#Hey make sure to always link to source when reposting stuff

[novelistparty]

photos by Alex Steed on bluesky from the last few days in LA:

[stolentrekblr]

Trekblr Community Reaction

I have wanted to compile reactions from the community for a while now, and today I finally made it happen. I have not editorialized anything, doing my best to copy reactions as written. Without further ado:

i love accs like this and the people behind them. the dedication to search for stuff like this and bring it home. sounds absolutely maddening and i salute them. to sift through garbage theft accs… doing the lords work

idk if i should feel honored or not, at least my username is there lol. this is very funny to me. like i dont even use facebook anymore

Omg they erased the last sentence. Lmao. I mean if you’re gonna steal my posts at least include the entire thing. It’s literally the least you could do

chat should we kill them?

OMGOD IVE MADE IT!!! this is crazy because i feel like my dad might actually see my star trek posts LMFAO. he's always on there. this is a big moment

I don't have a problem with reposts of my stuff if the watermark/username is included, but I appreciate the spirit of what you're doing

Nice sentiment but i really don't want people on facebook to have a link to my tumblr blog. thank god it's uncredited... been around a while my posts are always being stolen

The person Im thinking of flat out took OC memes from me and passed off my captions as his own. He gave me credit once from what I've seen and then the other times it looks like he made it up himself. I'm all for tossing memes out there and letting them be wild and free, but this guy twists it and uses it to beg for money on his page. He's got the lobes.

Why did they censor my pfp but not my username WHAT

damn. ig im famous now. better start lining up for autographs

People are posting me to Facebook???????

Damn... I'm not even mad about this tbh... someone thought my stupid post was good enough to steal and put on a facebook group 🤣🤣

disgusting

?!?!??!??!??!??!?!!!??!?

You know what I'm ok with Facebook enjoying this one I appreciate it being edited over them

This has never happened to me before

I honestly don’t mind seeing screen shots of my posts showing up elsewhere, it’s inevitable, but the nature of a screenshot shows the source of the post as well as the OP. But this crap is blatant plagiarism. Obviously this person is on tumblr, so I hope they see this. Please do better and have a smidgeon of integrity. Just give credit? It’s really not difficult? Thanks @stolentrekblr for the effort here.

Yooooo this is wild! Glad people like it I guess

This one ALMOST gives credit. But not quite. Could’ve just typed my handle in the post 🤷‍♀️ super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Come on... Just type "credit: *tumblr handle of the OP*" It's so easy not to be a spineless thief.

The watermark 🙄🙄

keep doing your thing op. you're like an archeologist but instead of screaming about how it belongs in a museum you are adamantly making sure people know where these things came from. i can't even fucking imagine the searching you have to do to find these posts. earlier today i couldn't find a post i had seen yesterday. keep it up!

I tracked down a post of mine that you found reposted on the data FB page, and left them a comment. "Hey look, its my post! didn't even crop out my tumblr url lmao. it was much more popular on my blog tho (1,817. notes)" They did not respond. 😒 It only got 344 reactions and 6 comments on the data page though... that page has like 38k followers... at least my posts do well when I post them myself on the Star Trek Shitposting page 🤣

I've made it. I have arrived. I got my 5 second shitpost lifted and put on another social media site, complete with a hazy photo overlay. I have won at Tumblr. I can rest now. I can rest.

Ohh yeah, this guy's a real loser. It's the WATERMARK for me 🙄

The HUBRIS!

ahh wow Ive never had a post escape containment before!! did they at least link back?

I am touched ^-^

plagiarism is the real problem. it gets worse when you see someone profit off the passions of other people in a fandom

well damn. and i'm here looking for employment...

sad to see someone else repost on fb and even watermark it. seriously what is up with the watermark over a screenshot of a tumblr post

Yeah. I think you're doing good work. I think exploitation is so baked into society that some people don't even realize when they are using the free labor of others for their own gain.

[its-stimsca]

Hey there!! I think i want to start making stimboards, but i personally cannot make gifs for multiple reasons, unless you know a good phone app or if IBIS can make gifs !!

Do you have any suggestions and tips ?

Are there blogs that don't mind using their GIFs as long as credit is somewhere ? Or is that typically frowned upon anyway?

