James Redenbaugh: Hey, Rob!

Rob Hurwich: Hey. How you doing?

James Redenbaugh: Going good. How are you?

Rob Hurwich: Good, yeah, I'm doing well. It's busy Wednesday, but all is good. Yeah, a lot. A lot with. With Kaya stuff, you know, there's a. This whole member press and stripe and learndash and PayPal thing. Yeah, it's. I'm coming along, but boy, it's. It's complicated. There's a lot of piece. Little pieces there. Yeah. So just a. Just a name? Yeah, yeah. But we'll get there. And then there's. And then there's this stuff. The font stuff. Yeah, I did a little bit of looking into it, you know, last night and trying some stuff out on the. Trying some stuff out on the staging site to kind of see what would happen if different things shift.

Rob Hurwich: So I can, you know, speak to that when Kaya gets here, but I don't know how, you know, like, if you've looked at it for a while or had an idea coming in of what we might do.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, it's.

Rob Hurwich: You were in, like, extreme close up. It was.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, I was a little close. That's better. Just got a new land plan for this trip.

Rob Hurwich: Right. Istanbul.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, in Thailand.

Rob Hurwich: Wow, cool. How long are you gonna be there for?

James Redenbaugh: Three weeks.

Rob Hurwich: It's awesome. What's. Like, what. Is there any particular purpose behind it other than, you know, see the world?

James Redenbaugh: My sister's. My sister lives there and so we're bringing my dad there.

Rob Hurwich: He.

James Redenbaugh: He hasn't seen her in a long time. Thought it would be good to get away. So, yeah, I'll be working some while I'm there and also taking some shorter trips to have some time with Emily and do some special stuff. But, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Kaya Mindlin: Hi.

Rob Hurwich: Hi. Hi, Kai.

Kaya Mindlin: I was on my zoom because Charis set up a meeting in my calendar, so I was on the wrong zoom.

James Redenbaugh: No problem. How are you? How was your vacation?

Kaya Mindlin: It was good. We were soaking in hot springs and visiting our friends who have a one and a half year old who's obsessed with my kids. So lots of baby cuddles and hot springs. Soaking is pretty good.

James Redenbaugh: Oh, which hot springs?

Kaya Mindlin: We go to Ashland, Oregon, which lives on a lithia water hot spring. And we stay in this place where they pipe the hot spring water into your. Into your room so you have a private.

Rob Hurwich: Whoa.

James Redenbaugh: Cool.

Kaya Mindlin: That's amazing. I'm like, how long do we have that? Our kids are gonna. Our two boys are gonna want to have like a naked week with their parents. We'll see how they've been doing it since they were really little. We go a couple times a year, so every time we go I'm like, is this it?

Rob Hurwich: Make it weekend with their parents. How old are your kids?

Kaya Mindlin: They're 11 and one just turned 8 yesterday. But kind of raising them European style in that way. So maybe it'll last.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Hopefully it never ends.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay. I've been running all morning. So I just skimmed the email from Rob, but I just got back from school drop off and had to get something prepped on the website, so. Cool.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, no problem. Rob, do you want to orient us?

Rob Hurwich: Sure, yeah, that sounds fine. Yeah. So like I was telling James and just, you know, said in the email was just a brief kind of, you know, intro to get us going. But I looked over things last night and I tried out some things on the staging site. So I just figured that would be a good way to get the lay of the land and see, you know, where the challenges might be. And also, you know, what changes, you know, we do what if would have what effects to the website. So I think that was a good thing to doto. So that way we can kind of hit the ground running at the meeting. So I can, you know, I can share my screen with you.

Kaya Mindlin: Sure.

Rob Hurwich: And then see. So I just need to. Logged out of the site. Yeah. I'm just gonna log in really quick and then we'll get off and running.

Kaya Mindlin: While you do that, I'm gonna send both of you the brand refresh I did a couple months ago.

James Redenbaugh: Great.

Kaya Mindlin: Oh, and then I can send you if needed. Like what? You know, like the actual files or whatever. If needed. I have a student.

Rob Hurwich: Okay.

