It started 40 years after I got my first computer. I was eight years old when I fired up my trusty Vic-20 (which I still have tucked away somewhere), and I’ve been staring at screens ever since.
I was feeling pretty good about my tenure in the tech world until my daughter walked into my office and asked the one question that started this whole journey.
"Do you know how to use computers?"
My initial reaction was a defensive, sarcastic retort. But her follow-up silenced me immediately.
"What do you think I've been doing every day and well into the evening every single night since you can remember me being alive?"
She shrugged. "I don't really see you doing anything with them that my mom doesn't do."
Her mother (while absolutely brilliant)... is a Veterinarian.
It caused an instant record skip in my brain. At the time, she knew I’d been at Google for almost five years. She knew I had worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and others. Throughout COVID, she watched me on video conferences, talking ad nauseam about technology.
But to her? Outside of the context of what she saw other adults doing, my "high-tech" work didn't look any different than any other adult with an open laptop. Just typing and talking. She never saw me build.
From the mouths of babes.
The Ted Lasso Summit
That comment stuck with me. Over the next few hours, while we sat on the couch watching Ted Lasso (Mom City man, it gets me every single time!), we hatched a plan.
"Okay kid," I said. "What are we building? Imagine it, and we'll hack it together."
"A website that we can sell stuff on."
"Happy to," I replied. "With one requirement: We don't have a warehouse, and won't unless for some weird reason this goes terribly well. So you have to find something small that you can keep safe until it's sold without any extra investment."
Ideas flew around the room until she finally blurted out: "Stickers."
We spent the next few days joking about our impending empire.
"Kid, you want us to take on the Big Sticker industry? That's a cut-throat world right there."
"Hey Dad, you could change your title from 'Applied AI' to 'Sticker Magnate.'"
"If we also sell magnets," I asked, "can I be a Magnet Magnate?"
"DAAAAD."
Automating the Boring Stuff
By Sunday afternoon, we had picked a domain name, registered an LLC, fired up Shopify and App Script, and got to building. But as we started, I had a realization.
A tweenager without much experience isn't going to care about a DNS A Record. She isn't going to understand how broken links impact search rankings. If I bogged her down in the "plumbing" of the internet, the fun would die instantly.
I realized that if I constructed the workflow properly—using basic scripting tools and a stack of different AI models—I could abstract away the vast majority of the complexity.
I made her a deal: I would attempt to automate every single "job title" she had heard me speaking to on the phone over the years. This would allow her to design and sell stickers, only diving into the technology when she naturally asked questions like, "What's a hero image?" or when she overheard something and got it wrong, like, "Mom, my page load time is the problem!" (The website wasn't even up yet).
For me, I'm a numbers wonk. I like the backend processing; I like seeing blazing fast speeds and clean data. The front end doesn't really interest me, but it interests the 12-year-old. So, to use her own words... when it comes to the creative, I just let her cook.
The Vancouver Sticker Company (The Other One)
With that, I present what we’ve been working on: The Vancouver Sticker Company.
My code has broken, deleted, and rebuilt so many dead links in the name of SEO experimentation that I can feel my collective list of bosses over the years shaking their heads in disapproval. We destroy, edit, and rebuild this eCommerce site over and over again, sometimes multiple times a day.
When the site blanks and shows up with zero products, every company I've worked with or for has had a collective meltdown and started lobbing off heads. We instead, laugh and try again.
Expanding the Workforce
Over the last few months, the project has grown beyond just a father-daughter duo. As more friends have been laid off from their jobs, I started making calls.
"You wanna make stickers? I offer a generous profit sharing program of zero dollars, and have no benefits, but I can offer you free adhesive."
The pitch worked better than you'd know. Now we've got a small, tight-knit group of friends making stickers between looking for jobs, all while they learn about the complex world of eCommerce that I've always taken for granted.
The AI in the Machine
While we're building and designing stickers every day, we are figuring out how Gemini and other models can help us get to market better and be more helpful. We aren't just generating generic text; we are building personas.
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The Geography Teacher: Our Flags are run through a model pretending to be a high school geography teacher, offering educational context and stories about the country's formation rather than just dry dimensions.
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The Trivia Nerds: Our European Ovals look back at Cold War Europe in both image and description. We task the AI with finding absurd-sounding factoids—like bootleg jazz on X-rays or Finnish wife-carrying sports—which makes us scramble to determine the difference between AI veracity and hallucination.
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The Daily Helmet: We're currently most proud of one of our emptiest datasets. Just released a few days ago, "The Daily Helmet" asks Gemini for a different helmet image to be created each day. It then passes that image through a model to request a text description suited to a child born in 2017 learning to read with dyslexia—getting slightly more difficult every day.
Roadmap: What's Next?
To reuse a trope from several old bosses, "we are building this plane while flying it."
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The Birthday Selector: We are building a tool for The Daily Helmet to zero in on a child's typical stage of learning based on their birthday, ensuring the reading difficulty matches their age exactly.
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Open Source the Art: We are creating a way for you to log in and download the images we've uploaded for free. Yeah, you can buy a sticker. It helps keep the site going, but as bizarre as it sounds, that isn't really the point of all of this. Until then, if you've got your own cricut and a laser printer, and would like one of our images, send a link and we'll see what we can do to get you a raw image file.
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Insource the production: printers, cutters, and Vinyl Oh my! It's technology we're exploring. Right now, we make use of a few different print on demand providers to automate everything from the moment a shopping cart is processed until a customer gets their stickers in the mail. We'd like to team up with a local print shop to do this work, or even better yet, start our own if there is demand.
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Marketing and Advertising: We don't want to give away too much on our strategy here, but if your name is Ryan Reynolds, and you were born and raised in Vancouver, Washington (you know, the original one), before November of 1976 (making YOU the original one too!), well then...we'd like to talk to you about a collab that will absolutely BURY you in free adhesives.
note: I also have in my notes to not forget about the hobo magnet. Mission accomplished, now I just have to remember what the hell it is we were talking about when I wrote it down...
Ultimately, the point of this project is to use technology to spend quality time with my kid and friends, seeing if I can't automate the boring stuff for them. Over the last several months, my daughter has helped me rewrite my decidedly crusty points of view—opinions formed back when I was wrestling with Netware 3.12 on a token ring network in high school. Seeing the world through her eyes has been the best upgrade I’ve had in years, providing a creative outlet that brings us closer together while keeping me in the game as I look for the next role to sink my teeth into.
That's it for now, and until I've figured out how to trust AI with an entire marketing campaign that doesn't suck, just remember that here at the vaunted https://www.vancouverstickercompany.com: We Make Stickers.
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