These folks are doing amazing work.  Recently my friend Chuck Anderson traveled to Ethiopia with charity: water to see firsthand the work they have been doing.  The photos from the trip are really incredible.  And then I saw Seth Godin, who wrote a little piece for the upcoming Threadless book, give his birthday to charity: water.  Here is a great quote from his post:

“In general, I think trade is better than aid, and creating scalable investments that engage the developing world is the best shortcut to bring us all out of poverty. But without a stable infrastructure, none of that works, and water is a key building block in that platform. The key is creating a dependable, long-term supply that communities can count on, and you can be part of that.”

If you want to get involved, send your birthday wishes to charity: water, not me.  For anyone that donates $50 or more, I’d be happy to send a free Threadless book when it comes out in October.  Just send me an email (jake@threadless.com) and I’ll hook you up.  And when your birthday rolls around, I encourage you to also consider giving it away!

Donate Now!

Thanks for an incredible decade everyone.  Happy charity day :)

ps… I’m starting this a bit early because charity: water needs what they can get by September 30th for the next round of work they are doing.

Character flaw: I don’t listen to a ton of music.  I have a few favorite bands and listen to them over and over again.  Luckily my wife is way into music and introduces me to new stuff a lot… and controls our mix during parties :)  But Against Me! has been my favorite band for the last 4 years.  Recently, thanks to Lance, our warehouse manager at Threadless, I got to see them play a set of 6 songs in a room of like 50 people at JBTV (F*cking incredible place).  I was standing right there up front, can’t wait to share the video when it comes out!

Anyway, before the show I got to listen to an interview with Tom Gabel, the lead singer.  He said that he wrote the album that “Joy” is on (“Searching for a former clarity”) while in a state of mind where he was convinced that he was going to die within a year.  So all of the songs were written about various things and how you would look at them if you knew you were going to die soon.  Great concept for an album.

Whenever I listen to Against Me!, for some reason I get lost in my own thoughts and the lyrics to the songs just keep egging me on, and I get just snowballs of thought processes going on.  It’s pretty great.  Why would I want to listen to anything else? ;)  I was listening to this album while driving from Chicago to Boulder last weekend with both the kids and my wife asleep in the back, and now knowing the thoughts behind the lyrics.  It was awesome.  And “Joy” is an incredible song.

I think the reason this song speaks to me so much is because I love the idea of not being in complete control, giving others chances for control and loving the outcomes.  I think that’s pretty obvious with Threadless since we give so much control to our community.  But also within the Threadless staff; I love giving people the freedom to run with the ideas that they are passionate about.  As a manager, even if you would do things differently here or there, sometimes it’s best to keep your mouth shut or at least make clear that your opinion is just your opinion, not the way things have to be.  Keep the idea their idea so it’s their work, not a service to you. There’s a joy in every possibility.

…

Don’t lose touch.

I’ve found that there are two very different sides to the concept. On one side, you have outsourced labor to the crowd. Let’s call it labor crowdsourcing. On the other, you have productive things being done with people’s passions. Let’s call this passion crowdsourcing.

On the labor side you have businesses like crowdSPRING (logo labor), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (general tasks) and Victors & Spoils (ad agency work). These are just a few examples. There are plenty more and they are not all bad! However, I’ve found that most of the companies that are creating a bad name for crowdsourcing fall into this category.

With the passion side you have places like Threadless (art on t-shirts), Etsy (selling handmade items) and Sellaband (music funding). Again, there are a ton more examples here but I do feel like there are a lot less than on the labor side. And it’s not all positive on this side either. There has been controversy with passion crowdsourcing projects like iStockphoto (stock photography) where professional photographers feel they have a hard time competing with $1 amateur photographs.

It seems like the key difference between these two sides is that on the labor side, people are generally making things and doing work specifically for the project. On the passion side, people are making these things anyway and are then given an opportunity to do something productive with those things. In turn, I feel the passion side is generally more about support and opportunity to the crowd while the labor side is about using a crowd to solve your own problems.

My view on the whole thing is that, personally, I hope to always stay on the passion side as that interests me far more. However, I do see plenty of opportunity and great things happening on the labor side.

Anyway, I think I could write about this forever and just wanted to outline my most basic thoughts here. I’d love to discuss further in the comments…

We just announced a huge partnership with Society6. Right now we are working with artists to build up content for the new Threadless Artist Shoppe that will be dropping early next week. So stoked for this and the new opportunities it brings artists on Threadless. Watch out, this will be huge.