Kaya Mindlin: Who's a great designer, actually brand does branding and design. And so I just had her. She and I work together to just update my colors and fonts. But now we're, you know, so I'm not sure where we're going to land with the fonts. I'm not particularly attached and I'll let you know some of the parameters that I have around fonts, but that's just what were working with. But then we. I don't think we ever fully implemented these fonts. I'm using them on like, social media and other kind of promotional places, but not as much in the website because we don't know what the hell we're doing, obviously.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, well, I mean, it seems like so if there are new. New fonts that want to get integrated, you know, from. In the new brand into the website, this actually does seem like a real you know, timely moment to do that. You know, for. If we're, you know, need to. Need to update things and fix things, clean up with the fonts anyways. So, yeah, it could be good timing. So essentially, you know, what's. What's going on. Right. Is that the idea, I think, right, Kay, is that you want to go in there and be able to, you know, make the design how you want to make it. Right. Which makes sense. Meaning, like, yeah, you want certain, you know, size. You want this. This text to be a certain size.

Rob Hurwich: And then you want this, you know, this text to be a certain size, and this to be a certain size.

Kaya Mindlin: Right. But if it was automated, like, this is paragraph one, this is paragraph two, this is heading with it, that would better. The problem is it has not been functioning that way. I don't need to manipulate it. If that's all set and ready to go. I know how I want it to, and it's kind of just not been established in a way that really is how I want it to look. But I don't really want to waste my time being like, no, this needs to be like, all of these titles need to be this color, and I'm like, changing the color every time because they're set to gray. So I would love to have it preset.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's. I think that is completely the idea, right. Is to have it. Have it systematized, so to say, like, you know, headings 1 through 6, this is what heading 1 is. This is what heading 2 is. 3, 4, 5, 6 down the line, you know, and those change, and then you have those six options. And if you really want to do anything special beyond that, then you. You can, but that's probably going to be more, you know, more limited and. Yeah. And then the same with the body text. Right. The paragraphs. So. Yeah. So that way it's like, right. You know, maybe. Maybe there's three. Maybe there's just like, this is the standard body text, you know, size, and that needs to be sized for a particular reason. And then, yeah, you have one larger, another size that's perfect.

Rob Hurwich: And to make it easy for you to switch between those.

Kaya Mindlin: Yes. So it doesn't need to be overly complicated. I'm basically using like a heading, a subheading, and a paragraph text. Like, there's all these other options in there. And the. The less. The less streamlined it is, actually, the more problems get created. It's like, it doesn't really take. Doesn't, like, stick. And also Charis Like I've said, she's not really visual and so she doesn't catch the hint. Like, I'm wanting these. These to look like this. So it would. I want it streamlined, for sure.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, we. I mean, we can totally do that. There. There is probably going to be some cleanup, you know, that needs to happen. So really, the, you know, the way it works with Elementor and I'll just kind of share and of course, you know, James can jump in at a certain point. So. Right. The way it works with Elementor is that these are the, you know, in the. The site settings. Right. So these are the settings that are going to, you know, generally speaking, be the. The ones that override everything else. Right. So you can. And, you know, and you have this, right. You have the headings, you know, certain. You have them set up a certain way. You might, you know, want those to change. And again, there's, you know, the system we can create. And then.

Rob Hurwich: So you have. Right now, you know, you have. It looks like you have heading five, right. So when you want larger text size, that's what you've been using, which, you.

Kaya Mindlin: Know, but I don't want to. I would love it to just default to be what I want.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, well, there's a couple considerations too small. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a couple considerations there. And there's, you know, I think we'll need to. My current sort of thought is to, you know, have to do a little bit of a workaround as far as not a workaround, but, you know, set it up in a certain way in order to. To make happen what you want to happen. Because with the site settings, the typography, right. There really is only one kind of body text font that it lets you do, right. So your font right now is 17 pixel called Poppins. And that's not this. That's the sort of smaller one, which is somewhere. So there is also a consideration just to name that really.

Rob Hurwich: Ideally, you don't want to be using paragraph formatting for text like this because from an SEO standpoint, that's going to hurt you. And also from like an accessibility screen reader standpoint, it's not ideal.

Kaya Mindlin: I don't know what you mean by paragraph. Don't write in paragraphs. Or do you mean don't use the paragraph setting? I don't know what you mean by that.

Rob Hurwich: Oh, yeah, okay, sure. So. So this is like. If we go here, you know, if we go here, you can see this.

Kaya Mindlin: Is not screen sharing, though.

James Redenbaugh: Rob, what's that he is.

Kaya Mindlin: Oh, I don't see it. Oh, now I see it. Oh, that's weird. I never had tabs on here. Okay, I got you now. Okay.

Rob Hurwich: Oh, okay. Oh, tabs. Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay, so this, this looks to.

Rob Hurwich: Be the, you know, so this is, this is paragraph text right here.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah.

Rob Hurwich: And this looks to be kind of the standard size. And so then what I'm saying is, and then this is something where you wanted it larger. So you know, so you added in, you put it as heading five rather than paragraph.

