‍From her unexpected rise as an ADHD comic creator to pouring over 3,000 hours into designing The Anti-Planner, a "productivity spell book," Dani Donovan shares her unfiltered journey: building a tool for people tired of feeling like failures, dealing with the emotional roller coaster of intellectual property theft, and navigating impostors selling shoddy knockoffs of her labor of love.

‍We discuss what goes into protecting your intellectual property as an entrepreneur, why valuing your own creative work is vital, and what Dani wishes she’d known before dealing with copycat chaos and the steep cost of defending her business. Her story underscores why trademark protection and legal safeguards aren't luxuries—they're essential armor for small business ownership.

‍If you’ve ever obsessed over planners you never use, struggled with perfectionism and procrastination, or wondered what it really takes to launch and protect something one-of-a-kind—this episode will resonate.

‍Get ready for hard truths, laughter, and transparency about the messy realities of ADHD entrepreneurship.

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Key takeaways for fellow creators and founders:

‍Protect Your IP Early - Dani Donovan’s story underscores the importance of copyrighting your content and considering trademarks before you reach mass awareness—even an overseas copyright or trademark if necessary.

Counterfeiting Can Happen to You - Whether you’re just starting out or have a viral hit, don’t assume your business is “too small” to be targeted. Copycats watch for what’s trending, and success makes you a target.

‍Community & Transparency Matter - Sharing the messy, challenging parts (like publicly addressing counterfeiting) can activate support from customers and fellow entrepreneurs—and may even lead to further growth and visibility.

‍Fun Fact From The Episode

‍When the first shipment of the Anti-Planner arrived, people (including myself) literally hugged it to their chest—and it wasn’t by accident! Dani intentionally made it “therapy pillow-sized” based on how she wanted users to feel about it. When have you ever felt like hugging another productivity tool? Yeah, it’s my first time, too!

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About today’s guest, Dani Donovan:

‍Dani Donovan is an award-winning designer and creator of the viral hit product, "The Anti-Planner: How to Get Sh*t Done When You Don't Feel Like It." Known for her relatable ADHD comics, tweets, and TikToks, she's been helping shape the online neurodiversity community since 2018. Dani was the closing keynote speaker at the 2021 International ADHD Conference, and her work has helped thousands of people seek an ADHD diagnosis and treatment.

Mentioned during the episode:

‍Alibaba

‍Steve Peha

‍Copyscape Plagarism Checker

‍MarqVision Brand Protection Agency

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About the Anti-Planner:

‍Tapping into her own frustrations and the lived experiences of ADHD peers, Dani Donovan spent over 3,000 hours creating The Anti-Planner, a “productivity spellbook”—a lovingly designed, non-linear, highly personalized compendium of over 100 strategies for overcoming procrastination and building emotional resistance.

‍Dani obsessed over every detail: the comforting size, playful illustrations, durable faux-leather binding, gold foil, thick paper, pen loop, and rounded corners. It is gorgeous, practical, and nothing like all the planners you’ve bought and abandoned two weeks later.

‍Buy your copy of the Original Anti-Planner here. (Dani also has a Clean version if you are not so sweary…)

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Your ADHD-ish™ host, Diann Wingert

‍Diann Wingert brings decades of experience as a psychotherapist and serial business owner and is now a sought-after coach to entrepreneurs with ADHD traits. Her style is direct and strategic, with a dash of humor, and filled with the insights of someone who lives and breathes the neurodivergent experience.

‍Diann is a fierce advocate for self-acceptance and meaningful growth at the intersection of neurodivergence and entrepreneurship. She is the creator of the ADHD-ish™ Method and host of the top-rated ADHD-ish™ podcast.

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Should I have Dani back again?

Want Dani Donovan to return to ADHD-ish™ to talk about what actually happens when your business scales way faster than you expected? Let us know by leaving a voice message here or sending an email here. Thanks!

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© 2026 ADHD-ish™ Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops / Outro music by Vladimir / Bobi Music / All rights reserved.

H: Dani, for listeners who don't know you yet, although in the ADHD world they would have to be under some kind of rock, give us the short version of what is the Anti Planner and what made you decide, you know, I think the world needs one more productivity tool, except, you know, not like the others.

G: So I got started making ADHD comics and had one kind of take off unexpectedly. And so being around my ADHD audience and peers and posting and seeing what really resonated with people and what sort of topics we were all really drawn to and gleaning some information out of that that so many of us don't just struggle with getting distracted, but we struggle with perfectionism and waiting to feel like it. And how difficult things can be when you don't have external accountability or how discouraging it can feel when you start something and you know, are excited about it, but you can't finish it.

And so there's all of these like emotions that I realized were kind of at the core of why I was procrastinating. Because I am the person who has bought so many planners. So, you know, many productivity tools and systems and online classes and self help books and the whole shebang and I don't stick with any of them. And they that always made me feel like such a failure. And so for me, when I went to kind of create a different sort of tool, what I did was look at what do I not like about other tools, like what set me up for failure with these other tools that I was trying and how can I kind of solve for those problems?

