Sebastian Arciszewski

A lot of entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s important to “keep your eye on the prize” and relay other cliched motivational platitudes about the importance of focusing on your intended goals with your business. While it’s true that it’s important to stay focused, many entrepreneurs often times forget to keep an eye on the shore. The metaphor is this: Most times when you start a business, especially a bootstrapped one, you start at the shoreline. The moment you start to spend your capital savings or indulge in debt financing to fund your business, you enter the water and start to drift away from that shore. The further you drift from the shore, the riskier the entire proposition becomes.

Have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? Remember that scene where the two brothers play chicken by seeing who can swim further out into the ocean before one of them chickens out and turns around? Being an entrepreneur is a little like that. Do you save anything for the swim back or do you employ some level of self-preservation in how you manage your personal and business risks? How far are you willing to swim from shore before you realize there is no hope in hell of ever making it back to land. Often times, not minding how far you’ve swam from shore can be a fatal mistake and unfortunately most entrepreneurs only learn this by finding themselves in the middle of the ocean, with little to no hope of staying alive. So yes, be passionate, charge forward, but always keep one eye on the shoreline, it could be the difference between failure and success.

Running your own business, especially when it’s a one-man-operation, can be pretty isolating. Any entrepreneur can attest to this. You don’t have colleagues to be, well, collegial with, and with the exception of a few friends, trusted contacts and the occasional cat that wanders in to your home office, you don’t have anyone to bounce your ideas off of. Overall, it can be a fairly isolating and monotonous experience . When I work, there are times I prefer silence but most times I actually prefer some level of background noise, chatter or music. My preferred isolation buster is Podcasts. Here’s the ones I listen to:

Back to Work | Build and Analyze | Hypercritical | Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe | The Talk Show | This Week in Startups | The Vergecast

Here’s a crazy stat: 53.5% of all users that open the newsletters from 604Republic do it on an iPhone first. What does this tell me? 1) A lot of my customers have iPhones. 2) Mobile email is insanely important. 3) I should probably be selling iPhone cases featuring some of the designs at 604Republic. 4) If you’re an email marketer, you should probably make sure that  your newsletters, transactional emails and any other correspondence / promo emails you send to your customers look good on an iPhone.

For years, parts of the t-shirt industry have been involved in a psychotic race to the bottom. $10 t-shirts, $9 t-shirts, $8 t-shirts! I’ve even seen a site try to do $1 t-shirts (they promptly went out of business). Here’s the crazy part, both cotton and printing costs have been rising steadily for at least the last five years, and with the exception of a fairly dramatic slump in cotton prices (after a meteoric rise) last March, the general cost of manufacturing a t-shirt has been on a steady rise.

Now it would appear that one of the giants in the industry is realizing that perhaps profit margins do matter! Shirt.woot recently raised their price from $10 to $12, and the totally insane part is that their forums exploded with equal parts praise, and equal parts rage. Some customers are educated enough to understand things like cost pressures and inflation. Others are not, and no amount of explaining it to them will appease their outrage. What it really comes down to is this: When running your business, would you rather be Apple or would you rather be Nokia? In other words, would you prefer to have a smaller market share with significantly higher profits, or a larger market share and be losing money or have razor thin margins because you’re dredging the bottom of the ocean for the lowest common denominator? You know another funny thing? I recently raised the price on a few t-shirts fairly significantly (+25%), and guess what happened? The sales of those t-shirts actually went up. Margins matter. Quality matters, and perceived value also matters… apparently a lot.

I’m always disappointed by email. Not by the medium itself, but about the fact that even in today’s hyper-connected, and hyper-competitive business world, some people still believe it’s ok to not respond to email. I understand that some businesses, or websites become victims of their own success. Suddenly their Inboxes more closely resemble some grotesque version of  a cluster-fuck, rather than an organized, manageable system for dealing with email. This however, is still no excuse for poor email etiquette.

Even when I’m swamped with email (which happens a lot), even if I’m not interested in what you’re peddling on any particular day, I’ll almost always respond with a short but courteous “No thank you, thanks for reaching out”. If the amount of effort that went into the solicitation is clearly above and beyond your standard copy-and-paste drive-by, and isn’t obvious, entirely unrelated spam, I make sure that my reply has a bit more substance explaining why I’m saying no. This is proper e-mail etiquette and to not do this simply sends a message of disrespect and signals either an arrogance or laziness that diminishes your business.

I think there is a real disease afflicting the entire tech industry. Let’s call it “Appleitis”. Unfortunately Amazon appears to be the latest tech giant to fall victim to this widely spreading illness. While I suppose it’s natural that Apple is now the envy of the entire industry, perhaps the entire corporate world, it’s this very envy that makes catching Appleitis for these companies so deadly.

