Sticker Mogul 2022

Monday. Monday. Monday.

Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest TS web development treats coming in hot. Here is Wes, Barracuda, Boss, and Scott

key.

Welcome to Syntax.

This Monday, hasty treat, we're gonna be talking about Wes is Wes' transformation into a JavaScript sticker mogul.

And this is going to be the 2nd episode that we've done on Wes' sticker mogul journey. And he just did a giant sticker drop, which you probably saw all over the Internet, especially if you're following this show. So we're gonna be talking a little bit about what went into that, how it went, a little bit of just about the logistics of shipping billions of stickers, and I don't mean literal billions, but you get the point. Lots of stickers all over the world. My name is Scott Talinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is the sticker mogul himself, Wes, the sticky man boss.

It's a 165,000 stickers.

I'll probably a little bit more about the stats, but it's close to a 1,000,000,000. Yeah. Round up. Round up. This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, Linode and LogRocket.

Now LogRocket is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions handled in a really awesome video scrubbable replay that allows you to not only get access to what the user clicked on when it broke, You get to see visually and and just, like, with your own eyes what they clicked on and broke. So that way, you don't have to be like, what were you doing? Which operating system where you on, what page, what were you doing. You can see all of that attached directly to a user object and see everything that happened. But now you also get to understand user journeys and more. You can track events, get heat maps, those types of things. LogRocket is really turning into an all around tool for understanding any user behavior on your site, and I am here for it. So check it out at logrocket.comforward/syntax

sign up, and you'll get 14 days for free. Thank you so much for LogRocket for sponsoring. We are also sponsored by Linode. You know Linode. They are the cloud computing developers trust. I'm gonna focus on their marketplace today too because they're gonna give you a $100. And you say, Wes, what could I do with that $100? You've talked about hosting node apps or whatever, but you can Put anything from the marketplace on your Linode server as well. They have images that are sort of ready to go. You just click and install them. They've got GitLab. You could run your own version of GitLab if you wanted. They've got open VPN.

So even if you wanted to use the Linode $100 Just for a a VPN for a couple months, you could do that as well. They have, the LAMP stack. You want to install WordPress on there, you're up and running. Drupal, WooCommerce, Django, Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, like, Bdioven Linux servers. You can literally run anything you want on it. And they have premade images for all of the things that you need to be able to run. Oh, there's another one, u tunnel VPN. So they have multiple VPN. I always wonder that. Like, could you just, like, spin up a server and run your own VPN? Like, you could just choose because when you when you That's a good question. Set up your server, You just you decide where those servers go, and, yeah, you can do that with with these images. There's a couple different VPNs. They have warp speed, low latency, feature rich VPN powered by Wirecard.

Some pretty cool apps, Rocket, Chat, Harbor, you name it. So check it out at linode.comforward/syntax.

That's gonna get you $100 in free credit. Try out all of the different apps they have in their marketplace. Thank you, Linode, for sponsoring.

Alright. Let's talk about, sticker packs selling. This is I get lots of questions about how how I do it, what I do, why I do things a certain way, etcetera, us.

So, we did an an episode, I don't know, maybe 3 years ago on how I sold stickers, and I decided to do it again, in 2021.

And things changed a little bit up in there, so I'm gonna sort of provide an update to it as well as Give a little cursor cursory understanding of how I do it as well. So, this this time, I went with, 10,000 packs of stickers.

I have them printed in China, a manufacturer called Zig Pak.

Kind of a crazy thing about China is that there is neighborhoods that are dedicated to things. And this is the, printing and packaging neighborhood in, in an area in China, and they can literally do anything. Like, the The guy that I use to print my stuff, you'll you can ask him, hey. Can you do like, when I sold my t shirts, I was like, can you do those, like, mailer bags as well? He's like, absolutely.

Or I was like, can you do those, holographic stickers that you usually see on things that Like like a coat. You need to know that it's like a legitimate coat. It has, like, a holographic sticker on it. Like a starter kit. Do those. Yeah.

