Editing The Pen Addict 94/transcript (section)

== Squarespace Sponsorship ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Very good at those. I enjoy those. So I want to take a moment to thank our friends over at Squarespace for bringing this episode to you. Squarespace, they are the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own website for a free trial and 10% off. Go to squarespace.com and use the offer code Tallyho2. Brad, are you still there? You probably muted yourself to take, to take a quick drink. Yep. I want to talk to you this week about Squarespace, if that's okay. And I didn't tell you that I was going to do this because people have heard me talk about how Squarespace were always updating their platform with new features, new designs, and more support. How they have beautiful templates that you can get started with. It's all drag and drop. They have 70 dedicated employees on their customer care team. They have robot responsive web design all built into all of their templates. You can do loads of stuff. But I want to talk about e-commerce because I was talking about this on Command Space this week with Brett Terpstra and he kind of mentioned it. And I said that you'd spoken, you know, me and you had spoken about this. People have heard it on the show in the past. But you're going to use Squarespace Commerce for NotCo, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Yeah. And I actually listened to that episode with you and Brett last night. So I did hear you talk about that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So you're going to go ahead and use, when the time comes to open a store, you're going to use Squarespace Commerce. Why did you decide to go with Squarespace Commerce?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, basically, it seemed the simplest with the most tools available, I guess, if you will. It had everything that we needed, that I felt we needed to build the shop. You know, it's got, it had inventory management. It's had, you know, different ways of presenting the products with multiple products. And, you know, for something like us, where we're having to choose different colors and different sizes, it's all just, it seemed really easy to put together. And then, even since we've chosen to go with that, they've added on additional things like having more shipping integration and having more accounting integration, which is all stuff that I don't have experience with. So having them kind of lead the way and point me to the right tools I need to, you know, to set this shop up and have it be successful and, you know, not cause me headaches on the back end, really. And that's what it's mostly about. I think all of the front end stuff, you know, obviously looks great. And that's probably the things you see the least as a consumer. But for someone who's actually using it, all the back end tools that you have, I think that's what, that's kind of what set it apart for me in looking and shopping around and trying to pick and choose which e-commerce platform are we going to go with.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Thanks for that, buddy. Sure. Squarespace Commerce, as Brad said, it's the system you can plug right in. It's the system you can plug right into any Squarespace site to allow you to natively and easily sell physical or digital goods. A great new thing about Squarespace Commerce is it's now available to everybody across all plans. It used to be only on their business plan. Now, if you want to set up a shop and sell things in just minutes, you can do that on any Squarespace plan.

'''Myke Hurley:''' As I said earlier, you can try out Squarespace for free. There's no credit card required to do so. Now, if you decide to sign up, it starts at just $8 a month and includes a domain name if you sign up for a year or more. Make sure that you get 10% off and support the show by using the offer code TALLYHO2. And just one last thing. If you are an engineer or a designer, well, Squarespace are currently looking to hire 30 of you by March 15th. This means that they're going to be bringing potential candidates and their spouses to be New Yorkers for a weekend completely on them. So if you want to hang out with the crew over at Squarespace and have an opportunity to take a really awesome job, go over to beapartofit.squarespace.com. Thanks so much to Squarespace for supporting 5x5 and The Pen Addict. Thanks for helping out there, buddy. Sorry to drop that on you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, you dropped that on me out of the blue. That was unplanned, but I was ready for it because they make it easy. And actually, we'll do this again here in a couple months once we actually do go live and I'll have more time to dig into the nuts and bolts of the commerce platform.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Me and Stephen were playing around with it. He had a bunch of prompt stickers that he wanted to sell. So he set up a store last night, which was open for a few hours until we ran out. And it was so easy. Yeah. We got an email every time anybody sold one. And the email had all of the information that you needed. So we could basically create the shipping information and labels and stuff. And it would do things like we put in the amount of stock that we had, the inventory. Right. And it would email you alerts as we were running down. Be like, oh, you only have three of these left. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's important for us where we're not selling a digital good that has infinite purchases available. We're selling pen cases that there might only be 50 of and you need to track those things. So yeah, we're excited about getting it going.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And it's like super easy to restrict countries because obviously to keep the cost down, we were only shipping to the US and the UK because I had a few here too. Right. So we're able to just from like a list, just select the countries that we wanted. And then you don't end up losing out on, you know, somebody from out of Mongolia wants a sticker and then we're paying like $20 and you've just blown all of the money from the rest of the stickers.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Right. So yeah, I really look forward to getting that going for more reasons than just testing out the Squarespace commerce platform. Good stuff. Yeah. So I want to touch on the pen blog of the week real quick before I get into them. Yeah. I like that we're doing this. This site is called Blystift.

'''Myke Hurley:''' No, I just meant that we're doing this. This site is cool, but I just think it's cool that we keep doing this. I think it's nice.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I do too. We've done it two or three times and we've gotten really good feedback on it. I'm real happy with being able to spread the love around, if you will. But Blystift is a gentleman named Matthias. Do you know what Blystift means, Myke? It's German for? Lead pen. Lead pen. Yeah. So I actually had to look that up.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I cheated. Sorry.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It's German for Rotterfaden Toschenbegleiter.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But no, back when I first stumbled across the blog, I did have to look it up. I was like, what does this mean? So I knew a long time ago, it's German for pencil, essentially. And Matthias does a great job of really digging into different pencil reviews. And recently he got what made me want to point out this week. And I always feature him in Inklinks because he does such a great job. And he always tells me thanks every week. I put him in there. He always sends me a comment. He's like, oh, thank you so much for putting in the link. He seems like a really nice guy. But there's this project that Pelican started. I don't know exactly when it started. You'll have to read about it in Matthias' post. But it's called the Pelican Wanderlust Project. And they're basically sending this box of Pelican products around the world. And he was one of the ones to receive it. So he goes through what all is contained in the box. And he does like an ink review. The ink comes with it. And he's supposed to do certain things, testing the inks, writing letters, and things like that. So definitely y'all check this out. And not just for this post, but for all of his posts that he does. He does some really great photography. Does some really interesting posts about pencils and finding different pencils and hard-to-find pencils and things like that. And like a lot of the guys that do the pencil blogs, every time I read them, I always want to get more into pencils. So that's on my list. The who knows maybe list. But I find it fascinating to read about. So thank you, Matthias and Blystift, for being awesome. And I call it the pen blog of the week. But this time it's a pencil blog of the week. So definitely check him out.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, Myke. You ready?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Ready.