A Soggy Saturday Email

Hey friend,

Howdy, this week you get a Saturday newsletter — the basement in our house in Atlanta flooded Thursday (stop me if you’ve heard this one before… this is the second time in 3 months we’ve had a basement flood) and thus my workday went up in flames. Or down the drain? Technically out the sump pump.

Either way, the silver lining of our very wet and muddy day was that in the midst of wading through basement water, I got a Slack message from our ace Customer Support/Jr Developer, Abi, saying that she had a demo ready for me of a new plugin she’s been working on.

This was really exciting for me, partially because the plugin she built is really cool, but even more so because the business continued to run and grow, even on a day when I was totally out of commission and couldn’t even manage to open my computer.

One of my business mentors, Barney, told me a long time ago that if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying — there’s no such thing as standing still (the same goes for our relationships, but that’s a different email). This is something that I’ve found to be relatively true… whenever I was pulled away from work I’d come back to an inbox full of people needing things. Basically, anytime I wasn’t actively working, I not only felt like growth was stagnating but was going backward. It was leading to burnout. If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance that you’ve experienced something similar.

Now, there are a lot of ways to grow a business, and a lot of them don’t involve hiring other people. You can raise your prices, build some automated revenue streams, or (as my wife would remind me) you can even grow your own ability to set healthy work/life boundaries and create the same output but with working LESS. There are tons of ways to grow your business without hiring more people.

But for us, we decided that in order to grow our business the way we wanted, we had to have responsive, timely, and high-touch customer support. We wanted our customers' interactions with us to feel human, and we felt the best way we could consistently provide that experience was by adding more humans to the team. And so, about a year and a half ago, we hired Abi.

Thursday, when I sent my soggy “SOS, I’m out for the day,” Slack message and she responded by letting me know everything would be handled and even progress was being made on new plugins, it made me smile. I was reminded all over again how grateful I am to have team members to pick up the slack and keep things moving when my (metaphorical or literal) basement floods.

(Thanks Abi)

Keep building and keep growing,

Will

PS Our customer support team is growing, but I’ll save the official announcement for another email.

Plugins

No new plugins (hopefully next newsletter), but we’ve made some updates to the List Section Sync plugin that now allow you to filter by featured products & blogs or by specific categories, as well as items from a portfolio collection.

VIEW PLUGIN

Mini Course for Code Curious Members: Cycling Site Subtitles

I recently released a new snippet in the Code Catalogue (members only) that adds a subtitle to your site logo or site title. The fun little twist though is that it can update to a different subtitle every time a user hovers over it.

This was a really fun one to build, so I re-built it from scratch and recorded my process along the way so that you can follow along. If you’re a Code Curious member and you’re interested in learning more about building components in Squarespace that integrate HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I’d highly recommend checking out this mini-course. Or, of course, you can just use the grab-n-go code provided in the Code Catalogue.

Not a member yet? Check out my Code Curious membership.

VIEW MINI COURSE

Podcast: Somewhat Useful

New episodes out now:

Episode 12:
Working with outside experts & 3 tips on collaboration with special guest Henry Purchase from SEOSpace

Episode 13:
Working with your spouse, the value of the Circle forum, and special guests Nick & Hannah from Squarekicker

Subscribe on:
Apple Podcast | Spotify | Everywhere Else

Big thanks to SEOSpace, the SEO Plugin for Squarespace, for sponsoring this season.

Code Curious

Code Curious is my membership for professional Squarespace designers. As a member, you get exclusive access to the Code Catalogue (with over 100 copy-and-paste code snippets), the Targeting Library (over 270 Squarespace CSS Selectors), and exclusive tutorials.

$15 / mo.

Unlimited use on client projects.
Cancel anytime.

Sign Up