Sadly, what the South Korean Copy Machines, and the Texas based, now mostly irrelevant beige box makers of the world don’t understand is that Apple’s identity is its own. Where in some circumstances emulating your competitor might prove fruitful, in this case, it will only ring hollow. Look no further for an example of this in Samsung’s latest Galaxy Note Super Bowl ad. Desperation never smelled so distinctive. That of-course brings us to Amazon. The first symptoms of Appleitis emerged when Amazon announced it’s Kindle Fire to great fanfare, only to receive almost universally lukewarm (at best) reviews and bring in disappointing Q4 2011 results, while in the same quarter Apple continued to skyrocket into stratospheric results.

Now, there are early rumours emerging of Amazon opening up physical retail stores! Yes, you read that right. Despite Jason Calacanis’ assertion that Jeff Bezos is the next Steve Jobs, I think the more obvious diagnosis is that Jeff Bezos has a clear case of Appleitis. Either that or Amazon is slowly going insane. Doesn’t the whole ethos, the very soul of Amazon as a company supposed to stand for the idea that shopping ONLINE is immeasurably better than shopping in a retail location? If you think that Amazon is in some way going to create an amazing and aesthetically pleasing retail experience by sticking a bunch of their Kindles into a store and turn this into a strength for them, I need only to refer you to the unbelievably beautiful web-design of their current website. Go ahead, check it out. Isn’t it gorgeous? No, you didn’t momentarily time-travel to the year 1999, you just visited Amazon.com.

The t-shirt industry is weird. Yesterday, through a chance connection, I had what can only be described as a very refreshing conversation with one of 604Republic’s direct competitors. We did it the old fashioned way. We spoke on the phone. I know that may sound archaic, perhaps even quaint in today’s tweet and tumblr driven world, but hear me out.

When I started SplitReason in 2003, the business of selling t-shirts online was very different. Threadless was only three years old, and TeeFury, BustedTees and SnorgTees were still but mere glimmers in their respective founders eyes. You could count the amount of respectable online t-shirt retailers on one hand. Today, things are very different. The competitive landscape bears little resemblance to that of 2003. Shirt-a-day sites are a dime a dozen, varying in range from selling a couple of t-shirts a day to selling tens of thousands of t-shirts a day. Catalog sites have matured and many offer hundreds if not thousands of products with at least a half-dozen of them pulling in ten million in annual revenues or significantly more (I’m looking at you Threadless). The pie has grown in size, but more and more the pie is getting sliced into an ever increasing set of slices.

The crazy part is that in almost nine years of being around this industry, never has a competitor called or spoken to me directly in any way, that is until yesterday. Throughout the years, I’ve been witness to competitors speaking bitterly about my companies in various forums and to various degrees, but that hasn’t exactly been akin to a direct, open and potentially fruitful conversation. This industry is littered with thousands of failed online t-shirt retailers. I’m not joking when I say it’s a mass graveyard of failure. I’ve seen so many of them come and go, it’s dizzying. I’ve also gotten so good at predicting which ones will fail and which ones will survive that it’s almost become a little betting game I play with myself. Despite the overwhelming failure rate I’ve observed, there seems to be a crazy, hell-bent insistance by the founders of these and larger more successful sites to never engage in any sort of meaningful dialogue with each other. I’ve never seen a single instance of a merger or buy-out. That just seems weird to me. Why does no-one in this industry talk to each other? What’s everyone so afraid of?

Yesterday’s call was a breath of fresh air I had long hoped for, and in fairness, should have been the kind of thing I had been attempting to engage in for quite some time. I learned a few things, and hopefully my competitor learned a few things from me. It was a free and open exchange of ideas, and at the end of the conversation I didn’t feel like either one of us had compromised ourselves and our accumulated knowledge to the sole benefit of only one party.

I believe this type of exchange of ideas can only serve to benefit, not only the parties that are talking, but the industry as a whole. So, if you’re one of 604Republic’s competitors, why don’t you give me a shout. Maybe we can learn something from each other, trade war stories, or simply figure out a way to work together to make an extra buck or two and continue growing not only our slice of the pie, but grow the size of the pie as well. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of: sebastian@604republic.com 

On more occasions than I care to remember I’ve tried to keep a personal blog of some form. Most of these efforts ended as a result of time pressures related to my work or a dwindling desire to share the ups and downs of my entrepreneurial activities throughout the last nine years or so. Consider this a renewed effort to share, I suppose with anyone who cares to read it, my various thoughts related to my professional career. Though even writing out “professional career” sounds somewhat prentious and ridiculous. I like to consider myself more of a person trying to create more value in the world through the things I build. The things I build happen to be companies or projects centered around the Internet and web-based technologies.

Since I spend a majority of my day working on my projects, all of which are in some way related to the Internet, chances are that most of my blog posts here (fair warning: however sporadic they may be) will be related to my work and various random musings I have on trying to succeed as an entrepreneur in the online space. If you find them insightful, great! At the very least, I hope to use this as an open way to organize and share my thoughts.