And so many of them are like requiring consistency or they're like cold and unfeeling and they don't have any guidance. And so for me, I really wanted to create something that helps people to navigate. How am I feeling? I'm feeling overwhelmed and then you can flip to that section and there's different types of overwhelmed. It's like, am I feeling intimidated or over committed or panicked or burnt out? And you say I'm feeling burnt out and then you flip to that section and you can find here are specific tools that help with burnout, that can help you get stuff done when you're feeling burnt out. And I think that that sets people up for success because so many of us with ADHD are tired of feeling like failures.

And so making something that has over a hundred different ways to get stuff done that are categorized by the thing that's making it challenging, you know, kind of sets it into a different category where it's not quite a book and it's sort of a workbook, but you don't have to fill stuff out if you don't want to and it's not a planner. It is a like what people have called it, like a productivity spell book right. But being able to find a tool that is actually 100 tools. It's like a Swiss army knife of procrastination busting strategies. And so the biggest thing is recognizing you might be using the wrong tool to try to solve a problem. You might be trying to use a planner to solve. You know, if you're writing stuff down time and time again and you're not doing the stuff, it doesn't matter how many times you write it down, you're not being, you know, getting what you need. And so if you are able to find what that resistance is, you can find the right tool.

H: I love the right tool for the right job. And I think one of the things that's so frustrating and really confusing to other people about folks like us with ADHD is that we go off on these epic searches for the perfect something or other and then we'll think we found it. And I call it the soulmate phenomenon. And we fall deeply, madly, passionately in love with this new thing for about two weeks and then we're like, oh, we're off on the search again. So the thing that's so crazy is that even when you find the thing that you've been looking for and it fricking delivers the goods, we will still only be able to use it for a short period of time.

So ergo, why we have so many shelf help books and so many planners and so many productivity tools and so many of these little timer thingies and you know, all the other thingies. But what you did with this Anti Planner and I'm going to share it here for those who are clip getting the video clip here, this is. You talked about it from the, the practical side. I want to just give you some feedback on the tactical side the tangible side, the physical side, the creative side, like it's beautiful, it's quality. When mine arrived, the first thing I did was take it out and hug it to my chest. And you later told me that you sized it so people could do that, I'm like, she knows.

G: I have reviews of people who are like, I love hugging this thing. I don't know how to describe it.

H: Well, it's funny because you know that I used to be a therapist before I pivoted into business coaching and people would sit in my office with these. I had all these pillows everywhere, as therapists do, and people would always reach for the one that was just about this size and they would hug it to their chest while they were talking about something that was challenging for them. So I'm like, it's a therapy pillow sized pillow.

G: Oh my God.

H: But it's so cute. It's so practical, like everything about it.

G: I forgot to mention that like, I am a designer. I'm a designer and illustrator by trade. And so the whole thing for me was making it like, I have bought so many workbooks, but I never fill them out because they feel like homework.

H: You didn't make this feel like work, Dani. It's cute. It's like everything is non threatening. Like, you know, the illustrations in it are almost like they come from a children's book. And you know, hey, we've all been struggling with the very same things that we're struggling with now our entire lives, since we were little kids who would respond to cartoon figures. So the care that went into this is so obvious. And I know from our previous conversations, you spent like well over 3,000 hours creating it. So when people say I wrote a book or I'm going to write a book, most people have no fricking idea, first of all, what that means. But secondly, because this isn't just a book, like, to do something at the level that you did it, it's gonna take 3,000 hours. And that's not because you're not efficient with your time.

G: So much of it went into the planning of the framework, right? A lot of it cause people are like, oh, you wrote a book and I did. But all of the pages are really structured to be, for the most part, if they could be one page, I wanted them to be one page. And they're all written sort of like experiments, right? Of like, this is what you' is how it works, this is why it works, here are some tips and it's bulleted out and it's bolded. So it's like super easily digestible because my, you know, I come from A people know me from like my tweets and stuff like that like really TikTok short form content.

And so how do I make this as easy to understand so that you don't just have to sit there and read page after page just to get to be like, give me the point, give me the point. And I found that the majority of those hours I spent more time illustrating than I did writing because there's so much. Again, there's so much illustration and design that went into this. But I spent so much time developing the framework of how do all of these. What are all the reasons why I procrastinate, and how do they fit into each other? So, like, the book has those five sections, right? Stuck, overwhelmed, unmotivated, disorganized, and discouraged.

And each of those has sort of subsections, because what I didn't want was people to have to look. There's 16 different, like, sub emotions. I did not want to have 16 tabs, I did not want to say, how are you feeling? And then people have this, like, paralyzed indecision. It's a lot easier to be like, I'm overwhelmed. And then it's like, let's drill into that in the way that, like, a feelings wheel sort of has, like, happy. And there's different kinds of different kinds of happy. You might feel, like, surprised versus calm or serene or something like that.

And so being able for to show people, you know, these different sub emotions, but realizing that this was not a framework that existed before. I didn't do a bunch of research and, like, grab somebody else's idea and, like, stick it in and develop a framework around it. It was so based on lived experience and just brainstorming what are the reasons on note cards and moving those note cards around until I could figure out how stuff kind of fit into other, you know, into other things.

