The stuff that isn't going well

Premise

So a bit over two months ago, I suddenly got laid off.

This was the first time I had ever been dropped, versus me just leaving, and I felt…

Pretty great actually lol. Not immediately (it was initially just a slight "okay? : / what the fuck?" feeling), but after it all settled in, I realized how genuinely happy I was lmao. It felt absolutely great to not have to go to work the next day. The thought of no longer needing to attend a million dumb meetings, no longer needing to work with people who had no right to be professionals with the quality they were putting out, and just being completely free for the next indefinite amount of time was just so liberating. Yes, this does cause a financial issue, but I honestly never realized how much I didn't like my job until it was taken away from me.

So I'm technically fucked but HURRAY! 🎉

Anyhow, based on my previous job search experiences, I was confident that I would be able to find another job shortly. …And based on the title of this post, you can probably tell that this did not happen.

Realization

This is realization on several fronts:

1. Whoa the job market is extremely, ferociously dead recently

My initial happiness and confidence eventually faded as time went on, and barely even the initial screening calls were being given out. The recruiters who had all relentlessly DM'd me several months ago—while I had listed myself as just having started a new job that exact month—had turned into a rare sighting.

The people who did reach out didn't even follow up—and that wasn't a problem with my resume, because they would just suddenly go silent for weeks on end after their initial "Hey are you interested?" message, before they even asked for documentation. There was a point where I got five rejections in one day. Two companies I was interviewing for suddenly decided that they no longer needed the position.

Every single day was job search job search job search, and it took me a while before the epiphany came, but I eventually realized: I was actually getting pretty fed up.

It wasn't just the job search that wasn't going well; there was a ton of other stuff on my plate, and the prioritization on finding work meant putting tons on time on job applications (can people please make these shorter), on creating portfolio pieces, and on researching freelancing and watching a massive amount of entrepreneurship videos. All of this serious-business work, coupled with a zeroed-out entertainment time, weighted down on me more than I had realized; it came to a point where, seemingly overnight—I suddenly just lost all passion for everything.

2. I kind of don't actually want a job

As mentioned in passing in the previous section, I was watching a ton of entrepreneurship videos. And by that, I mean:

Art as a business.

I had definitely considered it before. Hell, my ultimate goal had always been to support myself on my personal work, starting with the comic (when it comes out). But I had never considered it so urgently before.

This 'ultimate' goal, true to its name, was something that felt a bit…far away. Not indefinitely into the future, because I definitely wanted it real soon (I had literally been planning to publish the comic years ago lol), but it had honestly always been more of a nice concept than something that I was actively, diligently working towards. Which explains my long stretches of laziness—and the sorry state of now, with nearly two years down the line and not much to show for it. It's important to note here that I absolutely don't regret taking the time to plan and work out all the intricacies of the plot, or to come up with new funny little scripts to add to the story; it's just that there just came a point in time when things were plotted out enough, where it could have been consistently worked on. And that was a pretty long time ago.

At any rate, watching all these videos and coming up with several plans to turn this knowledge into a reality, in the very achievable near future, instilled a realization in me:

I don't want to be programming for the rest of my life.

I kind of don't even want to be programming right now.

As a disclaimer, I enjoy programming. I programmed this site. Every blog post is a bit more programming. I programmed this set of Webtoon tools. I had fun.

What's not fun is working with people you don't mesh with (honestly not something I thought would ever be a problem, up until my latest job experience), and working on something you don't personally care about. I care about my professional programming work in the sense that I don't want to see bad code, and I want it to be the best that it can be as that is a direct reflection of my skill, and I want the things I'm a part of to succeed… But it's not my project. I didn't choose to work on it; I was just assigned to. The product belongs to someone else, even if I was given the agency to build the entirety of it.

And I don't want to do that anymore. With all these wonderful ideas of how I can turn the work I want to do into my main source of livelihood, I feel more desire than ever to make that a reality ASAP, and a newfound sense of repulsion for any path that isn't that.

Buuut yeah of course I can't lol. Maybe if I had had other sources of financial support, or no one who depended on me.

3. I want the ideal, now

Two months ago—coincidentally just a bit over a week before I got laid off—I gave some serious thought to my ideal, realistically achievable life in 5 years.