Exactly. They They can do literally anything, which is really cool. So the company called the company is called Zig Pak.

They do pretty low order quantities as well if you you need to do it. It is very, very affordable.

The quality is very, very good. It's like I would say it's, like, 90% of sticker mule. Sticker mule is sort of, like, the gold standard for getting stickers printed.

They're not a 100% sticker mule quality, but they are very, very good of everything I've tried.

I get them I get them printed in I don't know. Last time, I did 18 stickers. This time, I did 15.

And they all they get put into a little polybag, And then they have a little cardboard top stapled on top. It's really nice because if I'm at a conference or if I wanna sell a whole bunch of stickers, I don't have to manually do them.

I can just grab a pack and throw it in the envelope or grab a pack and give it to somebody, and it's this nice little little things. So it's nice to have them prepackaged, for you. The 1st time I did it, they forgot to package them, so we had to do it ourselves, which was Very, very which is lots of work. They have I'm pretty sure they have machinery to to do most of the sorting and packing because it takes a long, long time.

The designs this year were half done by me, half done by, I follow a bunch of Indonesian skater kids. There's this, like, huge skater scene in Indonesia, and it seems like all of them are also artists. And they do sort of like that sort of skull, skull and crossbones look to everything. So I had them do a whole bunch of stickers. And there's a couple a couple of them made it into the pack.

Things like hard work pays off or, death by deprecation.

Work from home club? Yeah. Work from home club. That one's really good.

What was the other ones? The, vanilla JS. Oh, no no deploys on Fridays. That was the one that everybody loved. I made one that says no deploys on Fridays, And it's like the skeleton guy just sitting in a hammock drinking a beer with his laptop, which is funny because I deployed

the sale of these stickers on a Friday, and I'm like, I'm not even following my own. Yeah. Yeah. Your own your own sticker. If you if we don't all our own stickers. Who are we? What are what have we become?

And then there's just all kinds of different ones in there. There is I'll talk about the TypeScript 1 in just a second.

I have the pack so I sell the packs for $5 Shipped anywhere in the world. People are always like, how is that possible? Because between, like, printing the stickers and and packing them and Paying for envelopes and and labels and shipping and stamps and all that stuff. Like, how is that possible? So I have a sponsor come on, and they What I do is I have them pay for the printing of the stickers.

And in exchange for them paying for the printing of the stickers, they get a couple things. They get a pack and a sticker.

This last time I was WP forms. This time it's DigitalOcean.

One kinda cool thing about Going with a printer in China as they can, like I said, they can literally do anything. So DigitalOcean says, hey. Can we put the little URL That we are using to promote in the sticker pack. Can we just print that on the back of the sticker? And I was like, sure. I'll I'll see you. I was like, hey, sticker printer. Can we do this? How much extra? They're like, oh, yeah. We can do it. No extra.

No problem. No problem. Just so they printed on the back of the stickers a little part that you peel and throw away That has, like, a URL on it that says, like, check it out. Get $100 in free credit from DigitalOcean, which is pretty And that people always ask me, like, how did how does that come apart come come around? The 1st time WP forms, They just contacted me and said, hey. Like, can we sponsor the pack? And I said, absolutely. And then, DigitalOcean, I had a call with them. They're like, hey. How can we work together? This happens a lot where, like, cool companies will contact me and say, like, Hey. Is there any way we can work together, whether it's sponsoring the podcast or you do a course with us or whatever? And and, sometimes I'll be like, like, in the case of Digital Ocean, nothing right now. Maybe some stuff in the future, but I was like, you wanna sponsor the sticker pack? Oh, yeah. Sounds cool. We'll do that. So that was a a kind of a cool way to make it affordable. I always tell people the $5 sticker pack is my Costco hot dog, And I'll I'll do whatever it takes to keep it at $5.