I wanna be respectful so i understand if this means i cannot make stimboards until I'm able to make gifs myself :3

Hi!! The way I personally make my gifs is through using ezgif, and I’m fairly sure a bunch of other stimboard makers use this website too because it’s very convenient and free. Just submit the video you want to gif (not the whole thing, just a trimmed section of what u wanna gif), and it’ll convert it to a gif for you. Make sure to credit the original video if you post a gif of it, though, as it’s really important to give credit to the source

As for reusing gifs other people have made, pretty much all of the time it’s going to be okay to use someone’s gif in a stimboard, as long as credit it’s given. In fact, most people in the stim community on tumblr make gifs with the intent of them being used in stimboards. Some really great blogs that make a lot of original gifs to be used in boards that I go to a lot are @/talos-stims, @/heartnosekid, @/helium-stims, @/aliens-stim-too. There are a lot of other good ones too, but there are a few just to get you started.

You don’t have to specifically search a blog to find gifs though. Using the main tumblr search function you can type what you’re looking for, just include the tag “stim” in your search, and a lot of stuff will come up. You can use gifs that someone else has used in a stimboard, too. Just try your best to follow their sources to the original creator, and link it directly to there instead of the stimboard you took it from. A lot of stimboard blogs get deleted, which can lead to your link to the board becoming defunct in the future and that credit being lost for people down the line trying to source a gif.

If you’re making a gif of an animation or using a piece of art someone has drawn, that’s when you want to directly ask someone for permission. Most artists don’t mind as long as credit is given, but it’s important to check. If it’s a big artist that you can’t send asks to or contact in some way, just make sure to tag them in the post of the stimboard, that way if they can see you’ve reposted their art somewhere, and they can reach out to you if they don’t want it there.

The most important thing when it comes to all this is just to source your gifs. Copy the links in the notes app on your phone, a google doc, I personally do it on a discord channel, it doesn’t matter, just make sure you have SOME kind of credit to the gifs in your stimboard linked below your post. Don’t stress too much about messing up the first couple of times though, you get better at it and you can always go back and fix stuff later.

Hopefully this helps and wasn’t too much of a ramble. I’ve been thinking about making a sort of guide on my process of making boards actually, but haven’t gotten around to it since idk if anyone would be interested. Anyways that’s all

[mrntta]

Hey, just wanted to say it's always such a treat when you post new art, even if I am not super familiar with WTC (one of my best friends does enjoy info dumping me about it though so I think of it fondly in my own way). Anyway, I just wanted to ask whether you would like your stuff archived on *boorus. It's probably the closest thing I can do to signal boosting an artist I like. Of course I would make sure to add source links and such.

Hi, first of all, I'm glad you enjoy my drawings! And secondly, I'm fine with reposting, as long my watermark is not removed, then go ahead!

[clever-and-unique-name]

Okay, I think I’m finally (!) on the other side of the triggered mess of that whole picrew debacle the other day. Long post to organize my thoughts under the cut (and then I should be done talking / thinking about it):

There were so many facets to it that I didn’t even know where to start, but I think the main ones are: 

1a) One of my sister’s favorite talking points growing up was the treatment of artists online. Because, you see, she was an Artist and didn’t get as much recognition or fame for it as she thought she deserved, and she decided it was because people were Disrespecting Artists. So I got frequent lectures about how the worst kinds of people would treat art online--reposting art with signatures cropped out, altering work without consent, rehosting art, all that good stuff. Except it got more and more extreme and nitpicky as time went on and she started targeting other artists as well, claiming that artists needed to be citing their brush packs and linking to reference material with each post to be “real” and “responsible” artists, etc. The rules of how to interact with art and artists online became very stressful and I ended up too afraid to take part anymore (I was on places like DeviantArt back when it first started and got scared away by her “rules.”)

1b) My sister is a complicated presence in my life and always has been. She has engendered a lot of feelings of shame and “wrongness” in me about many things. So while random anons on tumblr don’t have that kind of influence over me, sometimes something like this happens where the topic happens to hit on a raw nerve left over from her, and suddenly I am feeling ALL the awful things again. Aka, it’s triggering. Not because of random people. Because of her. Thankfully, untangling all of this and separating Them from Her means I feel sufficiently guarded from their judgment again.

2) As I’ve grown away from her influence and become more comfortable with myself as a “creative person” (*cough* artist *cough*), I feel like I can make my own informed decisions about what is or is not acceptable when interacting with artist’s work online. I explicitly source everything but picrew content, and genuinely feel like leaving the artist’s tag is credit for picrews. But I struggle to say I feel that way as an artist, because obviously, my history makes it difficult for me to call myself an artist or use that to back up my arguments. Cue imposter syndrome. I’ll never be a “real” artist who gets to talk about “real artist things.”