Earlier this week I did a live interview on Inc.com. It was a pretty cool format, I just sat in my office and broadcasted live from my webcam while a moderator from Inc fed me questions that came in live from the community. You can watch highlights of it here.

I’ll be hosting a panel with 5 Threadless artists from around the world in Denver during the HOW Conference on June 9th.  This is going to be incredible, so stoked to meet and hang out with all of these guys and to share their thoughts with the HOW attendees.  It’s looking like I will be doing this again at Adobe MAX in October in LA.

If you read Women’s Wear Daily, I was interviewed for a piece in there last month. I found a link to a PDF of the article… check it out.

But wait there’s more!

• Tom does an interview with the Killswitch Collective on our 10 year anniversary.
• A blog on Trada recently written about Threadless that I really enjoyed.
• I have a little quote here in this BlackBook Magazine article.
• Bnet talks with me about vision as an entrepreneur.
• A super fun interview on the amazing Hide Your Arms t-shirt blog.
• An article on TechCrunch about bootstrapping your business.
• I am mentoring at the Founder Institute in Denver to a great crew of startups.
• A couple weeks ago I participated in the DC10 Summit Series. Amazing group of people.

Thanks y’all!

An example is that this year we are working on revamping the entire participate section of Threadless.com. In the past we would do the whole thing over a few months and launch it. Now we are working on one little piece of it at a time and launching it as we go… new things coming out constantly.

I’m pretty stoked about it. It’s a fun way to work and in the end, I think you end up with something even better as it is a constantly evolving work in progress rather than something you go into a vacuum on for a few months and hope it works when you launch it. Working in this way is pretty common nowadays but back when we started it wasn’t and it’s nice to be able to give this a try now :)

Last Saturday I went snowboarding in Vail, only my 2nd day of the year. On our first run, we went a ‘special’ way where there is no lift access and ended up in Minturn, CO – 8 miles away from the resort. We had to hitchhike back! Luckily we still got a few more runs in afterwards!

Snowboarding with Joe is never boring.

I’m mostly just amazed that you were able to start a company for $1000.

My future partner and I seem to be spinning our wheels, continually changing our business model and general idea for what we want to create. I think this is due to the fact that taking the step from concept to reality has so many hurdles we don’t know where to start. What was the first step you and your partner made to make Threadless a reality? If you could do it over, what would you do differently?

How long after coming up with the idea for the company did it take for the first shirt to be sold?

How would you have done things differently if you had $20,000 instead of $1000 to start up Threadless? Was money a real limiting factor?

I’m sure you haven’t made TOO many mistakes, but what was the first big mistake you made while creating Threadless?

Thank you again, and I totally understand if you don’t have the time to answer any/all of the above questions!

Random Question: I know you got the first $1000 for Threadless by winning a T-shirt design competition, but have you ever had any of your designs printed by Threadless?

My response:

Yo! Good qestions. My answers all revolve around the fact that Threadless started as a hobby not a business. The company was started 1 hour after the idea was born. It started as a thread on a web forum. We simply asked people to post tee designs, we’d pick some good ones and make them – and sell them… Giving the designer a few free tees for themselves.

As a designer and member of the art forum, this was just a fun project/thing to do for the community. $20k would have been way too much to spend on a pet project like that. It’s kind of like saying would you have been better at becoming a good skateboarder if you had $20k to buy your first board and build some ramps rather than $500. I’d never want to spend that much on an unknown hobby.

When we posted that thread nothing operationally existed at all. We had no t-shirt printer lined up, had no idea how we would sell the tees, no business entity. This is when we put the $1,000 together. (which was actually out of pocket – I didn’t win anything but my design bein printed in that first competition) I used $200 of it to talk to an accountant about setting up a sole proprietorship. I was 100% owner under this structure for the first 3 years before we became a corporation and I gave some ownership to my partner. Who, btw, was another member of that forum that I talked to a lot. Just great to have someone else excited about the project to bounce ideas off of.

The first contest on that thread was in november ’00 – we had the winning tees up for sale on a crappy website by February ’01 and that is when we made our first sale. For the couple years that followed, we had a separate bank account collecting revenue, using 100% of it to just print more tees. We didn’t take a salary at all.

There is absolutely nothing I would change. Honestly.

And singing loud! He’s a bit early… 5lb 5oz. He’s being watched closely but will be just fine :) Mamma’s doing well too!

But man, things like Quilts and Photoshop Tennis on Dreamless.org (gone but not forgotten) … or K10K’s matchmaker … or crazy YayHooray projects … they really made an impact.

Everyone out there participating on forums: stop talking nonsense and start doing something constructive! (And yes, that goes for me too)