Seed Conference 3: Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff - skinnyCorp

The skinnyCorp Guide to Doing What You Love for a Living
(and whatever else we end up talking about)

The business

The second presentation of the day at Seed was from Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who discussed the “perfect storm of awesomeness” known as Threadless. Threadless is basically an online call for t-shirt design submissions where the winning shirts get printed and sold for 1-week on the site. Designers are paid for their winning designs and gain reputation points within the community for influence over future design choices. Actually, the kind of cool thing is that anybody in the community who votes, comments, and purchases from the site, gains influence via reputation scores which feedback into a more loyal customer-base and better product selection. This sort of radically open feedback loop is known as “crowdsourcing.”

How it works

“Crowdsourcing is not a business plug-in, IT IS THE BUSINESS. Crowdsourcing means the CEO no longer has control.” - paraphrased from Nickell and Kalmikoff

The 4 laws of crowdsourcing, as proposed by Nickell and Kalmikoff are as follows:

1. Allow your content to be created by its community
2. Put your project in the hands of its community
3. Let your community grow itself (but nurture the growth)
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible

Picking your passion and what I’ll take away from this presentation

“Find your own perfect storm. Ride the excitening” - Nickell and Kalmikoff

Veering into a a hilarious vignette, Nickel and Kalmikoff spent a little time talking about tote bags. Many people have suggested that Threadless is the perfect solution for the custom-printing of tote. Why not just reproduce the community tools, fire up the crowdsourcing, and start making money hand over fist on tote bags? Because Nickell and Kalmikoff can’t get excited about tote bags. Please don’t suggest that they make tote bags. There’s obviously a huge opportunity in tote bags. You should go make tote bags.

Here is why they say you should pick something where you have passion, and not just where you see a business opportunity:

1. Passion inspires trust
2. Work harder (in a good way)
3. Be more inspired
4. Failure is less sucky

After talking about crowdsourcing and following your passions, the guys switched over into question and answer mode. What I found particularly interesting was where crowdsourcing didn’t tend to work and how there was still some amount of moderation and control that was required on behalf of the head guys at Threadless. Basically, the voters don’t determine 100% of the designs that get chosen. This is because the when voters determine the entire content, it tends to echo. The head guys are always using the crowd as their first filter but they ultimately select t-shirts that they’d buy and they weigh the votes of other members who have also bought more heavily.

Something else I thought was really cool was how reactive Threadless is in their business. They don’t do practically anything - in fact, they’re inherantly lazy - unless the demand for it is fairly obvious, where the method of doing things is just causing too much pain. For example, Threadless was getting to a point where they were buying out a color t-shirt from Fruit of the Loom for the year, for the entire world. Rather than be beholden to a single supplier, they decided to get into the t-shirt production business on their own.

“You’ll know that you’re at a growing point when shit just goes crazy.”

The last thing that they went over was the need to be patient. In the beginning, Threadless was really just a hobby. Success did not come over night but through a long series of tweaks with a product that they loved.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]