A few minutes ago I accidentally discovered that today, 5/11/12, is the 2-year anniversary of the launch of this project. So it’s absurdly fitting that tonight my business update airs in a new episode of Shark Tank. Also – how great that I randomly chose today to launch the next phase of this site, the monthly Cat Drawing Club. I guess cool things happen on May 11th. Somebody write that down.

I’m not sure how my update will be edited. We shot a day’s worth of footage, and I’m sure most of it ended up on the cutting room floor. So I wanted to talk about some of the cool things that are happening with the business in case they just use the footage that makes me look like a nutcase (and boy, there’s a lot of it).

This morning, at about 2:30am, I launched a brand new site design. I’ve broken things down into galleries that you can submit to, and hopefully everything is a little easier to find. There are now thousands of cat drawings on this site, and I encourage you to play around with that search box to see what you can find. I’ve now drawn cats on virtually every fathomable topic, and there are some real gems buried in that pile!

With the new design, I launched The Cat Drawing Club! Please do check out the commercial. Hopefully the song is just as infectious as the original! The Cat Drawing Club is a monthly club – every month, you get a cat drawing, and some other crazy fun stuff. You also get a membership card, and a $5 coupon for a custom drawing just for signing up!

Opening your mailbox just isn’t fun anymore. Hopefully the Cat Drawing Club will give you one cool piece of mail to look forward to every single month. And at $3/month, it’s just about worth the paper it’s printed on.

I’m also very excited to announce a relationship with Castlespring Enterprises, a toy manufacturer in China! This partnership was born out of Shark Tank connections, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. We’re developing a product line that we hope will be in stores and on shelves by the end of 2012.

I had been sick for about a week before taping my update, and I can’t wait to see if I was able to mask that… I’m pretty sure I was hopped up on NyQuil for most of the shoot. Hopefully that generates some lovely TV moments.

I’ll be watching tonight, and I hope you will be, too! Happy Free Cat Friday, y’all!