Customer Story: Hannah from Squid

Welcome Hannah! Tell us about you and what you’re building!

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I am actually an attorney by trade and I was in law school during the pandemic with my 3rd year being disrupted and spent at home. 

Having had experience renting a number of apartments over the years, I had always been a bit irritated by the “shower curtain only” option in the bathroom. 

And one night I drew up this crazy idea to come up with an adhesive shower door that I wanted for myself. I showed it to my mom and a couple of friends and they all said “Hey, that's actually a great idea”. 

I had no idea what I was doing (and still don’t!), but I found a product designer pretty soon after that and made a prototype to see if it could work. We’re still pre-launch today, but launching Squid in the fall :) 

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What have you been doing from ideation to today? 

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Prototyping, getting the product ready, finalizing our website and also running preliminary ads to see if people were interested before I spent the money to have them manufactured. Thankfully those campaigns were successful, so we have a pretty good list to go after once our first batch is ready to ship.

Have you found that your attorney work has overlapped with your Shopify setup?

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A little bit. I’ve gone the nerd route and read all my contracts. But probably the most that I've learned in Law School is being adaptable and trying to figure it out as you go.  

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Any learnings already? Things you would have done differently? 

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I've jumped the gun on a couple of things. Looking back, I could have done things a lot simpler without making my life unnecessarily difficult. 

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You leverage a Pixel Union theme right? How is that? 

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I wanted a single SKU website without too many bells and whistles and this theme we’re running on “Startup” is perfect. I love the aesthetic of it and I find it really self-explanatory. It also has neat embedded video features which are important to me because our product is best explained visually. 

I would definitely recommend using a theme just to get started instead of going in and trying to make things complicated. 

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And what about your experience on Storetasker? 

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Yes I was paired with Mladen and he's been incredible. He's familiar with the theme and our process of working through tweaks is so smooth. 

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What’s next on the horizon for you? 

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This is my first time manufacturing a product, so that's been a learning curve. Fortunately I've found a great 3PL that was willing to work with me. So really focused on just getting the first shipment here and dealing with freight.

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What would you attribute most of your success to at this stage? 

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Being adaptable and able to pivot quickly. There were a lot of times that something would go wrong and I would think this is just not worth it. But you take a deep breath and get to the next day where you’ll find the courage to solve the challenge. 

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Hannah, thank you! Best of luck to you on the launch. 

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