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Are your subscribers not interacting with your emails? Are they not clicking on your links and buying from you? Is it time to launch a re-engagement email campaign? What does that even do anyway? Let's find out, shall we? SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:15) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.(4:00) Have you been neglecting your email list?(7:03) Collect some data before you launch a re-engagement campaign.(7:36) Focus on clicks - not open rates!(10:05) Are people disengaged from your list? (11:15) What to include in your re-engagement email campaign.(13:30) Why you should get rid of those who don't engage.(15:22) Don't be afraid of deleting subscribers from your list!(16:32) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Have you been neglecting your email list? A lot of people who start working with us admit they've been neglecting their email list for a while. This happens a lot, to a lot of marketers, and for a lot of different reasons.But the good news is that we've got a campaign for that exact scenario. It's called The Terrible Friend, and it works like this: you show up and tell your subscribers that you've been a terrible friend. Because you know that people on your list get value from the topic you teach, but you've still gone and ignored them. So you tell them that the plan going forward is to email them regularly. You'll email on specific days of the week (ideally every day) with valuable information.And the important bit about this campaign is that you give them a blatant way of saying no. If they've moved on and are no longer interested in your solution, you give them the option to click on a link and remove themselves from your email list (i.e. to opt out). Because chances are that if you haven't emailed in a while, some people have forgotten who you are.And that makes sense. If you haven't emailed anyone for ages, launching this campaign gives you the opportunity to step things up and start emailing regularly again. So be humble and admit it's you who didn't get in touch. People will relate and connect with the human element of this mistake.Collect some data before you launch a re-engagement campaignIf you haven't emailed your list in a while, you haven't really been in a position for your subscribers to disengage. So before you launch a re-engagement email campaign, you want to send some emails and collect some data. We recommend you gather at least one month of data from the emails you send (especially if you email daily) as this will give you a good indication of where people are after you've ignored them for ages. You do this to find out whether people are opening your emails and clicking on your links.Focus on clicks - not open rates!When you look at your data, focus on clicks rather than open rates. Because Apple and Android are blocking what they're allowing to be reported back to the email marketing platforms. For example, Apple might mark all of your emails as open while Android may make it look like none of your emails were delivered. Technology is always changing, and you can't rely on open rates - not on a contact-by-contact basis.But by looking at clicks, you can decide to re-engage the people who haven't been engaging and delete those who are no longer interested. There's one downside to clicks though. Some larger corporations use phishing protection antivirus systems to make sure the email lists their employees sign up to are safe. This piece of software clicks on the links in your emails and checks where the page goes. So to you, it looks...

It's natural to not like competition, but having it is key for successful entrepreneurs. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked with Fred Cary, a serial entrepreneur and thought leader who has over thirty years of experience. Cary discusses the various successful companies he has taken to the next level and shares how his current company, Idea Pros, provides anyone a path into the entrepreneurial world. He also encourages entrepreneurs to view failure and competition as good things in their ventures. Guest: Fred Cary Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24   TRANSCRIPT MARY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Class E Podcast. I am your host Mary Sturgill. As you all know, this is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. Our hope with these podcasts is to share the story of innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers in hopes of inspiring you. And today we welcome, serial entrepreneur and thought leader with over thirty years of experience in that space, Fred Cary, has created transformational strategies that have resulted in billions of dollars in corporate value, and these stories cross boundaries. He's built high-growth businesses in finance and software, mobile technologies, data, retail, consumer products and E-commerce and probably a lot more. Through all of that, he's acquired of course thousands of lessons along the way that he is now going to share with us and he's sharing in his latest venture Idea Pros, which is an entrepreneurial startup services company. Fred, welcome to the show.  FRED: Well, thank you so much. I'm not sure I'm gonna I'm going to share thousands of lessons but we'll hit some of the big ones.  MARY: We'll share what we can with the time we have. So you have a… just to give everybody a little bit of background on you, you have a background in law with the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Harvard and you have an MBA in business from the University of Liverpool. But I suspect that your history with entrepreneurship started kind of way before long, way before you did any of that stuff. What sparked innovation and entrepreneurship for you?  FRED: The fact that I didn't fit the mold. I always felt kind of like an outsider from the way that my childhood and teenage friends approached what they thought was going to be their adult life. And the way that I did it, I was always all over the place. And I was always thinking about how to do things the different way, in a more unusual way, than my friends were. So that's really… by 21 I knew I could never work for anybody else.  MARY: So you knew at that point that you were just going to create whatever you needed to create at that point in time to work for yourself?  FRED: Absolutely.  MARY: Yeah. You've… we've listed briefly some of the ventures that you've had. What I'd like you to do, just to give everybody a little bit of background, can you go… take us through some of those, just briefly, maybe your favorites and briefly talk about what they are and where you took them.  FRED: My favorite companies?  MARY: Yes, yeah.  FRED: Historically?  MARY: Yeah.  FRED: Ok. So I think one of my favorites was Boxlot. And the reason for that is it was a company that was going to be a disaster. We started in 1998. And we were chasing eBay. eBay was literally a year ahead of us with their app and well, their website mostly at that point, and we just couldn't catch up. We had an auction website, we did better auctions than they did, much finer quality things than they did. And we ended up being just a distant second that we couldn't change. We had a lot of money that had already been invested in us. And it was time to either shut the doors down or figure something else out. And we had to make a really, really big pivot. I don't like quitting, and so, our pivot became let's be a technology company. The reason was a lot of the underlying technology needed for options, reverse bidding, bitter buy, accepting multiple bids, automated bidding increments, and a lot of that technology didn't exist. And so we turned ourselves into a technology company and re-sparked everything and all the biggest companies in the world started using our technology. And we ended up getting an agreement 18 months later for $125 million acquisition of our company which it was something that should have been in the assets. So I think that's a good one for me.   MARY: Yeah, that's huge.  FRED: Yeah. Another one's Imagine Communications. When HD first started penetrating American households, the cable industry was in really bad shape because the cable that would go to the home would only support one megabit of data and they needed back then 1.5 megabits to deliver an HD signal. And so it was going to be disaster for the cable industry. We came up with a technology that we approached the cable companies with our proposed technology and they said if you can make it we'll buy it and my engineers said, “You're crazy. We can't make it.” But we did. And nine months later, we came up with a technology that could in different residential communities that actually took their infrastructure and we quadrupled their throughput. So instead of only being able to handle one standard definition signal, they were able to deliver to HD and one standard using all the same infrastructure they had in place. So that company now, Imagine Communications, does probably $750 million a year in revenue and you know, it started from an idea that couldn't happen.  MARY: Right, that people thought just wasn't possible at the time. Yeah, that's amazing. And then what would be your third one?  FRED: Well, my third one is IdeaPros, the company I'm in right now. It's the hardest even though I brought a couple of companies public, it's the hardest I've ever worked really. And it's because we become co-founders with entrepreneurs and it's expensive to work with us. It's not cheap at all, but the entrepreneurs that we're about ready to go out and spend 100, 200, 300, $500,000 to build an app, build a company, do all the engineering for physical products, we approach them or they approach us most likely to be the co founder and they will pay us an upfront fee, a fixed fee of around, it's around $100,000 and they give us 30% of the company we're going to form together and then we do everything. We do all the heavy lifting from research and competitive analysis, customer profiling, branding, naming, positioning, development of the website, development of the app, development of the physical product, engineering, and all the way through marketing and then launching while we're training the entrepreneur how to really, really be experienced in a year period of time. So that's been very, very fruitful. I've had 100,000 applications in the last two years. We've taken 400 companies and we have about 24 of them that we think are going to be worth around $100 million dollars each. So $2.4 billion worth of value right there. So that's been very rewarding and very stressful at the same time.  MARY: Yeah, I bet so because I mean, I know, and you probably experienced this in your own journey that, you know, you have this great idea, but sometimes, a lot of times, you don't necessarily have the skills that it takes to make that idea into a company or a viable company, right? And you guys seem like you're providing that for some of the idea people.  FRED: You know, when I was a kid, the rich people were the doctors and lawyers and the businesses down the street and the movie stars, the athletes…now when people think about wealth, it's about entrepreneurs. When you have social media, it makes it look easy, but if you look at the underlying data, literally 94% of the multimillionaires and billionaires are entrepreneurs, went to really great schools, over 60% of them got advanced degrees from those schools. They know how to be an insider, they know how to play that insider game. And the rest of us the 95% of us, including me, we were all outsiders. We don't know the rules. We don't have the connections. We don't know what we're supposed to build and that's why the biggest cause of failure for new companies in America is that entrepreneurs build something there's no demand for. How crazy is that? You think the number one thing would be not enough money. The number one thing is that you built something that nobody wants. Your mother won't even buy it and that's really devastating to think all those dreams crushed. And so we started Idea Pros to really turn those outsiders into insights.  