It's my Costco. Because

like, you can You can go on the Internet. You can go to, like, Redbubble or on some of these print on demand sticker places, and they're a couple bucks a sticker. Right? And, as as silly as it is that us developers love stickers, it's it's kinda fun to have a whole bunch and put them on your laptop or I you see someone at a coffee shop with stickers that you know, and you know that it's fine to be like, hey. What's up, JavaScript? Like, we're we're brothers. You know?

I I've had my syntax sticker recognized at a coffee shop before. Really? Oh, man. They knew who I was, though. They they said, are you are you Scott? I said, yeah. I'm Scott.

Hope it's up. That was Kind of the fun thing about sending out all these packs is that I was able to, like, look at the addresses that were local to me. And I was like, wow. There's like, there was probably 6 or 7 packs that I could have walked to their and drop them in the mailbox for them, which is kinda cool. I didn't even know that many people live that close to me.

What's next? Packing them. So, Like, this this is a huge logistical thing because I have 10,000 packs of stickers that need to be packed to envelopes and and shipped off. And, the the reason why I only do it once a year or once every 2 years is because of the logistics and how much actual work work it is at the end of the day. Because it's not just like, oh, yeah. You want a sticker? I'll throw it in an envelope and slap a stamp on it, and, like, I'll drop it in the mailbox when I go on a go for lunch. You know? Like, this is major, like, many hundreds of pounds of stickers, many boxes, huge logistics, bringing them in. So I take the sticker packs, and they need to go in envelopes.

So I paid a whole bunch of my friends that live in Hamilton. I said, hey. Do you wanna do some mindless work? I'll pay you pretty well, but I need you to Put them in the envelope, peel the little thing off, and then close it, which is again something that I learned that I should not do the licking shot ones because those are very

your liquor gets, tired after Oh, really? Liquor. Yeah. I can't imagine that that would and 1 1, when PaperCut Since you had a commission or Yeah. Oh, man. I

I I the 1st time I did it, it was much it's much cheaper to get the envelopes that just have, like, you lick them, and then we were using a sponge. Uh-huh. And just you just sponge them and and close them. And it worked pretty well, but just the paper cuts you get from running the sponge over the thing. Not worth it. So I you pay a little extra to get the, the pre stuck ones that you just pull the tab off and close them. So I had a bunch of friends Prepacked them all. Last time, I didn't because, what I used to do is I used to get the addresses printed on the envelope, And then I would pack them depending on people. You could either buy 1, 3, or 10. That's it. You don't you can't pay. If you wanna buy 2, you just buy you just check out twice.

And keeping it nice and, simple like that allows me to move a little bit quicker. Like, with the t shirts, we had 2 T shirt designs, and then we had, I don't know. Like, there's all the way from men's small all the way to men's three XL, and then there is women's extra small all the way to women's three XL. So there was, I don't know, 14 different variations for each t shirt. That's 28 different variations, and it's just like, holy smokes. Like, this is a lot of of like, you think, oh, simple little t shirt. Just throw it in the bag. But, no, it's a huge production to actually have to pick and pack them all. So by doing 1, 3, or 10 is very, very simple. I know exactly, if what they can be stamped and shipped as. The reason why it's not 14 and 10 is that 4 is too many For a single US stamp, and then the cost of shipping goes up significantly after that. So this time, I prepacked them in envelopes and then sold them.

And then all we had to do is, when it came time to shipping is to print off a label with the actual postage on it. I'll talk about that in a second. Slap it on, and, and we were done. So next up is selling. How do I how did I sell them? We did a whole show on Selling shirts with TypeScript if you go wanna listen to that one.

I used that one. I used some of the code from that one, but mostly, I use my own course platform for selling the stickers because it is so simple.

People just need to check out. They put in their shipping address.

They pay for it, and and then the receipts and everything. Everything is just in their course platform, which is really, really nice.

I Really, really got to load test my, course platform on this. The 1st time I did it, I think about in 2017, I totally DDoS ed myself.

And since then, I've done a whole bunch of work on in terms of, how to scale it up and and make sure that the database queries are nice fast and whatnot and What have you done there?

Specifically.

