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Important Disclaimer: This article is not created to take sides in the situation. Instead, it serves as a helpful reminder for global Public Relations & Communications leaders to (in an unbiased way) put themselves in this scenario and play out the thinking. As Piar acts as a liaison between behavioral science and the PR & Comms world. The purpose of this article is to encourage communicators to think critically, beyond already well established & documented frameworks for best practices by the Crisis Communications Community - which serve as the correct process to tackle Crisis Comms, after the critical thinking required upfront has already taken place.
On October 14, 2025, Cleveland based Entrepreneur & Content Creator, Dan McLaughlin (@softpourn), owner of Golden Triangle Coffee, posted a five-minute TikTok explaining why he's shutting down sales channels on his seven-year-old coffee roastery website. The video has gained significant traction, accumulating 98,800 likes and nearly 4,000 comments across TikTok, Twitter, and small business communities.
The core issue: After activating and immediately deactivating Squarespace Payments, the platform continues to hold a substantial percentage of his incoming revenue for six months. This reserve requirement, combined with already thin margins due to rising costs across green coffee, packaging, and utilities, means every sale now costs him money during what should be his busiest season.
"I don't normally do this. I don't think I've ever done this. But I don't really know what else to do at this point," Dan explains in the video, after detailing multiple failed attempts to resolve the issue through customer service channels.
He's asking his audience to help him make noise. Then he goes back to work.
The clock is ticking. Payment-holds are standard practice, Stripe/PayPal/Square all do them, the question is edge-case handling. For Squarespace's communications team, the window to shape this narrative is closing. For PR professionals watching this unfold, it's a live case study in crisis decision-making under pressure.
Don’t expect a declaration about who's right or wrong in this article. What’s more interesting is showing what communications decision-making looks like when behavioral science frameworks meet real-world stakes.
Platform policy conflicts with small business realities happen constantly. Customer service gaps surface publicly. Risk management tools create edge case damage. These situations are predictable and, often, preventable.
But most teams don't have frameworks to stress-test their decisions before pressure hits. They wait until something goes viral, reach for the crisis playbook, and hope the holding statement buys time to figure out what to do.
The problem? Holding statements often makes it worse. They signal self-orientation. They fail intimacy tests. They try to optimize for legal, finance, product, and external audiences simultaneously, satisfying none.
Before any response gets drafted, let's map what's happening in the narrative space around this video.
Loss aversion is doing heavy work. The framing could have been "Squarespace is holding funds I'll get back later." But instead, it's "every sale costs me money during the holidays." That's visceral, immediate, and activates threat response in anyone who's run a business on thin margins.
The availability heuristic is priming. One detailed case becomes the mental model for how Squarespace treats small businesses. Everyone with a negative platform experience will pattern-match this story to their own. The comment section is filled with similar frustrations. With customers, the public, a helpful competitor (namely, someone claiming to be working at Block), and even a Squarespace employee from a different department offering alternatives in the comments, creating an implicit comparison narrative.
Authority has inverted. When Dan sarcastically references "award-winning customer service," he's weaponizing Squarespace's own brand promise. Their strength becomes evidence of the gap between marketing and reality.
Confirmation bias is loading across multiple audiences. Small business owners who distrust big platforms will see this as proof. Squarespace skeptics will share it as validation. People evaluating website platforms will bookmark it as a warning signal. One commenter, a Squarespace web designer, wrote: "I'm very concerned about this for my future clients who have product-based businesses so I will be contacting them about this. Let's put the pressure on them for the sake of other business owners."
And he owns the narrative frame entirely. He's reasonable, detailed, transparent about his mistake, clear about impact. Viewers are not seeing him yelling, but rather he's explaining. That makes it harder to dismiss and easier to believe.
Every hour without a response reinforces the frame he's set. Silence, often while well intentioned, reads as confirmation.
This is where most teams reach for the crisis playbook and start drafting holding statements. Legal wants to protect policy. Finance wants to avoid setting a precedent. Product wants to explain why payment-holds exist and educate on how the industry works. Meanwhile, Comms has the responsibility to translate all of that into something that won't make it worse.
So, PR & Comms leaders! Let's slow that process down and run it through frameworks that stress-test decisions before they harden into responses.
The Trust Equation breaks down into four components: Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy, and Self-Orientation. In crisis response, it filters whether your answer lands or backfires.
Credibility: Can you explain the payment hold policy in terms that make sense to someone running a small business? For this critical thinking exercise you’d want to avoid explaining it in legal terms or platform terms, but in the operational reality of a seven-year coffee roastery trying to stay open during peak season? If the explanation requires audiences to already understand payment processor risk models, you've lost credibility with the person who needs to hear it.
