Good morning, John.

This video is going to be an attempt at being honest about myself, which is never easy. In 2007, I very clearly remember sitting on my couch in my apartment with my wife's laptop which had a LightScribe CD burner, where you could burn like a CD on one side and then turn it over and you could burn an image on the other side, like a grayscale image. And I made somewhere between like 50 and 100 of these to take to a library event that you and I were doing in Michigan, and then I sold every single one of them.

Last year, I got a tremendous desire to own one of these and so I asked the internet and Sarah sent me her's and didn't even ask for any money, but did ask for a favor in the future and she has not yet called in that favor. Here it is. It's called Several Songs from Hank Green's Pants. Weird piece of trivia for you: That image there of the Nerdfighter skull and crossbones was designed by Vihart, the math YouTuber. Also, there is an Elle Cordova song on this, who is this person. She's become popular on TikTok and Instagram recently, but back in 2007 was a YouTuber. The fact that people were willing and excited to buy things from me that I made was very new and it led directly to the creation of DFTBA Records with my friend Alan. DFTBA is now 15 years old and over those 15 years a lot of good stuff and bad stuff and amazing stuff and hard stuff has happened to that company. Over that time though, it's become quite big. I think over 50 people now work for DFTBA full-time. Most of what that company has done and does is help creators create and sell cool products to their audiences which we love to do and you can find lots of products at dftba.com we also work with the McElroy Brothers and with Kurzgesagt. We're the logistics behind the Dropout.TV store. We work with a weird company called itemLabel that I love so much.

But in 2016, we started the first iteration of what has become the Awesome Socks Club. At that point, we were shipping at around 400 pairs of socks per month and donating a bunch of money to charity and we were very proud of that and it felt very good. That number is a little different now and around then, I bought a domain name, a relatively expensive one that I sat on for many years paying for it despite the fact that we were not using it. It was good.store. Very cool, very sleek, no dot com about it. And I didn't know what it was for but I thought it would be good to have. Now, this is the part that I'm not really looking forward to, but I just want to be honest and I know if you think less of me afterward, that's okay.

As the Awesome Sock Club grew and also as Complexly grew and a bunch of other stuff started happening in my life, I began having a specific feeling. So first, I sold VidCon, then I had a book come out that did very well, then I realized that like I didn't enjoy living a much more expensive lifestyle than I had previously, and I realized that like I didn't need money. And the jobs were hard, like there were a lot of problems to solve and I didn't always feel like I was doing a good job of solving them and also had all those other things going on in my life. And I was stressed out, and I was thinking like, "What if I just didn't do these things anymore?" but like you can't stop doing them. There's people who work for these companies. There's people who work with these companies. I like all of those people. There's people who benefit from and enjoy the things that the companies make. That wasn't a good combination. It was like I felt like that should be enough motivation and maybe it should have been, like just serving those people, but I was super stressed out and having a hard time being excited about the work and I was just doing it because I had to, which is okay. Like, that's part of life. But, I wanted other motivations and, John, you gave me one when you were like, "What if we promised to raise $25 million for a hospital in Sierra Leone where 1 in 17 women die in childbirth? And we don't know how we're going to raise that money, like we don't have that money, but let's figure out how to do it." That's very motivating and that's exciting to me in a way that making more money for myself was not. And I kept getting more and more excited about that domain name, but we decided to sit on the domain name for a while and like, what else can we do as a subscription. Like, what else do people need regularly.

So we worked really hard to try and find some great, ethically-sourced, absolutely delicious coffee. By chance, there is a company in my town that makes like luxury, high-quality, private label soaps so we started to do soaps with Sun Basin Soap. And this is gonna be followed by more subscriptions like tea. That's a lot of different places for people to have individual subscriptions to individual things, especially if we could be putting multiple of those things in one box and sending them to you rather than having them be in a bunch of different boxes.

