s n a p p e r h e a d: SQUARESPACE Business Model: Kill Golden Geese Daily

See those metaphorical tight little spaces inside the adjacent squarespace logo? Like entering an IKEA store, you are not supposed to be able to find what you are looking for—or get out—in a simple, end-user-familiar manner. Their business model appears to be (from a month of personal experience):

Impress geese (who have an ability to lay small golden eggs for life) with high-end ubiquitous marketing and impressively up-to-date, shiny, shit.
Kill geese while removing gold egg.
Discard goose carcass.
Wash hands.
Rinse.
Repeat.

This year, I began to move this blog to a modern pay site. In the (near? not-so near?) future, I will "go live" on snapperhead.space which was, obviously, only available at squarespace dot com. For one more tiny golden egg, I can transfer this domain to a different host. Yes, squarespace, you may consider that a threat.

I sent squarespace this email and have not received a response.

          Want to know why some fantastic computer games fail? Because their designers are “too innovative.” This is a lesson you at squarespace need to heed. I am three steps away from taking my sites to a more user-friendly home and requesting a refund for my year (before ever going live).

I just spent ten minutes trying to FIND OUT HOW to change my credit card info (my old card got hacked the day I used it to pay for squarespace - just a correlation, not a causation). It is not under my Profile; Accounts & Security. Also, there's no explanation where to find it at Accounts & Security.

          I feel, at this point, you—squarespace-email-reader/responder—might need to have this explanation provided, because you are stuck in your paradigm - and you think “your way is a better way”. Every other company, which I pay a subscription to, puts payment in a prominent place in my account or profile - or - they tell you where it is placed. You hide yours.

          Related: Your FAQ works fine. Type update credit card; answer is available.

          Related: Your CONTACT US works like a computer game that wants to test your temerity and willingness to solve the puzzle. It took me another ten minutes to find a way to send you this email.

The end of every subject tree ended with another branch of sentences, and a “Do you still want to contact us? take a screenshot and ...”   WTF squarespace - you need to get out of your own way.

          All this does is tell me you hate emails from customers. You despise reading complaints. And, you do not intend to ever peek out at what the industry is doing differently / more efficiently / gaining customer satisfaction better at, than you.

          You need to hire “secret shopper type” users to crawl around inside your over-designed sleek and impressive rabbits warren of a site and make things better or you are going to lose to Wix or Wave or whatever other new site is making things fun and simple, instead of more complicated, on the user end.

          -Veach Glines