MARY: Yeah, so that's what I was gonna say is you're taking those outsiders and giving them the path to get on the inside.  FRED: Exactly.  MARY: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So can you talk about a couple of the companies that you're working with?  FRED: Yeah. And I have to be careful because I'm just launching in semi secret mode. But we have one company that is, it's an app company. It's basically if you think of it as Uber for the construction industry, and it's called Grunt. You can find them at trygrunt.com. And basically, what it is is this, this founder came from the construction industry, always breaking tools, running out of supplies, and they need to go off the job site and you waste the day, waste a couple days and a couple of people that are going out there for hours. And with Grunt, you can place orders for whatever you want. Grunt drivers pick it up, deliver it to your site within an hour and in some cases two depending on how many places they need to go to. And so it really sells a major problem for the industry. On top of that, we're trying to make Grunt drivers sexy, you know? I can't tell you the number of guys in their 20s and 30s that probably hate delivering groceries to grandma at 8 o'clock at night. You know, it's not a very compelling side hustle. Be able to tell your girlfriend you're gonna go out and pick up some lumber and that's part of what you do in the first place. We want to make it like UPS when UPS first started coming out their drivers with the sexy shorts and everything was a big spin on things. And so we're doing the same thing with Grunt to try to make it a side hustle that you can be proud of doing if you fit that profile.  MARY: Yeah, and that's actually… I agree that's so much needed. I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and it was my job to get that project… get them all the materials we needed for whatever project on site and it does take a lot of time away if you're not prepared for that.  FRED: Yeah, yeah, anything can happen. You get there and then it's the wrong, the wrong thing.  MARY: Absolutely.  FRED: So, we're gonna do really, really well with that. There's another one that talking about kind of, Habitat for Humanity and things like that, there's another one called Exhale. Exhale is a web based solution. Our partner has been in health care for many years, and she's dealt with people with lung issues. And insurance companies only cover you when you get to stage four lung disease, which is insane to me. It's like okay, we're gonna help you die. Stages one, two, and three is where people really really need the help and it's not covered. So we built this company called Exhale. It's all… hundreds of videos, advice on how to eat, how to sleep, the types of exercises you do, you have groups. You put it all together and she's launched. She's doing really, really well. There's a lot of doctor groups that are signing up with her. She actually got picked to be on the board of the National Board of Directors for the American Lung Association, because of this work. So that's been a really noble work that's's really really taken off so that I think that's another good example.  MARY: Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the criteria that you look for? Because I'm sure some people have come to you, they've had the money. But you've looked at… you've done your due diligence and you look at them and you just don't think this is viable. What are some of the things that you're looking for?  FRED: You know, I was the first person doing this and so I've made a ton of mistakes, speaking of thousands of lessons. When we first started, we were really mostly interested in the idea and of course, the capital you had contributed or my model didn't work. If you don't have skin in the game, you're not as motivated as if you do. That's one lesson that I learned historically. So now, the entrepreneurs are actually even more important than the idea, because we can take an idea as long as it's a decent idea, we can take it and we can massage it and we can turn it into a great idea but you can't turn somebody into a great entrepreneur, if they don't have the heart if they don't have the grit and determination, not able to accept failure as a step towards success. If you don't have those things, you're not going to make it no matter how great of an idea we turn this into. So ultimately, obviously, got to be able to fit the financial profile. But then the very next step is are you somebody who's not going to quit? And if you got those two things going, now let's take a look at your idea. And let's see what that real market need is and whether or not this thing can go in and become a dominant player in that space. Those are the things that we look for in that order.  MARY: What's one of the problems that you wish that you discovered in any of your processes in any of your companies that you wish someone had told you beforehand?  FRED: Um, well, I think the most obvious one is things never work out the way you intend. And everything's gonna take twice as long and cost twice as much. And that's just the way it is, you know, and we have, we as entrepreneurs, we look at things and we see that there's a real need, and we believe that the world is going to come running towards us with this new great solution. And it's really, really a long process. I mean, if you look, everybody talks about Elon Musk and, and Tesla and everything. Number one, he wasn't the founder of Tesla, it's two other guys that did it. But number two, the first electric car 1890.  MARY: Right.  FRED: 1890.  MARY: I literally just read that the other day.  FRED: Oh you did?  MARY: Yeah.  FRED: I got my facts. So, the reality is that things take a long time and just because you're first doesn't mean you're ever gonna make it. And sometimes, I think the second lesson I learned is sometimes it's good not to be first. If you're second, third, fourth, you're making something but you're making it better because you've had the first ones go in there and crash and burn and try to do things but not do it well. And now you have a market demand, you have people who have penetrated the market, you have customers that are screaming about that one star component of the solution, and you can make that one-star thing, your five-star thing. So I would say don't be afraid of competition and understand that things take a really long time. So don't be afraid of failure either.  MARY: I think a lot of times and correct me if I'm wrong, because you probably know more about this world than I do, but I think venture capitalists sometimes look at the competition aspect of it. Is there competition in the marketplace already? And that kind of almost contradicts what you just said about it's okay to be the second or third company.  FRED: Yeah, well, you know, if they were worried about that, they would have never taken HelloFresh after Blue Apron or Lyft after Uber. There's always room for more than one. And if you look at, for example, the food delivery apps, there are at least a half dozen… ones that are doing really, really well.  MARY: Oh, yeah.  FRED: So venture capital, there's no venture capital firm that would give a dime to Quicken. When Quicken first started, he literally went door to door to every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Now over 240 of them, not one would give him a penny. They thought it was a stupid idea. Of course, after he really started kicking butt everybody wanted to give money at that.  MARY: Of course.  FRED: One thing you have to understand or the audience needs to understand about venture capital or any other type of investor, they don't know everything. A lot of times they haven't even ever started their own company. Some of them are just finance people, and bankers, and they are theoretically inclined, as opposed to being able to really find that target market and understand that there's an opportunity so don't be discouraged. If you can't find money in one place, go find it somewhere else. Because eventually you'll get it. Yeah, venture capital…To me, somebody comes in right away and says, “Hey, I have no competition. It's awesome.” If you have no competition, there's no demand, right? Because competition fills a demand that is generated by consumers or whoever the ultimate customer is. And if there's no demand and you're doing something so revolutionary that you have to actually build a demand where none existed before, then that's billions of dollars probably to get there. I mean, people..I use the example of the first car you know, somebody could argue that there was no competition when the first car came out, but the competition was horses. You know, that the issue was transportation. And so the demand was there for to be transported. You just had a different way of transporting people. And you're going to compete against that horse in the beginning. Cars were actually slower in some cases than horses and buggies. So, there's always competition and if there isn't, you know, you're gonna be one of those that fail because you created something that there is no demand for.   MARY: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Let's see, do you have and I kind of feel like you do, just from our conversation, do you have kind of an entrepreneurial philosophy of entrepreneurism?  FRED: Well, my first philosophy is, don't.  MARY: That's what everybody says.  FRED: Look, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to understand it's a lifelong struggle,no matter how far along you get. I mean, Elon Musk with SpaceX, he was one rocket failure away from losing everything that he had after he'd already had a couple of successes. A big payday for PayPal. And yet, still having those issues, problems with testing, problems with Twitter. There are always fires. And if you're not comfortable wearing a fire suit, you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. But if you are, then I think for me, the kind of mantra for entrepreneurship is be comfortable with pain. Because you know that in the end, you can help a whole lot of people. Whatever it is that you're doing, if you're doing it for the right reason, with the right purpose, the right determination that you're a potentially a world changer, and you can't change the world without hurting yourself. And as long as you're willing to do that, and do things for the greater good, you're going to be able to make it no matter what you're trying to do.  MARY: I think that's a great mindset to be in because I think you're going to be more prosperous if you're in the mindset that I'm doing a greater good, rather than I'm going to make money. The money is going to come.  FRED: Yeah, yeah. And I say that all the time too. Don't chase the money, chase your dreams. Make it a reality and as long as you have your dream and be really strategic about how you take that dream and actualize it. When you can actualize your dream, the money will follow. It's as simple as that because doing it the right way, doing the research, understanding what the real need is, and being able to deliver on that need results in capital coming your way. But when you're focused instead on the dollar, you end up being like the Enron's of the world and no matter how big you get the corruption of chasing the dollar can take you down really, really hard.  