On refusing to abandon (most) projects

I’m imagining you have even more ideas than the projects you do. So, how do you decide, “I’m going to actually try this one out” versus “This is just a fleeting idea that’s going to pass.” Or do you try to give every idea a shot?

I have a list on my phone that is just high and low an absolute wasp’s nest of ideas. Usually it depends; if it’s a product then it’s just if this is this something that I want myself. If it’s a YouTube video, it’s often a negotiation between, is this something that I’m excited about [or] is this something [that] would make for an interesting video or thumbnail and title? So, yeah, I feel like no matter the context you’re in, you have to make creative compromises. And that is the very minor creative compromise I have to make.

Right. I saw the one video where you have the project you’re working on where you keep trying and it doesn’t work: creating the roller coaster necklace. I imagine that happens many times, where you’re working on something and it just doesn’t work out. When do you think it’s okay to abandon a project or do you just keep trying to make it work?

You know, that is the first time that I’ve fully abandoned a project and it was mostly because I ran out of time. Other times, I think I almost never abandon a project, but I will adapt it. Adapt, don’t abandon.

I mean, there are things where I’ve been like, okay, this is not going to work out in the way that I imagined it, but I can tweak it and make it this. I always try to end up somewhere, even if it’s not where I imagined I would end up in the beginning of it. I think that comes from having the natural pressure of having to finish a project for a video.

What’s good about it is I can’t always be a perfectionist about it. It’s very easy for me to get stuck in perfectionism.

Do you work on one project at a time or have multiple things going at once? So maybe if you get stuck in one area, you can bounce to the other thing.

The way my work is structured is there are two separate businesses. One is the YouTube, like media-influencer-business and then one is the product business. For YouTube I usually just work on one project at a time. For the product business it’s everything at once. There’s just a million things going on.

How did you decide which products to bring to a Kickstarter project? I know you’ve had tons of projects. There’s a couple on Kickstarter, but many that are not.

It’s projects that I cannot fully pull off with what I have. So, it’s the more ambitious projects, the ones that are outside of the scope and budget of what we’ve already done. I think it’s just such a cool way of flipping the order in which you do things. One of my big learnings from last year was [when] I launched my first furniture piece in August and it didn’t sell as well as we hoped it would. We ended up racking up really high storage fees at our fulfillment center and we were like, okay, how can we make sure this doesn’t happen with our next piece? Kickstarter was the way to get up to the minimum order quantity with our factories uh but [helped us] make sure that we could actually ship out those units. I need outside investment to get [them] to market. I also need to make sure that the units we produce are actually going to ship out to customers. So it’s practical, but then it’s also with the newsworthiness of things. I think things being on Kickstarter is just more newsworthy than somebody launching a product on their website.

Do you ever have creative blocks? Are there chunks of time where you’re just not thinking of any ideas?

Oh, there’s so many. Usually it’s when I’m overwhelmed, because I get defensive and I just want to like hide under my couch. I’m working on a project now that I’ve been stuck [with] on a problem for four years and I’m finally [in] “fuck it, let’s just get it done” mode. Which is really nice, but there’s always blocks. I mean, I’ve had a block with the foldable coat hanger for years, and I think we finally have solved it.

It’s cool how it ebbs and flows and you’ll discover a new way to approach it that solves [a] problem–and then maybe [that] causes new problems. There’s nothing consistent about it.

How do you avoid burnout when you’re doing the two businesses at the same time?

I have learned to be so gentle with myself. I think that is one of the benefits of my role [being] purely creative. I realized that for me to be creative I need to be happy and I need to be well balanced.

I think in the beginning of my YouTube career, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. I was definitely running at risk of burnout. But it’s just knowing how much you have to give and being really smart about the parts you give. I make sure I sleep and I eat well and I work out and that I have time to see friends. I’ve realized that for me it’s really the way to be most productive and happy to actually enjoy the work I do.

How do you view when something is a success?

One of the things that’s most important is if I’m really proud of the thing that we’re putting out. That’s always been one of the core tenants and that goes for both the YouTube side of things and for the product side of things. If it resonates with people or not is a little bit more out of my control.

For success, it’s really just people understanding the problem that [the product] solves. Success is also: is [the product] unique and novel? That’s something I’m trying with every project that I do: is it something you haven’t seen before or a different approach to a really normal problem that people have?

