Well Spaced is a podcast for designers who build their businesses on Squarespace — it's a show about the platform itself and also about what it actually takes to run a real business inside that ecosystem.
Hosted by Wayne Pelletier of Resonant Pixel (https://resonantpixel.co/) and Olga Kolgusheva of Applet Studio (https://applet.studio), the show grew out of something simple: two designers with completely different business models who kept having conversations too good not to record. Wayne runs a subscription-based web design firm where clients pay monthly and never see a lump-sum invoice. Olga runs a course and template business, teaches other designers, and consults on digital strategy. Different models, different daily realities — and yet they kept finding the same friction points, the same questions, the same gaps that nobody else was talking about out loud.
Because that's the thing about working in a niche platform ecosystem: the community is full of smart, experienced people, but the real conversations tend to happen in private DMs, in side chats after summits, or after something has already gone sideways. The Squarespace Circle forums are great for certain things. They're not great for talking about a client who ghosted you, a pricing decision you're second-guessing, or whether you should blow up your entire business model and start over.
That's what this show is for. How do you talk to a difficult client? How do you handle discovery calls? How do you think about pricing beyond the obvious advice everyone already knows? How do you deal with AI changing the ground beneath your feet? How do you build something bigger than just you at a desk?
Wayne and Olga have both been doing this for years and they're still figuring it out. This is what that sounds like in real time.
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Will Vibe Coding Replace Web Designers? What It Actually Means for Your Business
Vibe coding is everywhere — Lovable, Base44, Claude Code, and a flood of Facebook ads promising "your website in 2 minutes." For designers, it's unsettling: these tools really can spin up a decent-looking site fast. So are they devaluing our work, or freeing us up for the work that actually matters?
In this episode, Olga (Applet Studio) and Wayne (Resonant Pixel Co) get honest about where AI website builders help, where they fall apart, and what it all means for the future of design as a business.
They dig into why AI-built sites are often "disposable" rather than real business engines, the missing CMS problem, why the copy is usually the weak link, and how the low end of the web design market is genuinely under threat. But it's not all doom — they also cover the shift designers need to make: from pixel-pushing to strategy, business development, and building community and confidence that AI can't replicate.
Plus a few practical wins: using Squarespace's brand settings to get genuinely good AI-generated draft copy, why giving clients copy to edit beats asking them for a blank-page draft, and the third-party workarounds (Zapier, Airtable, n8n) for populating repetitive pages at scale.
— What we cover —
• The rise of vibe coding and AI website builders
• Why AI sites are "disposable," not business systems
• The missing CMS and messy-edit problem
• Is AI devaluing design work? (yes and no)
• Why the low end of the market is most at risk
• Selling shovels in a gold rush
• Pivoting from pixel-pushing to strategy and community
• Getting good AI copy out of Squarespace's brand settings
• Why clients edit copy but won't write it
• Workarounds for repetitive pages at scale
Well Spaced is a podcast from Applet Studio and Resonant Pixel Co about design, business, and building online.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
21 Jul 2026
AI Overviews Are Eating Your Clicks — The New Content Playbook for 2026
Google's updates wiped out another chunk of blog traffic — and if you run a content-based business, you felt it. In this episode, Olga (Applet Studio) and Wayne (Resonant Pixel Co) break down what's actually happening to search: AI Overviews answering queries before anyone clicks, Google quietly rewriting your meta titles and descriptions, and a patent that lets Google serve its own version of your page.
But this isn't a doom episode. They get into the strategy shift that's actually working: moving from informational blog posts to commercial-intent landing pages, why blogs still matter (just for a completely different reason now), and how LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing what "visibility" even means.
Plus: why search intent from an AI user isn't the same as a Google user, the role of social signals and testimonials, and why the real job of a business owner is communicating and delegating — not being the bottleneck.
If your traffic has been going up, down, up, down with every Google update, this one's for you.
