When we were making post suggestions for the week, I mentioned to Michelle that we hadn’t done an ‘around here’ post in forever so here it is…

This week I had an epic panic when I thought our site was down, I 911’d Lindsay our coder and she checked that everything was just fine–phew! She gave me this link so I can check it in the future.

My friend Whitney is learning French the easy way, she’s using this company and I think I might start too!

I have a not so secret obsession with The Walking Dead (yes, zombies!) I finally got Michelle to watch and I feel such victory. To me the story is about never giving up and I love that theme. My husband and I just finished the last season and now I am a bit bereft of what to binge watch now, any suggestions?

Michelle and I are getting ready for our launch of our newest action set for lettering artists, it should be finished and ready to launch on May 5th, it’s time for a happy dance. Be the first to know when it’s in the shop!

I stumbled across what seems to be a pretty vibrant writing community with workshops, interviews with published authors and general writing encouragement (I want to take their grammar refresher course).

Maybelle suggested the Being Boss podcast.  I haven’t listened yet, but I am sure it’s a good one.

With high hopes I tried this new hydro-boost gel-cream for extra dry skin, spoiler it didn’t work for me, but it turned out to be a great primer!

If you haven’t already, you need to check out the comments from yesterday’s question- Is there a book you would recommend that has inspired you to go out and do/make something? I am chomping at the bit to explore every one of the suggestions!

Thank you for your visits and encouragement this week, it’s always so appreciated!

Michelle and I are dedicated to the idea of being as transparent as possible on the blog about our processes, we love sharing what we learned and to share both our failures and successes in the hopes that it gives you a shortcut to the latter. We are learning as we go along on our new venture and thought we would address the mailing list for anyone that has one now or is considering one for their business. We created ours with the idea of happy + useful mail in mind, we didn’t want spam email or used car salesman-esque emails urging you to buy, buy, buy, we wanted our list recipients to get an email from us and be excited, it’s something on the forefront of our minds when we send out our free Photoshop action for the month. Yes, we decided to create and giveaway a free premium action each month with no strings attached. Of course this is all new to us, we have only been doing this for a couple months but so far we feel it’s been a very good way to build not only a rapport with our potential clients but thank our existing ones that are on our list. When I do Besotted Brand emails I never send out an email with a sale unless it’s a good one and by good I mean 50% or more off. I know how annoyed I get with constant emails from brands that I often just immediately delete or unsubscribe. What if a brand actually has something that was worthwhile (and free shipping qualifies especially if you have overseas customers) well then, that’s different, right? When I do my sales it’s worth more to me in the time period I get sales then spamming my customers daily or weekly with meager percentages off. Time is money, always try to reach out to your customers in a way that would make you excited and move you if you were the one on the receiving end of the email. Do the other ways work, the pummel the email subscriber until they either submit or unsubscribe? I think it is a model that can work, but it is truly awful. I am no mailing list expert but I do know what I like. Also, in full confession here I do subscribe to some lists because I love to see what they’ll come up with next design/photography wise even though I am not a consumer (like Bhldn and Terrain).

So back to the our freebie for May! Both Michelle and I have been daydreaming about sun drenched locales lately (that will happen coming out of a Seattle winter). This image was taken in Los Angeles when I lived there and when I pulled it up the other night I felt like it didn’t convey the feeling of when I shot it, there was a vibrance and ‘joie de vivre’ missing that I wanted to convey, where was the magic of that moment? It needed a little technicolor and therein began the creation of this Photoshop action ‘aqua skies’ where you can paint on the blue in your image and transform it to a beautiful aqua in a swift click. We made it for skies, but it would work beautifully on bodies of water, eyes (use a subtle hand), clothes, etc. You’ll need to sign-up for the mailing list here to get it for May, but don’t worry if you want to unsubscribe immediately after that’s your prerogative (of course we would miss you dearly).

So tell us, do you have a mailing list now?  Do you have any tips + tricks that work for you that you are willing to share? If you have signed up for mailing lists what keeps you subscribed?

Last New Year’s Eve my husband & I took some time to compose and share our goals for 2015, (mine: 8-10 bullet points on my phone, his: an Excel spreadsheet with dependencies. deliverable dates, and probably a few pivot tables). Some of the goals were carried over from our 2014 lists, and we noticed a trend in our rationale for not making headway on those things: in an effort to make educated decisions, we do our homework, then revise our homework, then learn something new and revise it again…but, uhm… never turn it in. So many details researched, avenues explored, questions asked, but no final action taken. We decided to cook up a motto to get us out of that endless learning curve loop and what we came up with was: Action over Analysis. Of course keeping this motto in mind certainly doesn’t mean jumping into things without any analysis, it just means that once we understand the basics, we’ll move forward instead of hemming and hawing or indulging our perfectionist tendencies.

One of the goals that carried over from my 2014 list was for Tristan and I to officially launch Foto Rx which we had been working on for some time. As luck would have it, Tristan was mulling over a theme for the new year herself: Progress over Perfection. With our new symbiotic mantras in mind, we decided to dive (hearts full and heads strong) into launching Foto Rx. We are learning something new every day and fine-tuning the business as we go, which, it turns out, has been far more productive than trying to nail down every single detail before making our first move. There are still days filled with research and decision making, but whenever we get stuck, we remember our mantras and make the choice to favor momentum over inertia.

It’s amazing how a few simple words can help break habits that are holding you back. Do you have a motto or mantra? If not, you are welcome to ours – so far they are working wonders. Is there something you’d like to accomplish and have done your homework for, but haven’t actually made a move toward?

P.S. Tristan here, if you want to know how well this has worked for us, we created our first set of Photoshop actions over 3 years ago for a class we taught. A year late a huge blogger said we should sell them (we did nothing). We had about a zillion ideas in between that time (we believe most were good if not for us), but the moment we chose our mantras and decided to focus–again action/progress, we actually created something we are bonkers about, this works!