3) The primary reason I don’t link the picrews is the above, but it’s also because I have forget-shit-disorder. I make a bunch of picrews, usually when dissociated, throw them in a folder, forget about them for a month, and eventually post them. I’m not holding on to links for them. But again, I’m full of denial and imposter syndrome, so I don’t feel like I can “use that as an excuse.” The loud argument in my head this whole time has been very “You don’t actually have this disorder, it’s shameful enough that you’re using the picrews to play pretend in the first place, now you’re going to claim that sourcing them is too difficult because of a disorder you don’t have? Holy shit.” I was also primed for aggressive denial when someone made the honest mistake of calling our dissociated parts OCs, lolsob.

4) Not linking sources to picrews was a decision made by a couple parts specifically because linking them resulted in more upsetting reblogs (as I’ve explained multiple times now.) I’m sure it seems like “not a big deal” to just throw the link in there, but to those parts it feels genuinely threatening because people do not respect our boundaries about not reblogging the posts. So it became some conflict of ideals that boiled down to “Doing a courtesy for the artists is more important than your comfort or boundaries” which some parts were all too eager to accept (”Hey yeah how dare I insist on my comfort as a priority? I am Literal Garbage.”)

So yeah. I’m good now. It just took me a while to work all that out and figure out why the hell it was bothering me so much.

[theexecutionerssong]

Hello! With the new twitter update and recent repost shenanigans, I was wondering if you’d let us know when/if it’s ever okay to repost? (I know this may change due to each creator) but if I reblog / use someone’s gif as a reaction (on tumblr) and put a credit link under, is that good? Or just don’t even do it at all? Is there a proper way to re post gifs in a post if you’re talking about a show???? (Sorry if this is dumb/bad question.. I’m always afraid what’s “allowed”)

Hey love, it’s not a dumb or bad question and it’s always a good thing to ask when you don’t know. I’d never be mad at someone who didn’t know. I’m going to be talking only for myself here but I know a lot of content creators share the same mindset:

If you don’t know the source, don’t repost it at all. “credits to the owner” means nothing.

If you’re not sure if the owner is okay with you using their work, ask them. If they don’t reply or if they say no, don’t repost it.

If you’re on tumblr then you can use the search option which will link directly to the OP’s blog. If you want to use a gif that doesn’t show up through the search but you saved it, then you have to tag the creator. If you forgot who it is, then find another gif to use. I personnally don’t mind my gifs being used as reaction gifs only if there’s credit, aka I’m tagged in the post - not in the tags.

Compilations posts - saving gifs and then reposting them in a post because you see a theme or want to make a parallel or whatever - are a mess of wrong dimensions, sharpening settings and coloring - and I personnally hate them and do not want my work in them.

Making a complete gifset out of gifs you saved, tagged or not, is a no for me. You can ask a content creator to do it for you and I know most of us will do it happily and credit you as the original idea owner.

Do not save gifs or even pictures and repost them on another media platform such as twitter or instagram if you don’t know the @ of the creator on those media platforms so you can credit them directly. I’ve seen my stuff reposted hundreds of times, most of the time without even a link to my blog, even when I had myself posted the thing beforehand on my own accounts. Again, only talking for myself, but my @ on Twitter, IG and Youtube are linked on my homepage on my blog so it’s extremely easy to find me.

Basically, I’d abstain from reposting as much as you can and whenever you do, you have to credit the creator, no exceptions. Hope that helps and thank you for asking ♥

[hayjeon]

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are a compilation of some FAQs and just little things I want you guys to know! 

1. Navigation?

masterlist: here

recent works: here

upcoming work schedule: here

Fic recs are tagged under here

fic pics (inspo headers) here 

2. Who are you and where did you come from?

You can call me Hay (pronounced HAI, or HI) 

You can also see the hey hay tag for more asks that I talk about myself as a person/writer/pervert

3. Can I request a fic/scenario?

Sure! I’m always taking requests that inspire me to crawl out of the dark hole of my writing block misery; drop some ideas in my ask box/messages, and let’s talk about it! Sometimes I open my ask box to take any requests, so be on the lookout!

4. Requesting/asking rules/guidelines?

Please refrain from sending me the same request over and over; either Tumblr eats the ask or I don’t reply for personal reasons (either I’ve answered it before, want to keep it to myself, or maybe it was rude idk) please do not be rude to either me, any authors here on Tumblr, or any followers/readers on this blog. Rudeness will not be tolerated :)

As long as you follow these guidelines, I will always try my best to answer your questions or requests!