Kaya Mindlin: Because that's the only way that I can figure out how to make it larger.

Rob Hurwich: Totally, totally. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Well, I mean, what you did makes sense. Yeah, so it's just, we're just gonna get, you know, a system that also makes sense.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay, so go ahead and explain.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, so what I mean is that this, you know, from a back end perspective, this shouldn't be like tagged as heading 5. Right? Because if, because the way that then like the Google bots as far as SEO, what they're doing is they're looking at the headings. So on the back end of the site, like the code, they're looking at the headings H1 through H6. And that's giving it information as far as what this page is about and what the site's about. If you have a lot of headings that have all this text just from SEO, which again, we want to make sure that you're thinking that way and boost that, you're going to get dinged.

Kaya Mindlin: But you said that I should not use paragraph. Did you mean I should not use heading?

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, you should not use heading formatting for paragraphs.

Kaya Mindlin: So I should use paragraphs.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, that's right.

Kaya Mindlin: That is what I want to do. And what I want to do is make the paragraph copy larger.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: Can I do that?

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm. I'm gonna name one more thing. And then I want, I definitely want James to weigh in. So, you know, there's also something called globe, these global fonts.

Kaya Mindlin: Right.

Rob Hurwich: Which you can set in, you know, you can set in elementor, and basically they're like kind of custom presets. So that is one way, you know, that might be the easiest way to have different sizes, presets for paragraph.

Kaya Mindlin: So like, so I don't need the paragraphs to be different sizes. I want all the paragraphs to be a larger size. They can all be the same. Okay, So I need one heading One subheading, maybe one subheading. And I don't mean heading from a designer web SEO perspective. I just mean, I mean from a design perspective, not an se. You can call it paragraph, you can call it heading, whatever the hel. I want one heading, one for SEO. And then I want, design wise, a subheading, maybe a subheading. And then I want paragraph copy. The current paragraph copy is too small. Designers, you guys, you always set copy too small because you're looking at your big ass screens and the rest of us are looking at small screens and it's not legible. So I want all the paragraphs to be the same size.

Kaya Mindlin: I just want them to be bigger than the current setting. It's just that we're dealing with like sometimes when I we're dealing with this use doing it in the wrong way. Which is why you see different paragraph copy sizes. Some heading 5 and some paragraph is just because we're doing it in this funky way and so it's not consistent. But I am okay with all of the paragraph copy being the same. I just want it bigger than the current settings. That make sense?

Rob Hurwich: Yeah. Makes it. Makes total sense. It's easy. And then of course, I'm a simple.

Kaya Mindlin: Person doing things in a complicated way.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes total sense. Yeah. James, did you read? And we can chat set that and we can see what it looks like.

Kaya Mindlin: This is because me doing it in a weird way that I'm not supposed to be doing doesn't stick every time because WordPress is a little funky. I wanted this all to be the same, but it just won't damn do it. So I'm not making it different sizes. There. That is not desirable.

Rob Hurwich: Totally. There's also something else I'm seeing which is a hot tip that I can give that I think is going to also help. Help a lot. Which I think in some of the texts what I'm seeing is that there's formatting that that's coming in. I don't know if it's here, but there's formatting that's being brought in. I assume that's when you copy and paste.

Kaya Mindlin: It's probably one of us copy. Totally. Yep.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah. So I saw that a lot. Right. So this styling comes in when you copy and paste and then it gets set there. I have a very easy hot tip that's going to anytime you copy and paste something into elementor, you can do this. It's just basically it's as simple as Right now you probably do like command or control V to paste, right? What you're going to do is command or control shift V and then that matches the destination formatting.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay. Okay.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah. James, you want to weigh in? I can send that to you.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. So just adding shift in there.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah, yeah. Okay. And if it's more consistent, if the formatting is more consistent and I'm not having to like rig it, then maybe copy and paste also won't create so many problems. Or just use shift. Let me just.

Rob Hurwich: You always, I mean, I, I do that. That's like, you know, like the, the part of my, you know, the core existence is pasting in that way.

Kaya Mindlin: You know, it just copy and paste, do control plus Shift plus V. That's right. Okay.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah. And if you train yourself, your life will be different forever from this day forward.

James Redenbaugh: But I think we should do a scrub of the site and the styles and just clean out all the wacky formatting. I mean, first take a look at your style guide. Create a really solid evolution of that to just include a few more styles, like a pretty standard one from another project. Clean headlines, a few different size paragraphs. I know that you say that you want one paragraph size, but there's always. It's good to have a couple exceptions there. If we just look at the home page real quick, like if things are in a quote or if there's a caption under an image, it can look really good if that's a little bit smaller. But I'm definitely hearing that most of the paragraph fonts, we just want to be really consistent through the website.

