Hi Reader,

Your replies after my last email genuinely made my whole week! 🥰

So many of you hit reply to share kind words, your own stories, that you'd been lurking on my YouTube channel waiting for a new video, or just a simple "me too". Honestly, that is why I do this.

Thank you for being the kind of people who make this a safe place to share even the most vulnerable things. Allowing me to be myself makes showing up here for you feel totally worth it.

A few of you also wondered why I decided to share all of that in the first place. So let's talk about it!

It wasn't to make you feel sad for me, or to explain myself, or to earn some kind of sympathy pass for being MIA. I'm not rooting around for any of that crap.

I shared it because 1) it happened & that's honest, and 2) burnout is a sneaky little bitch. 😂

It doesn't care how long you've been doing this. (20 years)​
It doesn't care that you know the signs. (I've burned out before...)​
It doesn't care that you've set boundaries and tried to protect your energy. (we all try!)

It can still find its way in, especially when life is piling on from every direction at once: client work, admin, software updates, AI changes, taxes, family stuff, personal lives, the general weight of existing right now. It's a lot...

And here's the thing I keep coming back to: the more we pretend everything's fine on the surface, the more isolated & possibly panicked we feel when it's not.

I've been in this industry for almost 20 years. I've seen the hustle culture peaks, the "rise and grind" era, and the slow (sometimes excruciatingly slow) shift toward actually giving a damn about sustainability. And I still burned out.

So if it can happen to me again —who knows better— it can absolutely happen to you too. At any stage. In any season.

So if talking about it openly means even one person recognizes the signs a little sooner, feels a little less alone, or just gives themselves permission to slow the hell down and take care of themselves for a while...that's enough for me.

I'd rather be real with you than have you think I've got it all figured out. 🖤

Okay, enough feelings — let's get into the good stuff. Here's a peek at what's been happening behind the scenes lately. 👀

🖥️ Dubsado Flow Kit for Web Designers

If you've been wanting to get your Dubsado-life together (I hear you!), I've added something new for you! I teamed up with Cait Potter of Forms & Flows, a systems expert, to create this kit. I shared my processes, and she turned them into a full Web Designer Flow Kit with templates and step-by-step setup guidance so you're not just staring at Dubsad,o wondering how to create a functioning system with it.

Shop the Dubsado Kit →

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📊 Web Design Financial Trends Survey

​Diane Whiddon and I are running our annual Web Design Financial Trends Survey again, and we'd love your input!

We're really curious to see how things have shifted since last year — the industry's been moving at lightning speed lately, and we're curious what that's doing to people's money & decisions around their financials.

It's completely anonymous and only takes a 7-10 minutes, so if you want to help us (and the design community) get a clearer picture of where things stand, we'd love to have your experience in the mix!

Take the Survey →

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🔔 Quick Fix Update: Ultimate Client Portal System

Heads up if you're inside the Ultimate Client Portal System course: some of the Notion embeds weren't loading correctly for a bit, but that's been fixed! If you ran into that issue and couldn't access them, go ahead and pop back in — everything should be working as it should now. 💪🏻

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💗 New Custom Website Build — Starting Next Week!

I'm kicking off a new custom website build next week, and I am so excited to dive & get my creative juices flowing again. I'll be using BugSmash.io for the revision feedback this time, instead of Markup or Pastel, so stay tuned! 👀

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📚 Blog Updates

I've also reorganized my blog quite a bit. After TEN YEARS of blogging on Squarespace, it needed some updates!

Mostly this was backend cleanup of tags & categories to help streamline things there, but I also added some public category pages that might make it easier for you to find what you want.

Let me know what you think!

Since late November, I've been dealing with some imitation and phishing issues — and it turns out, there's a LOT of this going around right now. After a past client forwarded me a fresh attempt just last week, I rounded up everything I know and published a post about it. If this phisher contacts you or your clients, you'll want to know what to look for and what to do. 👇

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Phishing Scam Targeting Our Clients & Customers Find Out Now

A few things I've been nerding out on lately & keeping my tabs open for. 🤓

⏯️ My first-ever YouTube live: Just a quick life update while testing how going live on YouTube works. Very raw & real — but actually pretty fun! 🎉 ​

🚫🗑️ Demonetization has begun! Find out why YouTube is demonetizing — and even deleting — some channels at scale. I think you'll actually be relieved when you hear why. 👇 ​

📫 Social Media Scheduler Y'all know I quit using social media for business back in ~2022. No regrets! But I needed to get the word out about our survey, so I've been using Viraly.io to schedule posts and organize my content — and it's making it so much easier to manage. Affordable and surprisingly simple, even for someone like me. lol 😂

🎥 ​Tella* Tella just dropped account-wide analytics, and between that and its easy video migration tool — which would let me move my 1,200 Loom videos over — I'm seriously considering switching after 5-6 years as a Loom loyalist. Loom was acquired by Atlassian, and there's something to be said for a smaller company that actually has its feet on the ground with its users. 🤔

🎨 Live Q&A with Cait & me Cait Potter and I want to go live for a Q&A session all about CRMs & systems. What questions do you have? Club members can answer the 3-question poll here to weigh in, or leave a comment & share your thoughts!

🧠 Your niche isn't a cage This week's Monday Mindset post in the Club talks about that locked-in, trapped feeling around your niche. Reality check: your niche is a magnet, not a cage. 🧲 ​Read the post here — no login needed!

Alright, that's your brain-full for this week!

Now go touch some grass. 🌱
Or snow? ❄️ I actually haven't seen our grass in weeks, so I reckon snow counts too. 😂

Anyway, see ya next time!

Katelyn Web Designer & Educator ​Thrivin' on coffee, community, cursing & carefully laid plans!