I love reading your thoughts about any works that I’ve done, and love having my readers contribute and brainstorm things with me. Feel free to express yourself and don’t hide behind anon too much cause I love to get to know my followers.

5. Works in progress?

I upload previews here and there, and once the idea is somewhat drafted close enough to get a vibe for the fic, I’ll upload a header into my masterlist and mark it as coming soon. Otherwise, most wip’s will be listed in my wip page and the percentages indicate how far I am on each one. 

6. Bias?

ugh this question kills me lol as you can tell from my url, I love them all equally, but have a bit of favoritism for Jeon jungkook. But as you can tell by my masterlist....I have an affinity to MYG and KTH too.

I also stab talent so: Big Bang gd, dean, crush, black pink all of them lol, and much more

7. Status on writing?

If I am not updating a certain fic, not updating what you requested, or inactive for a while, please understand that I have a personal life that is busy and full of responsibilities and demanding work.

It’s easy that I lose inspiration for a fic/au/series, so if you feel inclined to, instead of phrasing your ask as “when are you gonna update ___?” it might help me as a writer, and you as a reader for you to instead approach it as a discussion! (Please do this with other authors too….) and ask us, “What would yoongi do if ____?” or “How does y/n feel about what happened to junggook in chapter 3?“

This attitude from the readers definitely encourages us to brainstorm new ideas, and to revisit the intentions that we had for starting fics.

Encouraging messages are also very welcome, for it perks up our day and our inspiration as a writer to see that our readers are enjoying our stuff! :)

8. What happened to Sutures and Stitches/[certain fic/drabble]?

Unfortunately if a certain fic is still unlisted on my masterlist, it’s because I’ve stopped writing for it. You can notify me about certain drabbles you’d like to be shown on my m.list and I’ll update accordingly, but otherwise, please don’t ask me or beg me to update any redacted stories.

I’ve probably just lost a lot of inspo/direction for those fics and have no desire to continue. In the case for sutures and stitches (which I get questions about the most often), I have definitely lost direction and inspiration for it and it drains me even more to force myself into writing and finishing the series. Please understand that it’s better for me to prioritize my relationship with my own writing than to complete stories that I have no more interest in.

For your reading enjoyment though, I have left them up and you can find them through the search bar. Future spin-offs and editing processes/reuploads will be considered but on my own time. Thanks!

9. Are you down to do collaborations?

Eh, maybe. In theory, I’d love to create more of a community here, but on the other hand....too much drama lol. And I really don’t do well with deadlines for my writing.

10. Legal stuff/disclaimers

I do not own any of the members/media/references on this blog, unless otherwise specified

Pictures: Any image/media displayed on my blog, unless otherwise specified, does not belong to me and should have been already properly credited to the source. Please let me know if any links aren’t working or if I’ve failed to do so properly.

all writings under this blog name are mine; other recs and authors will be credited accordingly.

everything on this blog originates from my mind and does not reflect any real occurrences with any of the idols mentioned on this blog unless otherwise specified

Anyone caught plagiarizing or reposting/translating/rewording without permission from me will deal with the appropriate consequences under the law and the copyright over this blog.

As of now, this blog does not allow any translations or reposts on any site other than tumblr. If found, I will take all necessary actions to make sure it doesn’t happen without my permission on this site. 