Of course now that we’re becoming more of a proper business, the success is [also] for it to sell well and for it to resonate with customers in that way. We can make products that sell well, but that I don’t like personally. And that’s not really success to me.

Do you view what you do as an art project in any way?

I don’t think I’m cool enough to be an artist. So, no. It’s more of a thought exercise of like, how can we solve the problems that are so common that we don’t even really think about them as problems? How can we make something that turns it on its head a little bit? That is really the sweet spot for me right now.

It kind of reminds me of when you go to someone’s house and they’re like, “Oh yeah, our hot water doesn’t work in this room, so we’ve created this thing.” People create workarounds, but they just do it on their own and they don’t think expand it to other people who have the same problem. It’s an interesting ouvre to have just a bunch of different projects like that.

Yeah. I really want to follow my enthusiasm wherever it goes. For now I’m so happy just finding those little pieces of friction in your life and spending an obscene amount of time trying to work around it.

When you’re working, do you have like a particular like ideal situation? Like do you listen to music? Do you like do you do you start things out by like just thinking on things on your own? Is it more collaborative or like how do you bring an idea to life?

The way I structure my day, I need to-do lists. I need such a strict to-do list to follow because otherwise I’ll just just flop around. It’s interesting–I started the product business because I wanted to stop YouTube. And now I’ve realized how important the YouTube channel is for the process because it does provide the time pressure and the structure for it. Often we’re filming a project and unfortunately you can’t really listen to music when you’re filming. I’ll start with a sketch that then goes into a CAD design and then I start prototyping it in cheap materials like cardboard or thin plywood and then you kind of graduate to more and more complex versions with more expensive materials until you hopefully have a final version. From there it’s figuring out how we would manufacture it if it does go into the product pipeline, which is a completely different process.

And with the most recent project, the one you’re doing for Kickstarter, the laundry chair. I watched the general idea of how it works. Was this an idea that was nagging at you for a while or just one day struck you?

It was nagging at me for a while. I was on vacation and for some reason it just struck me and I was like, “Okay, I need to work on it now.”

I started sketching. It was my stepdad’s parents house in Palm Springs and I remember them having a chair in the guest room that I was staying in. I was like, “This one’s kind of good proportions.” I started measuring off of it and sketching off of that. Some projects are like, “Okay, we’re going to work on this” and you kind of have to grab the projects, and then there are some projects that just grab you. This was definitely one of the projects that grabbed me and was like, “No, you’re going to work on me right now.”

You were saying before as you’re a perfectionist, can an idea be overworked by the time you try to make the thing happen? Like you kind of lost the original inspiration?

Not really. I think for me, so much of the enthusiasm is having the final version. So that’s what I’m working towards. I’m very excited about having the object and seeing if it works in the way I imagined that it would. I’m usually tugged by that end goal of having the final version. But for sure, there are projects that I finish for a YouTube video and then I’m like, you know what, I’m pretty done with this. I’m not [going to] pursue it further. Then there are some, like the roller coaster necklace, where we’re still working on it.

I mean, seeing the video, when you dropped it, I could feel your pain. I think people assume that someone who’s created anything has figured out the system, that like nothing ever goes wrong, you know? I interviewed Philip Glass who’s like in his 80s and he was like, “I have to practice every day.” So, I think it was good to show because things don’t always work out perfectly. You run into these sort of bumps in the road.

I feel like I flail forward a lot. But then also the creative process has a lot of joy in it for me. It’s a really enthusiastic and joyful process. I am also so fucking cranky throughout a lot of it, especially the roller coaster necklace, because I wasn’t really progressing and I kept on running into the same problem. I don’t think I’ve been that angry at a project in a long time.

There are so many pleasant moments and that are amazing and so empowering. There are parts of it that I absolutely love. But then there’s parts that suck. The self-doubt and frustration and confusion. I think with every project, I’m like, “is this the one I’m never going to pull off?” I’d want to start mapping out my feelings throughout projects, because I think I follow the same “feeling curve” where I start out really enthusiastic and I have some quick wins and then I get self-doubt, and then I pull myself out of it, and then I get into frustration because I’m working on like the fifth attempt or a final attempt, and then I’m feeling really good when I have the finished one. Every project manages to trick you into thinking the feelings you’re having are completely unique, when it’s actually the same curve that you follow almost every time.