H: No, that completely makes sense. And I think, like many entrepreneurs, solving a problem that you have for which a solution does not exist becomes the basis of a very successful business. And because you are an artist, you know, you care about the details. It's still work, a lot of work, but it's necessary. You wouldn't be able to do it any other way, right? You wouldn't be able to just slap it together.

G: Oh, no.

H: Which is why when you first found out that somebody was actually counterfeiting this work of art, do you remember? And I listen, I know you've got some distance from this, so I don't want to trigger or retrobotize you in any way, but when you first found out somebody's fucking counterfeiting my work, do you remember the first thought that went racing through your head?

G: It was violating it. It was, something is happening against my will that I don't like, and I can't stop. And it was this feeling of so there was, I guess there's sort of two emotions. So there was like violating, like anger towards whoever was doing this. And then there was this it's really complicated to describe the emotion because it wasn't like indignation and it wasn't shame and it was like wanting to defend myself because I found out, because I started getting all of these. So for context, I had a viral video takeoff that was about why the Anti Planner costs what it does. Because I had somebody who said, you know, do you hate poor people was like the comment that I got and so I was like, you know what? I'm going to reply to this in a really calm, like, I am going to assume you did not have bad intent here.

And I'm going to go ahead and explain. This is why it costs so much and went into, here are all the materials, here's how much it costs. I run my own business. I have to pay people to help me on the back end of stuff. And there's so much that goes into it that took off, that went viral. And so I suddenly had this like, influx of orders, felt really good. And it was about a month later when I was getting suddenly all these emails from people who thought I scammed them, from people who thought I, Dani Donovan, who is such a perfectionist that I spent this long making this book, made this crappy product that has like see through flimsy pages and like a flimsy cover and type like they retyped the whole thing.

So there was just typos and I got all of this feedback from people who were angry at me while I was over here processing how horrible it felt to have this happen. And so I didn't because I want to reply to them and defend myself. But it's so difficult to be kind of in that position where this thing that's like it's my worst fear is people thinking that I'm like, careless and sloppy.

H: Well, I mean, and to that point I mean, they clearly. I always say where there is opportunity, there are opportunists. And I can easily imagine why that video went viral, Dani, because every craftsperson, every creative person, every writer, artist, designer, like, probably shared it with everyone they've ever met because it's the how do we establish our value? I mean, a lot of the coaching work that I do, you know, I work with people who are experts in their own right. But being able to claim that expertise and charge what their value actually is, that's always like, that's a process that we get to. And it's not just a matter of the amount of time and energy and effort you put into it. I mean, you did things that I would even think, wow, using six different custom fonts that were created from your own handwriting.

G: Yeah.

H: And I went going through the pages going, oh, there's one. Oh, there's one and like this, that. I mean, to make it so unique in every way and then seeing that the counterfeits are like fucking Comic Sans.

G: Oh, my God.

H: Oh, my God And it's like all the energy, all the effort, all the uniqueness that you might not even expect all of your people to find. I mean, they're probably like finding Easter egg hunts. You know, months after they start using it, they're going, oh, I just noticed she also did this for us. But then the schlock version started selling, and the poor buyers have no idea it didn't come from you. I mean, I'm like, I would probably be going to the psychiatrist for getting some new meds that I'm not on.

G: It was really difficult because I had gotten, it was a while before I ordered one. I don't know where it is right now, but I got one. I'm like, I have to see it. And I remember it showing up and me opening, and I just started crying instantly because it was so bad. Now, I will say that there are people who do have critical thinking skills. Not that people who didn't realize it was a scam don't have, you know, but there were plenty of people who were like, someone wouldn't spend this much time making all of these illustrations, designing this so well, putting all of this together and having 10 typos on a page right? It's like when you get those Amazon instructions that have, like, random Z's in the middle of sentences, you're like, someone who doesn't speak English wrote this. And so there were, I will say that I felt proud of myself for having not put out a digital version of the book in its entirety, because people have been asking for it for years. Ever since it came out, people have been asking

H: No doubt.

G: And I was like, I don't want people to counterfeit this and they still did, but they had to retype it. So it was at least a giant pain in the ass for them to scan all my illustrations and retype everything. But because they did that, there was enough people who realized that this is likely not the real thing. I must have gotten something that like, is a ripoff because the quality was so bad and it wasn't what I showed in the video. You know, I was like, showing how, you know, it was like a tough cover and stuff like that.

And there were enough people who saw it, who understood because of how bad it was, that there's no way that this is it. And I'm gonna go, you know, I got emails who did come in and said, hey, I think that this is a scam. And so if I would have made it where I had the digital version available, they could have just printed it. It could have been that, you know, that easy. And so I do take some stock in the fact that it was at least challenging in the fact that it did. But I guess it goes to show how hard someone worked to rip off my stuff. It's a 328 page book.