MARY: And fast. You know a lot of people create business ventures obviously we talked about, that they're not always successful. Is there another piece of information that you're thinking or advice maybe that you're thinking that people need to understand or know that they might not know?  FRED: Oh, yeah, we don't know anything when we start a business, you know? When I talk about that… literally the way that we approach entrepreneurship, nobody would do that in something like sports. Can you imagine if I wanted to hire you as my coach for a sports team, and you're asking me like, right, well, what sport is it? And I tell you, I don't know. Do you have any competitors? I don't have any clue. But I think I'm the only one. And well how big is this sport? I don't know, what are the rules? I don't know. How do you get all of the spectators to root for you? I don't have a clue. Right? But that's how we go into entrepreneurship. We don't know the market. We don't know the market size. We don't know the growth. We don't know the holes in the market that we can exploit. We don't know what those personas really want and how to take them not only as customers but as passionate advocates of a brand. So what I would say to our entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs, you need to do your homework. Think about it. That you're a coach of a sports team. DO you know all the rules? Do you know all the competitors? Do you know how to win? And if you don't know those things, you gotta get them. You know, I have on my website a free resource. It's called the insider checklist. And you can just go to ideapros.com and download it. As I said, it's absolutely free and it gives you seven points, seven highlights of the things you need to consider when you're starting any business. And then on top of that, for the next seven days, you get an email from me, and each day that email will cover one of those seven points and cover it in a lot greater detail and there's an embedded of 20 minute or so video on that subject from me. And so by the end of the seventh day, you'll not only know all those seven points, but you really get in depth knowledge about them. They're a critical foundation for anything that you want to do as an entrepreneur.  MARY: Do you recommend that people do that before they approach you as far as becoming partners with you?  FRED: Yeah, oh, yeah. You know, you need to understand what it's all about. And if somebody wanted to be my partner… Excuse me, that was a lingering allergy cough. But if somebody wants to be my partner, I would definitely suggest going through those things first. And you know, one of the things that we did…Idea Pros ended up becoming a drinking out of a firehose. There was just so much incredible demand. And I only had this one holding solution. But now we have a lot of things that are really inexpensive like I have master classes on purpose-driven entrepreneurship, we have things… for $1,800, we have a program that will take your idea and completely… everything I said about the market research and everything, will completely dissect that idea. Look at all these things you need to be looking at. Give you back a 40-page report on exactly what that market is, how you should exploit it, who your personas are, and how to go out and raise capital and you're going to need to go further up that food chain. So we do have a whole lot of things. If any of your audience wants to reach me or learn more…my executive assistant is not in the room because she always kills me when I say this, but you can write to me directly fred@ideapros.com and I'm happy to kind of steer anybody where they need to go.  MARY: Yeah, and you can check that out on Fred's website as well - ideapros.com. Fred, you've talked about the videos a little bit. Am I mistaken, don't you have a TV show like on YouTube?  FRED: Um, we actually have a TV show coming up. It's not, it's not out there yet. But, I do have over half a million followers on Instagram and I provide advice on personal development entrepreneurship every single day. I encourage you to go there. It's official fred cary, C-A-R-Y. And that is… I put my heart into that. I never have a script, I never have bullet points and never know what the heck I'm going to be saying. I'll just start talking and I'll put it down there but I think you could spend a minute a day on just going and seeing what I'm saying today, it will give you a good foundation to be a better person and be a better leader.  MARY: That's… how important do you think social media is now for companies for startups? FRED: For a startup, well most startups, it's critical. Your persona is represented digitally nowadays. You don't have a real storefront. You have digital storefronts, and everything that you do is measured by what is seen online whether it's your website, whether it's your blog posts, whether it's your LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube channels. Everything you do is what you're being measured by. And so if people look at you… Suppose you're a web development company and you go to your website, your website doesn't look great, or you have that copyright 2021 on there and instead of 2023. You know, these little things, that's how people would look at you in the real world before. And so social media, in the sense that it is addressing your customer base, it's critically important. You always want to have what you believe is your persona. It's the clear representation of your company and your belief system is projected in everything that you do online.  MARY: When you say persona, you're talking about brand?  FRED: Yeah, yeah, your brand. People think your brand is what you write down. Your brand is what people, your customers think of you. And so you can have, you can say your brand is this or that or whatever it is and write it on all the walls in your office and make every employee chant it when they walk in in the morning. But that's not your brand. Your brand is how you're perceived by your public, by your audience, by your customers. That's what your brand is. So that's why it's so important - social media and otherwise, every engagement with your audience. It's really important that what you want your brand to be is projected in such a way that your audience believes that as well.  MARY: Yeah, I just finished ghost-writing a book for a local businessman and so I'm totally stealing this from him.  FRED: Let's tell his name.  MARY: I'm not sure he wants me to, but I'll ask him first. But he says perception is reality. So it's going along with exactly what you're saying that how your audience or your customer base perceives you or the community that you're in perceives you is the reality of the situation.  FRED: Yeah, and you're, you know, no matter what you want that to be, you're never gonna get unanimity. You're never gonna get 100% of people buying into it. I mean, even in what I do, you know, but look at venture capital. Venture capital, 90% of their bets fail.   MARY: Right.  FRED: I'm trying to make my percentages way higher than that. But even so, let's suppose I have a 25% failure rate. That means 25% of my clients, my customers, my partners, probably think Fred is…you know, they don't feel that highly of me because their dreams have not been able to be met. So trying to manage your brand essence is very difficult when you can never make everybody happy. So you really have to make sure that what you're doing affects the most people so that you can curate. A lot of people don't like Apple, but their brand is very, very powerful and their brand… they do that in everything they do. You know they start with their why as much greater speakers than I did a really good review on but they start with their why and everything that they do, you know, at the end is we just happen to sell iPhones and computers, but that's the last part of the statement. They don't lead with that. They lead with the essence of being different or thinking differently, in creating unusual things. And you can see how powerful their brand is because if I told you that, I just heard that tomorrow Apple is releasing its first ever electric toothbrush. I wouldn't have to say another word. Not true at all. But you would know it's going to be sleek. It's going to have Bluetooth, it's going to tell you whether you're brushing right. It's going to crash and break into little pieces as other stuff does. But you're going to know the essence of… what this thing…you have it, you're imagining it in your head because they've done such a great job of creating their brand imagery for you. And that's what you need to strive for.  MARY: Yeah, and that's branded loyalty. Because Apple customers are super loyal.  FRED: I argue they're prisoners. Both of my daughters have Apple and I have Apple stock.  MARY: Well, that's good. I'm an Apple girl all the way. I call myself gadget girl all the time because I have so many gadgets and most of them are Apple. And Apple did not pay me for that little plug there either.  FRED: Nor did they pay me for that toothbrush. If it comes out, you guys are my witnesses.  MARY: If they come up with it, yeah. You heard here first folks. Fred's idea. Fred, what is next for you? And maybe Idea Pros, or maybe you want to separate that into you personally or Idea Pros.   Fred: Well, with Idea Pros, we still have a long journey ahead of us because as I started this company, previously, we only had this kind of flagship product. You know, all in co-founder. And there are a whole lot of entrepreneurs who need help at some level. Once you decide to be an entrepreneur, even if you fail miserably your first time, and you go back to corporate America, you're going to come back out. And so, we want to create this kind of umbrella that really addresses entrepreneurship from the very nucleus all the way through larger companies that need strategic consulting advice. So, they're a lot of programs, a lot of new solutions, that we're building with Idea Pros, and that's gonna keep me busy for a while. We're out raising capital right now and what hopes to be our last round before we think about going public within the next couple of years. But so, that's a big journey, but I think one of the big things for me personally is finding a way to balance my life a little bit. You know, I tell everybody else to do it and I do spend the first hour of the day or more trying to take care of me, working out, mediating, things like that. I'm working 10, 12 hours a day, working on the weekends, and I gotta find a way to calm down and relax a little bit. Maybe make, you know, three months out of the year working out of Italy.   MARY: Oh, that's a great idea. I just went to Malta and I worked from Malta when I was there so I think it's a fabulous idea.  FRED: Yeah, yeah.  MARY: Well, Fred, thank you so much for this great conversation. I've just thoroughly enjoyed it.  FRED: Thank you. I did as well. And I'm looking forward to crossing your path again.  MARY: Yeah absolutely, We need to get you to come speak at Furman.  FRED: I would love to do that. I think if you can educate people early enough…one of our partners, client partners, actually they had double MBAs, from prestigious schools…so she came and decided to work with us and she said the first six months of working with me, she learned more than both of those programs together, so I'm happy to speak to young people and try to let them know what they're getting into and let them know how to deal with the fires ahead.   MARY: Alright, listeners remember if you or someone you know is an entrepreneur or just has an idea that they've been thinking about launching, our Greenville Starts program is a great place to learn what you need to know and to make some of the connections that you're gonna need that can help you make your venture happen. The Fall cohort is full though, I will tell you, but you can get on the list for the Spring cohort and all you have to do is go to the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship website and go, I think it's the very first thing that pops up and put yourself on that list so you can get into that cohort. We've had some fabulous launches from that group. That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. Remember this is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies department here at Furman University. Remember you can catch the podcast two ways now wherever you listen to your podcasts and also we have a brand new YouTube channel where you can watch the podcast. So you can go to YouTube and check that out as well of course, it's just under the Class E Podcast channel. To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure that you hit that subscribe button to YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode and most of our episodes are produced by student producers, currently Isabella Martinez is our student producer. So she will have created this podcast for you. We want to thank you for tuning in. I am your host Mary Sturgill. Until next time everybody, dream big.  