Mostly is just increasing the amount of resources available, But I also have made sure that they're, I've there's a couple spots I still use sessions in my application, but For selling stuff, it doesn't matter if you have sessions or not. So the actual selling of these stickers, I put them on, I was on render, and I allowed them to scale up to many, things. And it never once at the at the peak of it, I was selling a pack of a pack of stickers less than a second. Like, it was it was hundreds of stickers, per minute that these things were selling, and I never hit 3% of my CPU usage, on a single droplet on render. Like, I I went I I sized it up and went much more expensive, but I was very, very surprised that you were just scaling up dynamically for this event and you're scaling down afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because it's like I went up from, like, a $20 droplet up to, like, a $60 droplet.

And then I also set up load balancing, meaning I said you can scale up to 5 maximum of 5 droplets. And you're seeing if you're within 80% resource usage of a droplet, spin up another one and then start load balancing them for you.

And I was like I was like ready to pay a couple $100 for server costs and literally did probably didn't even need to go past the $20 droplet for this, which I was Very, very happy about.

The other the reason I could also do that is because I have a single database. Right? And none of that the database Could handle it. No problem because there was very it's just saving records and then counting how many stickers have been sold on every single request and and then allowing people to either buy them or not once they're sold out. It rerendered

the rerendered the the layout a little bit differently. There's no concern about, like, 2 people simultaneously placing an order just because the operation's fast enough. Just because,

Every single request that got sent to my back end is just handled as requests. So if there's 7 requests sent at the exact same time, It's not like they're waiting for each other or tied up. The the server just sort of handles every request as it comes in. The one thing that did break was my push notifications I use pushover, which sends a, a text or not a a push notification to my phone every single time that selling sells.

And it just stopped working for, like, 20 minutes, and then it started working again after that. And that was because it was I was getting a push notification, like, more than 1 a second at the at the height of it, which is really, really funny.

And the reason why I did that is pushed it on Twitter. I pushed it on Instagram. I emailed my my list, things like that. People have been waiting for these stickers for a while. So I was very happy about that, And my course platform handled it really, really well.

And, also, I was really happy because I had run I was running, like, the the rest of the course platform on a totally different server, and I was, like, happy to see that I was able to run the same platform across many servers and just point the domain names at different people.

Next is shipping.

In the so in the past, what I did is I got them all in envelopes, and then I ordered a whole bunch of USPS stamps.

We put them in the back of our car, and we drive Cross the border to Buffalo, New York and bring them to the the mailbox there, and I would use, USPS international stamps for all the international ones and USPS, local stamps for all the local ones, and that worked really, really well.

Then when I was sort of as I keep scaling it up, I keep doing more stickers every single time. I was like, first of all, these hardly fit in our car anymore. It's so much.

And second of all, I don't know that I'm I know that it's allowed to bring mail across the border, but I don't know if I'm doing it the right way. So I called the I called the border agent. I was like, hey. This is what I've been doing. I've been, like, sort of crossing.

Oh, the last time I did it, the guy said, you know what? You're allowed to do this, but you have to go in the truck lane. Mhmm. Like, you gotta go with the transport trucks because you're a transport truck.

You're enough of a sticker mogul now that you're a transport truck. I'm a transport truck.

Literally. So I I went to figure out how to do that, because you have to register You have to register the parcels on behalf of every single person that they are being sent to, which is not a big deal. I can automate that. And then you have to buy, like, a truck number, which is, like, $100. Not a big deal. I could do that.

And then it got a little bit more complicated where you have to, like, Have some special software to because of COVID, you can't just bring them the info and piece of paper. You have to, like, presubmit it.

So I started getting involved with, like, brokerage companies that would broker the deal for me. I would be the transporter, and they would broker the importing of these parcels into the US for me. And at that point, I was like, nobody wanted to talk to me because there were $5 stickers, not a $10,000 skid of cantaloupes or something like that. You know? So at that point, I was like screwing you. Yeah.