© 2017 <hayjeon.tumblr.com>

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Laura Roeder of MeetEdgar, a brand that makes automated social media toolSome stats:Product: Automated Social Media ToolRevenue/mo: $200,000Started: May 2014Location: North AmericaFounders: 1Employees: 11Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hi, I’m Laura Roeder, the CEO and founder of MeetEdgar, a social media automation tool.Since Edgar’s launch in June 2014, our remote team has grown from two to two dozen people, we’re doing $4MM in annual recurring revenue... AND we’ve bootstrapped the entire way. (No investor bucks for us!) We're now providing smarter social automation solutions to more than 5,000 happy customers.imageI began my entrepreneurial journey at the age of 22 when I quit my job to launch a social media consulting business. I quickly realized I needed a way to more effectively manage my own social media presence, and so in 2014 I pivoted and dove into the software world to do just that with Edgar! Our tool serves many customers, especially those that are online and content-based.Here’s a recent team photo at one of our biannual company retreats. This was taken in Phoenix, Arizona.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I had been teaching social media marketing to entrepreneurs and I had an online course business called LKR Social Media that I had been running for about 5 years and I had created a training course called Social Brilliant that you can currently access if you’re an Edgar customer through Edgar University. The course is teaching people how to repost their social media and how to make sure that they can easily fill up all of their accounts across all the different platforms. A lot of our customers for the training courses were solopreneurs managing their own social media and I saw what a huge time burden it was to create content and write new social updates across multiple platforms every day.The AHA moment that I had was noticing that your reach on any given platform is very small. You’re only reaching a small percentage of people that follow you on any platform. It’s actually really smart to make sure you’re repeating and repurposing your content. Entrepreneurs think that it seems like they are repeating the same stuff over and over again but that’s only because they are the ones seeing their own status updates, but nobody else does. It’s really smart to repurpose, upcycle, recycle and social brilliant taught people how to do that in an organized way. You would create a sheet with all of your social media updates with categories, all colour coded, so you’d know which ones you’ve sent, which ones need to be changed. SO, in 2014 when I launched MeetEdgar I wondered why I was keeping this spreadsheet and paying for a social media tool at the same time.Social media tools did exist at that time and they do what they did then which is send an update for you but nothing more. Why isn’t the tool doing all the work that I’m doing on the spreadsheet -- that’s what MeetEdgar was created to do. To handle all that grunt work for Social media, to do more than just send out an update.I validated the idea of MeetEdgar through the course, Social Brilliant, there were people willing to pay to learn how to organize and send updates, so I thought that they’d probably be willing to pay for a tool that does that work for them. We didn’t do any research beyond that, as far as my financial and career at the time, MeetEdgar was funded from profits from LKR Social media, we are a bootstrapped company, a self funded company and I brought over money from the social course, to create MeetEdgar.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Our product is software, we build it with code. I am not a developer so my husband, Chris has always been my partner at MeetEdgar and he’s the one who built the initial version of the software. This is my first software business, I had never done it before. Chris and I really worked closely together, with me really understanding the customer needs and how to make things easy for customers and outcomes for them in the world of social media. This is the world that I had been entrenched in for the past five years, working with entrepreneurs in the realm of social media. I knew that side really well, and Chris’s expertise was software, and helping decide which features we needed, and what we didn’t need.He knew a lot about simplification and making sure we weren’t giving our customers too many complicated options so it took about six months of him working full time to build that initial version of Edgar that we launched with. He was a freelancer at the time, and we were in a good position for him to be able to devote the next six months to Edgar and it ended up paying off really well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-83CxffuAkDescribe the process of launching the business.We launched Edgar in the summer of 2014 and got customers immediately. We are a bootstrapped business and we hit our first million in ARR less than a year after launch. For a bootstrapped business that is really fast growth. If you look in the first year you can see the gradual ladder of new customers that increased every month.Right from the launch, we knew we had a hit on our hands, people were using it and liking it, and this was not a surprise to me because I knew from the online course business that this was something really needed. As a user myself, I also knew there was a gaping hole in the software that was offered at the time - we do offer something really unique with MeetEdgar that other tools don’t offer.I did have a large email list from the online course business, of about 70,000 people, I had 25,000 followers on Twitter and a good social following. That was a huge help to have that audience, and it took me 5 years to build that audience, it wasn’t like I was born with that, but I believe anyone can put in the work to build that up over time. If you haven’t started building an online following or email list, the best day is today! You can start at any time.Our launch strategy was to target our existing audience, and we also targeted people who were not in our audience, specifically people who were using other social media tools. We did have the largest ad spend we’ve ever had that first year of our company - we spent $40k on ads for new followers. They can work really well for people who are already using those tools and want to see what’s new out there.imageA lot of people do pay ads as something to do down the road but organic reach is really small in the early days because you haven’t built up that customer base, word of mouth or SEO for your website so I think front-loading your ad spend can make a lot of sense, and that’s what we did. We also used an invitation system on our website, so instead of buying it you had to request an invitation and that was a great way to capture email addresses and to get people excited about something a bit more exclusive.What we did wrong with our launch was that in the beginning our marketing was too segmented, I had this idea of having already set up this email list from the previous business, so I’m going to try all these different offers, each group was given a different offer and I did that instead of having one big exciting launch, because I thought I could test offers and find the perfect one. That was a waste of time and I think we could have had a bigger impact if we had a big launch from the beginning.The money that we used to fund the launch was the profits from the online course business which was still running. We ran both businesses together for a year. We were selling software and courses. We later ended up shuttering the online course businesses later down the road because the software just felt more fun and had less focus on just me, and I wanted to have a business that I could easily step back from.