Rafi Glantz is the Partner Success Manager for accessiBe. As Mike Hingson discusses near the beginning of this episode one of the advantages of being a podcast host while working for a company is that it is easy to find talent and interesting guests close at hand. Rafi is one of those gems listeners now get to meet. He was born in the United States, but moved to Israel when he was 18. Listen to his interesting story and learn how he became an Israeli Citizen, joined the military and then worked for companies in his newly adopted company. Rafi will take us on a journey of discovery including what brought him to accessiBe and all his adventures since joining the company. Some directories do not show full show notes. For the complete transcription please visit https://michaelhingson.com/podcast About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast we're inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:21 Hi, and welcome back to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset, the podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Unexpected. It's always kind of fun. Today, I want to introduce you to Refael Glantz, we call him Rafi. We call him other things, but Rafi is what will you like that? We will call you Rafi today, and Rafi is the partner Success Manager at excessive B, you know, and he is the second person from accessibility that that we have talked with on this podcast. And why? Well, yes, it has some to do with accessibility. But even more important than that, what I find interesting is that when I have the opportunity to work for an with a company that has a lot of very talented people, it's great to be able to interview everyone and talk about their talents, without having to go far afield to as a result be able to interview lots of people with lots of interesting stories. So we don't have to go search for guests too far. Because we could just look inside in our case excessively. And it isn't always about accessibility. But by the same token, sometimes it is and sometimes excessively comes up in the conversations as I'm sure it will today. But Rafi, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Rafi Glantz  02:40 Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.   Michael Hingson  02:43 So Rafi, you I have to say that you don't really sound like you were born in Israel.   Rafi Glantz  02:50 I was. No, I'm from Detroit originally.   Michael Hingson  02:54 Yeah, there you are see? So, um, so you are from Detroit? And when did you when did you move to Israel and what what brought you to Israel.   Rafi Glantz  03:05 That's a kind of a funny story. So it's funny, it's good that you bring that up. When I was 18, or 17, really, I was finishing high school. And we're living in Philly at the time with my family. I went to university up in Bel Air in California at American Jewish University, which no longer has undergrads, which might tell you a little bit about why I ended up dropping out. And when I turned 18, I realized, okay, I can join the military now, which is really what I wanted to do. And I ended up moving to Israel getting my citizenship here. And I did about almost three years in the military here. And then when I got out, I realized that it made more sense for me to find a job in the high tech world here, then go back to the states and pursue a degree that to be totally honest, I didn't have too much interest in anymore. What kind of a degree did you want to get? Well, I went for pre med, and what they called bioethics. And I was actually a combat medic in the Army. And so I had some interaction with that stuff. But the interaction that I had, I guess helped me realize that that was not the path that was gonna, at least I thought at the time, make me really happy.   Michael Hingson  04:21 So you, you switched, how, how difficult was it to become a citizen in Israel? I asked that because, you know, there are lots of discussions about immigration and citizenship and so on here and it'd be interesting to hear a little bit about what it's like when you when you did it over there.   Rafi Glantz  04:39 For sure. So luckily for me, it's very easy for me to prove that I'm Jewish, because my dad is a cantor and now a rabbi. So he's got a very strong body of proof to show that I am in fact Jewish and Israel has a law called the right of return. So if you are Jewish and can show it that You're essentially guaranteed citizenship here. And they have a very much streamlined process. So I had my new identity documents and everything the same day I landed. Wow. Yes is much smoother than Much, much smoother than our southern border currently.   Michael Hingson  05:15 Yes. Makes it a real challenge. Well, so I'm real nosy. How old are you now?   Rafi Glantz  05:23 Oh, I'm actually just turned 28. About two weeks ago,   Michael Hingson  05:26 congrats. excited me as an interesting company. The founders were under 30, when they formed accessibly, they were part of the 30, under 30, for Forbes in 2019. And I learned that sure Heckerling, the founder, the CEO of excessive he will be turning, I think he said 32 in January. And it's interesting, it's lots of young people, which is great. And not too many of us who have been around the industry for a long period of time. But but there are advantages and disadvantages, I suppose as long as the tribal knowledge can be passed on from people who've been there, but it's really cool to be with a company, where there's a lot of vision, and a lot of enthusiasm for, for what we're doing.   Rafi Glantz  06:16 Absolutely, it's really exciting for me as well, because to come from, you know, a world where in the United States, especially where we're really taught to defer to experience and age, and that, you know, somebody who is older and more experienced in an industry definitely knows better than you. And, you know, you shouldn't necessarily go against that grain. That's very much not the culture here. And so while of course, a lot of our startups don't succeed and don't achieve the level of success that we certainly have. It's really, really inspiring to see guys who are not that much older than me. build such a behemoth, you know, and don't you wish you'd had the idea first, oh, my God so much. But unfortunately, and I'll tell you the truth, a lot of people in sales calls and stuff like that, they'll say something like, wow, this is really impressive. How did you build it? And I said, Well, to be honest, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. But I will take all the credit you're willing to give me sir, absolutely.   Michael Hingson  07:15 Makes makes perfect sense. You know, the, the issue is that it is still a team. And I think even in the US, though I'm not seeing as much as you might think of deferring to people with a lot of experience, we we tend to, I think as a as a country look down, especially the younger people look down at a lot of older people, there's a lot of age discrimination that goes on here. And it gets pretty, pretty vigorous sometimes, which is unfortunate.   Rafi Glantz  07:48 I actually, I never want I haven't lived in the States for about 10 years. So I'm a little out of date there. But I also grew up a lot of the time in a synagogue surrounded by I guess a little bit of a different approaches, right. And I went to a religious school for a lot of my early childhood. And so that was like really drilled into me that you don't argue with the rabbi's on certain things.   Michael Hingson  08:11 So while you lived in Philadelphia, did you go look at the stairs and see if you saw rocky running up and down the stairs or hearing meal? Yo, Adrian Are any of those things?   Rafi Glantz  08:20 Just I will admit that I have yo yo words real way, many times inside the museum of art as well, which let me tell you the security guards are not fans. They've heard it before and they don't want to hear it again.   Michael Hingson  08:33 Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine they've heard it way too many times. And not too many people probably run up and down the stairs either.   Rafi Glantz  08:44 Not anymore. Maybe they used to but right now, not not too many. I've done it a couple of times. But there there are more stairs than you would think.   Michael Hingson  08:55 Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then there are those silly people who run up and down the stairs of the Empire State Building. I'm just as confused about those people as well. So it's okay.   Rafi Glantz  09:10 Yeah, listen, I'm confused about people who run marathons. If somebody tells me they ran a marathon, I said, who chased you? Like yeah, exactly what I don't understand what what was the reason? But, you know, teach there. If that's what gets here, you know, gets you up in the morning then great.   Michael Hingson  09:26 Yeah. Well, it's the same thing as football. You don't want to play this game where everybody just beats up on you. That's fine.   Rafi Glantz  09:33 Exactly. You know, there's a great SNL sketch. I love the vintage SNL sketches. And yes, the more recent ones like they're kind of hit or miss for me, but they had a very good one with Alex Rodriguez. And Charles Barkley and then they had Kenan Thompson playing a football player. And you know the baseball play rod and and Barkley are talking about wow, you know, I played for 10 years. I played for 20 and my knees or shot or this is hurting. And the football player says, I played for 10 games, and my brain doesn't work. Which we don't want to make light of CTE but it is a very serious issue that not enough people address. So I'm at least glad it's being discussed now.   Michael Hingson  10:17 Yeah. Well, and and we do need to look at more of those things. But still people like to bang their heads together. So it's, it's okay. It's a news event for me. And that's okay.   Rafi Glantz  10:31 I think it's better than rugby. At least they wear helmets. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  10:34 at least. I was in New Zealand in 2003. We were there for about two weeks. And it was during a lot of the rugby playoffs. There are two things that went on in in New Zealand at the time. One was rugby playoffs, and they certainly are very, very loud and opinionated about rugby in teams. But even more so New Zealand had just lost the America's Cup. And they were yelling, why is it that the government doesn't take over paying for our ship our yacht so that we can win? Because Oh, it was just vigorous and horrible.   