So at that point, I was like, you know what? There is this other company in Around me that is called Stallion Express, and they do exactly that. So shipping in Canada is so cost prohibitive That what they do is they will sell you US postage.

You give them the package, and they will broker it And drive it across the border for you and then ship it for you.

And they have a whole API. This is how I did my t shirts called Stallion Express, and It was a little bit more expensive, maybe an extra 20, 30, 40¢ per, things sent, but being able to both automate all of that, have them broker it, and then most importantly, they will let you digitally print postage, which is not something I was able to do previously. Everyone's been, like, use stamps.com. I I tried stamps.com.

I tried all of these different things out there, and none of them allowed me to shoot en mass print 8,000 pieces of postage all at once.

So, they have integrations with other, they have bigger integrations with the post office where you literally can print US postage, and that allowed me to Not have to go buy, you know, $10,000 worth of US stamps, but I was able to just, Print the label from them and then slap the label on the envelope, and then it was done. Mhmm. You threw it in a box and, it was pretty good. For the international ones, in the past, I had used USPS international stamps, which is the best because they're like a buck 50, and then you can mail it anywhere in the world.

I had to move to using the option that Stallion had, which is APC or post NL.

So they'll literally just fly them to the Netherlands and then have the Netherlands mail them around the world for you.

So most of them Our through PostNL, and then there's a handful of countries, Africa and whatnot. It was much cheaper to go with this company called APC.

But between that, it ranged from as low as 81¢ to mail a pack to Scott, up 2, $6 to mail a pack to Kazakhstan or Brazil. Very, very expensive. So It kind of evened out, which is like I lost money on some of them, and then I made money on some of them. At the end of the day, I I put, like, pretty good money in my pocket, in from from doing all this stuff, so I'm I'm not too worried. I just love that I can sell them to literally anybody, and I don't have to be, like, anywhere in the world, but you can't sorry. These countries know it's too expensive to ship them. That that was the thing with the t shirts is that I ship them internationally, but kind of a pain in the butt for people to pay $80 to ship a t shirt to Pakistan or something like that. You know? Yeah.

I wrote custom endpoints in my course platform to export all the data, 2 stallion express, which is really, really nice that you have access to all of us, so I didn't have to do any spreadsheet kung fu. I just had to do a bunch of reduces To to output them, print of the labels. I have a really good little, thermal label printer here.

And would you you wrote the code to print on. Right? Did you use your your code to print on your thermal printer this time? Yeah. I For the

for the US and international ones, the labels were just generated by Stallion, and I just had to download the PDF and print them. For the Canadian ones, I had to I had to generate my own labels. With the T shirts, I had to do a little bit more because there was packing lists. Mhmm. Like, you like, one small black one and a medium women's, pink one. You know? It but with this, it was just I gripped all the single pack US together. All the 3 packs US together. All the 10 pack US together.

And then all the 1 pack international, 2 pack Internet or 3 pack Internet. You get the point. Right? I just grouped them together. I printed them off at once. I put a label on top of them. And then and then when you were packing One of them, you knew every single thing that I'm doing is 3 packs go in these envelopes, and and you slap the thing on it, which was really, really easy. So it was much easier than the actual t shirts.

For the Canada ones, I had to print custom labels because you cannot print Canadian postage unless you are a very large corporation, Which is fine. I just printed out labels, and then in the corner of the label, it said how many stamps to put on it, and then we just quickly Slapped them on. I went to the post office and bought $800 worth of Canadian stamps. It was about 10 hours worth of work Between my wife and I of actually putting the labels on them, I probably, at some point, will outsource that to my friends as well that live locally.

But in my case, I just wanted to get them out the door. I was leaving for my birthday.

So I was just like, I just need to get this thing done. So I just Kinda hunkered down for a day or two and just slapped all the labels on them myself.

I got very, very quick at it.

Cost. So $5 sticker, US.