H: You know, Dani, I think there's so many lessons in this, including the fact that, you know tons of creative entrepreneurs. I know tons of creative entrepreneurs who take their talent for granted. It's part of the whole what is your value? And I like to separate value from worth because that's a whole childhood trauma rabbit hole. You're like, well, am I worth it? No, we're not going there. It's the value of your work, but it's not just your time. It's your talent and it is your unique perspective. And these are oftentimes the things that we take for granted. We don't recognize how special they are.

We might even assume, if they come easily to us, that they come easily to everyone. So when somebody says, do you hate poor people? And when I first saw the price point on this, I'm like, it was before I knew you and before I knew anything about what went into it. I thought, this is a bit spendy. So I think it's like being confronted by the reality of that and understanding it's not just your time, it's not just your energy, it's also your talent. And it's so hard to determine the value of that. We almost have to rely on what people tell us about how what we've created has helped them in ways that nothing else has. And I know that you've gotten a lot of that too. But when the business reality of this is that, hey, I don't care how new you are in business or how long you've been in business.

If you are listening to this right now, as an entrepreneur with adhd, don't ever make the assumption that your business is too small, too new or too well established that this couldn't happen to you. It's one of the reasons why Dani and I wanted to have this conversation because that tends to be, oh, it'll never happen to me. But people do knock off highly specialized products like yours and because you can't compete with them on price, because you have genuine production costs. Help the listeners understand, like the math of this. Because I think a lot of people think, okay, well it's, what's the difference between having a copycatter and having competitors? You can always lower your price, but you can't.

G: No. And that's the other thing is I think there's a couple of things happening right where people are used to cheap things that are produced in China. Like this book is not printed in China and so people are used to cheap products. People are used to books that are put out by publishers, in which case no publisher would have let anyone spend this amount of time. Like the amount of time that I spent on this is objectively crazy but I knew that I feel like that that's going to be worth it in the end and it was.

But people don't, you know, necessarily think about this was one person and that I am one person now like running an, a single product e commerce company that manages the entire supply chain. So I have people, you know, not just who come in, who have to help me with my finances and customer service and people who need to come in and help manage the security on the website because, oh, we had somebody who's coming in who's testing a bunch of credit cards and if you're not paying attention that can, you know, really screw with your stuff.

I need somebody who's going in here who's help who's, who's doing project management and who is keeping track of I would say the calendar stuff. And there's all of these different roles that I can't do by myself while also being the entire marketing and sales department and the entire like social media presence and the face of the brand and everything. Like, it's just, it's too much so having to pay people, and I wanted to pay people well is, makes it challenging. So that's just one cost of the kind of back end of things. But I wanted to have a faux leather cover and gold foil. So that's shiny, you know, and catches the glint out of the corner of your eye. Like, I really hate to pretty.

H: Ohhh it’s so shiny.

G: I hate to lean into that whole, like stereotypical ADHD like, ooh, shiny thing. But like the ooh, shiny thing, it works because people are like, I don't forget it. People have like a little stand. I've seen people who have it on a stand in their desk and it catches their eye because of the shiny and so…

H: I think you mean the shrine, right with candles.

G: Yes, yes, exactly. The spellbook thing. Exactly. But, you know, I wanted to have an elastic band so that it didn't fall apart if you put it in your backpack. I wanted to have tabs so it was easy to navigate. I wanted to have wire O binding so that you didn't have to hold it. God, I hate holding open softcover books. Oh my God, I can't write in those right?

H: Making their backs just so you can keep them open.

G: And that was one of those that goes back to that user experience of me planning through what are things that stop me from using something that I otherwise would. And that could be the best book in the world. But it is a soft cover and I am not going to write in it because the experience of writing in it is feels bad and I wanted to have thick paper so that if you colored the coloring pages with markers, it's not going to bleed through right. I wanted to have a pen loop on it so people who lose their writing utensils could kind of like have that there.

I had rounded corners were extra but I wanted it to not get like banged up. And when it either arrived for people wherever they were storing it. So there was a lot of thought that went into the user experience of what will make someone use this? What will make somebody love this? What will make someone come back to it again and again? Because it feels really good to interact with. Because again, we were talking about earlier, we quit stuff so easily and that this is something that you can use it once and you can forget about it for four months and then see it out of the corner of your eye and go, huh, I forgot I had that and grab it again. Because you don't have to use it every day to be successful.

But one of the things that keeps it out for people is the aesthetics of it. And these paper, flimsy paper, copies of it that were with the thinnest paper possible. You could literally see the next page through the page. It's like wax paper, one step up from wax paper. And they used, I had a mock up of the cover and they printed out my mockup of the cover so it looks like fake gold foil. But the reason why so many people thought that it was the real thing is they stole my image images from my website. So the images they're using are not images of their fake version. The images they were using were of my actual legit one.

H: Now, because this is such an important asset in your business and literally the most incredible labor of love built on genuine experience as a person with adhd. I'm thinking about all the ways that you've talked about creating this. It's really an experience. It's the Anti Planner, but it's more than that. It's a book, but it's not a book. It's that you were very intentionally. It's the physical embodiment of your need and desire to reduce fatigue and friction every time someone with ADHD is experiencing that dysregulated emotional state that stops them from doing the thing that they want to do.