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?The main way we have always attracted and retained customers is through content marketing, social media marketing, and organic search. In the early days, we spent a lot of ads, but that’s not where we get most of our customers today. It’s not what’s got us most of our customers through the years, it supplements our strategy but isn’t our core strategy.We have always been strong on our blogging, our social media marketing, email marketing and collecting email addresses and word of mouth. Word of mouth is really important to scale and grow your business but the problem with word of mouth is you can’t really track is in any kind of quantifiable way. A lot of people aren’t clicking referral links, and a lot of people don’t know where they heard of you or when but at some point someone recommended MeetEdgar to them in a forum, on a tweet, in person and that has always been our biggest source of growth. The way I view it is word of mouth backed by content.Content gives people something to share, and a way for people to stay in touch with you so people don't buy the first time they hear of you. Marketers have this fantasy of a really tight funnel where it goes from the top to the bottom and the customer buys in. It’s very rare that you make any buying decision that first time you see an online product. Buying software is not how you would buy an item in a grocery store, for example. Most people do not impulse buy the software. We have to recognize it’s not a linear journey from where our customers hear about us and then buy us.That’s why social media marketing is so important for that to keep in touch factor. Someone might hear about us and then start following us on Twitter or Instagram and then they might opt-in to get our emails which gives them an easy way to remember us and us an easy way to stay in front of them which is really important. Now that we’ve been around for five years and looking at our data, absolutely some people stay on our email list for years before they buy. It’s important to do these boring things like blogging or emails so that people following get these regular touchpoints and discover more about you. It keeps you top of mind until whatever reason where they are prompted to buy. You can’t ever control that part, you can help educate and why you are a better choice but it’s ultimately their decision and when they will be ready to buy it.We have a lot of female customers, a lot of solopreneurs and we’re very focused on that small business market. Most of our customers are business owners who are managing their own social media. That’s another way we can stand out from other tools, we don’t serve agencies or enterprises. We don’t have plans for them. We serve small businesses.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Our business is profitable! The beauty of a bootstrapped business is that you have to be profitable, otherwise you don’t have a business!Today our operations look like a very lean team, we have 13 distributed team members, we don’t have an office, we work remotely and we love working remotely.Our plans for the future are to keep improving the product and keep solving the problems that come up for our target market. The expansion looks like meeting the needs of more and more entrepreneurs. We’re not looking to expand into enterprise or agency, we’re looking to help those small businesses run their social media to help them save time and do it really effectively. Edgar grabs their content for them, optimizes it, sends it out. That’s what we are going to continue to do better and better.imageThrough starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?We have had some tough times in dealing with our external partners. Being a social media marketing tool we are very much at the mercy of the social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. In 2018 Twitter changed its rules so that you can no longer repost content on their platform ever, you can’t repost the same tweet on two different accounts. This was a feature of Edgar that our customers really liked and found useful, so we had some people leave our customer base and do their social media manually.We ended up losing a percentage of our users. We knew that other tools were in the same boat as us but we didn’t realize people would stop using the tool to do it themselves. We lost a chunk of our revenue and then we lost other functionality to other platforms and then got it back, there was an error on Facebook’s part that we didn’t have any control over. We were also really late to the game with Instagram. We should have built that access sooner. We had to adapt and do what we can, which meant building a mobile app. I’ve learned that you can’t wait on external partners, you have to take action on whatever you can, sometimes that’s a good situation and sometimes it’s not.What platform/tools do you use for your business?We use Slack for our communications platform, it’s so great that it can integrate with so many things and we all stay connected their day-to-day.We use Zoom for video calls, it’s the next best thing for real-life conversations. We default to video calls for meetings and any quick 1on1’s.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?How I built this is such a valuable behind the scenes story of the true ups and downs in business. Especially those that are farther ahead than you who have achieved all sorts of success and gone through the challenges, and how they think about things like marketing and product development.I like that they ask the same question at the end which is, how much do you think is luck, and most entrepreneurs will say that it is. You can’t control what your partners or customers do, and so it’s a good reminder to not overthink things, you just have to try things and see what happens.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?My advice for other entrepreneurs who are just getting started is to start collecting money. Get 1 customer to pay you. The real test is to see if people will buy it. Sell something and collect money for it. Do that as soon as possible.It’s so important to stay in action and to realize that the perfect solution is not going to come down and shine on you, the only way to learn is from reality to see what really happens. To see how customers respond. You have to take action and take chances.There are so many great small businesses out there with a lot of successes.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Not at the moment but keep an eye out in 2020! You can keep an eye out on our careers page.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookInstagramTwitterLaura’s TwitterIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM