Editing The Pen Addict 180/transcript (section)

== Inspiration ==


'''Adam Kornfield:''' And that kind of rolled in. The inspiration, I can tell, is a big deal for you, Joey, specifically. And that kind of rolled into the manifesto, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. I love positive messages. I was always like that guy who was like, everybody was cringing when they saw one of those inspirational posters. And I was like, I got to have it. It's awesome.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Adam, does Joey ever bring you any ideas where you just like sending back to his corner and just like go sit over there and chill out for a minute?

'''James:''' Heck yeah. All the time. I mean, I think that's one of the things that Joey and I work well together at that. A lot of times we'll come up with different ideas. And one guy will look at the other guy and be like, man, no way. I'll say things to him sometimes like, Joe, I think we should be doing this. And he'll be like, no way, man. And I'll, you know, we'll keep talking about it. And then maybe over might be a week. It might be a day. It might be three months. We come to a conclusion one way or the other. Joey, the same thing. Some days we'll come in and be like, I think we should be doing this. And I'm like, sometimes I'm like, wow, that's a great idea. Let's do that. Other times I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, no, hey, we're not doing that. Go home.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah. Well, I'm sure there wasn't much of a fight, though, on this planner, though. The planner that came out looks really, really good. So you've done, for the first time, you have a planner ready for 2016. It's a special edition confidant. How did that come to be?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's a good story. Actually, I believe James was the inspiration to that. So we have two new guys here, James and Jay. James, do you want to come over here?

'''James:''' Are we allowed to bring our own special guest on real quick?

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Yeah, bring James. James is my email buddy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' James does all of the social media, all of the emails. He's basically, if you're talking to Baron Fig, you're talking to James now. It used to be me. So James was getting a lot of emails, apparently, about the planners. Do you remember, James, how that went?

'''Joey Caffone:''' So like every day I'd get an email. You guys should do a planner. Or you should do a planner. Or when are you guys going to do a planner? We just got bombarded. It was pretty much the same thing, but it was just from multiple different people. So I was talking to Joey. And Joey said, OK, we need to do it. But we had a limited time frame from a production standpoint. So we needed to design it like in a day.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, we did the whole thing.

'''Joey Caffone:''' Was it a day? It was like a day to three. It was like three days. And Joey's like, I don't even know what's in a planner. So I had to go on a scavenger hunt and find planners. All right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I was like, all right, James, if you want to do a planner, like I've never personally used one. So go out and get as many planners as you can find. And we need to learn everything we can about planners in a day. A day. So we did. And I sat there quietly and just kind of broke down the design of, I don't know, a dozen planners and then pieced it back together into something I thought made sense into what you've got now on the site, the 2016 planner, which I'm super proud of, actually.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' So that this is really interesting because do you think back in the beginning, like from the Kickstarter time and the time you're launching the website, do you think you could iterate on a product that fast?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Um, it, no, I think that, what is the phrase where, uh, intense times called for intense actions or whatever it is.

'''James:''' I mean, the planner, the planner was one of these strange ones where I think once James said it, like, Hey guys, we should do a planner. We all kind of looked at each other. It wasn't something we all kind of looked at. We're like, yeah, let's do a planner. And then we all looked at Joey. It's like, Joey, you ready to start doing some design? Yeah.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' Cause you, this is a time sensitive, uh, item for sure. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. And we were just going into a production run and it was basically like we have four days to do it. Uh, otherwise we wouldn't be able to do it for another year. So we all sold. And that was the focus for those four days.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' That's amazing. That's yellow. This one's blowing my mind. And so I, I, I want to, I want to keep getting my mind blown and talk about this pin that y'all are making. But first we want to talk about our good friends and your good friends at Squarespace.

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'''Adam Kornfield:''' So you guys have the analog tools are on lockdown. Y'all are nailing all the paper goods. Your digital tools are going well. You got the note-taking tool, the inspiration tool. And now an input device has to be next on the ledger, right? I mean, you have to make a pen, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, yeah.

'''Adam Kornfield:''' So how did the Squire, so the name is the Squire. This is a pen y'all are going to be launching on Kickstarter on, what, November 10th. Tell us about how the pen design came about, how the name came about. Tell us everything about the pen. Everyone wants to know.

'''James:''' So, I mean, obviously we make notebooks, right? And in notebooks, you have to do something with it. You can look at it, but it's not as much fun. So tons of questions. What do we recommend? What's a great pen to pair with it? You know, fortunately, a lot of pens work pretty well with our paper, and we gave out a number of recommendations over time. But always in the back of our mind from day one, like Joey started saying, we knew we wanted to make a pen. And that was always part of our game plan of what to do. So, wow, we want to do everything at once. Things have to go step by step. So finally, how long ago did we start planning this pen?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' 14 months ago.

'''James:''' 14 months ago. So this has been under development for quite some time now.