Fail Fucking Often: The creators of Good Fucking Design Advice listen to themselves

Photos by Michael Reese.

It’s not much to look at, the “studio” of Brian Buirge, 28, and Jason Bacher, 26. Narrow stairs descend from the kitchen of the visual communication design graduate students’ ranch-style home to an unfinished basement, sprinkled with workout equipment and piles of unfinished laundry. To the left, there is a humble corner, much smaller than a Kent State dorm room. It encloses a folding table covered in posters and packing supplies, a bookcase housing boxes with erasers, notebooks and pencils. A tall desk is lined with stickers that spell out “Thanks” – Buirge and Bacher are very polite, after all. It’s a surprising setup for a company that sends products around the world, but for now, it works.

Buirge and Bacher’s friendship began when they were undergraduate students at Kent State. After a group project that left each of them unsatisfied with the partners they were assigned, they began taking notice of each other’s work. Both men quickly realized they shared similar design tastes, so they decided to stick together, forming a team that would eventually start a project none of their peers would ever be brave (or crazy) enough to pursue.

Good Fucking Design Advice is a joke — or at least that’s how it started. As an adjunct instructor, Bacher quickly became annoyed with his students’ often irrelevant questions. He started feeling like a broken record, and Buirge was sick of listening to his complaints every morning when they got coffee. The pair started thinking about sites they had seen before, like, “What the Fuck Should I Make for Dinner?” They even toyed with an idea of a site where students could submit work and they would critique it. That idea was quickly shot down because neither of them had the time for such an undertaking. So they settled on a site that spits out information. They never knew “Good Fucking Design Advice” would grow into so much more.

“We kinda put the pieces together, and we were like, ‘Well, Good Fucking Design Advice,’” Bacher says. “Let’s go get our coffee.”

Neither Bacher nor Buirge was in 100 percent. Neither of them had time to start a business that would take up all of their time. But before they had time to reject the idea, they found themselves putting everything together, sharing the workload 50/50. When they finished the site, they couldn’t do anything but laugh.

“At the time, it was nothing; it was a joke,” Bacher says. “We wasted 12 hours; we didn’t do any of our homework; we threw any responsibility we had out the window. And all we have is profanity to show for it.”

The day after they completed everything, they launched the site. A notice was sent out to some of their Facebook friends, people who they thought would appreciate it — collectively about 200 people. They came back to the studio late that night to work on other assignments and decided to check the site’s analytics, which told them how many individual people were visiting. They both had an inkling their idea could really turn into something.

“We got 500 people that night, not just somebody hitting reload,” Buirge says. Bacher and Buirge were both surprised because neither of their personal websites had been as successful.

“Any month I broke 100, I was like, ‘I must be doing something right,’” Buirge says. But Good Fucking Design Advice blew them away.

“First night, we were like, ‘Wow, that’s 500 people, let’s go get a beer,’” Bacher says. “The next day was 6,000, so we were like, ‘Wow, 6,000. Let’s go get a beer.’ The third night we got online, we were like, ‘Whoa, 70,000. I’m tired; let’s go to bed.’”

The site launched with 25 pieces of advice. One piece is displayed on the homepage, but when a user clicks, “This isn’t enough, I need more fucking advice,” different advice appears. Users can click as many times as they want or need. Advice is also available to be downloaded as wallpaper. Within four months, the site offered 75 pieces of advice, including:

A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas.

Never fucking get caught.

You can’t polish a fucking turd.

“Getting up to 75 was a feat,” Bacher says. “We felt like we had really achieved something.”

Today, the site offers more than 200 pieces of advice. Bacher and Buirge add advice a couple of times each month. They have learned what good advice truly is, and now they are constantly looking and listening for it.

“Initially, we were trying to come up with it ourselves,” Buirge says. “Then we were paying attention in our classes. We would be in the same class together and listening to our professors talk, and then they would say something, and we would look at each other and both be like, ‘Oh, that’s one.’”