So I'm totally sold on the value of it in all the different ways, but one of the numbers that you shared with me, I'm just like, oh shit. Like to protect something like this that's such an important brand asset and not from an imaginary threat. A real fucking threat, you are now paying more than if I got the number wrong, let me know. More than $40,000 a year to a service that does monitoring and takedown. That had to be maybe it felt like it was the obvious decision or the only choice you could make, but that's a lot of coin.

G: I'm like literally about to cry.

H: I'm sorry.

G: No, no, no, no, no, I'm not. It's just hearing, I am usually the one who says it out loud. So like I'm say not desensitized to it, but yeah, it is it. Sorry I cut you off.

H: Hey, it was two people with adhd. It was going to happen sooner or later, but and I think we've made it. Like we're pretty well into this and it's happened for the first time, so I'm not even going to edit. I think this is like, yeah, par for the course, but it's a lot of money and that had to be an important decision. How did you arrive at it and what does this monitoring and takedown service actually do for people who may be or will soon be in this very situation.

G: So the decision to do it was challenging because again, it is so expensive. You did get that number, right? It is over 10, it's like $10,500 a quarter and it was so hard because it took a while for it to even be like, actually, say, working. Because the service, it's called Marqvision, they use AI to scan the Internet for people using my images in their listings and so it kind of reversed Google Image searches. And then they submit claims to those websites to get those things taken down. Because to have someone do it physically by hand for how many there were would take so long, would cost so much and I have had, now it's been a year and a half-ish.

H: Walmart shoppers get your copy and I'll say they could do that.

G: It was on, you know, Temu, which I never bought anything on on Temu. It was on, you know, all of these websites that I then had to. There were so many on Amazon and because they used my it's called an ASIN number. It's like your Amazon barcode, essentially and people had it listed that they were selling a legit Anti Planner. And Amazon will always sell the cheapest version of whatever it is that they say is that same exact product. So it was the Anti Planner is now, it's $58 on full price and it was people were listing it for like $16. And so I don't blame people, you know, or 19.99. And I don't blame people for saying, you know, looking it and saying, okay, I definitely want this one. Because even if they wanted to buy my legit one from Amazon, they couldn't because that listing was stolen from me essentially. And so we had just been on Amazon for like two months before this happened.

So I didn't have that many reviews and then suddenly I had this giant wave of reviews. Negative 1 star reviews from people who were reviewing the scam copies. And it tanked my Amazon listing. I had like 5 stars, complete 5 star ratings across the board and it went down to like a 3.4. And I had been like, if you looked up adhd, I was on the first page. If you looked up planner, I was on like the second page. And it just tanked everything like it ruined my Amazon. Like I would say experience there and it's now it's back up to like 4.5, but you know, it's 4.9 on other platforms.

And my brain is like, I can't, we've reached out to them and they won't take down the 1 star reviews from these scam listings. And so people don't even realize that you can buy something from what looks like a legitimate listing and that you could get a fake product. Like, that's not even a thing that people realize can happen. I didn't know it could happen until it happened to me.

H: No. And I mean, dumb question alert, but you know, I noticed that you said that each time you went viral with a video, of course you got a dramatic influx of new orders. But that was also a signal to the counterfeiters that they could make a bunch more sales. So like, I don't know, did you ever think maybe I need to stop doing videos on, you know, TikTok?

G: It was such a huge sales channel that it's like it was one of the biggest ways that I was able to reach people. And so I actually like did not have the thought, like, maybe I'll stop making maybe I'll stop making videos. But I found like if ever I was having one that was taking off to the point that there was an increase in counterfeiters, it usually meant that I was making enough bank that it was, you know, it's fine, it's okay. And it will usually be like, okay, this is what's going to pay for the service to take down counterfeiters.

But it's like I get to pay $40,000 a year is more than I was making at like my first four jobs out of college right. And so it's very crazy kind of seeing that number and knowing that it's like I'm paying for the pleasure of someone else not making money off of my work and they don't care right. There's gotta be like no remorse from these companies and I used to just say overseas counterfeiters because I didn't want to assume that it was from China. But then once the Amazon listings started coming off, you can actually see where things are coming from.

And they were just it was one place in China there were all of these fake listings, but they were all selling the same fake product. And it's because one place made it and sold it on Alibaba and they sold them in bulk on Alibaba and people who were looking for cheap drop shipping things were just buying it. There might be people who bought it on Alibaba to drop ship who didn't realize that it was the fake version, I don't actually know. But like it was on this mass distribution thing of what's hot and if you hit the what's hot on anything, people are going to go in and grab your stuff.

And so, but people would see my product and they'd look for it elsewhere and see scrolling, scrolling, scrolling all of these different ones that were cheaper and going. Of course I'm going to go for the cheaper one. Especially if they look, if they look similar. And so they're just taking advantage of people. And again, it's the industry, it's the black, like underbelly, like the dark side of E commerce that I think people don't really talk about a lot but it's not just E commerce.

