From: Calvin from Simplero <calvin@simplero.com>
Subject: Horses, self-acceptance, and lots of new features in Simplero

Hi Lovely Simplerista,

This past week has been real quiet on the blog, because ... well, first I had one of those shame-attacks, and then because I've been at a workshop with Wyatt Webb at Miraval (that's him on the right).

Have you ever had a shame-attack? Something happens, and then it's like a downward spiral starts, and before you know it, you're the worst person to have ever walked the face of the earth. Not just bad. The worst. I was the worst entrepreneur ever, I couldn't get my shit together, I couldn't do anything right, and I was fucking fat, too. In my mind.

I find that when these things happen, the content is really irrelevant. It'll be the same-old-same-old stuff, and it'll start in one area, and then quickly move into all sorts of other areas. Thankfully, by now I know that it's all bullshit, but it still can take a while to get out of the funk.

What I did was load up the audio version of Tara Brach's book Radical Self-Acceptance, a book that I first read in 2007 or 2008, and I just went for an aimless stroll around the East Village, and I actually really enjoyed myself, discovering new streets and shops. Then about an hour into it, a friend from San Francisco texted, and we agreed to meet up for lunch and a museum, and before I knew it, the funk was gone.

When we were in India, I'd do TV series and Domino's Pizza, and it would take about two days. I'm getting better at it :)

I think especially as entrepreneurs, we're prone to these things. It can be a lonely and challenging journey.

Wyatt's been incredible. It's a group therapy workshop with Wyatt and his horses as facilitators. Groups are fascinating. The amount of work you can get done in a group is just amazing, since insights and revelations just keep bouncing around from participant to participant. And then it's good practice for me to get out of my "outsider" habit. If you ever get a chance of something like that, jump at it.

New features in Simplero

On Friday we launched three fairly new features, both big and small:

  • A redesign of the public pages and spaces to make them flatter, more modern, and most of all, more mobile-friendly. On mobile (phones, tablets in portrait mode), the menu is replaced with what's called a "hamburger menu" on the right. This three-bar menu that you click and it opens up a menu that comes in from the side of the page. Check it out. You can also just make your browser window smaller to trigger it.
  • The ability to upload logo and icon for your account, which will be used on invoices for now, and later on other things. We encourage you to upload right away if you have them. They're under Settings > Your public site.
  • And the ability to pause/resume/reschedule auto-responder sequences for each individual subscriber or participant. You cannot change the distance in days between each auto-response, just when the sequence starts. You do this by clicking the timestamp under "Autoresponder" on the subscription or participant, and choosing a new one.

Fun stuff from around the interwebs

Now that we're talking about animals, I encourage you to watch this video about Diablo/Spirit, a black tiger, and how they're able to communicate with it. My wife has that gift, too, so I know it's real, and it's quite incredible.

Here's the link to the video. It's 15 minutes well spent.

With love,
-Calvin