A month after creating the site, Bacher and Buirge began selling T-shirts and posters. The grand total for startup was $14.45 (mainly domain name expenses). They didn’t have any money, so they didn’t know how they were going to pull off selling merchandise. They also didn’t want to buy only 10 T-shirts if they were going to have a demand for 10,000. A friend suggested they do a pre-sale to gauge interest.

“Oh, pre-sale. Oh, we’re so dumb,” Bacher says. “That is a genius idea.”

Between T-shirts and posters, the pre-sale generated about $10,000 in start-up money. They used the money to pay for the creation of products without digging into their own pockets. That was when they learned the power of having good vendors. The person who was supposed to make the shirts and posters bailed.

“We’re talking 11th hour,” Bacher says. “We were finding someone to burn a screen who can produce a good-quality poster and a good-quality shirt. Buirge lost some hair and managed to grow some back. I was completely bald after that. It was the most stressed out we had ever been.”

The person who had committed to doing the work for them had been given four weeks to produce everything. He told them a week before everything was meant to ship that he couldn’t do it. Buirge and Bacher went on a three-day, no-sleep packaging marathon to get everything shipped by the date they had promised.

“We were like, what? Is this some kind of joke?” Bacher says. “It’s not April 1st, is it?”

After the one-year mark, things died down. Most of their business had been international, so to boost local sales, Buirge and Bacher started donating their products, and they hired an intern to help them out. Around January of last year, they were only shipping about 10 items per week.

“And we were completely happy with that,” Buirge says. “We were never really in this to make money in the first place. That wasn’t an objective, and it still is not.”

They had to make the decision to either improve or end the project altogether. They decided they wanted to tell their story and make the site more personal. Up until then, they said it sounded like an angry person, basically like a sailor. And that wasn’t the impression they wanted to give people.

Buirge and Bacher created a three-minute video and re-launched the website. They added a page for their intern and did all the things they wanted to do in the beginning but didn’t have the time for. Buirge says they were always running behind because they were learning as they went. The first 50 coffee mugs they sent out broke because they didn’t know how to package them properly.

“Everything that we did, we failed first, and we didn’t anticipate the demand we had, so it was like trying to catch up,” Buirge says. “Initially, we didn’t even think of it like a business. It was a side thing we were having fun with.”

Bacher says they began waiting to see if the pot would boil, and it boiled over. Sales increased more than 500 percent. They went from shipping 10 items a week to 10 items a day. It was almost as if they were starting it all over again. They bought what they thought was enough product to last a couple of months, but they sold out of everything they had within three weeks. And since then, Good Fucking Design Advice has been consistent.

In the 18 months the site has been around, it has grossed more than $100,000. Buirge and Bacher pay themselves modestly. Bacher says he and Buirge are no different than the other students struggling in their house. (They live with two other roommates, both named Jason).

“Before, we really didn’t really know what direction to go,” Bacher says. “We just kind of got lucky, I guess. But now I think we have a little bit more of a chemistry for success.”

Buirge and Bacher’s site now includes another person’s story: Tim Johnsen, a student from Arizona State University, spent a week with the designers and developed a Good Fucking Design Advice app. Their goal is to offer people different experiences through their company.

“He sent us a PDF of what he was thinking about and a video of a rough prototype he had put together,” Buirge says. “We were like, wow, this guy’s really into it.”

They decided to bring him to Kent so they could tell his story better.

“We weren’t really sure if he was going to be some crazy ax-murderer or what,” Buirge says. “We had never met him.”

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, what if he kills you in your sleep?’” Bacher says. “We were like, ‘He hasn’t even met us yet. We’re crazy.’”

“We might kill him in his sleep,” Buirge says.

Buirge and Bacher put Johnsen to work in order to get him into every aspect of what they were doing. He had to roll posters and stuff tubes along with them. They still can’t believe “some crazy website” made him want to travel across the country and sleep on their couch.

“It makes you realize, you don’t need a lot to change the way someone thinks or invite a great deal of inspiration in someone’s life,” Bacher says. “I mean, hell, look at this room. We have a shower in the middle of our poster space.”