another fly-by-night site looking to usurp the current king of the hill with a Patagonia vest and flexy-straw.

Re-Cap the Good

• A potential replacement for Etsy… maybe, in a few years… maybe

• A potential replacement for Etsy… maybe, in a few years… maybe

• You can import and export your customer list

• Offers a no-nonsense way to update fans and customers

• Allows you to see which customers have bought the most from you over time (can you say loyalty rewards?)

• Offers discounts for subscribers and referrals

• If they get more people on board eager to participate in the recommendation engine, this could really blow up for people

• Being an early adopter could potentially be beneficial

The Not-So Good

• The recommendation aspect feels a bit forced and performative

• The newsletters are too sparse and limited

• Having the updates scheduled for you is weird; I cannot figure out why this is even a thing other than making it automated so people don’t have to think about it too much

• Not a lot of people to interact with, especially if you’re trying to connect with others in your niche

• The quality mix is vast, ranging between good to not great, with very little stand-out awesome work so far

• Shipping and sales tax info is nonexistent, which means you’ll be responsible for it all

• There’s very little information about this platform online, what their financial backing looks like, and whether they can endure the storm of a declining economy in 2025

Final Thoughts

I’ve always been the type to jump into new platforms to see how they work, but should you do the same with Latchet?

The jury is still out.

It’s not an Etsy replacement yet, and it’s definitely not a replacement for any other email platform, Substack included. There are too many limitations right now, but I definitely see potential.

I believe that Latchet’s operating procedure at this stage is to put these tools out there for creatives and watch how those people interact with them. They want to see how users respond so they can build the next version with them in mind.

It appears that they are operating in good faith, but there’s not much info on how things are selling, what is selling, and where any sales are coming from.

Switching or at least opening a shop here will be a leap of faith. You can sit back and watch for a while, but there’s also the chance that we’re on the edge of something cool that just needs support while they cook behind the scenes.

External Signals

• This old-school beat box by Futura is a chef’s kiss

• If you don’t know who Futura is, you better ask someone (which means me…you can ask me—click the link).

• I’m enjoying this extensive Neo-Soul playlist on Spotify

• In particular, this album by Pat Smith hit me hard.

Manual Transmission runs on attention, intention, and the contribution of others. Become a paid member and get access to free digital assets, how-tos, live process videos, and other surprises. Your contribution will help keep this ride running smoothly.

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So how’s your summer going?

Triggered, Wrecked, but Alive

A few years ago, I posted a YouTube video at 1:30 in the morning. It was a motivational piece about chasing inspiration when it strikes—regardless of the time. I was in my studio, burned through all my midnight oil and left with noxious fumes, but the muse to speak out hit me like a motivational sledge hammer lined with memory foam.

Sometimes you just can’t wait for morning, hoping that the same electricity hits you again.

I posted the video and later that day, and someone I used to know called me a creeper for making late-night videos. He was a blackbelt at the judo dojo my son and I attended, and as much as I admired his expertise on the tatami, his personality left a lot to distance myself from.

This guy thought it was weird for me to be up late making videos and would tease me about it, but is same guy who used to flirt with married moms from his kids' judo class and carried a gun to practice because he thought a jealous husbands might show up (not even joking).

But This Ain’t About That

This is about honoring those rare moments when something lights up inside you. If you’ve ever felt that sudden urge to make, then you know it doesn’t follow a clock or a calendar. You either answer the call, or you watch it fade.

This month was supposed to be a creative vacation. I’d take a break from my daily rituals, shuttle my son around, rest a little, maybe make something small. Instead, I made close to nothing.

Didn’t write, didn’t draw, didn’t build, didn’t ship. The creative part of me flatlined.

Until this week.

I was just another night of me melting into the couch, half-dead, scrolling Instagram, when I stumbled into a rabbit hole of unfamiliar music. Not the algorithm-fed playlist garbage that Spotify keeps handing me, but real new music; sounds that made my synapses pop and lungs tighten as I held my breath in anticipation of the drop.

In that moment, I realized: music is my conduit to creativity.

Music unlocks the part of me that wants to make.

It sparks the nerve endings, lights the fuse, makes me want to run to the studio and get to work.

I didn’t run though: I’m tired, lethargic, but I wanted to jump up and throw paint. In the past few weeks of being inert, the impulse to move matters. I’m writing this now to hold onto that spark, so tomorrow I can act on it.

Truthfully, I already have, here’s a new work-in-progress to prove it.

A Wallet Full of Lint and Possibilities

Things are tight right now. I won’t go into why, but money's a problem, and not making anything isn’t helping. While art doesn’t pay my bills on its own, it does keep me sane long enough to figure out the next move.

So tomorrow, I work. Maybe it won’t be much, but it’ll be something.

Expect more drops on Saatchi soon.

Cheers,

Dave

PS - There’s a whole other conversation about the intrusive thoughts regarding everything I’ve been doing and what’s next, but I’ll leave that for a time when I am emotionally equipped to handle it without crashing out.

PPS - If you’d like to know what music has inspired me this year so far, I make a Spotify playlist every year of songs, new or old, that hit me in the right place at the right time.

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External Signals

• Clement Hudry is my new favorite sports photographer.

• The Great Indoorsman is a woodworking philosopher on the level of Van Neistat, except not insufferable. His third video, Sex & Glue had me deeply relating to his journey even though I’ve never touched a machine planer in my life.

• I won’t claim to be the biggest Royksopp fan (or the biggest EDM fan), but this YouTube set featuring the Norwegian duo is on my infinite repeat list.

• Something else I did while on sabbatical: Gardening, which is so weirdly satisfying—who knew?

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