Cheers Lovely Simplerista,

This week, Mandi is on vacation, and I'm taking care of Simplero customer service for the week. It's a great reminder of how valuable (and fun) it can be to talk directly to you, the customers.

One of the things I enjoy the most is when a customer comes to me with a struggle, and I'm able to come up with a simple solution that I can implement right away to solve it, not just for one person, but for all customers present and future. It's how Simplero has come to include little genius tweaks and smart shortcuts to make your daily life using Simplero easier and more enjoyable.

And it feels great to be able to do that.

Talking to my coaching clients inspires me too in my writing, videos, and my life. They help me reconnect with my mission and purpose.

On top of this, Raegan just started as our Head of Marketing and Sales, and she's been busy talking to a bunch of you too.

Talking to people, especially your customers, has so many benefits. You build relationships, you gain a better understanding of your audience, and you see their problems.

What I like the most about it is how my brain will automatically start to brainstorm things I could do to help people out and improve the situation. That's the kind of thing that happens when you immerse yourself. You start to think about it in the shower.

When I restarted my coaching business last year, I was actually really scared of this. I didn't even know if I wanted to work with people one-on-one. But I offered some free sessions to people as market research, and I'm glad I did. I ended up loving it, and now one-on-one is actually the only form of coaching I do. In the future, I want to add some group programs, but right now I really love interacting with my clients and feel privileged to work with them.

So if it's been a while since you've really connected with your customers, do yourself a favor and do it now. You can reach out and ask to meet them on Skype or over the phone. I recommend adding video and audio to the conversation, because it adds a personal touch versus boring text, or even audio-only. But however you do it, make sure you connect and learn from the experience.

New Features in Simplero

We've made a lot of improvements to our video delivery, so it should now be better and sharper than ever. We're still working on a new CDN, which should make it even faster.

We've simplified the HTML code that Simplero produces for your opt-in forms (List > Signup forms > Embedded), which should make it easier and more robust when used with other systems that don't properly adhere to HTML standards.

Lots of minor improvements happened this week as well. I'm counting a total of 73 commits in the past week, and that's just on the master production branch (nerd talk).

Random Links from around the Interwebs

Gary Vaynerchuk on meditation as the next big business wave.

Minimum wage and automation.

Why Netflix couldn't happen today.

With love,
–Calvin