Chapter 3: Staying Connected to What You Built

I was sitting in a conference room at a professional development event in November 2013, half-listening to a presentation about donor engagement strategies, when my phone buzzed.

New order: $127.50. Customer in Portland ordered three shirts and a beanie.

I smiled. That was Sarah's third order this year. She'd become one of our most loyal customers.

Two minutes later, another buzz.

Zendesk ticket: "Just wanted to say thank you. Wore my Stupid Cancer shirt to my follow-up appointment today and my doctor loved it. Made me feel brave."

I bookmarked that one to respond to properly during the break. Three minutes after that, another notification.

Instagram mention: Customer posted a photo wearing our raglan tee with the caption "Finally found a brand that gets it. #StupidCancer"

This was happening in real-time, on my phone, through Slack. I wasn't frantically checking email or logging into multiple platforms. I was connected to the heartbeat of something I'd built, even while doing completely different work.

This was the power of treating Slack not as a chat app, but as a window into your community.

The Joy of Staying in the Loop

As Chief Operating Officer of a nonprofit, running the ecommerce store was just one part of my job. I had donor meetings, board meetings, program planning sessions, and travel for conferences and events. On any given day, I might be in back-to-back obligations for hours at a time.

Early on, being away from my desk meant being completely disconnected from the store. I'd emerge from a long meeting to find dozens of emails, and I'd have to piece together what had happened while I was gone. Orders had been placed. Customer conversations had happened. Community members had posted about us on social media.

But all of it felt like history. I was catching up on what had already occurred instead of experiencing it as it unfolded.

The disconnection bothered me, but not because I was anxious about problems. I was missing the good stuff. The rush of seeing orders come in. The warmth of reading a customer's thank-you note. The excitement of watching someone post about us on social media. These moments gave me energy. They reminded me why the store mattered.

I didn't want to be chained to my desk, but I also didn't want to be cut off from something that brought me so much joy.

Slack became the solution, but not in the way most people use it.

Slack as a Window, Not Just a Tool

I used Slack differently than most people. Instead of channels for team discussions, I created channels for information flows:

#incoming-money - Every time an order was placed, a notification would appear with the order details: who bought what, where they were located, how much they spent. Watching this channel was like watching the scoreboard at a basketball game. Each notification was a small win, and they added up throughout the day.

#community-love - This was my favorite channel. It aggregated positive customer interactions: five-star reviews, thank-you emails through Zendesk, social media posts mentioning us, Instagram photos of people wearing our gear. On tough days, I'd scroll through this channel and remember why the work mattered.

#support-conversations - Every new Zendesk ticket created a notification here. I could see what questions people were asking, what issues they were having, and how quickly we were responding. But more importantly, I could see the stories people were sharing with us when they reached out.

#inventory-pulse - Low stock alerts, reorder reminders, new shipments arriving. This channel kept me connected to the operational rhythm of the store without having to log into our inventory system constantly.

#to-do - Tasks that needed attention, flagged from various sources. This one was more operational, but even here, the items often came from community feedback: "Three people asked about hoodies this week—time to consider adding them?"

Each channel was a different lens on the same thing: a community rallying around a brand that meant something to them.

The Psychology of Real-Time Connection

There's something powerful about experiencing your business in real-time instead of reconstructing it after the fact.

When you check your email at the end of the day and see that ten orders came in, you see a number. When you're connected via Slack and watch those ten orders arrive one by one throughout the day, you see ten different people choosing to support what you built. You see their names, their locations, what they ordered. Each one is a moment of connection.

When you log into Zendesk at the end of the week and see that fifteen tickets were resolved, you see a metric. When you're connected via Slack and see those fifteen conversations unfold in real-time, you see stories. You see someone nervous about wearing a bold statement shirt to work. You see someone ordering a shirt for a friend going through treatment. You see someone asking if we ship internationally because they want to send our products to their cousin in Australia.

The difference isn't just informational. It's emotional. Real-time connection makes you feel part of something alive.

And here's what surprised me: this connection didn't make me more reactive or stressed. It made me more energized. Seeing orders come in throughout the day felt like applause. Reading customer thank-you notes felt like fuel. Watching community members post about us on social media felt like confirmation that we'd built something worth building.

I wasn't monitoring for problems. I was celebrating what was working.

Building the Information Architecture

Setting up Slack as a window into your business requires thinking carefully about information architecture. You're not just connecting tools. You're designing what you want to see, how you want to see it, and why it matters.

The first step is identifying what gives you energy. For me, it was seeing orders come in, reading positive customer feedback, and staying aware of support conversations. Those became channels.

The second step is identifying what you need to act on but don't need to see constantly. Inventory alerts mattered, but they didn't give me the same emotional lift as customer thank-yous. So inventory alerts went into their own channel that I could check periodically.

The third step is connecting the tools that hold this information. Some connections were native integrations—Bigcommerce posted order notifications, Zendesk posted new tickets. Other connections required Zapier.

But the technical setup was straightforward. The hard part was designing the architecture so that the information flow felt like a gift, not a burden. Too many notifications and it becomes noise. Too few and you're not really connected. The goal was finding the rhythm that kept you engaged without overwhelming you.

The Transferability Lesson

Slack won't be around forever. The specific tools I used won't be around forever. But the principle will always matter: find ways to stay connected to what you're building in real-time, on your terms, in ways that energize rather than drain you.

Today, there are even more options than existed when I built the store. Discord, Microsoft Teams, custom dashboards, mobile apps for specific platforms. The technology will keep evolving.

But the need stays the same. If you're building something that matters to you, you want to feel its pulse. You want to see the community rallying around it. You want to experience the wins as they happen, not reconstruct them from reports.

That connection isn't a luxury. It's fuel. It's the reminder that the work you're doing resonates with real people. It's the energy that keeps you going during the hard parts.

Celebrating What You Built

The difference between monitoring a business and staying connected to it is the difference between surveillance and celebration.

Monitoring is defensive. You're watching for problems, catching issues, preventing disasters. It's exhausting because you're always looking for what might go wrong.

Staying connected is celebratory. You're watching the wins, reading the stories, seeing the community grow. It's energizing because you're constantly reminded why you built this thing in the first place.

Both approaches can use the same tools. Both can have real-time visibility. But the experience is completely different.

When you design your information architecture around celebration—orders coming in, customer love notes, community posts, milestones reached—you create a system that fuels you instead of depleting you.

And that fuel matters. Building something from scratch is hard. There will be difficult days, operational challenges, moments of doubt. But if you've built a window into your community, you can look through it on those hard days and remember: this matters. People care about this. What we're building resonates.

That's not just operational visibility. That's connection. And connection is what makes the work sustainable.