H: Well, to be fair, I mean, I almost feel like I don't really want to bring this up because it pales in comparison, but I am in the process of trademarking ADHD-ish, my podcast, ADHD-ish Method, my coaching program. And because I never really thought I needed to do that, it just didn't feel like, you know, oh, my little old business doesn't require something like that. Until one of my clients said, hey, by the way, did you notice that somebody else has started a program for ADHD entrepreneurs called ADHD-ish? And I was like, what? No, I didn't know and so it's a different experience.

That's brand identity theft and the trademark process will take care of it. But I really had to think about, do I want to share this with my audience now as a result of this conversation, they're kind of hearing about it, but you had to talk about it. So when you think about like brand identity theft versus copy I mean, I guess one's more of a copycat and the other's more of a counterfeit. Does it feel like the same problem to you or a different one? And I'm not, not saying because they're a different scale. But does your brain think of those as two different things or similar things?

G: It's hard to say because again, one of them is like intellectual. I mean, they're both like forms of intellectual property theft right. And that people, a lot of people don't look at intellectual property as property. They're like, oh, whatever, you know, say not whatever, who cares? But again, I've gone through the trademarks are expensive also, I've had to trademark stuff and I had to get a trademark in China because apparently in China, whoever files for trademark first gets it, whether or not you actually own the stuff.

Anyways, to answer your question, I think that it's similar, but definitely slightly different because it's like I don't have someone who is calling themselves the Anti Planner and putting out their own content under that name. I have somebody who's ripping off the same product as me and using my actual stuff. But I have five star reviews on my Amazon and on my website from people who are reviewing scam copies and they go, this thing is full of typos, but I don't care, the content is so good, I'm leaving a five star anyways like, I have gotten five star reviews.

Tons, actually tons of five star reviews of people who still got scam copies, but it goes to show that like, at least. And to me, the way I've had to reframe that is at least there are people who couldn't afford a regular version and who are finding this valuable, I don't love that. But like, ultimately I cannot offer this at at a $20 price. I cannot offer this at that. But that is still containing they're stealing like my ideas, but they're at least packaging it where some of it is the same.

I think if somebody were to take the Anti Planner name and put out content, especially like put out any kind of content, and then people saw it and confused it with me, especially if they were used to seeing my stuff. And it's that confusion where trademarks come in, where people are publishing things and they think that you did it, but it was somebody else and they're trying to pass it off as original. And that I think is where that difficulty lies because I can't I have not had someone who has put out Anti Planner content and tried to make it seem like their own thing.

But other people will think, well, wait a minute, this person seems to be doing pretty well, so I'll just use theirs like, no, I think not. Now we have our experiences, painful, traumatizing, and expensive to resolve. But what do you think most entrepreneurial folks with ADHD are missing when it comes to protecting what they've built? Whether it's knowledge like their intellectual property, their bandwidth, or something else? What is it that most people are just like, wow, that never occurred to me, but whatever.

G: Copyright your stuff. Starting with a copyright, like, that is the thing that I feel very fortunate that I had actually a writer who reached out to me when my first ADHD comics were going on. His name is Steve Piha, I have not talked to him in forever, but he DMed me and was like, you should make a website with a newsletter immediately and you should copyright your stuff and here's how you do it. He reached out and was like, here's the little thing, right? Because it was like, there's not many steps and also here's how much it costs, because it wasn't that much, all things considered and so I went and did it for my ADHD comics.

And so one of the things was like, at the time, I didn't have trademark for Anti Planner, but I had my and I had copyright stuff for it, but I had copyright stuff for all my comics. And I have comics in there and so I think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs who don't think about taking legal steps to protect themselves because you're so focused on what's in front of you and just like, making sure that you've got enough money to put food on the table that spending money on something that may or may not happen preemptively.

H: Well, that might not happen.

G: Yes, and you don't need it. Same thing with insurance, you don't need it until you need it. And so it's one of those things where if you are if somebody stealing your name or somebody stealing your work would, like, completely screw with your business model, I mean, it's definitely was it worth it when even though it doesn't feel like because then you get to, then you keep it right? Like, you get to have it, and you've got legal protections if somebody is taking towards it to either cease and desist or to go after them for, like, penalties. And I think that I didn't take it seriously because I was so I was in a weird position because I'm so used to people ripping off my work online and chopping off my footers.

And because the Internet's the wild west, and I create Internet content, and Internet content is. It gets stolen and repurposed and written over the top of, and all of this stuff. And that bothered me so much for so long because so often things were making the front page of Reddit and had no attribution to me, didn't point anybody back to my site, and I had to choose kind of to, like, get over that, or I'd be mad all of the time. But something like this where it's like, genuinely impacting your business, genuinely emotionally, it's also, like, emotionally upsetting. I'm sure that you kind of went through that same thing where it's just like, find that out. It's just like, devastating that somebody could do that without remorse.

