The beginning of new things

I started writing this the day before the Counios and Gane monthly newsletter went out. I was nervous—this was the first time I was openly broadcasting what I’ve been up to on davidgane.com.

Then, on a whim, I decided to test my membership activation with a credit card. When I set everything up, it seemed fine, but I thought I should give it a quick try. I immediately got a processing error.

I searched through all my settings on the website. Everything seemed fine. So then I went to the payment processor, Stripe, to see what was going on there. Everything seemed fine....except I’d get a different screen on my iPhone vs. the website, saying I needed to be verified.

As far as I knew, I was. So after a lot of searching, I eventually emailed support. They told me I was a “High Fraud” risk, which was confusing, since I had just set the account up. They said there was nothing that could be done and they’d be closing my account in three days.

However, the whole website hung on receiving payments from them. They were kind in their response, and offered other payment processers, but unfortunately, Ghost, the website that ~~is~~ was the backend of davidgane.com, only used Stripe for their memberships. If I didn’t get things sorted out, my whole venture was screwed.

More frantic emails from me, a rather restless sleep, and then after three hours of waiting this morning, I got a notification saying I’d been misidentified as unauthorized and everything was now restored.

Phew.

But, I have to say the whole experience has shaken me a little.

I like having backups of my backups, so suddenly being blocked by what seemed a pretty clearcut “No” was extremely worrisome. If they had not taken the time to reassess and reevaluate, I may not have got things back to normal. And then where would I be?

I’m thankful though that things worked out and I can once again start moving forward and sharing this with you.

Each day, the idea of what davidgane.com continues to develop and I grow more excited, Sure, I’ve only got two other subscribers besides myself (hi wife, hi sister), I decided to leave this newsletter as an early record of hopefully where things all began.

Thank you for reading.