James Redenbaugh: And so, you know, step one, let's make a comprehensive style guide based on the one you just shared as a PDF, and then also a corresponding page on the website that matches one to one. What's there. Then we do a deep clean and then we make a really clear set of instructions for you on how to add content. What's the right way with loom videos. And it should be easier than whatever you're doing. And we'll include tips about, you know, if you're pasting, especially from Google Docs tends to do this a lot. If you're pasting from something like that, how to do it so you don't get those unwanted artifacts.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah, okay. That, yeah, that sounds fantastic.

James Redenbaugh: Awesome.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah.

James Redenbaugh: Cool.

Kaya Mindlin: And then as far as fonts go, just like a little caveat for me, and I'm pretty sure Danielle, who did the style, the recent style guide did check this, but. And, and I'm not sure whether we can even have these font. I think I paid for a couple of fonts. I'm not sure what's going on there. But any font I have needs to be able to do transliterated Sanskrit. So it need. And. And the current. Actually, the paragraph or heading five actually is not good at that. So it needs to be able to, you know, have little dots and the accents and the things that I'm using for transliterated Sanskrit without looking funky like that. So my current heading font works for that.

Kaya Mindlin: But then I think that number five that I'm selecting for paragraph, I think it kind of sucks for that, and it makes the text look weird when I'm doing transliteration. So that's just one little thing that I always have to test when we're selecting a font.

James Redenbaugh: So in the style guide, there's actually no sans serif fonts. Everything is. Is serif. But on the website, we have a lot of these serif fonts in paragraphs.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah. Because I don't think we. I don't think we ever. We didn't. That's what I was saying. We didn't really ever adopt the fonts because we didn't know how to do it. So. And I'm not. I'm not in love with that font that you see for a lot of the paragraphs. I mean, this I like, but that I'm open as far as fonts. I'm not, like, particularly attached one way or the other. I kind of. I like my current heading font a lot. I think that's on brand. But the paragraph font, I'm flexible on, and I'm open to best practices. What's. What looks the best. I'm open to your design opinion and all that, as long as it's readable, like, not too tiny. And as long as I can transliterate and, you know, do. Sounds good transliteration, I think that.

James Redenbaugh: We should go with a serif font for the paragraphs. So because everything, you know, it's. It's more traditional, a lot of people think it's more readable. Your designer picked Garamond here. We can test if that has the. The accents or not, but we could definitely pick one that. That. That will work. And I think it should match the. The headlines better and feel less disjointed. And then also things like buttons can be that. I think that things like navigation can stay. Yeah, yeah. It's elegant. And then like, here we have this serif font, especially when it's all camps. I think it's Nice. I mean, San Serif. But I think most of the fonts should be more. More serif. And what was I gonna say? I forget I'm blanking. But, oh, yeah, the. You have two main headline fonts.

James Redenbaugh: This one that's more expressive and this one that's more orthogonal. Do you want to keep. Keep that?

Kaya Mindlin: But yeah, I mean, I don't think I use the italicized super frequently. Like right there. That's just my tagline for the. For the brand. I don't think I use that heavily.

James Redenbaugh: Okay.

Kaya Mindlin: So mainly it's just this upright.

James Redenbaugh: Mm.

Kaya Mindlin: Simple.

James Redenbaugh: Okay, great. And then while we're at it, I think that we should standardize colors and talk about contrast, because that's another thing that affects accessibility and SEO when we have really low contrast fonts like Student Love. I can read it. Most people can read it, but people that don't have great eyesight are going to have a hard time. And then Google dings you for that. Yeah. So we should standardize that as well, and we can give some examples of, you know, what colors to use on what. Not only what colors can be used, but what colors go well together to create a nice aesthetic and a good contrast. Cool.

Kaya Mindlin: There was something else I was gonna say. Oh. As far as SEO goes, you know, could be wrong advice. Someone, a designer, SEO person, told me that for SEO, the main thing you want is to have one H, one per page, and that the other Hs are less. Is that accurate? So we. We did our best to do that. We didn't, like, spend a ton of time on it, but we did try to have, especially on, like, the sales pages for different programs, just one H1. So were somewhat aware about the headings and SEO, but not enough aware.