H: Or justify it I mean, maybe they're like, well, I feel bad. Well, I mean, I couldn't possibly know what this person is thinking. And now there's more than one, but I couldn't possibly know what they're thinking or what they're feeling. But what I do know is that they were able to justify it. It's kind of like when someone says, oh, I feel really bad about this, but and then they go ahead and do it anyway. Yeah, I really, I really, I really had to think long and hard about whether it was okay, but at the end, I decided to go for it. It's like, I'm really glad that you were able to get over your negative feelings and continue to be an asshole.

But, yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about the rejection sensitivity aspect. Because when I know you sigh of recognition. Because when this happened, I mean, first of all, yes, you were personally targeted even though they don't know you personally. Your ability to earn a living from the work that you do deeply impacted, put you in hot water with your audience. You really didn't have a decision whether to go public with. You had to defend yourself. And yet this crisis happened in the midst of you continuing to run a business. It's not like you could say, okay, I'm gonna set my business aside.

G: That's what I did. That's what I literally had to do, which was crazy, is like, I had to. We had stuff that we were working on, right? We had projects and initiatives, and everything just came grinding to a halt because this was impacting everything. We were bleeding, and it was we were bleeding on some things. And then the website sales were still going up, right like, we did have the TikTok thing. And then it kind of after that, I found out it was because they were running ads with my video, with my face. They stole my video and were running ads on Facebook because I had people who were like, I bought your who were emailing in and bought the book. And they were like, oh, I saw an advert on Facebook. I'm like, I'm not running ads on Facebook.

H: That is diabolical right.

G: We did see, like, a sustained thing. So part of me was like, the people with critical thinking skills who. They said, I went to the website, I clicked on it. I went to the website, the website looked sketchy. So then I looked it up and I found your website right? And so I did, I did get some sales that trickled in from their diabolical, you know, advertising kind of thing but sorry to bring it back. You said something right before I kind of went into that oh, that having to tell people about it. And the business kind of grinding to a halt. And so we had, you know, I was pulling my operations people and my tech people and trying to like media to get bandage.

The hemorrhaging that was happening because my stuff wasn't standing out. People weren't clicking on my stuff on these marketplaces because there was too much competition. And again, there were all these things. So until we got MarqVision onboarded, and even after that, we're feeling customer service emails and we're having to figure out a pop up on the website to tell people about, hey, look out for scam copies. To this day, the top of my TikTok bio says watch out for Anti Planner or beware of Anti Planner scams.

And so it ended up becoming this big thing where I had to like warn people. And then I did have another viral video, actually like my second Anti Planner viral video that took off that was about the counterfeiters because it was around the holidays and I had someone on my team who I was talking to about what was going on because we couldn't keep up because people were wanting to buy it for Christmas and it was too, you know, other people were like, there are some people who knowingly buy the scam copy also.

A lot of those people can't afford it and need to justify it to themselves and it is what it is, I can't help that. But I was talking to them on a call and I was talking about how it felt violating and I started crying and they were like, tell people, tell people about how this is impacting you. So I set my phone down and I just hit record and started talking about it and I started tearing up by the end of it, like genuinely like my voice is like breaking and I'm like, I don't like being that person that's just like I'm gonna cry on the Internet and overlaid it with some videos of what was going on. And I told people like I pay the people on my team well and people don't realize how expensive shipping is.

People, I can't keep up, and I showed the side by side comparison of here's they stole, scanned all my illustrations, they stole all my content, they used Comic Sans for the thing. I sort of like went into it and described it and that took off. And like you had said before, where it's like anybody who's a this was not just reaching people who had adhd. Business owners, small business owners, independent creators, people who are writers, people who are artists. Like this was the content that, that burst right out of my ADHD and found itself with entrepreneurs.

H: Well, I mean your business apart from the Anti Planner runs on a combination of creative energy and hyper focus.

G: Yes.

H: And so there's no freaking way that you could just be kind of managing this crisis on the side while continuing to be creative and focused. It had to be, you know, stop the hemorrhage, all hands on deck and when you could move back into it. And obviously it's still not over, it's not like you can say, whew, that was rough, I'm glad that's over. You still have to pin it at the beginning of TikTok because someone coming into your like, I mean, new people will be exposed to you through this interview hopefully. So there'll be people who never heard of you, never heard of the Anti Planner, gonna start following you on TikTok and it's gonna be right there. So this is going to be a part of your reality probably from here on out and you've learned so, I mean, so much knowledge that you never wanted to acquire.

G: Yes.

H: Because but if you were starting over, let's say you were even before you even created this gorgeous girl, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? And when would you do it differently? If you would do anything differently.

G: I didn't think that this would, I didn't even conceptualize that this could happen without me putting the digital version online right. So I would say I underestimate it, how hard people would be willing to work to steal stuff because again, they retyped a 328 page book. So I underestimated that and didn't even think about Chinese counterfeiters because if I would have had a Chinese trademark, I'd be able to absolutely make legal moves in a way that I am not able to get sort of retribution for that kind of stuff. And being able to be aware, other than saying filing for Chinese copyright, there's not a whole lot that I could have done differently because I'm glad that that viral TikTok took off right.

