The website goes live (again)!

Setting up a business takes a lot more time than I expected. I wanted to make sure I did everything correctly to make sure that I was setting things up so that Thread & Thumbsticks LLC is a legitimate company, a separate entity from me personally. Lots of advice online says to make sure you have a separate business bank account to your personal bank account, so after registering the company the next step was to choose where to open the business bank account. My first choice was American Express, but then I got an error when trying to set up the account. I called their customer support, and after they reset my application and told me to try again, I got the same error so I gave up and switched to Bluevine. Unfortunately, I’ve been having issues with my web domain (threadandthumbsticks.com) and particularly with my email addresses - they were very often unavailable. On top of that, despite receiving emails from Bluevine, the one email I never received was the one to validate my email address. 🙃

So, after setting up a temporary Gmail email address I was able to open my business bank account, and then start paying for things! I really wasn’t happy with the first site I set up with WordPress, and so I decided to give SquareSpace a go (which is what this site is built in). After working out how to get my domain to point to this site (it turns out you can’t transfer domains within 60 days of acquiring them), and waiting for the funds I transferred to my business account to clear, I was able to pay for SquareSpace and actually publish the site! (It’s worth pointing out I was able to get a 10% discount thanks to using the code from the wonderful Taliesin & Evitel channel ☺️)

So, finally, the website is live, and it’s in a state where I’m comfortable editing it and am pretty happy with how it looks. I’m totally new to all of this, so I’m aware that it’s not the most slick site in the world (and I’m sure the same will be true of the videos once I start publishing them 😉), but it’s a decent start. Using SquareSpace made it possible to even easily set up a way to sell digital goods, so I figured I’d put my designs for a potential Thread & Thumbsticks logo (a thumbstick, of course) up for a couple of bucks. Feel free to check them out!

Next steps are to actually start making videos, and then once I have one or two published, to see if I can get myself set up as an affiliate with a couple of business to try to generate some revenue from affiliate links…