I'm Danielle Baskin, Founder of Dialup and Branded Fruit, ask me anything!

Or more precisely, can you live comfortably off your products without working 40+ hour weeks and take more than 1 month a year off work?

I was a feather dealer in Runescape! I had a business selling bulk quantities of feathers to high-level archers so they wouldn't have to walk back to the general store while they were in battle. The in-game stores only sold small quantities, but I offered bundles of 100+ and I'd deliver them directly to the players. Like Uber for Feathers.

I acquired my feathers by hiring players that were new to Runescape. Since they needed to level up anyway by attacking small creatures, I convinced them to kill chickens, which would drop feathers. I paid them in gold and armor in return for all their feathers. Some people worked for me for 1 hour, some for a week. Then I marked up the feathers and advertised my services to the wealthy archers. New players leveled up, top archers saved time, and I got paid for my services. Everyone won. I had repeat clients and a list of rolling employees which I kept in a notebook. This was in 2001. None of this was for real money, but account was worth over 2 billion in gold by the time I quit.

What do you want to manufacture? I sort of fell into manufacturing. I studied sculpture and was a props maker, so I've been in the habit of making objects. Then people wanted my objects, so I had to design repeatable processes with cost-efficient materials.

The project I learned the most from was the Pokéball-themed battery that went viral. I had to hire 25 assembly line workers and we made a few thousand of these mostly by hand. I wasn't trying to become a battery manufacturer, but I rapidly prototyped the original object and then suddenly had the problem of needing to make thousands of these.

I'm moving from tangible goods to software, so I'd love some tips from you!

This is a good question. Kumquats are my favorite fruit. They're both intensely sweet and sour at the same time. I also like that they're bite-sized and enjoy bringing them on hikes.

They're also amazing paired with miracle berry.

While they're good blank, they always taste better when they're branded with a logo.

I put all my businesses into one umbrella LLC at first, and then if one business seems like it's becoming a larger entity, I'll create a new LLC. Right now I have 3 LLCs and 1 C Corp.

I use Stripe Atlas! Then I do all the proper legal work, like a getting a business license in my state, etc.

Keeping everything under the same sole-proprietor LLC is a good to do at first, in case your project doesn't take off.

Whichever ideas stick around for the longest and won't leave my mind are the ones I actually make. I tend to not write down many ideas, because the ones I care about the most will always just float to the top of my mind. Other ideas can be exciting for a few days, but not really be good. I try to forget everything so I don't pursue the mediocre ones.

Sometimes I wait months or years to act upon stuff, because it just keeps returning to my thoughts. It took me around two years to launch Physical Cloud and I ended up selling them to Amazon Web Services a few weeks after I launched the site.

Sometimes I create ideas within a few days, if I feel like it's really time sensitive. I made Drone Sweaters right before Christmas and Pokéball batteries right after the game came out. Neither would have worked as a good internet story if I launched them at a different time. And both were cheap and quick to initially set up.

See above answer!

How do I know something is time-sensitive? Paying attention to the internet so I'm aware of what's relevant to other people at this particular moment in time.

I also talk about random ideas at parties or wherever and pay attention to how people react. Verbalizing ideas to someone else is a great way to see if they're actually good. I dismiss a lot of my own ideas if it doesn't feel new or relevant.

1. Don't spend any money on advertising. Try everything else but ads.
2. Always have a good story. People will talk about your product if it tells a compelling narrative of why it exists or how it came to be.
3. Sorry, that's the end of your free trial. Please buy my Best Marketing Practices PDF for only $10.99.

You’ll probably lol at this too—I have a Slack team just for me! I get notifications for orders, inquiries, request, etc. across all my companies using Zapier. I different channels for each project.

I use Airtable to stay organized and paper / whiteboards to write down all the stuff in my mind, then I prioritize it once it's all written down.

Managing different businesses at once is something I’m constantly learning how to do. It’s complicated — especially when deadlines overlap. I’ve been hiring people to replace me for specific processes and I try to communicate with everyone I'm working with about my agenda for the day through individual company Slacks. I have one for Dialup and Branded Fruit.

I think I need to have a bunch of businesses or projects, because they use different parts of my brain and I learn random knowledge from different projects that benefit other projects.

If I focused on just one thing, I might have too much tunnel-vision and I could ignore another thing that people want.

For example, right now Branded Fruit is a better business than Inkwell Helmets. When I launched it, I felt like I was procrastinating things, but it's 5x the MRR of my helmet company and it wouldn't have existed if I tabled it for later.

I think it's good to toggle between ideas, binge work on ideas for a few months, then return to old ideas. I'll return back to helmets next spring probably, now that I've learned a lot about bulk orders and fulfillment from my fruit business. I'm also learning about working with engineering teams for Dialup and UX design for mobile apps that will benefit other projects when I return to them.

I feel like each company I start gives me a new toolkit that I can use for everything else.