This was brought upon by a very smart person on youtube who had suggested this as a way to ensure that you're actually working towards those goals, and not just wasting your time (which I was). So anyway, I worked it out, and the financial aspect of achieving that life was mostly covered by "just keep working until my comic takes over 👍 (assuming it will be successful enough)". But now I realize:

I don't want this in five years. I want to achieve part of this lifestyle now.

It's a scary and hopefully ridiculous thought that I don't want to put into words, but I feel like—there might be a time limit. And technically, yes, it's there for all things in existence unless someone's going to crack the code to immortality, but the problem is how soon it might be. I'm hoping it's way into the future, I'm hoping it's way past the next five ten fifty years, but you just can't know. I honestly want to delete this entire paragraph lol, but it's worth putting it out there.

Because this makes me actually feel like I can't take things slowly. I hate that I need this kind of extrinsic motivation to truly think about my life and the properly-analyzed path forward, but reading over those words re-slaps me in the face with a wakeup call every time. I can't just keep dilly-dallying. I need to actually work towards my goals, as soon as possible, and as much as possible.

An aside

(Just me unintentionally rambling, feel free to skip)

So reading this you might think that I'm the most diligent person in the world now, but…yeahhhh I'm not. Maybe?

I have been working super hard on the Notion template that I will introduce in the next section, to the point where it essentially became my full time job for a week. Not to mention the marketing aspect; creating thumbnails, product images, and descriptions for different websites, writing thank you emails and creating the proper package, applying to a massive number of template markets (these application forms are long), and spending a good 15+ hours trying to create listing images that matched Etsy's aesthetic and extremely weird dimension requirements.

But on the drawing side? —It really hasn't happened yet.

I've been spending literally the entire past month on just the template; creating it, marketing it, creating extra tools to go alongside of it, etc. So in that sense, I have been super diligent, but it's not like I've had stuff to do for it every single day. There have definitely been days where I've been busy elsewhere (ex. spending the day going out more because it's summer and Mother's day—which is technically what I want to be doing, just while salaried), and days where I was just too tired to work on something. There have been days that just passed in a flash without me having any sort of entertainment, and before I've done any comic or template-related work. What I'm trying to say is…

Actually wait, I've actually been pretty diligent??? Yes I haven't drawn anything, but I legitimately just haven't had the time or energy to. The things I have been concentrating on, do contribute to my overall goal. Any time I allow myself for light entertainment frequently gets pushed to the very end of the day—essentially right after I've decided to go to sleep, meaning I get very little time and energy to enjoy it.

So the real thing I'm trying to say is: write things out to get a proper sense of how you've been doing! I haven't been slacking off, but I literally did not really realize that until I wrote these paragraphs. Don't accidentally put yourself down like I did!

The ideal

1. Publish the comic
2. Gain a fanbase
3. Create multiple streams of active and passive income off of this IP, such as merch, Patreon, etc.
4. Attain prosperity 🎉💰🎊✨

But since just accomplishing #1 could take at least a year I had created a full work and publishing schedule for the beginning of this year, with an ideal publish date of July, that had already gone wayward before the financial setback, and I really did need some sort of income ASAP, I decided to try out the next best thing:

Selling products.

Context-free, and no fanbase required. I had initially thought about selling my mom's art—she has taken to drawing (traditionally) as a way to not think about physical discomfort, and I had fully planned ideas—but somehow, I went to work on a Notion template first, even though I had significantly less concrete ideas for it. My mom's art focuses on lots of plants, flowers, and cute animals as well, which would've been great for Mother's day…and is admittedly a lot more marketable than the niche I've got going lol… But I just wanted to make the template first! I do still plan on going back to the objectively better plan later, but there are a few benefits to doing this template first as well.

Because it has a niche, there are very specific and obvious places where I can promote it. There is also zero competition as far as I can tell—absolutely no other templates for webtoons or comics exist anywhere!
In contrast, while cute animals/flowers/etc. are definitely in significantly higher demand, they are also in a significantly more saturated market. I can't think of a place where I would be able to really promote any of this; it would really be just throwing it out there and hoping for organic search to get eyes on it.

The Notion Template

For anyone who might not know what Notion is: it's basically an online text editor, but with nice default formatting (you really can't make these pages ugly), and a bunch of built-in organizational data tools.

The point of a template is to leverage those tools in order to build a workspace that is curated for a specific purpose. In this case, the purpose is Webtoon creation.