Reliability: Does your response match the "award-winning customer service" promise? Dan's already told the story of repeated contact with no resolution. If your public response doesn't acknowledge that gap, you're confirming his characterization instead of reframing it.
Intimacy: Can you demonstrate that you understand his actual situation, or is it actually just the category his situation falls into? There's a difference between "we apply consistent policies to all merchants" and "we see what's happening with your peak season timing and we're looking at options."
Self-Orientation: Is your response designed to protect the company or solve the problem? Audiences can tell, because if the first three sentences justify policy, you've already signaled self-orientation over customer focus.
Run your draft response plan through those four filters before it goes out. If it fails any of them, it will make things worse.
As a Public Relations & Communications leader, you know you can't optimize for everyone because trying to, makes your response generic and safe. Which in a crisis usually means ineffective. Map the stakeholders and decide who matters most right now.
Primary stakeholder: Dan and Golden Triangle Coffee. What does resolution look like for him? What would rebuild trust & confidence? What timeline matters?
Secondary stakeholders: Other small business customers using Squarespace Payments, or evaluating it. My take is that they’re likely watching to see if this is a pattern or exception once they have come across the post. Your response signals what they should expect if they hit a similar issue. The comment section shows this concern spreading: web designers questioning whether to recommend Squarespace, other business owners sharing similar experiences, Squarespace Circle developers flagging the issue internally.
Tertiary stakeholders: The broader small business and creator community. They're pattern-matching this to their own platform relationships. They want to know if this is how companies with scale treat customers without “leverage”.
Internal stakeholders: Legal, finance, product, customer service, leadership. They all have (it can be argued they are competing) priorities and different risk assessments. Comms usually acts as a connector between them, communicators have to translate between these groups and external reality.
You can't make all of them happy. so you have to decide which relationship matters most and optimize for that (not an easy thing, especially as the stakes heighten). If you try to thread the needle between all of them, you end up with a statement that says nothing and satisfies no one.
Next, let's map the options and run a Pre-mortem on each. Behavioral scientists say they “help to identify preimplementation barriers” but let’s translate that, without jargon for PR & Comms: A premortem assumes the decision has already failed and works backward to figure out why. It surfaces blind spots before they become headlines.
Speaking of headlines, I asked PR Author, Columnist & Co-Founder of Notably, Carly Martinetti for her take:
"What's missing from most crisis frameworks is the acknowledgment that speed and perfection are enemies. I've watched companies lose the narrative not because they said the wrong thing, but because they spent three days getting legal, product, and PR to agree on the 'right' thing. By then, the story's already written itself. The real skill here isn't crafting the perfect response but instead knowing which 80% solution you can execute in the next two hours that won't make things worse. Dan's video has been up for days now... so, every hour of silence is Squarespace choosing a response strategy, whether they realize it or not."
Option 1: Stay silent.
Premortem: The narrative spreads without any counterweight from Squarespace. The video gets picked up by small business advocacy accounts, platform skepticism communities, and eventually trade press covering e-commerce challenges. In this scenario, you risk that silence reads as confirmation of his characterization. Other customers with similar issues start surfacing their stories. The pattern story writes itself without you, and you've lost the ability to shape the narrative frame effectively.
Option 2: Standard legal/policy response.
Premortem: You issue a statement explaining that payment holds are industry-standard risk management, necessary to protect both merchants and the platform, applied consistently across all accounts. The statement is technically accurate, yet it also proves his point about "rock solid defensive" customer service. The risk is sending signals that policy matters more than his specific situation. The response becomes evidence for his claim, and the story gets bigger because now there's a company statement to react to.
Option 3: Private resolution, no public comment.
Premortem: You work directly with him to resolve the issue. He updates his audience that it's fixed. That sounds good until the next case surfaces, and the next. The pattern that emerges is "Squarespace only responds when something goes viral." While you may have assumed this is the most diplomatic way to resolve it, you risk inadvertently creating a template for future pressure. Every customer with an issue now knows the path to resolution is public pressure, bypassing the role & purpose of solid customer service. Here, you've made your support system less effective by signaling it only works at scale.
Option 4: Public acknowledgment plus private resolution.
Premortem: You post a response acknowledging the situation, explaining you're working directly with him to resolve it, and committing to reviewing policy application for edge cases like his. It’s likely that the Comms leader may assume this is the “textbook” best practice play from the playbook, and that sounds reasonable. But if execution isn't fast, transparent, and doesn't actually resolve his issue, you've now created a second story: "Squarespace promised to fix it and didn't." The response becomes another piece of evidence instead of resolution. If you reach this point, the stakes are now higher than ever because you've made a public commitment that has an effect on confidence now, as well as trust.
Each option has a risk tolerance, some assumptions, and your brain circuitry is at the mercy of unrecognized biases that override critical thinking and cause PR & Comms leaders to turn a blind eye to the “failure mode” from each scenario. In short, the working question PR & Comms leaders should form is: “Which failure mode are we most prepared to manage?”