Out of that, you have to, like it's it's crazy how Oh, by the way, the shipping company, Stallion, they came to my house and picked up all of the boxes, which is really nice because It was, I don't know, 20 boxes. I think I think it worked out to be, like, 600 pounds of stickers, and my whole garage was full of stickers, which is nuts.

So out of that $5 stickers, you pay for the stickers, the shipping, the envelopes. That was like like, the envelopes were, like, 20¢ apiece, which is, like, That's a lot when you look at it. It's just a $5 sticker. Right? The credit card processing fee, that's one thing about selling very cheap things is that The credit card processing fee is still 29¢ plus 2.9%.

Right? So that that's a big chunk out of it as well.

Paying my friends. I I was kinda happy that I was able to pay friends and whatever to actually pack them. It's kinda cool, paying for the labels. Luckily, You can order them in bulk.

You just got got them off Amazon. One thing I learned is don't buy the labels that are on a circle roll because they curl.

So I found what's called the fanfold labels where they just, they they lay flat like a fan, and then you can feed them into the printer, and they will fan fold themselves back into a pile If you do it properly, and that was really nice for keeping it manageable. When I did the t shirts, I printed them on these circle labels, And they're just we just had freaking, like, spools, like like, kilometers worth of labels just, like, dragging them through our house because they're so long.

So that that was the thing.

Other things, sometimes people don't get them. That's the thing about sending them anywhere in the world Is that sometimes they just won't show up, in certain areas. And if that's the case, I refund them or I re re resend them another pack, and we try one more time to send them. Do you keep a handful of extras around waiting for that? Or, like, do you do you prepare for that? Usually, I so I sold 9,000 of them, And then, I realized that I had probably another 2,000 left after that because sometimes the printer overprints sometimes, and then they And then they they come back to you and say, hey. We overprinted because sometimes they get screwed up or the the cutting is off. Like, they're, You know, like, when they cut it and the border is not perfect. Mhmm. But if they have enough good ones, they'll say, hey. Do you wanna buy these? Otherwise, we have to throw them out. So I got an extra 1,000 packs out of them that way, so I'm selling them right now to people who miss them, which is kinda cool. So, yeah, I keep them around. Plus, like, conferences is nice to Just give them out for free and whatnot.

The TypeScript logo. So the I did a holographic TypeScript logo on the front.

I wanted to do the, like, the official TypeScript logo, but I went on the I went on the website for the TypeScript logo. And, usually, the logos that I use, the JS logo, and all the logos that I use, they are usually licensed for Like, under one of these, like, GitHub, MIT, or whatever, and you are allowed to use that logo for commercial purposes.

That was not the case with the TypeScript logo.

It says it says that you can use them for giveaway stickers and and general marketing, but this was not a giveaway. I was selling them. Right? And then they say you cannot use the TypeScript logo for your application or your product, and Pack of stickers is technically a product. Right? So I went to Microsoft and I said, hey. Like, can I use it? I know it says it says I can't, but, like, can you give me permission? So they went the lawyers and everything. And, eventually, Microsoft said no. Sorry. Like, we can't like, we know that you're cool, but we can't set a precedent where People are selling stuff with the TypeScript logo on it at the end of the day. Right? So I said, alright. Can I at least use the word TypeScript? And they said, sure. So I I did, like, a custom TypeScript design, where it says TypeScript in the square, kinda like the JavaScript logo, but it wasn't the actual TS logo. That was not that was not allowed.

I did a custom JavaScript TypeScript logo in a square, but it's not the same one.

Not allowed to do the the front end. Like, I probably could have just done it, and it would have been fine. But I, I ran into some trouble with the I can probably talk about it now. It's Been many years. I you I did, like, a knock off of the Patagonia logo many years ago, and I did I did it as JavaScript.

And within, like like, 30 minutes of posting it on Instagram.

I had, like, a cease and desist from from Patagonia, and I was sitting there with 8,000 packs full with Patagonia stickers full of Patagonia stickers. So I had to pay someone to cut everyone open, pull it out, And then seal it back with a heat sealer, and that was awful. So I will as much as I love these little, like, parody stickers and stuff.