Rafi Glantz  11:16 I'm glad they've got their priorities in order. Yeah, we   Michael Hingson  11:18 certainly do believe that sports are parameters and Okay, anyway. So, so tell me, you, you moved to Israel in 2018, and enjoyed the military and worked in as a medic. And so you must have lots of interesting stories. Did you ever get to see much in the way of combat? Or were you close to it or any kind of experiences around that that you want to tell?   Rafi Glantz  11:43 I saw enough. So I actually joined the military in 2011. Or actually, sorry, 2012, because it was November 18 was November 22, something like that. 2012. And then I was in there for almost three years. And for most of my service, it was honestly very boring. Most people who do military stuff will tell you it's mostly hurry up and wait. Yeah, I have a lot of very funny stories that are not appropriate. But I can tell you that in 2014, we ended up having what some people call a war, some people call an operation in Gaza. And I had the misfortune to be involved in some capacity. And I learned that that is not a career path for me that I would much rather work in high tech. And I think one funny tidbit that I will share that I think will tell a lot of people listening just one thing about our culture is that Israel is a very, very small country. So we have what's called staging areas for the military, basically, where, you know, you park all the vehicles and leave all the soldiers in a relatively protected area, so that they can be sent to a new area as needed. Now, the public knew aware a lot of these staging areas work because it's not secret. And a lot of the soldiers you know, they're 1819 20 they're gonna call their parents and say like, Hey, here I am, everything's okay. Don't worry about me. I could not tell you how many random citizens of this country showed up to staging areas all over the place, with food, blankets, coffee cigarettes, for people who smoke everything you can imagine, over the course of a two week war, I gained about 10 pounds. I think this is maybe the only military operation in history, where the majority of the soldiers actually gained weight.   Michael Hingson  13:39 But it is nice to see that the military folks are are supported. And I understand that's what's going on. You mentioned it and I'm not sure that a lot of people really understand how large is Israel.   Rafi Glantz  13:51 It's pretty small. It's about the size of New Jersey a little bit smaller. And when you take into account the West Bank and and Gaza, it's even smaller, you know, the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem even though we see it on the news all the time we hear about it, the distance between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is like 30 miles. It is not a big place. And it's a little bit funny because you'll have experienced this Mike living in California, driving 45 minutes is not a big deal, right? Driving an hour to Costco is relatively normal. Like I'd rather if there's a Costco 40 minutes away, but I'll go in Israel, if you're driving more than 20 minutes, people will look at you like what, how can you do that in the same day? How can you come back? It's so far, because it's just a completely different standard.   Michael Hingson  14:41 It's interesting, I have met people when I lived in New Jersey, we met some people who lived in Springfield, which is no more than 10 or 15 miles outside New York City. And yet, these people who were 40 and 50 years old, never had been to New York City. It really, it is amazing to see some people how confined they, they keep their world, they have never been to New York City, much less going to upstate New York or anything like that they have just been around Elizabeth and Springfield and so on, and had never been to to New York City. It's amazing. If you know, for us, as you point out here in California, we don't think anything about that, we oftentimes will drive three and 400 miles to go from one part of California to another and think, right, not too much of it. Karen and I do a little bit more thinking about it. Today, she's got a little bit of rheumatoid arthritis, so she won't drive as far at one time. But we have, and it's normal to see that. But you know, at the same time, there's a lot of value of being around home, but not going 10 or 15 miles to the to the largest city in the country. One of the one not the largest in the world, but one of the largest in the world. And seeing all that it has to offer is really a strange thought, a strange feeling.   Rafi Glantz  16:09 I couldn't agree more. And you know, what I we have a lot of what we call taboo to my life, which basically means Culture Day on Sunday. So when you're in the army, they'll take you for like a special trip on Sundays to see a historical site or to see the western wall or something like that. There's a lot of kids who live in a country the size of New Jersey who've never seen the wall or the Dome of the Rock or all of those, you know, very holy sites that Jerusalem so famous for in prison.   Michael Hingson  16:38 Yeah. And go figure and and I think it's a great loss not to visit, or at least learn about a lot of those places. I think that the people who don't do that miss so much about the rich culture of wherever they live.   Rafi Glantz  16:54 Definitely. I, like looking back, I would have liked to spend more time, you know, investigating City Hall in Philadelphia, and not just for all the relatively corrupt things that happened. Just kidding. But that'd be fun. It would necessary certainly be nice.   Michael Hingson  17:13 Yeah, it's an interesting and interesting place. And, you know, we got to deal with politics as we deal with it. So I'm still with Mark Twain. I wonder if God had been a man because he was disappointed in the monkeys. But you know, we got to do.   Rafi Glantz  17:31 That's not the most unlikely theory, I've heard to say.   Michael Hingson  17:37 So you, you went to the military, and you came out and did school and so on? And what did you do before you joined accessibility?   Rafi Glantz  17:47 Well, before I joined accessiBe, I realized that in the Israeli tech scene, you know, a person who speaks English, like I do, and has a relatively acceptable phone manner, can find employment in the high tech space. So I started working in the financial technology industry, mostly just, you know, working in the crypto field, and I went in whatever I do, my philosophy is that, you know, you should dive into it as deep as you can, and learn everything that you can about it. Because you never know, like, what's going to come in handy and how much information you'll need. And particularly in the crypto world, it's, it was such a new field at the time I'm talking, you know, 2016 2017, it was such a new field, that there really were no experts. So if you were willing to put in the time and Google things and study, you know, you were as much of an expert as anybody could find. And the problem of course, being that it's expanded so much that nobody could possibly keep up to date on everything that's going on. But that was that was sort of my first foray into the real high tech world.   Michael Hingson  18:57 So what did you do?   Rafi Glantz  18:59 Um, mostly I just did marketing and content. So I tried to connect with the communities that were behind these organizations. And I learned a little bit about how to manage marketing, but mostly it was managing people whether they were working with us on projects or whether they were doing marketing or influencer marketing or anything like that. I mostly learned how to keep my own stuff organized, and keep people on deadlines, which as you can, as you probably already know, is not the easiest thing. It's like   Michael Hingson  19:32 herding cats. Absolutely. Yes.   Rafi Glantz  19:36 So we both have cats, so   Michael Hingson  19:40 I think they weren't themselves out for the morning anyway, at least I hope so. Ours was yelling at us. Certainly Ervin has quite a down I refilled her food bowl so she's a little happier.   Rafi Glantz  19:50 Not There you go. Although I see mine just loves human food every I'm a big I love cooking that's like my Yeah, my stress relief or and every Every time I make anything with chicken, meat, fish, anything, the cat assumes it's for him. He doesn't understand that I'm not cooking for him and I've already given him. So it's, it's, it's a problem. But I always find it adorable to feed a cat pieces of cow meat, because he would never be able to get that in the wild. I can give it to,   Michael Hingson  20:21 well, ours likes her food. Although she will eat chicken. We haven't seen her eat a lot of fish. And we haven't been able to convince her to do that. So that's okay. But she she really likes her own food. But what she really loves is when she's eating, she wants to be petted. So our food dish, her food dishes up on our sink, it's a double sink with a long counter between the two sinks in the bathroom. We have to keep it up there because there are certain dogs who will probably invade the food bowl if we don't. Because he believes everything is for him. It's a laugh, he's a Labrador, but we we put the food up on the counter. But she wants to be petted while she's eating. In fact, she really likes to get rubbed all over and she'll lay down and per while she's eating, getting petted.   Rafi Glantz  21:19 That's one way to do it.   Michael Hingson  21:21 And during the during the night, at least well, I'll only let her do it one time. I told her when she started this, that she gets at one time a night. And that's it. She'll walk me until I get up in the middle of the night and feeder. So frustrating. Yeah. But, you know, animals are fun. And you know what you can't argue with all that they bring us in that we get to bring them. The fact of the matter is that all animals have personalities. And I'm sure that there are people listening to this who say I never let my cat do that. Well, you know. On the other hand, our experience unless there's some catastrophic illness is that our animals tend to live a long time. I had one guy, Doug Holland, who lived over 15 years, typically, guide dogs worked for me for 10 years or so. I've had two that didn't, but both were illness relate well, one was illness related. And one was she just really got fearful of guiding actually was my sixth dog. Marilyn, she only worked about 18 months. And then just this afraid of guiding but there were other issues with her. But even Roselle worked from 2000, I'm sorry, from 1999 to 2007. And she had for the last three years, she guided a condition known as immune mediated thrombocytopenia, which is where the platelets in the blood will be attacked by your immune system. It's something that humans get in dogs get and and eventually got to the point where she couldn't work more, but she lived for four more years. And that was okay. But we love our animals. And when we should they add so much value to us, I wish more people would take the time to really develop relationships with animals.   Rafi Glantz  23:15 Yeah, I think they, like you say they add a lot to your life. And you know, you can get your emotional validation from all kinds of different places. But in my mind, like there's nothing better than a dog because no matter what, as long as you're not abusive, and a lot of times even then that dog is going to love you and support you and be there for you until the day it dies. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  23:37 they may not trust you as well. And that's something that I talk a lot about when I when I travel and speak and talk about what guide dogs do and even the experiences of the World Trade Center. I tell people that dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally. The difference. However, between dogs and humans, his dogs will generally be open to trust. I had I saw one that wasn't because she had been abused. And it took us months before we got her to trust us. But then when she did, she opened up and became a great friend for us for three years. It was in the latter part of her life. And she still lived to be 15.   Rafi Glantz  24:17 Wow. So my family has had poodles for the longest like full standard poodles and little purse dog. Yeah. And I, you know, on average, I think they're living with nine years, maybe 10. Not not quite that long. So you must you must really take care of these guys.   Michael Hingson  24:35 Yeah, every dog is a little different. We haven't had poodles, but we've had cats that lived a long time and stitch our current cat is now 12. So she'll, she'll be around quite a while yet, especially if we keep making her jump up to get her food. She's got to get around her size. We're not going to lift her up. She's tried to start to pull that one on us few times. We don't do it.   Rafi Glantz  24:59 Well, right because those cats, they'll take advantage of you. They're clever.   Michael Hingson  25:03 You think   Rafi Glantz  25:04 I met mine, he has this thing he loves knocking over glass items, doesn't care what it is if it's full of water, if it's full of juice, whatever, he will knock it right over. And the worst part is, you'll see him doing it. And I'll, I'll go, you know, I'll yell at him. However you yell at him to try and get him to stop doing something. And he will look over at me and knock it over. As he looks at me. Yeah, with no shame. No. No shame at all. Just as though it's like, oh, this is what I'm doing. This is mine. As if I as if he paid for it from IKEA. Right. You know, he doesn't understand now there's glass on the floors. He doesn't understand why I'm picking him up and trying to put him in another room. Yeah, cut his paws open.   Michael Hingson  25:53 Yeah. We haven't gotten to the point of stuffing him in a box and saying you're going to stay here for a couple of weeks, you're grounded. Work. Well, how did you come to accessiBe? How did you discover this company?   Rafi Glantz  26:09 It's actually a very funny story. So I started working at a company called Celsius network, which is in the crypto space. And people that are great, like I don't, I don't have anything negative to say about them, it just didn't really work out. And I was looking for a new role. I had some friends who worked in marketing, and they had a great marketing company called market across an inbound junction. So I spoke to them had an interview, they turned out not to be interested. And a week later, I haven't interviewed accessiBe, and I ended up getting hired. And I thought, you know, these are two totally unrelated things. Turns out market across was an early investor in excessively. So it's sort of close the loop there. And it's, I've been here for almost two and a half years now. And it has been a very, very crazy ride. You know, when I when I joined excessively, I think we had a little bit under 4000 Total customers period. And we were we just started selling in the US a few months before. And we were working out of this small office, north of Tel Aviv, it took me like an hour on a bus to get there every day there and back. And two and a half years later, we have grown just an unbelievable amount. And it's sometimes really quite surreal to see it.   Michael Hingson  27:33 It's it's an amazing company. I just learned about it literally about 12 and a half months ago, and have gotten very much involved in it and find the same sort of thing. It's an interesting ride. It's a great ride. It's it's a great company, and there are a lot of things that it's doing. So So what exactly did you start doing? And are you still doing the same thing you did? And what do you do now? Exactly?   Rafi Glantz  28:02 Ah, that's a good question. So I started out doing just regular sales, I had access to be I was one of our I guess you'd call it an account executive. And within a couple of months, it became clear that we needed somebody in the company to handle enterprise accounts. And despite not really having any specific experience doing that. The powers that be which are shared deck, LM gal pulled me into an office and said, Hey, do strategic partnerships. And I said, What's that, and they said, we'll figure it out. So there was a little bit more planning than that. But they kind of threw me into the deep end there. We built a lot of really cool partnerships with organizations like Synchro and real page and other groups whose names I won't get into right now. And from there, we realize that now we really need you know, as we grow, we need somebody who really has experience and processes and is more professional to handle that. So we brought in Darryl, who now does that and I moved over to the partner success team, which I did part time a little bit in the partner success in strategic but now I really work with our agency partners because excessively has partnerships with almost 5000 agencies in the United States and Canada. And I work with those partners to help them with essentially whatever they need accessibility wise, you know, some of them, they have a lot of technical questions that need addressing, they might not be sure how to go about making a website accessible really, and with others, there are more questions relating to how do I get my clients to want to spend money on accessibility? Because unfortunately, there are most business owners out there today. If you tell them, hey, you can make your website accessible for this and this and this, their immediate answer is, well, what happens if I don't, because I don't want to spend that money. And I don't really agree with that approach. But that is, unfortunately, their approach. So a big part of my job is arming these agency partners with the right tools and the right talk tracks and points to make and statistics that will help them explain to these business owners why accessibility makes sense, not just for their business, but also morally and legally.   Michael Hingson  30:34 So, for fun, what what's good is, what do you say? What do you say to someone? Or what would you say to someone who says, I just don't want to spend the money to make my website accessible? And I asked that, and I'll tell you why. Ask it, I'd love your thoughts on this as well, is you were well aware that over the past several months, there have been some people, and it's a relatively small number, comparatively speaking, but still, they're very vocal, who say none of this stuff works. It's not good. The companies just plain don't have good practices and so on. And the only way to do web access is to do it right from the outset, or to do it with manual coding. And I'm sure there are all sorts of other arguments that you hear, but what do you say to the person who says don't want to spend the money?   Rafi Glantz  31:24 Well, yeah, let's let's take that into points. Because I think the the don't want to spend the money is one point, and then the detractors are another, I'll address both. But let's tell because I want to spend the money. Right, so don't want to spend the money. I usually say one of two things. One is the really positive side, which is hey, 26% of American adults, according to the CDC, live with a disability, even if I cut that down to 5%, who really have trouble using websites, I know very few business owners, that wouldn't invest $50 a month to increase their market share by 5%. And to be perfectly blunt with you, sir, if you can't afford $50, for 5% more customers, your business is a bigger problem than accessibility. And I know that that sounds a little bit aggressive, but it is the case. And then I'll also mention something that you'd actually brought up in a previous, previous webinar that we did. The Nielsen data that shows that people with disabilities are the most brand loyal community, and particularly online, most businesses now are doing their best to build a supportive and positive community of customers and of users. So this is a great way to do that. And I'll also try to humanize it a little bit and say, hey, put yourself in somebody's shoes for a second, who needs to use a screen reader or Braille reader or click stick? And let's say you're looking for new shoes, right? If you go on Google, you're gonna go through 1215 websites before you even find one you can use, then by the time you do if you need shoes again, do you really think you're gonna go searching for a shoe store? No, you're gonna go back to the one that was accessible. But more than that, you're going to share it with your community. Because there are so few business owners in whatever your space is, that cater to people with disabilities, people will flock to you. And I think that that's just a general advantage of capitalism, that if you choose to stand out by being accessible, and being one of the first movers in this space, which I know, it seems like there's already a lot of activity and accessibility, but less than 2% of websites are accessible. So if you make yourself accessible, even next week, you're still one of the first movers, it sets you apart, it puts you in a new class. And it's also a great, it's a great piece of PR to put out both internally for your company culture, and externally for the world to see that you are a brand that cares about all people and takes all their money.   Michael Hingson  33:51 There you are. Well, how does how does access to be fit into that? What is it that accessibly? Does that company should take that kind of an interest in?   Rafi Glantz  34:03 That's a good question. So I'll first say that our position to my best understanding of it is that accessibility and I know this is a very San Francisco thing, say so get ready, Mike. Accessibility is more of a journey than a destination. You know, there is no such thing as 1,000% Perfect accessible website at all times, for a lot of reasons. But the real big thing is that websites change all the time. And sometimes there are things that an automated widget can't fully remediate on its own. So what we've done at accessiBe is we've created a full web accessibility hub. And we're in the process of releasing certain things now. But the big flagship product that everybody probably knows about is our automated tool, the widget, the overlay, whatever you want to call it, and that's a really big important step towards web accessibility. using that tool. You can make pretty much any website reasonably accessible. In 48 hours or less for less than $500 now depends on the size of the website, it depends on certain other factors. But that's generally the case. That being said, depending on your website structure, your needs your compliance obligations, you may want certain other things, whether that's testing by a person who actually has disabilities and can confirm that everything's working properly, or whether it's us working with you to develop best practices for your internal development, so that you can make sure that when you build new products, or you update your website, you're doing so in the most accessible way possible. To access campus, you know, we're actually creating a learning center for developers to become web accessibility developers, because I know that a lot of our marketing and conversations are about an automated solution. But we do want to empower developers to make these changes permanently. The issue is that when we looked and I say, we're not really looking for this, but when we