Notes

My office looks a lot different since starting Rendered.

The view behind me near Post Commons in Alton, IL one day last week.

I traded a windowless basement with multiple monitors and a full greenscreen studio (cyc wall, 4k cameras, the works) for a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and my truck.

And honestly? I love it. Between the sunroom at the house, local parks, and spots like Post Commons in Alton near the river bend, I don't struggle for focus or inspiration. Hot coffee, good WiFi, and a calendar that isn’t wall-to-wall meetings. It's amazing how much you can get done when the signal-to-noise ratio shifts in your favor.

Sure, the hills are steep, but look at the view from my parking spot at Post Commons this past week.

Had to snap a pic of the fresh Retrofit Engineering & Design decal on my laptop at Post Commons and send it to my friend Jesse who owns Retrofit.

And when I get stuck, I drive. Country roads are my muse. Time to take in some beauty, think, pray, and sort things out. Sounds like a waste of time when a hundred things are screaming for my attention, but it's the opposite. It's how I reset.

Hard season. Necessary season. Good season.

This is Rendered.

If you've ever tried to find a product image on a manufacturer's dealer portal, you know what I'm about to say.

I spent years working with about forty different manufacturers, many of which had their own dealer or "partner" portals, and none of them necessarily made my life easier. Every portal had its own login, its own password rules, its own expiration schedule, and its own completely unique idea of where to put things. Spec sheets under "Resources" on one. "Marketing Assets" on another. "Dealer Tools" on a third. One of them had a tab called "Literature" that hadn't been updated since what I can only assume was the early 2010s.

And the product photos. I could write a whole separate post about the product photos. If your product image looks like it was taken on a folding table in a warehouse with a fluorescent light buzzing overhead, your dealers are not excited to sell that product. And when the image is postage-stamped size, it's not super helpful when trying to make your product look good on screen or in print.

The real problem is that these portals were built for the manufacturer's internal workflow, not for the people actually trying to sell their products. And when your partners have to fight through dozens of different logins and treasure hunts just to find a brochure, some of them are going to quietly stop fighting. They'll just sell the product from the manufacturer whose portal doesn't make them want to throw their laptop out a window.

This is fixable from both sides. If you're a manufacturer, your portal is your partner's first impression of what it's like to work with you. It should be at least as good as your product. And if you're a dealer or distributor drowning in logins, something as simple as one organized page in your own system, with every portal bookmarked, labeled, and annotated with where things actually live, can save your team real time every single day.

I build both of these now. The bar is shockingly low.

I've been saying this for over twenty years, and it's still as relevant now as it was in 2002.

Back then it was bands abandoning their dot coms for MySpace (remember Tom?). Now it's small businesses treating their Facebook page like it's their website. Same mistake, different platform.

There's a special kind of dread that comes with hovering over the Send button on a marketing email. You've checked the links, proofread it over and over, previewed it on mobile and desktop and mobile again. Still terrified.

And honestly, the tools don't help. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Brevo, doesn't matter which one. They all give you a drag-and-drop editor that looks great in the preview and then lets you accidentally break your formatting, stretch an image, or send a test draft to your whole list. The templates are supposed to keep things consistent, but they're fragile, especially when more than one person is touching them.

But let's say the email looks fine. You hold your breath and hit Send. Now some unsubscribes roll in, and your heart sinks watching each one come through. It took me a while to learn that's completely normal, and that most of those people just had a bad day and cleaned out their inbox. Think about how many times you've done that yourself. It's not personal. It's just human behavior.

Most email anxiety isn't about the message. It's about the tool and the metrics you're staring at. The fix is a system that only lets you change what you're supposed to change, and knowing which numbers actually matter.

For 25 years I Googled "random password generator" every time I needed a new password. One day I just built my own so I'd stop doing that. That became Boltkey.

Then I needed to practice songs in a different key, so I built SetKey.

Then I needed to track expenses without bloated software I'd never fully use, so I built Account Rendered.

Three problems, three tools, zero subscriptions. Sometimes the best app is the one that only does what you actually need.

rendereddigital.io