New York City Uptown Squarespace Meetup Recap
Uptown Squarespace Meetup at Kallistic
Kallistic hosted a Squarespace meetup at our offices in Washington Heights in New York City starting at 7 pm on Thursday, June 2, 2016. Attendees included several Squarespace employees, Kallistic’s partners, a number of Squarespace specialists, and several freelance designers and developers. The event was organized by Kallistic with the assistance of Erin Petree of Squarespace.
Speaker: Yoko Ohama, Template Designer, Squarespace
Speaker: Ward Sandler, 320NY Co-Founder
Special Guest Observer: Ice
The event featured two presentations, the first by Yoko Ohama of Squarespace on new Squarespace templates, template design and tips for working with templates, the second by Ward Sandler of 320NY on MemberSpace and creating a sustainable Squarespace business. Each presentation was followed by a Q&A session, and attendees had time to mingle and talk afterwards.
Presentation by Yoko Ohama, Template Designer, Squarespace
Yoko gave an attendee-only presentation on Squarespace templates and template design.
Presentation by Ward Sandler, Co-Founder, 320NY
How to create a sustainable Squarespace business:
Understand your variable and recurring revenue and have a monthly revenue goal.
Recurring revenue adds greatly to the sustainability of a business.
Provide something customers want on a recurring basis (training, updates, social media posts, SEO, etc.)
320NY’s MemberSpace product, which adds member logins to Squarespace, provides them with a substantial amount of recurring revenue.
320NY also sells a monthly support plan for updates and technical support which provides them recurring revenue.
To help control variable income, 320NY does the following: 1) focuses on websites in the $2,500 to $4,000 range that they can turn around quickly, 2) charges 100% up front with a money-back guarantee, and 3) takes only credit cards, not checks.
A few things that have really helped 320NY in expanding their business: 1) always respond to and follow up on inquiries, 2) manage expectation, 3) fire bad clients, 4) ask directly for referrals from clients, and 5) get feedback from every client on what they liked or didn’t like.
Download a PDF version of Ward’s full slide deck:
For more details on Ward Sandler and 320NY, see: 320ny.com
Special Celebrity Guest, Ice
Ice is the star of the new Key & Peele movie Husku in theaters 2017.
Conclusion
We hope to host a Squarespace meetup at our offices in uptown Manhattan once a quarter moving forward. We will post details of our next meetup on Squarespace Circle and Meetup and notify any previous attendees by email.
Kallistic is a New York City based boutique design firm specializing in web development on the Squarespace platform. Our team’s experience in design, development and marketing helps you work smarter, not harder.