Getting Started with Ethercycle and Shopify

Howdy & Welcome to Ethercycle!

Thanks again for choosing us. We're a small business by choice— I love being able go to work and grow businesses like yours. Email me any time you have questions.

Allright, enough platitudes. Let's get to work!

Providing Effective Feedback

You are welcome to make design suggestions, but as the ecommerce expert, it’s probably a waste of both of our time for you to worry about it.

Included in your project is two rounds of revisions.

One round of revisions means that you give us a single list of all the changes you’d like to see in the current mockup. Because this work is done on a timeline, it’s important to sum up all your thoughts and changes in a single place (one call or one email), and hand those over to us.

Your input is important and totally necessary to guide our work. We may not get everything right on the first try. That’s not just okay; it’s part of the process. Our work together can (and probably will) be iterative.

Here’s how you can provide us with effective feedback, so we can really earn the money you’re paying us for your site. The magic happens when your hard-earned skills and expertise come together with ours.

Good Feedback

• Be honest. If you don’t like something, we need to know – now, not three weeks down the road.
• Be specific. Point out what, exactly, is not working for you, and why it’s not working.
• Ask why. If you aren’t sure what we were thinking, we’d love to explain the reasoning. Everything we’ve done for the project has a purpose.
• Refer to your goals. Relate every piece of criticism back to your goals.
• Relate to your audience. Your audience should be top of mind for every decision or critique that you provide. What do they need? What will they love?

Not-so-good Feedback

• Involve everyone you know in the creative process. We work best when you alone serve as the expert on your company and its audience. Art made by committee is rarely successful.
• Take things personally. If we missed the mark, we need to figure out why and move closer to our mutual target. If we disagree with you, it’s because we’re thinking about your goals and your audience. It’s not personal, it’s business.
• Do our work for us. Please give us written or verbal instructions about what isn’t working; don’t redo our work to illustrate your point.
• Prescribe fixes. You’re paying us to provide solutions. Explain the problem and we’ll pitch potential fixes to you, based on our research, experience and skills.

A Note on Availability

It's our policy to work Monday through Thursday, 9am to 5pm CST. We reserve Fridays as personal development days to better our business, while nights & weekends are reserved for our families of course. If you have an extremely urgent issue, we are available at a rush fee of $500/hour for work occurring outside standard hours.

To stay 100% productive for our clients, I can't take unscheduled phone calls, and I check my email only twice a day. (Literally, I use Inbox Pause to ensure this happens. You should try it.) If you'd like more access to me then that, I offer an executive strategy retainer that you may be interested in.

Like you, I also take some holidays off. Expect intermittent availability around most major US holidays, especially Halloween (my anniversary), Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Eve Day, my birthday (January 24th), Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day.

Thanks again

Let me know if you have any questions about Shopify, Ethercycle, business in general, or why your car makes that noise when you turn left.

Talk soon,
—Kurt
Kurt Elster, MBA
kgelster@ethercycle.com
877-384-3740 x700