I I can't do that anymore because that would have been if I had actually sold them, I don't know if they would have Come after me this or whatever. Yeah. I had to take down my Instagram photo with the Patagonia sticker on in the background. That was that was not good. And it's funny because now all the time, I see, like like, dance Gavin Dance has a knockoff Patagonia, and I see it all the time. I'm just like, But you're not and I've I I narrowed it down to some of the Patagonia devs Followed my stuff.

I started digitally stalking these people that Yeah. Peace and assistance with me. Like, how did they find out, like, so quickly. And it was it was because there's that's the thing about being a dev is there's always somebody in one of these companies.

And usually, it's good because they usually can help you out, but they ratted me out. So that that's okay. I still love Patagonia. For Patagonia. I still like Patagonia.

They were really cool because they said like, they offered to recycle them for me, which was really cool. Oh, hell yeah. They said, hey. Yeah. If you ship them to us, it it It would have cost me 100 of dollars to ship them to them, but they offered to actually responsibly recycle the stickers, which was kinda cool of them. That's cool. So no hard feelings, Patagonia.

And I think that's it. That's that's the the thing. It's today is Tuesday, I shipped them out on, I think, Friday.

And, like, my Twitter feed is starting to pop up with people getting them.

Most people in, like, northern the northern states.

Like, you're seeing them come in, like, New York and New Jersey. Oh, Florida just popped open. The USPS is amazing. I can't believe

how fast some of these are. I have 1 sticker on my laptop currently, Wes. Only 1. Syntax sticker.

Yep. I put a I put a a plastic case on my computer for the 1st time ever because I was like, you know what? This thing's thermals are good enough where it's like, I'm not gonna worry about if a plastic case is hurting the thermals on it. And, you know me, I'm clumsy. I don't wanna I don't wanna risk breaking this thing. So I put the there's, like, dark black case on, and then I put 1 syntax sticker logo on the corner thinking, like, alright. This is just the start. And I was like, you know what? This looks so good with 1 black synthetic sticker on the black case. I don't know if I can I don't know if I can anything more to it, so I'm just gonna live with it for a little bit and decide what I wanna do here? But Totally. Yeah. Oh, that that was the one thing is the, the jet the j s sticker

is I asked the printer. That's the beauty of having, like, a printer that is not just a custom. Oh, Scott's got it right there. So I asked them, can you cut, like, the j s logo out of the sticker, but then not peel it. It's called like a kiss cut usually like that.

And what happened is that they're like, absolutely, we didn't just cut it and not touch it. So the the part that you peel off Is the sticker, and it's like like punched out, but then you also are left with the actual j s letters that were cut out, and then that's another sticker. So 2 for 1. 2 for 1. So I put the just the j s on my my white iPhone Pro Max, and it looks great on the back of this thing. Yeah. It looks great. I I didn't I mean, It's hard to get it perfect, but it's fun. It was a fun little thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. I really like them. Every now and then, they they wear off. But if you put them in, like, a high traffic area, like the back of your phone or I put them on the, where you put your your, wrists when you type on your laptop.

They wear off after, I don't know, 6, 8 months or whatever because there is a high traffic area, but it's it's worth it. It looks pretty cool. Yeah. Kiss cut in a high traffic area. It's perfect.

Kiss cut. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. So that is it.

I probably won't do them for another year or so. It's it's a lot of work, but it's always fun to do it. I Really enjoy figuring out the logistics of it all because it is a very high volume thing.

And then it's it's fun. Like, I'm done now, and I can I can sit back, and then you get to see over the next week or 2, they show start Showing up over all over the world, and it's cool to see where people put them? I love it. Yeah. Just in the last 1 hour as we've been recording this, I've had 8 people post on Twitter. The pictures of stickers, I love I love seeing them go around the world. It's really cool. Love it. Alright. That's it. That was tasty hasty. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully, that answers all your questions about being a sticker mogul, and, we will catch you on

Wednesday.

Peace. Peace.

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