Welcome

We're here to learn and share what we know about running our small businesses/freelancing within the furry fandom and related~

This is the landing page for the Furry Business Chat. Please read the rules below before clicking the invite link to enter the chat (invite link is near the bottom...somewhere...).

A D M I N S

Please see the landing channel for list of admins.

@Kaikirith, @numberchu @Muttstera @Temrin (no PMs) @Dana_Danale

Please only ping us once if there’s any issue. Feel free to PM us as well.

Quick Links

Furry business chat Wiki (wip)

C H A T R U L E S

👔 English: The language of the chat is English. If you prefer speaking in another language, feel free to ask if anyone else in the chat speaks it and take your conversation to private message.

👔 Stay on topic: The topic of the chat is running a business or freelancing, particularly one that caters to furry or fantasy fans (and anime/comic/general fantasy fans by extension). This is a pretty broad topic so discussions can range all over the place, but try to avoid talking about unrelated issues with your personal life, a funny meme you saw, etc.

💭 Politics... Politics impacts our businesses quite a lot, such as legislation concerning sales taxes or traveling between countries with merchandise for conventions. If politics comes up, stay business-focused and carry any debates to private messages: Our goal is to understand the law as-is (or laws being considered and voted on) and how to run our businesses within the current or soon-to-be-implemented law.

💭 Mental Health & Productivity... Mental health and issues with procrastination come up sometimes in the chat. It can be relevant since running a business is naturally stressful and can impact your mental health, or your mental health can impact running your business. Touching on these topics sometimes makes sense, but again, try to focus on specific business impacts. We can't advise what medications to use, and we aren't responsible for motivating you to get your own work done.

👔 No self-promotion: It may make sense to share your website or something you're selling if it's relevant to the discussion, but don't promote yourself or ask people to buy your wares*. We're all here to learn how to sell, so we're probably not your target customers anyway. Check out the 'Other Chats' below for great places to sell and promote yourself.

📣 *EXCEPTION: PROMO THURSDAYS - On Thursday (in your local time zone, at any time), you may share ONE personal link/promotion. Add #promotionthursday to your comment to make it easier to search.

Promotion Thursday is about leveraging the networks of other creators/business owners in order to promote yourself. We tend to focus on growing our Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. followings as large as we can, so if you want to drive traffic to your Kickstarter (for example), asking people in the chat to re-tweet your tweet about it is a great way to reach thousands of more followers.

Please don't just dump your Kickstarter or shop links or commission samples. We're busy people running our businesses and asking us to copy that link, go to our social media, draft up a new post, paste the link, and post it, is asking us for more work than many of us have time or mental bandwidth for. If you actually want people to help you promote your shop/crowdfund/whatever, make it easy for us! Copy and paste a tweet, facebook post, tumblr post, Mastodon toot, or anything else that's super easy for us to visit, click 'retweet' (or equivalent), and move on. Again, many of us have grown our social media audiences into the thousands, so giving us a quick tweet/facebook/etc that we can quickly share into our networks is the most efficient way for us to help one another.

This concept gets explained again and again every week, including an automated IFTTT post that also spells this out. If you're confused about how promotion Thursday works, click the #promotionthursday hashtag and browse past examples to see what to do. If you dump your shop/crowdfund links or commission pricelist or anything else that doesn't involve others helping you promote by leveraging their social networks, your post may be deleted without warning or further discussion.

If you can think of a better way to explain this concept so that it's not confusing every week, let us know! We're always looking to improve and help each other's businesses thrive.

I promise none of this to be mean or overly stringent: These rules are in place to keep spam down to a minimum, to make sharing fair, and to actually help one other (few people will do anything if you dump your commission price list, but many people will retweet your tweet and potentially send their thousands of Twitter followers in your direction).

💭 *What's the difference between an ad and sharing a link/product image? We LOVE seeing images of your table display or merchandise! If we're discussing, say, pins, feel free to share an image of your pin merch and describe your process for designing and ordering it, and which manufacturer you used. This is very relevant to the discussion and will help others. If you instead pop out of the blue and say "My wolf pins are on sale for $5 at this link!", that's clearly an ad and not relevant here. Dumping an image and saying "What do you think? 0w0" is also trying to sneak in an ad.

If you offer a service (e.g. you run a printing service to make prints and stickers), you can share what you make and discuss what you do if it comes up organically in discussion. If someone is talking about prints (for example) and where to find a particular type of print, you can respond with images about the type of prints you make and share a link to your business or invite people to PM you for more info. That's totally cool and you're probably helping us out, too!

👔 No NSFW images, and mark NSFW links: Please don't upload NSFW images into the chat. If you link to something that contains NSFW content, just be sure to warn us.

👔 No AI art. Discussion of AI art in the context of business is allowed (E.g. what to do about your art being stolen, what spaces ban it, etc.) what but please do not post AI art in chat.

👔 Be open-minded: There's more than one way to approach a business question, there's more than one great printing service to use, or store to get art supplies from, etc. If someone thinks the service you recommend isn't great or your approach isn't right, don't take it personally or start an argument. Just discuss the pros and cons or speak about your own experience for people to think about. You may learn something new!

👔 No illegal/bad advice: Don’t advocate for theft, intimidation, extortion, or any other ridiculously bad ideas. Don’t talk about a law or legal policy that doesn’t even exist. Backing up your advice with sources is recommended.

👔 Avoid just sending people to Google: The purpose of this chat is to share our knowledge and ask questions when we need help. People from all levels of experience are welcome to participate. While it can be frustrating when a beginner asks a common question, avoid telling them to "just google it." Your interpretation of what's "beginner level" may be different from other people's. Instead, either don't respond (we're all busy and it's okay not to get back to someone, even if they asked you directly!), suggest some search terms they could try to point them in the right direction, link a hashtag we've used to discuss the topic before, or...just answer their question.

👔 DO NOT DISCUSS BOTS OR SPAM: If a spam account appears in the chat, just ping the admins or PM one of us and leave it at that. If you have a question about bots used in the chat (such as Combot or IFTTT), or have recommendations for other bots that can be used, please bring this discussion to @furrywatercooler.

👔 No racism or discrimination: You'll be banned.

❌ Avoid using slurs or exposing problematic content when discussing problematic vendors/partners: As businesses in the furry fandom, championing social causes and working only with vendors who support or do not hinder the social causes we care about is important in our community. You may want to out a vendor who has supported problematic causes, made problematic tweets, etc. to warn the rest of us not to do business with them. If you wish to do so, do not quote any slurs or share images of racist/discriminatory symbols, and include a warning with any links you share that include such content. This chat is a place to discuss our businesses, and while it's important to know about who exactly we're working with, not everyone wants to see a racial slur or similar in the middle of their day while discussing, say, sticker vendors.

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DISCUSSING COVID-19: Covid19 is having a measurable impact on many of our businesses, so of course it's topical to discuss. Many of the on-topic rules are relaxed for this topic. You're welcome to discuss:

• Where to find or how to apply for government aid or other relief/loan programs*
• Which manus are still operating and shipping, and/or how to handle manufacturer closures
• International shipping and any problems or news updates related to this
• Legislation that's being considered in your local government and how this may impact our businesses (You can ask that people contact their representatives, but please leave opinions on politicians out of it)
• Mental health resources, productivity tips
• Convention or other event closures, new virtual/online events
• What YOU and YOUR business are doing to adjust, or how you've seen other businesses adjust
• etc.

We discourage you from discussing:

• What the disease actually is or isn't, what its symptoms are, how deadly it is or isn't, etc. We encourage people to refer to their official health resources like the CDC for the latest information about this disease
• How good or bad government leaders are handling this
• Many of us are severely emotionally impacted by this. You're welcome to gripe in the off-topic sister chat, @furrywatercooler. The main business chat is meant to be more of a resource.

*BE CAREFUL WHEN CLICKING LINKS AND ENTERING YOUR PERSONAL DATA. We strongly urge users to search for the official government websites first and navigate from there, even if the "same" link has been provided in chat. There are many ways to scam and spoof web links, and it's much safer if you find and use the official sites on your own.

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F B C E T I Q U E T T E

The following aren’t hard rules, but highly encouraged when participating in the chat.

👔 It's a smart idea to add the name or emoji flag of your primary country of business to your Telegram username. Several business questions, especially around taxes, are unique to different countries (or states, territories and cities), so offering a short-hand way to understand where your perspective is coming from helps.

👔 If you’re sharing a personal or slightly off-topic link as an example (e.g. sharing your commission page when we’re discussing commission pricing), try removing the default web preview from your post (look for the “X” that appears near the preview after entering a link).

👔 Feel free to ask anything, but also try searching for past topics. Certain topics come up a LOT (like how to price your work, taxes or law changes), so try using the Telegram search or clicking on a relevant hashtag. You can always reply to old comments to bring up the topic again and ask for more details.

🏷️ ”Tagging" a discussion

If you find the current chat thread to be useful, try tagging it! This makes searching through past conversations much easier. Simply leave a comment while others are chatting (or pick a good comment and 'reply' to it) with a hashtag, such as #tax, #shipping, #branding, #merch, #promotion, #advertising, etc. Try to see what other tags have already been used so we can create an easy-to-search library of frequent topics.

💰 Tax Tagging: When tagging a discussion with #tax or #taxes, please also add your country and/or state or territory code, like #FR or #USA #IL. This will greatly help searching through past advice for country-specific tax laws.

🕵🏻 Con staff are here!

Yes, some members of the chat are part of staff of some furry conventions! It's awesome to have staff from various cons in this chat, and if they're open to answering questions then that's also welcome. But please don't expect answers or explanations from con staff who choose to participate when asking about how their conventions are run or why certain con rules are in place. Lean on the normal outlets for contacting them need be (i.e. their official website or social accounts).

YES, you can…

👔 Link to your website or shop

👔 Share examples of your work (and ask for advice on pricing it, etc.)

👔 Share your convention/event table display or storefront/shop setup (use #tabledislay)

👔 Link to a useful article, chat/tweet thread, video, etc.

👔 Ask for critique on your website, merch, business cards etc.

☢ WARNING Your very first post in the chat cannot be a link or the auto-mod will think you’re a spam bot and ban you. Please say hi or participate a bit, first.

👔 Invite your friends

👔 Ask if anyone can collaborate on a project or offer a service you're in need of

👔 Recommend a product or service

👔 Give a referral link which benefits you (just let us know it's a referral link)

👔 Share examples of other businesses

👔 Share a job post or event/dealer's den/artist alley opening

⚠️ NOTE: We have a bot which sends any retweets made by "dealer's helper" on twitter into the chat already

👔 Use the poll feature... sparingly

Link to chat

O T H E R C H A T S

Below are other chats made by @Zelaphas or partner chats which you may find useful:

THE WATER COOLER: Sister chat of Furry Business. If a topic is already settled but you’d like to continue discussing it, OR you just want to shoot the shit, check out @furrywatercooler. Stickers, gifs, memes, and other off-topic tomfoolery are welcome there.

THE WIP ZONE: This chat from @Matrices is a great resource for sharing what you're working on (especially fursuits) and asking for feedback. Join at @WIPzone.

🆕 JUST FURRY STREAMS: Are you a streamer looking to promote your stream? Check out the @justfurrystreams channel. Fill out the form in the pinned announcement to have your Twitch streams automatically shared to the channel when you go live!

Places to Advertise on telegram.

The Pawn Shop : This is a sales chat for adoptables/characters and premade fursuits! 

@TDD_PS

THE DEALERS DUNGEON: @TDD_DD

Commission Gallery : https://t.me/FurCommGallery Post any advertisements for those seeking commissions or postings for open commissions.

Floofers Market : https://t.me/floofersmarket

Furry Market Place: https://t.me/furrymarketplace

Furry Art Market : https://t.me/FurryArtMarket

Feral Marketplace: https://t.me/feralmarketplace

THE DEALERS DEN: @thedealersden

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