— What we cover —
• The March Google update and the traffic drop
• AI Overviews and the "no-click" problem
• Google rewriting your titles, tags, and serving its own pages
• Why LLM traffic doesn't convert like Google traffic
• The shift from blog posts to landing pages
• Why blogs still matter (feeding LLM context + brand authority)
• Social signals, testimonials, and authenticity
• Building systems so you stop being the bottleneck
Well Spaced is a podcast from Applet Studio and Resonant Pixel Co about design, business, and building online
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
30 Apr 2026
The secrets of local networking (not awkward at all)
Olga has built her entire client base online — SEO, templates, Zoom calls with strangers who found her on Google. Wayne gets the majority of his work through local relationships and referrals. Neither of them had really compared notes on this until now.
In this episode Olga asks Wayne to just explain it — how does local networking actually work, how much time does it take, and is it worth it for a web designer who isn't naturally a glad-hander? Wayne breaks down the approach he stumbled into almost by accident: joining a local business association, eventually getting on the board, showing up consistently without ever trying to sell anything, and watching trust accumulate until people are three beers into a happy hour telling him they hate their website.
The core insight is simple but easy to underestimate: in-person trust builds differently than online trust. When someone meets you face to face, knows your personality, has seen you show up month after month with no agenda, the moment they need a website you're already the obvious person. You don't pitch. You don't hand out cards. You just become the website person in the room.
They also talk about where local networking goes wrong — the BNI-style referral groups that feel like speed dating, chambers of commerce so large you could network for years and barely scratch the surface, and the exhaustion of trying to attend every event in town. There's a sweet spot in community size, and Wayne has a pretty specific take on what it is.
In this episode: why Olga finds in-person selling awkward and what's behind it — how Wayne's local strategy started out of loneliness, not a plan — the right community size for meaningful relationship building — how long it actually takes before referrals start coming in — why showing up without an agenda works better than any pitch — business cards and why Wayne still has most of his 250 — BNI and referral groups and why they felt gross — chamber of commerce vs. smaller local business associations — meaningful conversations as a trackable sales metric — and why the moment someone says "my nephew built my website" is exactly when you want to already be their friend.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
30 Apr 2026
The biggest Squarespace scam ever
This one is personal. Right before recording, Olga caught a scammer actively browsing her website — pulling up old pages buried in the sitemap, not linked anywhere — and within minutes received a fake form submission. One of her clients had already paid money. Wayne has been dealing with this for months.
If you're a Squarespace Circle member and you haven't heard about this yet, here's what's happening: scammers are scraping designer portfolios, pulling client contact information from public sites, and sending emails impersonating Circle members — complete with fake Gmail addresses using your real name. The offers have shifted over time, from SEO packages to site audits, but the mechanics are the same. They find your clients, they use your name, and some of those clients pay.
Squarespace has responded — they've notified Circle members, reached out to customers, and worked with PayPal and Stripe to shut down payment links — but the scam keeps evolving. An FBI case has reportedly been opened by a Circle member in New Hampshire. The emails are still going out.
In this episode Wayne and Olga talk through what they know, what they've done to protect their clients, and what they wish Squarespace would do differently. The practical takeaway: email your clients now, tell them exactly which address you write from, and tell them what you would never offer or ask for. Don't wait for this to land in someone's inbox first.
In this episode: how the scam works and where the client data comes from — fake Gmail addresses and how to spot them — how voice and tone is actually catching scammers out — what Squarespace has done and where their hands are tied — the FBI case — PayPal and Stripe shutting down payment links — why the scam keeps working and what that says about client communication gaps — what to send your clients right now — and why this might push designers off the platform entirely if Squarespace doesn't get more aggressive about it.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
30 Apr 2026
Running a Squarespace template shop
The truth about selling Squarespace templates (it's not passive income).
Selling Squarespace templates looks like the dream from the outside — build it once, sell it forever. Olga has been doing it since 2020 and she's here to set the record straight: it is not passive income. It is a second business running alongside your services business, and if you go in without understanding that, you will probably give up before it works.
