Other than the things with John Hodgman, what did you do to promote yourself in the early stages? In other words, how much of a following did you have before Baby Got Back, and how did you get them?

I didn’t do anything to promote myself on purpose, other than blogging. I played here and there, with Hodgman but also at the PopTech conference before all of this started. I wouldn’t say I had much of a following at all before Thing a Week, some fans certainly, but not really something I would call a “fanbase.” I wish I could say there was some trick to it, but it’s like starting a fire without matches. Small things first that burn easily, blow on it a bit, wait for it to get big enough so you can add bigger pieces of wood. Sometimes it doesn’t catch and then you start over, maybe you use different materials, maybe you move to some new spot. It’s not like you can throw a switch – the stuff I did with Hodgman started in maybe 2000, and from there it took me years of various kinds of trying and not trying to get traction like Baby Got Back. And when that traction did happen, I had a catalog of stuff waiting for people to discover.