Dear Lovely Simplerista,
This week saw the deployment of our new marketing site at http://simplero.com. Check it out! We hope you'll like it.
And of course, we're always open to more testimonials, so if you'd like to be featured along with the other lovely people here, please email me back with a quote, your title, your website URL, and a good headshot, and we'll get you on there.
A big thank you to all who are already there! Most of those testimonials are words that came spontaneously in conversation, and we asked permission to quote them. So it's very natural and organic, which I love.
We got the US trademark ... woot!
And yesterday, our trademark for Simplero in the US was registered, so we can now saw Simplero® (we got the trademark in Denmark back in April). Yay! It feels great to know that we have the name secured and won't have to change it again.
Back when I created my first LLC, I chose the name "Fearless Entrepreneurs LLC" because I wanted to focus on the spiritual entrepreneurship teaching side of my business, and I thought that "fearless" was a cool way to encapsulate the spiritual part without saying spiritual (love vs. fear, and all that). But within weeks I got an email from someone in the same office as mine (The Hub on Mission St. in San Francisco), that they had the trademark for Fearless Entrepreneur singular, and I'd have to change it. Bummer. I never even thought of checking for trademarks. The domain was available, what more could be necessary, right. (Seems like some internet marketers have snatched it now and are apparently getting away with it.)
I then decided to focus Simplero instead, which at the time was called zenbilling. So I changed the name of my LLC to zenbilling LLC, only to get nasty letters from zendesk about infringing on their trademark, in their preparations to go public. It seemed ridiculous, given that I'd known their CEO for 13 years, we weren't in the same business, I was only using the "zen" part of their trademark, and there are plenty of other products with "zen" in them (including "zencoder" which we use) that they didn't go after, but since I wanted to change the name of my product anyway, I decided to do that instead.
I got a hold of my numerologist (I'd link to her, but her site is down), I added domain search to my calculator, and I started looking for a good new name for the service, and officially changed the name on December 3, 2013. We immediately applied for a trademark, and that is what was officially granted yesterday.
No more being forced to change names!
Stability FTW!
Keep the interviews coming
Did three more interviews this week, and it seems like everyone's loving it.
If you'd like to do an interview with me, or if you know of a podcast or other show that you think should interview me, please hook me up.
Thank
New features in Simplero
With the new design also came an update to the way your public pages look. The login screen is very different, and, if you ask me, way prettier. After having been looking and looking and looking for years, I've finally found a designer that I really enjoy working with, that understands how to design for the complexities of an app like Simplero, and who has great taste, and a great product and tech mind as well. Such a pleasure to work with him. So expect more design tweaks in the future, as we continue to work together.
One issue that a number of people have been having are the menus in spaces.
The space menu was never intended to go beyond what can fit in a single row of items. If you need more (which most people do), you can group them under a common header and make a hierarchy. You can go up to five levels deep, and we'll show the first three levels in the menu via drop-downs, so there should be plenty of room to add all the modules and content and other pages you'd like in there.
But since people were often adding more items than would fit, we made the new design so it expands cleanly and beautifully to two rows. But if you go beyond two rows, it's not quite as pretty, although I just now made the background color behind the menu expand past the two rows.
My suggestion is still to try and consolidate things into a single row of menu items.
Here's a video showing what I mean and how to do it.
Since recording it, I did change it so the background color behind the menu expands to more than 2 rows. But still, try to limit yourself, for the sake of your customers :)
And while recording the video, I noticed a bunch of little things that were either broken or confusing in our interface for reordering pages within a space, so I fixed a bunch of those. So if you've been feeling frustrated with moving pages around in a space, chances are it works way better now.
Random links from around the interwebs
Jason Kottke has linked to the story about the day they changed the distance between rail tracks in the southern United States from 5 feet to the northern standard of 4 feet 9 inches. It was all carefully planned and orchestrated, and then completely changed over in two days in 1886. I was going to say that I doubt our current US government would be capable of completing such an operation, given that construction on Houston Street seems to have been going on for four years now. But then I realized, the railroads weren't owned by the government.
I also love this story about a Chinese carrier that offers on-the-spot pocket enhancement with the purchase of an iPhone 6plus. Speaking of, I tried one for a week, and returned it. It was just too big. I was always afraid of dropping it as I was trying to use it one-handed on the street. Not good. The iPhone 6 is perfect.
And finally a story about Amazon. I love Amazon. I live in a doorman building, and I get everything from toilet paper to guitars delivered, mostly from Amazon because it's just so darn convenient: 1 click and you know you'll get a reasonably good price and your item delivered no more than two days later. But they have monopoly (or monopsony) power, and that's a real problem. Paul Krugman has more.
That's it for today.
Have an amazing week!
With love,
-Calvin