November 2025 - Board Meeting

11/05/2025 - Board Meeting

11/05/2025 - Board Meeting

Attending:

• Vice President: Jake

• Secretary: Brad

• Director: Chris

• Director: Matt

• Director: John

Absent:

• President: Dave

• Treasurer: Meg

Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting and September Notes Revision

Vote to approve the minutes of the October board meeting and the revision to the September board meeting notes (The Secretary forgot to include the vote to approve the minutes from that meeting's notes.)

Yes: 5

No: 0

Result: Passed

Financials

• Thanks to Meg, we cashed out the CD per the vote taken the previous month (October).

Current Members: 83

• It was noted that two new members signed up on the new website and got keys but they haven't been seen since.

• So far only 1 member has a recurring membership through the new website.

Shopify Website Discussions

• Brad expressed frustration with many of the limitations he's found in trying to create additional functionality on the website. He has made it so that members can view their Tool Fee payments and see when they are due for renewal, but the Shopify website doesn't provide ways for members to provide information about themselves. For example, members cannot enter a preferred name nor upload photos of their faces.

• Brad and John agreed to work together to make the website send new members the welcome email, something the website has not been doing so far.

• The idea of only offering recurring monthly subscriptions (not the single month option) was mentioned.

• Shopify costs us $105 per month.

• Zapier costs us about $600 per year.

• It was noted that in PayPal payments made through the website, PayPal extracts a fee for the payment, but Shopify does not. In other words, for every membership payment, either Shopify or PayPal extracts a small percentage, but not both.

• Right now we have two systems for member tracking. There is the original PayPal and Google Sheets system, and now Shopify tracks members that have signed up using its service. In the long run, our goal is to transition such that Shopify tracks of all our members. In the short term, we discussed possiblities for how the two systems could talk to each other.

  • Shopify has the ability to interface with Google Sheets, but only by adding a new line to the bottom of an existing sheet. No ability to read from the sheets has yet been found.

  • Matt mentioned we could use App Scripts in Google Sheets to work with data that Shopify adds to it.

  • Jake suggested we could create automation to check for canceled PayPal subscriptions that then updates Shopify.

  • Brad floated an idea for how the door could start interfacing with Shopify.

  • Seal is the app we use in Shopify for recurring subscriptions. There may be a way for migrating Google Sheet data to Seal from PayPal. Apparently the Seal system is easier to work with than Shopify.

• Ultimately, it was agreed that Brad and John would start a discussion of what things we want the website to do and how we can get there.

New Domain Email Addresses

• Fortunately, from a fortuitous find, we were able to log back into our old Google Workspace account and set it up to handle the email addresses to use our new domain. All the old emails addresses, such as "tools," will now work again as long as their domain names are changed to "@desmoinesmaker.space"

Space Updates

Vote to purchase the SawStop table saw for $3,000 from general funds

Yes: 5

No: 0

Result: Passed

• Brad wrote some blog posts for the new website. He was unsure whether or not we can include members' company names in the posts and made a note to ask Meg what the limits are on this.

• Krieg declined to use our shop to photograph their tools. They were unhappy we weren't willing to move the Lead CNC.

• The new door system to track access is ready to go thanks to Matt. He's been too nervous about breaking stuff to implement it.

Meeting Adjourned

• Board Member 1: "He keeps talking about this "high score." I'm afraid to ask him about it now." Board Member 2: "I'm working on being the world leader in unread emails. Whenever I get a pop up I always put my email in there." Board Member 3: "You're the reason every advertising company thinks that spam works."