Rob Hurwich: That's great. That's a big. That's a big thing. And a lot of people, you know, don't. Don't do that. And then, you know, can have to get clean. Cleaned up. So that's great.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah. So what do you think? Like, James, because we're talking about now, we're sort of going a little bit farther than just changing the text size and kind of doing the necessary cleanup on the pages for that. Yeah. So it sounds more like there's a larger plan as far as the design incorporating in the new branding, getting the style guide system set, and then also the colors.

James Redenbaugh: So, yeah, so I can have one of my designers take one of our style guide templates and expand on what you already have. Create a solid set of fonts to Use and then we can create that in elementor, get you to sign off on it, say this looks great. Or paragraph font even bigger. Or you guys went too far with the paragraph font. We can bring it down a little bit and then we can go through and do a deep clean, just every page. Make sure that we're using those styles and elements in a consistent way and then make sure that you guys know how to do that moving forward.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay. Yeah. As far as like contract goes, like, if I do your membership, like, what would that look like in terms of the.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, like how many creative efforts is that? I would say, you know, it sounds complex, but all of those steps are pretty. Are pretty easy, I think.

Kaya Mindlin: Like, it sounds like we're just looking at doing like universal consistent changes and just implementing things.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah, I would say like one to two creative efforts for that whole thing.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay. Yeah, perfect. Because it feels like it's consistent with what I was thinking, which is just like, clean up the website, get the website optimal as a step one before step two. That would be like more traffic to the site, right?

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense because were talking about like then looking at the user experience.

Kaya Mindlin: Right.

Rob Hurwich: You know, and the user journey. And it does make sense to get the basic design elements. Yeah. Set. So then, you know, when those larger pieces move around. Yeah. It stays consistent.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah.

Rob Hurwich: Cool. There's one other thing that I came upon that I just want to name for everybody that seems important, which is when I did a test and I changed the base body font text, I did notice that it changed the size of the course of this text, the course directory text. So, you know, when I changed it, you know, significantly, all these got bigger as well there. I don't know if there's. There could be a way to, you know, to just. For like the learndash courses, James, you might know to adjust this text size different than the regular font size. But I just want to kind of bring that in because what might make sense as far as a universal text size on the. The site might not make sense or might be too big for the course, table of contents, things like that.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, I think we should bring some extra care into the LMS because UI is really important there and whatever we come up with for the whole site, we can inform what we're doing here. Sorry, what was that?

Kaya Mindlin: Sorry. I'm just like seeing that these videos aren't working.

Rob Hurwich: Oh, this is the staging site.

Kaya Mindlin: Oh, okay. I was like, what's going on? Okay, I know.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, I did that the first time I opened up the staging site too. I was like, oh, God, I broke it. But this is. Yeah. Anytime I'm screwing around with backend stuff, you know, I want to be doing it.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay. It's the staging side. I didn't realize it. Okay, cool.

Rob Hurwich: Exactly.

Kaya Mindlin: Sorry. Go ahead.

James Redenbaugh: So we can tweak all those things in. In the learndash settings, and then anything that we can't change with the settings we can do in custom CSS pretty easily. But, yeah, like these paragraph fonts we can change to the new serif font. But things in the menu we might want to keep sans serif just to make it. Make it clean.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah, it does look nice. I kind of like that. What we have is the menu is also kind of consistent on the front end of the site with, like, the menu. It sort of to have a symmetry there. So that seems nice. Like, these are menu items, and that's the top bar menu. It feels. Yeah. Symmetrical.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Cool.

Rob Hurwich: Great.

Kaya Mindlin: All right. That's exciting. Yeah.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Rob, what else do we need to. To talk about while we're here?

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, let me look. Let me look at my list and see if there's anything else. I think, as far as the. Let me just make sure. As far as the. The text. Oh, there is one more thing. Yeah, good. I'm just going to make sure there's nothing else on the fonts. Yeah. That covers the fonts. I'm going to share my screen again, so let me get back here. Okay. So the other thing that Charis pointed out to me is that the, you know, like, there's articles that you write that are, you know, that are posts. Right. So you have, you know, a lot of posts and, you know, she's calling them articles. I mean, I. I don't see that there's like an actual kind of blog section that's accessible from the site. But it sounds like, you know, you're using those articles somewhere.

Rob Hurwich: But it doesn't look like there is an actual post, like, template design. So, you know, what happens is. Yeah, it looks. It looks funny because there's no, you know, there's. There's no actual. Right. So, you know, like the articles that you write, the posts. Yeah. Look like this.

Kaya Mindlin: These need to be templated. Yeah.

Rob Hurwich: Right. So.

