Hi Reader,

I'm a loyal person, sometimes to a fault. I mean, I used the same makeup foundation for more than 10 years, my favorite clothing store has been Maurices since ~2010, and I've been married to my high school sweetheart for nearly 20 years. 🤭

For a long time I treated my software the same way. Once a tool made it into my toolbox, it basically had tenure. 🎓😂

Like Dubsado: I've used it for about 10 years, and it's still where I manage most of my client's booking processes. Until recently, it was also where my lead capture form lived, and that form had one MASSIVE problem for me now, that it never had until my business began to grow. It can't do conditional logic (yet). Every single person who filled it out got dumped into Dubsado, even if they were never going to be a service client and were inquiring for a different reason. Some potential clients, but also SEO pitches, software companies wanting a review or a backlink, and random cold sales emails disguised as "project inquiries," a lot of which were clogging up my CRM with people I'd never send a contract or invoice to. 🫠

So every week (sometimes every DAY) I'd open my inbox, see a new lead, get a tiny hit of excitement... and then realize it was just someone trying to sell me something I hadn't asked for. Then I'd go clean up the mess they left behind in my CRM by deleting the 'project' and the 'contact'. Over ...and over ...and over.

And I just kept doing it for way longer than I want to admit, mostly because I honestly wasn't sure how to handle it. That's how I'd always managed inquiries, and moving it elsewhere felt like a whole big thing I couldn't bring myself to deal with.

When it was just weekly or even monthly, I could deal with it. But when it became DAILY, most days of the week, I realized just how much time this was costing me to DELETE 'bad leads'. It was also sucking all the energy from responding to good ones, because now I had a sour taste in my mouth for looking at inquiry form submissions.

When I finally decided to rebuild that form in Breely, it was way less painful than I'd built it up to be in my head (with some help from their AI assistant, which can actually do the setup for you).

Now one form routes everybody down their own path AND responds immediately after they submit with information unique to what they submitted.

The cold pitches get a polite autoresponder and never get near my calendar. Real clients get to book a discovery call. And only actual clients end up in Dubsado, via a Zap, the way it should've been all along.

Our tools work for US

Here's what I keep coming back to... Loyalty (or avoidance of the unknown) at the expense of functionality or efficiency, is a drain on our time, energy, and sometimes also our wallets.

Our businesses grow, our processes change, and the tools that were perfect for Year-1-Me can suddenly turn into the thing slowing Year-10-Me way down. 😬

I think we hang on for a few reasons:

• A sunk cost fallacy. "But I spent SO long setting it up!" (Yeah, & you'll spend even longer working around it.)
• Switching feels scary. Migrating stuff can absolutely be a pain, and nobody wants to break something that's technically working...
• We forget to look up. We get so used to the workaround that we stop noticing it IS a workaround.

But software isn't a friendship. It's more like an employee. LOL

You can be grateful for everything it did for you and still decide it's not the right fit for where your business is headed. Nobody's getting their feelings hurt here. Acuity will be just fine without me, I promise. 🤣

That doesn't mean you need to go blow up your whole tech stack this week, either. Switching tools every time something shiny comes along is its own trap (ask me how I know). When you keep hitting a wall in that tool, especially if that wall hurts every time ya hit it (LOL), that's when it's time to look up & check for another option.

So here's a little homework, if you want it. Pick ONE tool you pay for & ask yourself:

1. Is it still doing the job I need it to do, or am I working around it?
2. Am I paying for features I never use?
3. If I were signing up today, would I still choose this one?

If you get a "no" on any of those, it might be time to start shopping around. 🤷‍♀️

Last year, Christy Price introduced me to Gavin and Breely... It's been one of my favorite tools ever since!

I've tried a LOT of online schedulers in the last ten years: Acuity, Calendly, TidyCal, Cal.com, and a few that don't even exist anymore. Breely is better, and only $7 a month. This week I'm taking you inside my actual account, showing you the conditional logic inquiry form I just told you about, the AI assistant that'll set things up for you, subscriptions for recurring client services, and the HIPAA compliance tips that I can't believe exists at this price.

​My Favorite Affordable Calendly or Acuity Alternative​ Peek at the inside →

👩🏻‍🍳 Kitchen's recent updates

• They're officially GDPR compliant now!
• We can customize the Login page in more detail
• We can customize each resource type, including default icon colors, and whether clients see each other's names in the top right corner. 👏🏻
• They're also working on a refresh of the Home page for clients; soon it'll be customizable, but already the home page & sidebars are much simpler

Keep an eye out for the next blog/video where I'll show ya some of these features & updates!

🐾 Rowan's update

Because I know a lot of ya'll are also dog-people, or pet-people, and may be curious, I thought I'd share a quick update on how it's going so far!

She's just shy of 6 months old now and walking on a leash like a champ (finally!), after we got her an escape-proof harness. She's still pretty scared of passing vehicles, especially larger ones, and wants to run away & hide; the harness makes us feel more confident that she's securely tethered on walks even if she gets scared & tries to bolt. (Before she was surrendered for adoption, she got hit by a car & it broke her leg, which is where the fear comes from.)

She's going for walks with us whenever it's nice outside (on low-traffic or no-traffic walkways), going for car rides to get some calmer socialization time in too, and she LOVES a new toy to play tug-of-war with. She gets her 6-month vaccines in a couple weeks, which I think are the last set until fall next year. She's recently started picking up & carrying off some of the smaller rocks we used to mark Luna's gravesite with a cairn, of sorts, in our backyard... 🤦🏻‍♀️ Overall, she's doing really well, and though we still miss our Luna-bug, we are beyond happy we picked Rowan to be Luna's sister! 😍

⏯️ Recent post: A peek inside my community for web designers. Free for everyone, or join Insiders for more hands-on support & opportunities to pick my brain.

🤖 ​Pangram​ Even on the free plan, this is useful to suss out AI-written content without a human in the loop. Free plans use included credits, and ~100 words = 1 credit. Great for figuring out which newsletters aren't worth our time, —as one example. 🤭 And it's a web app, or Chrome extension, so it's always ready!

🐦‍⬛ ​Littlebird* I've been using this on the free plan just to help me 'look back' on what I've done, what I've spent my time on, without tracking my time. I'm on the free plan still, and it's been fun! Accidentally close a browser tab & not notice? Or can't remember which event talked about X or Y? Littlebird helps with those things!

📝 ​MarkLayer​ A free-forever, no-paid-plan-available, website annotation tool that doesn't even require an account to use! 🤯 I haven't tried it myself, but shoutout to Club member Evan for sharing it with the group hereand starting a discussion on it.

🖥️ ​Kleemt* A unique Squarespace tool that lives in your website editor, with 25+ pre-built custom layout sections, 15+ customizable blocks. I used it to create the timeline on my new About page! It's a one-time payment license for access, per site its installed on. (No subscriptions!)

🗂️ ​BlockBuilder* This handy tool turns your Airtable or Google Sheets into prettier live embedded content. No code or plugins & works on all website platforms. I just used it to rebuild my Favorites database on my website! ​Learn more about their lifetime deal here* affiliate link!

That's enough tech talk for one week! 🤓

Oh, and hit reply and tell me: what's one tool you've been hanging onto out of pure habit? No judgment. I clearly have a few of my own. 😂

See ya next time!

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