In this episode Wayne asks Olga everything — the misconceptions, the marketing, the support load, the client surprises, and the moment a template buyer becomes a custom design client. Olga has been selling templates for almost six years, is closing in on Squarespace Circle Platinum status largely on template installs alone, and has made pretty much every mistake so you don't have to.
The biggest thing most designers get wrong? Launching a template before they have an audience. Olga's honest benchmark: you probably need at least 2,000 monthly blog visitors before a template shop makes sense. That means 50 to 100 blog posts and a real understanding of SEO before you list a single product. Skip that step and you're building a store nobody can find.
They also get into how templates and services feed each other as a funnel, why Olga scrapped 18 individual template courses in favor of one simple guide, how she designs for a niche that almost always surprises her, and why the designers who quit at three templates are the ones who were closest to it working.
In this episode: the passive income myth — how long it actually takes to build template sales — blog traffic as a prerequisite — how many templates to launch with — building your first audience vs. building your first product — support, documentation, and where to draw the line — how templates become a pipeline for custom services — designing for a niche and getting surprised by who actually buys — Squarespace vs. Showit vs. Webflow vs. Shopify template markets — why Olga still hasn't given her Showit shop enough love — and what she would do differently if she started over (spoiler: not much).
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
29 Apr 2026
Surviving the busy season
February hit different this year. Both of us went into the month expecting the usual seasonal uptick — and instead got leads every single day, sometimes two before lunch, working through weekends just to keep up with delivery. It was exciting and completely overwhelming at the same time.
So that's where we start: what does it actually feel like when business is going well but your systems aren't ready for it? The bottlenecks, the guilt, the middle-of-the-night anxiety about keeping clients happy, the moment you realize you are the business's biggest bottleneck. Wayne is actively hiring. Olga is rethinking everything she built.
That leads into a bigger conversation neither of us expected to have — what kind of business are you building, and for what end? A freelance practice you wind down quietly at 65, or something with a real exit multiple? Wayne has been thinking about this for a while. Olga is hearing it for the first time and it lands.
We also get into Squarespace memberships and why building a sortable member directory inside the platform is harder than it should be, how Wayne ended up recreating a third-party community tool in about 30 minutes using Zapier tables, and a heads-up for anyone using social proof widgets on sites with California or EU traffic — the GDPR exposure is something most designers aren't thinking about.
In this episode: the February lead surge and web design seasonality — being booked out vs. being ready for it — hiring and removing yourself as a bottleneck — SOPs, automation, and fixing systems during slow weeks — exit strategy for freelancers vs. agencies vs. productized businesses — valuation multiples and what your business is actually worth — Built to Sell by John Warrillow — the emotional rollercoaster of running a business day to day — ADA compliance lawsuits and ambulance-chaser tactics — Squarespace membership limitations for community directories — Member Space, Community Box, and why Wayne walked away from both — rebuilding a member directory with Zapier forms and tables — social proof widgets and GDPR liability — Howl's Moving Castle as a surprisingly accurate business metaphor.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
29 Apr 2026
New Squarespace podcast is launched!
Wayne and Olga introduce themselves and explain why they're launching a podcast together. They met at Squarespace Circle Day in New York (September 2025), connected online afterward, and started chatting so regularly about business that recording it felt like the natural next step. This first episode is a "why we're here" conversation — no deep topic, just origin story and intent.
Key themes in this episode:
Two very different business models (productized subscription vs. course/template shop) operating in the same Squarespace ecosystem
The loneliness of online entrepreneurship and the gap in having peers who truly understand niche platform businesses
Why the Squarespace-focused podcast space is underserved — and why audio + YouTube felt like the right format
Upcoming topics teased:
Selling to local clients
Selling templates
Discovery calls
Pricing
SEO
AI & market predictions
What clients really want (but don't say)
Circle designer identity theft scam
How to pivot your business model
Squarespace platform updates
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
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