Kaya Mindlin: So these are huge problems with the paragraph writing in there. It's driving bananas. Yeah. And just by the way, there's not like a posted blog because most of these, they go out to my. As a link to my email list, maybe one a month at the most. And they're time sensitive. So, James, they're based on Vedic astrology. Usually astrologically, this is what's happening. And so that's why it doesn't really need to be something that people are, like, clicking through and reading. All of my blogs, they work really well as promotional. This is what's happening right now astrologically. Here's some teachings about that for free. Sign up for this program to deepen. It's like that.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah. Great.

Kaya Mindlin: They're not stylized and they're not templated, and I would love to have that better.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, I think that's just something that we should put on the list is just to create, you know, a template for these posts. So that way they just, you know, it looks nice. Nicer than. Than this.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah. And then obviously I don't like how these look at all, so I won't be. I'm not, like, offended. They look terrible.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, well, there's just. There's nothing. It's. Yeah, it's just kind of like the Raw, you know, the Ross, the Raw css, you know, and HTML. All right, so we'll put that on the list. But that. That's also good to know, like, where they go in the context. Yeah. So that's all I have as far as, you know, the site design. I mean, I could speak a little bit to where we're at on, you know, the Member press, Stripe, learndash, all of that if. If we want to, or, you know, can just kind of keep, you know, keep the. The conversation going, but I don't know if you'd like a little bit of an update.

Kaya Mindlin: Up to you, James.

James Redenbaugh: Up to. Yeah, go ahead.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay, sure. Yeah, do a little update.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, I think, you know, and I sent an email yesterday, you know, to you and Charis, and, you know, it was kind of long, so I don't think that you got into it yet, but just there's a couple updates. So, yeah, I'm making progress with that. And essentially I'm tracking. I feel like I've done what I could in a testing environment and I'm tracking live, and I have added some logging capabilities to the live site, which I think is helping a lot. And I'm seeing where some of these breakdowns are happening. I have been in conversations, you know, with Stripe and PayPal and long conversation with member press, and now I just started one with learndash. So I think that there are. I can.

Rob Hurwich: I can see already there are a couple of Places definitely where there's some breakdowns happening with how things have been set up in some ways manually. And so, you know, part of what I feel like is an end deliverable here, you know, are like SOPs, you know, which, you know, Charis has said she's, you know, would really like and is open to. So sops that are. That's just going to share. Okay. Like if you know, anything that's, you know, anything you need to do that's manual anything, you know, like when this happens, when something is, you know, when a failed payment happens and a subscription is past due, this is what it means. When a subscription is canceled, this is what it means. And if somebody wants to sign up again, you have to do this. So you know, just to name.

Rob Hurwich: There's a lot of complexity in all of this. And so yeah, it's not that anybody's been like, you know, doing anything, you know, like obviously wrong. Like, it's just, it's. Yeah, there's a lot there. So. Yeah, so that's, that's really the update there. I feel like I'm coming along. The other thing, you know, to say is that there is this something they're calling a retroactive tool which would reset everybody's access permissions based on their subscriptions. Yeah. So, you know, I haven't wanted to like plug, you know, like lock that.

Kaya Mindlin: In yet because that's everyone based on basically what they're currently paying for.

Rob Hurwich: On what they're currently paying for based on what Member Press says. Right. Member Press is the one who really and is the only one who should be controlling access. So based on what Member Press says. So you know, it might be at a certain point it might be a good idea to do that. It might not.

Kaya Mindlin: Can you select which programs, which memberships you do that with or would it be across the board at this point?

Rob Hurwich: It's like one, it's like a, you know, it's like a nuclear bomb or whatever. It just does it, you know, like there's one button and it. And it just does it. So it is, I think it is something I might be able to test on the staging site.

Kaya Mindlin: It feels risky only because I feel like it would make sense for the subscriptions, which are two. But then I have all these standalone programs that have different time frames so they pay for them once and some of them they get three months access and some of them they get a year access and some of them they get lifetime access, but they only paid Once. Once upon a time. And so I feel like that would be the crack in the system maybe is different access time frames and they paid whenever they paid.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, I hear that 100%. And it may better to just like, you know, sort of fix where the breakdowns are and then, you know, and then just understand that things will have a better resolve more and more over time. Yeah, yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: Because I just feel like more people are most of its functioning like the minority is the dysfunction.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah. Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: So want to like pull the rug out and have more people be screwed up? I don't know.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for that. That's. That's helpful. Helpful to hear. So that's really where we're at now. And at a certain point, hopefully we'll just kind of have that set up and SOPs and then really can focus on these more high value tasks. Otherwise. Yeah, I sent a list of things that I'm working on. So I just wanted you to know that and check in here with the three of us. There's these tasks and things that, you know, Charis is asking for. You're asking for things that just kind of, that need to be done. So I know we're kind of in a transition as far as like, you know, what the payment container and working with, you know, the new, you know, methodology there.