looked, we could not find a really great comprehensive learning center for a developer to go from a JavaScript developer to an accessibility developer. And so we just made it, we're creating that we're creating access flow or creating access find, we're building this whole network so that whatever your needs are relating to accessibility, we'll be able to meet. And we're going to do our best to do that in an affordable way and an accessible way. Because we, as much as we'd love it, if everybody made accessibility, a core tenet of their business and of their approach to the web to the web, we also have to recognize that many website owners, in fact, the majority, they spend less than $1,000 a year on their entire website infrastructure. So there has to be a relatively easy and affordable way for them to achieve some modicum of compliance as well. I think   Michael Hingson  36:53 one of the important things to make sure people understand is that if you use something like excessive BS, overlay technology, it's it's AI Artificial Intelligence powered overlay, you're not suddenly saying My website is perfectly and totally accessible. But it makes a significant difference. And because of things like what you said, access flow, without going into a lot of detail about it, it will give you tools to help you determine what else needs to be done to make the website accessible in a more complete way. And that's extremely important to be able to do. You know, you have talked about I think that the right thing the the moral and ethical reasons for making your website accessible, and it's something that we should do, we don't tend to think in an inclusive way, whether it's here in the US, or in most places, although in Israel, the laws are now pretty stringent about website access, but they're not really stringent throughout the world, in that they don't absolutely mandate and require totally, that websites, for example, and apps and other things need to be accessible. And people do find ways or try to find ways to get around it in various places. Now, I don't know much about the history in Israel and what people do today. But I know we're here, even though a number of courts have said that the Americans with Disabilities Act does apply to the internet, because the ADEA does not specify brick and mortar facilities as the only places that businesses have to provide inclusion to address. But some people say well, but the ADEA was invented before the internet. And so it doesn't apply. And a couple of courts have gone along with that. So Congress needs to address it. The president needs to address it, and they haven't done that yet.   Rafi Glantz  38:58 I agree that I think one of the issues that we're dealing with that we saw and continue to see during these Facebook, or I guess now I should say meta, these Facebook hearings is that our elected officials don't seem to understand how the internet works by any stretch, and neither do judges for for the most part. I know, I know only a very few number of judges personally, but none of them are JavaScript developers, you know, none of them know how to code. It's not something that you're trained on in law school. So I think that in general, there needs to be a change in the approach to this so that there's some sort of mechanism for people to get trusted information. So they'll be able to make a reasonable decision because I do think that a lot of the decisions that have been made are being made from a place that's not as informed as it could be.   Michael Hingson  39:49 Well, I think that's true. And if you look at things like excessive BS ace audit tool, or you can go to the World Wide Web Consortium website, and Find their audit tool. There are places where you can go to say to a website, here is my website address. Tell me how accessible My website is. I think people would be really surprised. For the most part, if they found out just how inaccessible and how unintrusive most websites really are. Yeah, you know, most people   Rafi Glantz  40:23 don't think I talked to business owners and agency owners like, probably 910 12 times a day at this point. And most of them, very few of them have any hate in their heart towards people with disabilities, the real issue is that they just don't think about it. Because number one, they're busy running their business, they're, you know, chicken with their head cut off on most days anyways. But unless you have somebody in your family who has disabilities or in your community that you're close to that you work with on a regular basis or something, for most people, it's just not top of the mind. Now, not saying that should be the case by any stretch. But it's, it's a challenge for us that we need to make this more visible, for lack of a better word.   Michael Hingson  41:05 Absolutely. And, you know, the reality is that there are some who say, I'm just not going to spend any money, I can't afford to do it. But again, it's a mindset shift, if they looked at it, as you said, that is, think of all the business that you can get by making your website accessible. I think anyone who has any insight into the business concepts of the world would agree that it makes perfect sense to make your website accessible. And then when you bring things into it, like access fine, and maybe you want to explain a little bit about what that is, but access fine, also, can help make a difference for people.   Rafi Glantz  41:45 Yeah, access fine, is I talk about it on my calls a lot, because it's a huge opportunity for a business owner. So access find is the world's first search engine that is only going to display accessible results. So only accessible websites, and everybody who uses accessibility is pretty much going to be on there. So what I like to say is that if you're everybody does SEO now, right? Everybody wants to optimize their search results and get found on the internet. Well, if you're doing SEO on Google, you're competing with every other shoe store, every other hockey rink, whatever it is in the world, and certainly everyone in your area, if you're on access, find you're competing with like five other people, because nobody's accessible yet. So as frustrating as that is, it's a huge opportunity for the early movers to establish themselves.   Michael Hingson  42:33 And I want to make it clear as that access find is not just accessibly. That is it is the intent is for it to be website remediation process agnostic, as long as you are working to make your website accessible, it doesn't matter what tool you use, so long as you do it. Because the reality is, when it comes down to it, there are two things that go into making a website accessible. One is the code that somehow gets inserted somewhere that does things like label images, or label buttons and define links and so on, tells you that you have a shopping cart. And so that's that's one. But the other is specifically looking at what you do to make that website usable. And a lot of it has to do with labeling. But it also has to do sometimes with layout and other things like that. And so the issue is it doesn't matter what tool you use. But however you do it, the fact is that the evidence of you doing it is visible to audit tools that look for it. And it's visible to people who who know how to look for it. And that's what you really want to get to.   Rafi Glantz  43:56 Yeah, I mean, I, we don't care how you become accessible. If people can use your website. That's awesome. And we want to put that on access fine. And like access find is not solely an accessible thing. It's a nonprofit. And we're in partnership with the Christopher Reeve Foundation and with the Viscardi Center, and a whole bunch of other really awesome organizations that believe in the same goal that we do that whether you choose to work with us or anybody else. The goal here is accessibility. And that's actually, you know, we did this ad that I got a lot of Facebook messages from my mom's friends about this ad that we ran a national ad campaign in the US which you know all about Mike the Unstopables. And the reason the the purpose of this was not so much to sell excessively, but to sell the idea of accessibility, because like Like we said before, so few people are really aware of this at all. And of those people very, very few have it at the top of their mind.   Michael Hingson  44:55 Diversity is a term has really gone away from dealing with disabilities and I will make that argument all day. We talk about diversity when we're dealing with sexual orientation, race, and gender and so on. But disabilities don't get included in that, which is why I prefer to use the term inclusive, because either you are or you aren't. And if you're leaving anyone out, then you're not inclusive. And it's as simple as that. The fact is, as you pointed out, 20 to 26% of all people in this country and mostly throughout the world, have some sort of disability, how often were we discussed or talked about, or issues that we face brought up during last year's presidential campaign in this country? And how often are those kinds of things considered today, and it's just reality is not much.   Rafi Glantz  45:47 Yeah, and it's a real shame, because there's a massive missed opportunity, I think, you'll probably know the number better than me. But there's close to $500 billion a year in disposable income in the community. And most people are just choosing not to tap into it for some reason. It, it doesn't make sense, particularly now, in a time when we have inflation, we have supply chain problems, we have all of this stuff, and people are scrambling to find customers, you would think that they would want to access the market that's right in front of them.   Michael Hingson  46:18 One of the things that it isn't directly related to web access, but one of the issues that we face as blind people is that the cost for assistive technology, the technology that at least hopefully and does somewhat level, the playing field for us, is expensive screen readers, the software that makes computers talk and describe or verbalize what comes across the screen tools to produce Braille and so on cost money. The National Federation of the Blind has worked with Congress to get introduced into Congress the accessibility assistive technology affordability Act, which calls for a tax credit for people who purchase assistive technology to help us offset some of those costs, yet, and it was actually put into the buyback better program of Congress and Joe Biden. But it's now been dropped as they've been weeding out some of the the programs that people are debating over whether they want to include or not, that is extremely unfortunate that they would that that would even happen, because it's pretty universal thing that for us to be able to do the same things that you do, there are going to be some costs, because we have made our universe some site oriented, that we leave people out. And we've we've done that in various other ways. But even I think I could make a strong case, to a degree more with blindness than than anything else. We think that eyesight is the only game in town. And we don't tend to think about the fact that some of this technology costs, we're not saying pay for it, but give us some tax credits to help us offset some of the costs. And so there's a push right now to get that put back into the bill. But you know, we don't tend to think about people with disabilities in general. One of my favorite examples, is we watch the view everyday, Karen watches it. Now, last month was national employment, or National Disability Employment Awareness Month. I didn't hear actually, except for one time, any disability mentioned on the view in the whole month of October, and that time wasn't even relating to employment or disability awareness, other than saying how inspirational it was that a couple of people with Down syndrome were doing something. It's not inspiration, we need its recognition and understanding and a raising of expectations about society. Absolutely.   