In the comment section of Dan's video, multiple users are tagging Square and Block as alternatives. At least one person identifying as a Square employee (username: @canarymission) wrote: "I work at square (not square space) and I'm more than happy to get you out of this mess."
This creates an interesting secondary layer: How do competitor communications and social intelligence teams monitor and respond to peer company crises?
While no company wants to be seen as opportunistic, standard competitive intelligence workflows include monitoring for exactly these moments. The question becomes whether and how to engage when opportunity presents itself through someone else's crisis. Social listening teams at competing platforms are almost certainly tracking this conversation. The decision point is whether responding publicly adds value or appears exploitative.
For competitors watching this unfold, the framework is similar: Run the Trust Equation (does outreach feel helpful or predatory?), map stakeholders (is this about one merchant or signaling to a broader market?), and premortem the engagement (what's the failure mode if this backfires?)
This case matters so much for PR and Comms teams because it's not unique at all. These situations are predictable and preventable. But most teams don't have frameworks to stress-test decisions before pressure hits.
To further illustrate, I reached out to the influential Global Risk, Crisis & Emergency Communication leader, Philippe Borremans who shared:
“Most large and complex organizations have a crisis plan, but very few know what to do when that plan fails”
While possible misconceptions on the gap here, may be: Creativity, writing ability, or media relationships. In reality, the gap is in decision quality under pressure.
Tools like the Premortem Worksheet help PR & Comms leaders to surface assumptions before they become narrative risks. The Trust Equation helps to catch self-orientation before it gets the better of you, subconsciously. The Stakeholder Matrix forces explicit prioritization instead of vague optimization. Crisis Response Patterns show you which playbook move is paired best with which situation, and which failure mode you're most prepared to manage.
Warning: I urge PR & Comms leaders not to view these as theoretical tools. They're operationalized well, and lead to unexpected growth when you use them in live decision moments. They’re not meant to be used in retrospect after damage is done.
It’s only fair that I hold up the mirror to myself to drive home the point of this article. Because in a meta-way, this article itself uses the frameworks it describes. I'm stress-testing my own assumptions by asking myself: Is this about taking sides, or showing decision-making under pressure? Am I optimizing for being right, or being useful? Does my analysis demonstrate intimacy with both Dan's situation and Squarespace's constraints, or am I just “performing” my stated neutrality?
When I map stakeholders: PR and communications professionals are the primary audience. Agency leaders and in-house teams evaluating decision frameworks are secondary. People following the Golden Triangle Coffee story are tertiary. I'm not trying to satisfy all of them equally. I'm optimizing for the first group and letting others find value if it's there, and open minded to learning for the sake of growth.
When I run a premortem: Then I ask myself, If this article fails, why? If it reads as vendor pitch instead of teaching, I've lost credibility. If it oversimplifies legal and risk management complexity, I've failed intimacy with people who work in platform policy. If it doesn't give you a next step, can it be interpreted as a waste of your time?
This is what operationalizing metacognition looks like. You think about your thinking!
You stress-test your logic. You make your assumptions visible so you can interrogate them before they set into place, becoming decisions you can't really take back.
I don't know how this resolves for Golden Triangle Coffee and Squarespace. I don't have inside information, and it’s not on Polymarket so I'm not making predictions.
But, I know the pattern and trust that you’re seeing it too! Personally, I’ve seen it play out dozens of times across platforms, agencies, in-house teams, industries, and crisis types. Observably, I found the teams that handle it well are the ones who built the thinking infrastructure before pressure hit, because they fall back on heuristics, SOPs, and systems already in place when unexpected twists and turns occur. Conversely, the ones who struggle are reaching for the playbook in the moment and hoping muscle memory carries them through.
If you want to be in the first category, you need frameworks that work under pressure. You need tools that surface blind spots before they become headlines. You need a process that makes thinking visible so you can stress-test it.
Continue the Conversation:
What would you do if you were leading communications for Squarespace right now? What framework would you use to stress-test your response options? Share your thinking in the comments or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Tanzeel Sukhera is the Co-founder & CEO of Piar . Tan is based in Montreal and has 7 years of experience in Media Monitoring & Social Listening, PR & Comms Measurement, Strategy & Analysis. Tan is a former TV News Anchor, and has experience working with some of the most influential and iconic brands in the world. From F500 orgs, to Public Sector, NGOs to innovative venture backed startups. Now, through events and workshops, Piar helps PR and Communications leaders apply techniques and frameworks from behavioral & decision sciences to help them think about their own work, in their own context - more effectively. Use on real-world campaigns, messaging, and stakeholder work among other applications. Learn how to get started for free today at piar.co.👈
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