And I am happy that I hate to say, like this crisis did lead to me having another viral video that led to a ton of brand recognition. And so I think and not having the digital version online, I'd like to go back and you know, and pat myself on the back. I did think about people stealing my stuff enough to not have a digital version like that, but to understand that people could, if I told that story and people could connect and like educate with people. I'm like, I don't want to come on here and just like pity party, you should give me money because I'm struggling. I need to tell you guys that this is what's happening and it's really hard and that people connected with that.

And I almost didn't tell that story right. If someone on my team hadn't mentioned, you should film yourself raw talking about this, I might not have had that idea. So I would say that, like, going and realizing that, like, I could have talked about it sooner. This started happening in, I think, July or August, and I didn't make that video till November. So I wish that I would have been, I was talking about that there was scam copies and to beware, and if you get a scam copy, here's what you do. But I was not talking about the impact that that was having on me. And I am someone who shares my story, I'm someone who shares my lived experience.

And I was hiding from people because I didn't want. I was afraid of having this whole, like, oh, woe is me kind of attitude. But the reality is, every time I've been facing business challenges that are outside of my control and I come up and I tell people about it, the community is so supportive. And again, it goes beyond just that instant who are already who are the people who are already following me. And I had, you know, underestimated the power of that entrepreneur community as well, and that solidarity that I think we feel with each other.

H: I think one of the most popular, most frequently downloaded of my podcast episodes is the one where I spilled the tea on a failed launch. And I cannot believe the number of people, I didn't even know they were listening or people that had been shared with and they reached out. And, you know, the thing is, is that oftentimes when something bad happens to us, we somehow feel responsible for it. It's like, like, well, I didn't even know something like that could happen. Why would you, you're not devious like, who would think of taking out a copyright in China, for crying out loud?

Like, you know, but yet we somehow think, and I see this so much with other folks with adhd, we really hold ourselves to a very unreasonable standard. I refer to it as having ridiculous expectations of ourself or because why would you know? Why the hell would you know that? And why would you even think my stuff is so good that people would spend an enormous amount of energy and time to copy it? You're a creative person, everybody's creative, right? No, they're not. In fact, I think there's a lot of creative envy out there. And this is the work of people with creative envy, people who don't know how to create their own stuff, so the only way they can make money is to rip off other people's stuff.

So yeah, you didn't know, why would you have? It's clearly been an empowering experience and one that the former therapist in me would say, this is what I call post traumatic growth. You're not glad it happened. You're not grateful for it. You wouldn't wish it on someone you dislike intensely. But it was an incredibly empowering experience because you were able to master it. Yes, it's expensive. You lost your innocence right. But you know what? Look at how many people have now been informed. How many people are going to listen to this and be informed that you do need to take this seriously.

Your time and talent, your creativity, your thought leadership, your expertise is valuable enough for other people to steal. There's one more question I just have to ask you. You mentioned offhand that when you priced your pre orders, you were thinking, I don't know, maybe 500 or a thousand people are going to buy this in the initial pre order. But didn't you get like 40,000 or more orders, like completely like 10x what you expected? I have a feeling that you didn't go 40x.

G: 40 or 80x.

H: Listen girl, I'm not good at math and but you're absolutely right. So that's not kind of experience where you go, okay, well we better gird our loins and you know, power up the printing presses. I'm sure the story didn't end with and then everything went smoothly from there, right?

G: Yeah. No, no, no, no. I will say with you mentioning the like high expectations that we hold ourselves to. I had like a version that I was making and then once I saw how many people were pre ordering it, I was like, I have to make this the coolest thing I am possibly capable of making. So it added that extra pressure on top of everything of knowing how well it could do. Did actually crank up the quality level because I was like, oh, this is gonna go, this is gonna go places. This isn't just like a little pet project but it did start as a pet project. But there were so many other challenges beyond just the counterfeiters that grew out of me scaling way too fast.

H: Yeah. And you know, honestly, that's another, I mean, that's another thing that most entrepreneurs don't think about and don't think it's gonna happen to them. Nobody's anticipating counterfeiters or brand ripoff artists, but they're also never expecting to have the problem of scaling too fast. And I have a feeling that this is a juicy enough story that instead of trying to keep cramming in at the end of this already fascinating and important conversation, do you think I could convince you to come back and talk about what happens when you scale too fast?

G: Oh, my God, no. I hate talking about myself and my products.

H: I hate talking to you, obviously.

G: I do not like talking. This is so, I'm going to go upstairs and complain. No, this is absolutely. Yeah, no, this is wonderful, I would love to come back.

H: Okay, fabulous, we will absolutely do that. Because I think the things that we don't expect to happen, we don't prepare for. And then when they do happen, even if we manage to rise to the challenge and master the situation, oftentimes we're still thinking, why didn't I expect that? So it's like, there's no winning, you know, we are relentless bullies of our own brain. So we will absolutely have you come back and talk about what happens and what actually breaks in your business and your brain when things go better than expected and you scale too fast.