A few weeks ago Inventables reached out to me to have a conversation about my experience with the X-carve, the CNC machine and software that I use to turn my designs into reality.

I readily agreed to help (rather late due to the COVID-19 situation) because this was a company that had already gone above and beyond to provide me with much-needed customer support to get me on track. I would send long emails and pictures detailing the issues I’d run into, and they would send me long, detailed responses to address each and every one of my problems. Sometimes they would talk me through it on the phone. Never once did I feel like I should know better, and they always championed me on in my projects. I would send them pictures of my cats as a way to ‘pay’ cat taxes to show appreciation for the level of customer support I received. Working as a solo entrepreneur can be rather quiet at times but I knew that Inventables always had my back.

With Easel, the software which I draw the products in as a free, quality, and amazingly intuitive software I already had a very good first impression based on my user experience. On top of that, Inventables has a great community full of people who share their builds and designs openly, and users who take time to help each other in the building process. I had decided somewhere along the line that somehow I would also try to give back, and grow similar values of sharing and helping others should I ever have the opportunity.

Imagine my surprise on the day of the interview when three people showed up on my screen to talk to me. I had just spent a good 2 hours pulling weeds in the garden and had not realized that this was a video interview! They turned out to be really friendly and very professional. I was really humbled that they were interested in my experience with the machine and software given that I was rather young to the game. They took the time to ask me questions for about an hour, asking about my small businesses and most importantly, what else they could do to make my experience better. They asked what Inventables could do for me. I’ve only ever thought about what I had to do better, not what the software could do for me, and this is a question I would never imagine a company sending 3 people over to ask me about. I was humbled and motivated and definitely inspired to forge on with Catlyco as well as upping my game with the Inventables X-carve.

To add to my surprise, two of the three-team members had cats (that showed up in the chat!) and they ended up buying from my Etsy shop - (with its 3 products and 15 total purchases and all). This week, the awesome interviewer shared the products with a few more of the Inventables team and a third team member has just purchased another cat bed. These may seem like small wins but for me, having them do this was a lovely morale boost, especially coming from the company that created the very machine I used to make my products.

So, with that, I wanted to say a big Thank you to Inventables and especially the people who took the time to talk to me, for creating a machine that makes dreams into a reality and providing the necessary support to use the machine, for showing me that a business can be generous with its time and resources, value sharing and community with great success. Thank you for your interest in me as an individual and for making me feel big, and thank you for supporting Catlyco as a small business. I couldn’t think of a better way to start off my Catlyco website and blog. =)