And so, welcome to the Good Store. As I sat on that domain name, I began to develop a secret goal, and goals are good for motivation. I shared this goal with L.J. when we were in the interview process to bring her on as CEO of DFTBA, and she was like yes, yeah. So when we were first thinking about this stuff, of course Newman's Zone is the thing that we were looking at as a model. It's this company started by Paul Newman who was an actor who was like "I don't need the money, but I wanna make salad dressing and we'll give all the money to charity." His quote was "Let's give it all away." Let's give it all away! It's a powerful idea. My goal, and I don't know if I'll ever beat it, but it's a goal, is to beat them. Like companies are always competing against each other for market share and for higher profit than the other company. But Newman's Zone is the only, as far as I know, big consumer brand that gives all of its profit away, except maybe Good Store. Now Newman's Zone over the course of its existence has given away more than $600 million to charity, and Good Store is nowhere close to that. Like, we need to operate at our current levels for hundreds of years to reach that. I don't know whether we'll ever get there, but it is exciting to me. It is inspiring. I think it's exciting for me the way that making more and more and more money is inspiring for other people. I'm just not like those people. And you'll notice that Newman's Zone doesn't have like a separate website for all of its different products, so we're gonna steal that from them as well. Good Store is now the landing page for all of the different things.

In addition, we needed a team internal at DFTBA dedicated to making things with and for Good Store. It's a super small team but they're really focused on trying to find new, ethically-sourced, high-quality products that make life better and simple. Right now, the store is chock-full of holiday specials and bundles. There's my cancer socks that I designed. There's bath boxes with new dreamy descriptions. There's coffee coffee boxes for all the caffeinated folks in your life. All these things make awesome gifts for people you love or you can gift them to yourself, we won't tell, but be sure if you want to get them by December 24th to order on or before December 8th. That's the last day we guarantee shipping for Christmas Eve. And just so you know, based on like current trends, these will probably sell out before December 8th. Like, they might not but that's what it's looking like right now. We'll probably order more of them in the new year, but as far as our current stock, they're running low.

So I know a fair amount about business now, which isn't really what I had intended to have happen, but one thing that I do know is like there's ways these things work, and they work the way that they work one because like that's the way people do things, and like it's easier to do things the way people have done them before. But also, there are like reasons. Like there's no way you could do this idea in the traditional way people start businesses. Like you're not gonna get venture capital funding if your business model is giving the profit away. So there are things that are necessary for doing it this way. First, you have to do it slower. Like it was 2016 when we first had a sock subscription and now it's almost 2024. Most venture-backed product startups, uh, move very fast. They try to blitz the market. They try to acquire customers super fast. We're just going much slower than that. everything we do has to be self-funded. Everything we do has to--we to--try and do the right thing. All that stuff's tricky. But the second thing, and I think this is why Newman's Zone was possible too, is you have to have some foundation. You have to have something to build off of. I know for a fact, like it's just a fact, that the success of Good Store wouldn't be possible without the foundation of this community. Already I think it's quite a bit bigger than this community. I want it to be much bigger than this community, but that foundation was necessary for it to have been possible to have a business that is different like this.

To recognize that, that this isn't an idea that exists independently of Nerdfighteria, we're having what we're calling the Founders Club. You can join the Founders Club soon. It's not ready yet. It'll be a place where you can contribute new ideas. You can get early access to some products. Maybe we might test some stuff on you, maybe we might give some discounts to early stuff so that you can try them out. Let us know what you think about it. There will be various perks and we're building it out over the next few months. If you're interested in joining the Founders Club, you can sign up for the Good.Store newsletter. I've put a link to that in the description, it's right at the top. We will be in touch early next year, so again, honesty. I do not usually know what I'm doing. I often times wish that I was different from me, like, I wish there were things about me that were different. I've tried to change them. I have worked against it when I need to, but that juice only runs so far. But the things that this community can do together are very different from what a normal business can do. Like, the limitations are different and the advantages are different, and understanding that those differences and then using that understanding to implement something that is quite different from how it would be done by someone else, that's like very spicy for my brain.

And holding this in my hand the seed from which all of this grew is really special to me. So thank you Sarah and the thing that I feel holding it isn't really impostor syndrome because I don't feel like I'm trying to pretend to be something that I'm not. But it is absolutely a feeling of not knowing knowing what I'm doing or whether I'm doing it right. And like, being okay with that. I'm so proud of all of the things that this community and all of the people who have worked for. VidCon or DFTBA or Complexly or any of the things that we work on have built and continue to build. I'm really excited for what I think is a pretty big new chapter in this. I hope. I don't know. Who knows. Maybe this is as big as it will ever get, regardless, it's already very big and is doing a lot of good. And John, I look forward to doing like whatever is next with you, and I'll see you on Tuesday.