Rob Hurwich: And so I can, you know, my idea is to kind of keep going with these tasks, but also, you know, make sure that we're checking in and I'm not like pushing over limits.

Kaya Mindlin: Yeah. I mean, Charis was under the chairs. Didn't realize what I thought, which was like, we are paying Rob. So she was like, oh, it's so great. I can just like send Rob every little question that I have. So now she saw the bill that I paid, she was like, oh, sorry. I was like, yeah, stop doing that. Happy to pay for very valuable work, obviously. But. But yeah, I like if we can clean up, like continue the process of cleaning up the payment in particular, like all the stuff with Stripe and all the stuff with PayPal and if that can be James. I don't know. Like, I'm still a little confused about the container get clearer. But. But I haven't like gone with a fine tooth comb and read it really clearly.

Kaya Mindlin: I just, I've got the gist I get and there's tears and so if it's possible for that process to be within, like if I commit to that lowest tier to begin with. As we kind of had a brief exchange about James today.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: And it can fit into that. That would be great. If it's something that we just wrap up this gig that Rob is doing a la carte. I'm also okay with that. And then start fresh with the subscription. I mean, I'm obviously whatever's going to be more economical for me is better, so.

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. So I think that we should. You for what? Rob has already done this. This month, the a la carte style, you know, whatever he's done since my invoice. And then in. In March, we consider it at this prism scale and we have two initiatives. One is the. The. The style refresh that we've talked about, and the other is continuing the. The work that we're talking about now. And, you know, if we complete both and we have room for more stuff in March, then of course we go on to that.

James Redenbaugh: But Rob, you and I can coordinate around the creative effort units, make sure that we're not overloading ourselves for march and pacing things out and sounds like I'll more take the lead on the style stuff and of course, you know, work with you on that and you take the lead on the other stuff and we'll get a lot done this month.

Kaya Mindlin: That sounds good.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, that sounds great.

Kaya Mindlin: Holding the reins on chair us.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, that happens, you know, sometimes when you know, like, if you. If you get somebody who's capable, you know, it happens to me. I mean, not to say, you know, I feel like I'm fairly capable.

Kaya Mindlin: Right.

Rob Hurwich: Then, like a lot of times, you know, people are like, oh, right. They just. It's like, oh, you can actually like, you know, help us. And then starts. Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: It makes me think of. So my. I come from a family of very short women, and my husband Michael is like 6 foot 5. And so anytime we visit any of the women in the family, they're like, he's here quick. I need you to reach up there and get that. I need you go and fix that. Like, whatever they haven't been able to reach for the last 12 months. They're like, put him to work.

Rob Hurwich: Nice. So, yeah, Rob has a big.

Kaya Mindlin: And anyway, that way you can just like focus really on these two. Like the payment thing in particular.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah.

Kaya Mindlin: Tracks there. Instead of like, have a bunch of stuff flying at you.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, that's great. And you know, and just to name, like, I'll show you my kind of behind the scenes. Right. Like I. So anything that comes in. So even if Charis does, because sometimes, like, sometimes items come in, you know, and it's like, it's actually not a bad idea to like, note them. Right. And I do, I have, you know, I have lots of things noted. I have another document because when I'm seeing something, I want to just like bring it in. Right. And so just to name, like, I can pop in as many different, like, items and tasks here, prioritize them. They can just sit in long lists, you know, for months at a time. But they're, but they're here and I'm tracking them, you know, and I have write my notes on them and things like that. So I have the.

Rob Hurwich: That's just a name, right. I have the capability of like, of tracking things and, you know, working on making sure that like, high priority items go up to the top that need to get addressed. Other things get pushed down. So that's part of the service, I think.

Kaya Mindlin: So in other words, if Charis sent, like, forwards you a problem as she's been doing, like, hey, this is a customer that's having this issue. Like, that's still okay because maybe it impacts the work that you're doing that we're talking about and. Or you just note, make note of it, but it doesn't mean you're doing billable hours on it right now. It doesn't fit the priority.

Rob Hurwich: That's. Yeah, that's exactly right. Exactly right.

Kaya Mindlin: She still have permission? Because I do think there's. Because we can't. I certainly don't know off the top of my head, the random problems that happen because I'm not dealing with them. And for her too, they're so miscellaneous that maybe. So is it okay for her to be like, here's an example, it doesn't mean you're addressing it.

