I can't believe this story is real.

I'm a little ashamed to say I didn't recognize her at first.
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The profile picture had been too small.

It was last Friday afternoon, and I was outside in the driveway with the kids.
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If you know me at all, you're going to find this highly improbable, but I was...
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​Playing basketball?​
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As of a few weeks ago, we now have a basketball hoop for the first time since I was a kid playing "'95-'96 Chicago Bulls" outside with my little brother who I allowed forced to be the Pippin to my Jordan.*
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​*He was better, but I was older. The older sisters in the room get it. ​
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Ostensibly, the hoop was a gift for Mason's 7th birthday, but I think we have all come to understand that on a deep, soul level, it is actually mine. ​
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Not because I'm great at basketball (although I'm good enough to impress my kids and occasionally my husband, which is all that matters)....
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But because it's the perfect moderately-competitive, mostly-mindless drug for terrifyingly-unregulated pre-launch nervous system.
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You dribble, you shoot, you miss. Damn. But no problem. You try again. Swish. Swish. Repeat. Highly satisfying. Instant gratification. Repetitive. Meditative.
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Free driveway therapy, basically.

So on Monday, I was in driveway with the kids, meditating, when the car pulled up.

A man got out first. Middle-aged, nice face, big smile. He was holding my grocery bags, which I took from him, realizing this was my Instacart. The woman in the passenger seat got out, too.
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​Oh, that's cute, I thought. An Instacart delivery date.​
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He told me the view was beautiful — it is, it's the thing most people notice when they pull up — and I thanked him and said something forgettable about the mountain.

Then the woman with him spoke for the first time.

"I told him last time how beautiful it was out here. It was his fault about the coffee, actually." ​
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She paused. "I still feel so terrible about that."

I was confused for a second. I hadn't ordered coffee?

And then it hit me.
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​It was Rett.

Remember Rett? This Rett?!

Just in case you don't have time to read another newsletter, a quick recap:
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A few weeks ago, I told you about an Instacart order gone very wrong, then very right.
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My shopper — a woman named Loretta who went by Rett (I've since learned it's actually "Ret," with one 't') — went out of her way to track down my favorite coffee beans. After placing my order, I'd realized we were out of coffee, panicked, and messaged her to ask if she could possibly add some beans before she checked out.
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She found them. They were on sale. She sent me the fist bump emoji. We bonded. We were, briefly, a team.
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(I was the Scottie Pippen.)

Except when I unpacked the bags she'd left on my porch, the coffee we'd just worked so hard to attain wasn't there. It was the ONLY thing not there, in fact.
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I processed my grief to my eleven-year-old and her best friend. I requested the refund. I attempted to move on.

And then, at 9pm that night, I came home...
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​... to a single grocery bag on the front porch.
🥹🥹🥹

Rett had come back. Five hours later, to my mountain in the middle of nowhere. With my coffee. Because she couldn't let the order end like that.

I wrote a glowing review on Instacart, left her a big tip, then wrote about it here. Fifty thousand people read it.
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And now, thanks to the wonders of a small town and a limited delivery radius, here she was in my driveway again.​
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It was kismet. It was a miracle. It was an Instacart-sponsored episode of Touched By an Angel?

I got chills. "Oh my gosh — Ret?!" I said.
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And then, continuing my well-documented habit of hugging strangers in unexpected circumstances, I hugged her.

"I wrote about you!" I said, creepily, before quickly clarifying that I'm not a weird, I just have a marketing newsletter and that fifty thousand people had read the story. That her coming back that night had turned into this whole thing about human customer service and connecting and what it means to actually care whether someone has their coffee in the morning.

She asked if I'd send it to her.

Later that night, I did — typing her email address from memory and hoping desperately I'd gotten it right, because I am not an auditory learner and no one should ever give me verbal directions to anywhere.

She wrote back and told me that she loved the story. She'd felt horrible when she discovered the coffee had fallen out of the bag. (Her husband missed it.) That she's the kind of person who believes in good customer service no matter what — twenty years in HR will do that to a person.
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Then I got to this part:

"I am glad to have been your 'Ret' — you were mine, too."

This is when I'm grateful for the internet, guys.

Like, in just two paragraphs, what do we know about Rett? (Other than the fact that she clearly understands I would, in fact, like to weave a follow-up.)
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She believed in what she was doing, even when it was hard.
She was operating in a crowded market, doing good work, wondering if anyone noticed.
She had a brutal week and kept showing up anyway.
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And all she wanted — underneath the HR career and the Instacart gig and the fist bump emoji — was a moment of actual human connection in a world that hands you a tracking number, passes you to an AI agent, and calls it service.

She was doing everything right. She just didn't know if it was landing.
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If it mattered to anyone. If anyone would see her.

I think a lot of you know that feeling.

You believe in what you do. You're showing up in a crowded market. You're doing the work — good work, careful work, the kind of work where you'd go back for the coffee — and some weeks you wonder if anyone is out there, noticing.

Your website is the place where they should see you.

It's not a brochure. It's not a menu of services. It's the place where someone pulls up to your driveway for the first time, and in thirty seconds, decides whether you're the person they've been looking for — or just another profile picture that's too small to really see.

The problem is that most websites don't show the person behind them.
They show the outcome without the human; the results without the process.
The grocery bags without the Rett.

And so people scroll past. They hire the fast option, the first option, the cheapest one, the loudest one, the one that showed up on the first page — because nothing on the site gave them a reason to believe this was someone who'd come back for them.

But when someone sees you.
Truly, sees that you're their Ret and knows that they're yours, too.
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​It's magical. It's how the internet can bring strangers together to create something that gives you goosebumps in the driveway.
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On Tuesday, we're releasing a collection of templates to help you get seen at your best, for what you do best.
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The whole of you, the humanity of you, the reason you do what you do, the '20 years of human resources" it took to hone the way you care, and the way you show up when everyone else has checked out.
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That collection comes with the biggest discount you'll see on our templates all year.

And in the Un-Boring Your Website free masterclass on launch day, I'll show you how to build a site that actually sounds like you, connects like you, and makes the right people feel like they've found their person.

The class is free. It's live. And if you've ever had a week where you wondered if anyone was noticing...
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Hi. I'll be your Ret if you'll be mine.

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Your favorite Michael Jordan impersonator,

— Jen

P.S. Ret — if you're reading this one, too, I hope someone reads this email and hires you on the spot. I'm so glad the internet brought us together.
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P.P.S. New collection of templates drops Tuesday and I'm sending an extensive sneak peek to the waitlist tomorrow. Click here and I'll add you to the list. ​