Why I made it

Aside from being part of my product brainstorming, it was genuinely made to solve the problems I've come across throughout my story planning process. I've planned a huge amount of stories over the years, many with quite a large scale; and while my current comic is by far the most organized I've been out of all of them, there are still things about it that are difficult to work with.

One particular example that kickstarted this entire thing is lore tracking: not being able to tell whether I've already written about a certain lore aspect or not.

Funny little scripts for my comic pop up in my head all the time. They do definitely come up more when I've been working on the story, but they do still appear outside of that from time to time, even after having been away from it for a good while. Which is great! But therein also lies the problem: I can't remember whether or not I've already written about the subject!

The only thing I can really do is to perform a text search over the entire workspace, to see if this lore aspect has been mentioned anywhere else. I usually link to lore blocks (which raises the other issue of "if you cut or delete it, the link is broken") when I talk about them, but this method is still just unreliable; what if I phrased the subject differently, or just used a different word?

So I wrote a note to myself to somehow organize my lore such that I'll instantly be able to know if I've already written about a specific part of it. I would like to note here that my lore pages are already pretty well-organized; they've got proper headers, sub-headers, etc., everything is laid out in point form, and I use links whenever needed to cross-reference lore aspects. This meant that, logically—I couldn't really think of a way to improve it.

Until I did!

The process of making it

Once I figured out the foolproof way to track my lore, and whether or not it's been explored within the story or bonus content, there were a lot more points of improvement that I was able to identify and fix with my current workflow. The more I did this, the more I wanted to add; what started off as just a convenient small template for webcomic creation, became this massive workspace spanning over not only the story, but its promotion, and progress tracking as well. I would literally go to sleep with a ton of ideas on things I could add lol, bits of text that would be both entertaining and helpful, and so on.

The creation of this took a week in total. I would spend long, long hours on it every day, sitting with very bad posture (or sometimes standing with bad posture) and endlessly typing away.

The best thing about it was that, as I was making it, I legitimately thought that this was gold—I wish I had this while making my comic!

The process of selling it

So after the template was finally completed, I thought I was basically done.

Nope!

Holy shit there was another massive amount of work to do lmao. There was so much research needed to create the listing's images. To write a good description (even though I still got way too wordy). To then promote that listing and hope that people will read the promotion. Even just providing the link to the template after the checkout page was a thinking exercise with tons of considerations. How should I phrase things? How can I write a thank you email that shows my genuine gratitude, without being too much, and while also politely asking for a review? Why does Gumroad make my gif so massive with no resizing options? (Revelation: The email that gets sent out is a fixed narrow width so all images look fine in production. It's just the preview for them that's messed up.)

And this was just for listing it on one website!

Not to mention how I initially had my template organized into very nice Teamspaces (essentially headers in Notion's sidebar, with all the pages within it permanently expanded so that you never have to bother with the page tree), but it turns out you can't share templates like that orz…everything has to be nested under one page. There were also so many weird decisions made on Etsy's listing editor (which can and will be its own post entirely) that was an extreme pain to get through.

In order to get some ratings and possibly reviews to show to future customers that the product is indeed worth buying, I decided to give the template away for free to the first five people who were interested. This was definitely the right decision—I don't have a preexisting fanbase, and I'm aware that this isn't exactly a wealthy industry for 99% of potential customers—and I had hoped to get some ratings in exchange for that 100% discount, though not all five people gave it lol. Still, I'm happy that what is there has led to a few real purchases. And most of all—the value of getting good feedback is unbeatable.

Despite what I thought about the template while making it, when I put it out for sale, I…actually got impostor syndrome. This could actually be the first time I've had this feeling lol, so it was so relieving to hear that the people who used it actually did find it super useful. It felt like all the work I put into it was worth it, and the knowledge that I had created something that gave value to someone's life (or at least hobby or career) was amazing. So this is just a note to all consumers: if you see something you appreciate, please just drop that artist or creator a note! A simple message can really make someone's day—especially if they happen to be going through a hard time.

From here on

Regardless of my burning desire to get my art career rolling ASAP, I'm still going to continue job searching for the next while because I do need that financial stability.

That said, I'm also going to double down on getting the comic out; if I had already established a fanbase, perhaps I could've been already been able to monetize my work. While it's too late to cover for my situation now, it's certainly never too late to start!