Rob Hurwich: It's actually ideal. It's. For me, it's optimal. Yeah. For her to be sending because. Because a lot of that, especially now, a lot of that is very applicable to you write, to getting these systems all synced up. So she can just send me things and then I can note where they go and hold that container.

Kaya Mindlin: I will let her know not to expect that. Just because she sends you something doesn't mean you're fixing it. It's just going on the list and maybe helpful to the process that you're doing.

Rob Hurwich: Yes. Yeah, that's right. James, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think also, you know, the longer term, you know, plan, right. Is to have, you know, like a client portal where we can be seeing like these, you know, these issues together. You know, just in the same way that like, right. I have my. My board. Right. So that we can, you know, not. Not every node or whatever, but that we're seeing. Okay. Here. There's this issue. There's this issue, you know, and so that way, you know, okay, this is in the pipeline, but these are, you know, these things are priorities. That sound right, James?

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah. And Kai, I was gonna ask, do you guys use Slack?

Kaya Mindlin: No.

James Redenbaugh: No, never mind.

Kaya Mindlin: Every time she. We both suck at using any of those. Monday, Slack. Awesome. We just send each other Marco Polo messages. She has, like, a Google Doc of, like, tasks and priorities and timelines and stuff that she uses for herself, but.

James Redenbaugh: Cool.

Kaya Mindlin: And then our email system. We use Front for our email system. I don't know if you've ever used that. It's amazing. Actually, Lauren, who used to work for you, found it for me. Because we can be in my one email, says my one kya, but we can write notes to each other under email. So I can be like, hey, Charis, check out this thing from Rob. Or, hey, this person's an asshole. Like, be careful with how you talk to them. Like, we can write to each other about emails and we can also kind of have notes in there about tasks that we're working on. But, yeah, we haven't. We've tried all these other task systems and we end up failing at using them. It's just, like, one more thing to learn.

James Redenbaugh: Cool. I'm gonna check it out.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, but that's interesting. I see. So that's why. Yeah. Because I've been curious as far as. Right. Because there's, you know, there's one email that you. That you both are sharing. So I was sort of like, if.

Kaya Mindlin: I have to change assistants or whatever, like, it's just consistent and it's really nice to be able to be. If we both need to participate in a response to someone or whatever, to be able to basically talk about the email with each other right there under the email, or if she drafts. If she starts a draft to someone but she's not sure. Is this how you want this to look? I can see the draft and respond to her. And yeah, it's really a great system front.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, yeah, I see it. I looked it up. Yeah, that's cool. That's a. That's good. Yeah. You have little notes. You'd be like, you know, like, clearly Rob doesn't know what he's talking about here. You know, things like that.

Kaya Mindlin: Not at all, actually. It's been like, rob's so great.

Rob Hurwich: Thank you. I'm so glad.

James Redenbaugh: Wonderful. Okay, great. Well, I think that's everything. I've got fireflies working for me here, so it'll. I'm going to generate another artifact for this meeting. I'm already taking notes in there, so we can share that and you can see the start to see the initiatives that we're working on there and we're building out the higher level pages so you will have that client portal with easy access to important docs, active initiatives, stuff like that.

Kaya Mindlin: Nice. Thank you. And obviously James, you and I can pick up the thread of the conversation about the subscription email.

James Redenbaugh: Sounds good.

Kaya Mindlin: Okay, well, happy new moon day.

James Redenbaugh: Happy new moon day. It's. It's 54 degrees here and it's feels like spring. I went outside and I was like, oh, maybe I haven't gone outside in like two weeks. Oops. Yeah, it's beautiful here. So I hope you guys are feeling the spring vibes too.

Rob Hurwich: Not quite yet, but it'll make it up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm in Massachusetts. I'm in Western Mass. Yeah, yeah. So it's still pretty wintry out here, but it's a good time to be recovering from shoulder surgery, you know, and not leaving the house anyways, you know, so nothing out there exciting.

Kaya Mindlin: You'll be summer ready when you're healed.

Rob Hurwich: That's right. That's right.

Kaya Mindlin: You'll be out there surfing.

James Redenbaugh: Nice.

Rob Hurwich: Yeah, that's the plan. Cool.

Kaya Mindlin: Well, thank you both.

James Redenbaugh: Thank you.

Rob Hurwich: Talk to you soon. Yeah, thank you too. Sounds like you got a plan.

Kaya Mindlin: Sounds good. Take care.

James Redenbaugh: Bye.

Rob Hurwich: Thanks.

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