Rafi Glantz  48:54 And there's just not enough representation. For all the reasons that you point out there just isn't. I think, what was Senator Tammy Duckworth? I think she's one of the first if not the first woman with disabilities in the Senate. And I mean, she, I could not think of a more heroic story. I mean, she was a combat helicopter pilot, if I'm if I'm remembering this correctly, who was wounded in combat, and ended up becoming a United States Senator. I mean, I could not think of something that would be more appropriate to teach kids, but you rarely hear about that today. The news stories that we hear about are so much, so much less interesting and so much more depressing.   Michael Hingson  49:37 What's interesting is that she isn't the first to have a disability and be in the Senate or the House, and specifically one of our previous podcast guests, a lady named Peggy Chung, who is also known as the blind history lady, talked about the fact that before 1940, there had been three blind people in the house and to whom served in the Senate. But since then, not one single blind person has been in either house, which is kind of interesting. But really, we've gone backwards, we have gone backwards. And she makes that point during the podcast. So if people haven't heard that it's a fascinating one to go listen to. She's got some great stories. She even talks about the fact that the typewriter was originally invented for a blind person. It's a great story, you should go find it. It's, it's, it's in, in the the podcast, and   Rafi Glantz  50:29 I heard that clip on your LinkedIn, you saw that? Yeah.   Michael Hingson  50:33 Good for you. I appreciate you looking. But it's a fascinating story. And the reality is that so many people could make contributions to society, but we tend not to recognize or lose out on getting what they can offer, because we operate in the assumption that there's only one way to do things.   Rafi Glantz  50:55 Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you said initially, is something that I quote you on, I do attribute it, don't worry. But in my in my call, because I'll bring up you know, Michael Hanson, and everything. And I'll say, well, now he's our chief vision officer. But as he says, You don't need sight to be a visionary. And you know, it gets a chuckle. But it's also true, you really don't. And one of the very few experiences that I've had, that sort of, certainly not put me in your shoes, but let me feel a little bit of what it might be like, was, there's this restaurant in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and I forget what it's called, but they put everything in complete darkness. So for about two and a half hours, you're eating, drinking being served everything, mostly by people who have disabilities, both deafness and blindness, as if you're part of that community. And initially, it was very disconcerting. And I did make sure not to wear a white shirt, of course. But it was, for lack of a better word, very eye opening.   Michael Hingson  52:00 The only problem with that, and a lot of us express this concern is if you go away from that having had challenges and you think that's how it is for for people who are blind, you're missing the point. Because the fact is just like for people who can see you learn techniques to do the things that you learn, the fact is that I'd be glad to go to that same restaurant with you and laugh at you while you're having a problem. Because I don't have that problem. Because I've learned techniques. And so there was an organization several years ago that created a website, and was called how I see it, or that's how eye see it the is Eye. And they asked their members to put up on the website, videos of themselves being blindfolded, trying to accomplish tasks. And the whole intent of it was to say see how difficult it is to do this if you're blind. And the reality is, they were so wrong by doing that. And what actually occurred was that blind people discovered it and started putting up our own videos on the same website, saying See how easy it is if you learn and actually overwhelmed the site, and eventually was taken down. And eventually there were some discussions. But it was an organization that has to do with eyesight, and blindness and so on. And they missed the whole point. The reality is that, that it's not the blindness or the eyesight. It's how you learn to deal with it. Most sighted people don't learn to be very observant, by comparison to say, a Navy Seal or someone in the military or people who learn to use their eyes or their ears extremely well. And people who truly learn to understand their senses recognize that, that in fact, there's more than one way to do things. And it isn't always about one particular sense. Absolutely.   Rafi Glantz  53:56 I think a great example of that is actually one of the guys who helped create accessories, initial solution a dt. So he's a friend of sheers. I'm imagining you might have even had the chance to meet him.   Michael Hingson  54:08 I haven't met I know about it, but I haven't met him yet.   Rafi Glantz  54:11 Okay, so get excited. But he is a really nice guy. He came in and showed us a presentation. But what really impressed me was that this guy, not only does this screen reader talk about two and a half times my normal speaking speed, and my speed is not slow. He's also listening to music and also coding while he's having everything read to him and everything. That is very impressive, regardless of any kind of ability or disability. Like I don't think that I would be able to do that. Without like you say without a lot of practice. And there are absolutely strategies and stuff that you would learn to to help you do it. But for someone like me, it's still impressive.   Michael Hingson  54:54 So I have a couple of other things. One is I want to get back To the whole issue of access, and so on, we talked all about the moral aspect of it. But the reality is there is a legal aspect of it, and what do you what do you say to people? Or let me let me combine both of them together, there have been criticisms that that people say is bad marketing to say that you shouldn't make your website accessible just because somebody might sue you. And creating that level of fear. When in reality, it does happen, and it can happen. But what do you say to people about that? And how do you deal with the people who plain say, that's wrong to even say?   Rafi Glantz  55:38 So it's an important point to bring up? And I think that number one, it's in arguable that this is a real problem. Now, could you argue it in court? Sure, you can argue whatever you want in court. But as you know, the American legal system is not 100% perfect all the time for everyone to say the least. So there is a lot of case law to show that you do need to be accessible. The real problem that we face today is the demand letter problem. And it's a lot more of a murky issue than the full on lawsuits. Because the people who send lawsuits, in my experience, much of the time, these are actually well intentioned people who actually have tested this site, they want to use the website and they can't. The demand letters, on the other hand, are coming from a relatively small number of law firms that have identified this as a great way for them to make money making settlements. And unfortunately, in our, in my opinion, particular, that tends to paint the community of people with disabilities in a very negative light. Because in my experience that I believe also in yours, your first instinct when something is not perfect, or as expected is not to sue the pants off of somebody, you're going to engage in a dialogue with them and try to get them to understand why this is something important. So when people tell me, Hey, I don't really believe I'm going to get sued. Sometimes I'll be a little bit rude and just say, Okay, wait. But what I usually will respond with is a story that actually happened to me. So about two years ago, I was in Las Vegas, right before Corona started speaking about web accessibility, and somebody interrupted me about halfway through the presentation, right when I was talking about the legalities, and he claims to own 60 locations of a payday loan company. Now, I won't defend payday loan companies, I don't understand how 3,000% interest is legal in the United States of America, that's a different conversation. But he claims to own 60 locations, and he got a demand letter from some attorney asking for $10,000 Because his website wasn't accessible. Now, this guy's never heard of accessibility before, which is puts him in the same boat as the vast majority of business owners in the United States. So he calls us lawyer and asked the Hey, what's up with what's going on? And the lawyer explains, well, listen, it's you, we shouldn't really fight this. Because if I take this to court and fight it for you, you're going to pay me $100,000. In legal fees, it's going to take like a year and a half. And we'll probably still lose, because you're not accessible. Like you haven't done any work to your website, you don't have any grounds. So he said, Okay, he wrote a check. And he started looking into how to make the rest of his websites accessible. The problem is, and this speaks a lot to the nature of many of these complaints. The day his check cleared, he got 59 more letters and had to settle for $600,000. And as much as I disagree with the business that he's in, I appreciate him having the courage to come forward and speak about it. Because this happens a lot more frequently than we realize, because most business owners who have something like this happen to them, they're not going to speak up about it, they're going to be as quiet as possible, because they don't want to get sued again, and they don't want to cast their business and themselves in a negative light.   Michael Hingson  58:49 The other part about that, though, is that his lawyer wasn't up on it enough to understand that maybe there are ways to address the issue either. Very true. I know, excessively, has interacted with a number of companies, I'm sure you've got stories about this companies that say, Hey, I'm being threatened with a lawsuit. Can you help us and that what accessiblity has done as helped in two ways. One, it's offered its its products, and when that's put on the site, that greatly mitigates a lot of the accessibility issues by just using the overlay not totally, but that it helps. And the other thing that excessive B will do is then show with its its own documentation that it creates case by case. Exactly how the, the website has become accessible. And that in fact, the the lawsuit is not justifiable. Yeah,   Rafi Glantz  59:50 I mean, I don't know the exact number anymore, but I don't even close to it. But it's it's literally in the 1000s of people who have come to us with papers already served and all Almost all those cases, we've managed to make the whole thing go away. We've never had a client successfully sued due to using our tool. And I will also say that having access to be on your website has despite what whatever detractors might want to say, which, you know, they're welcome to say whatever they want. But having accessiBe on your website has become a lot like having the ADT flag on your lawn. You know, people see that flag and realize you have a good security system. And they're a lot more likely to move on to the next victim than test it out. And we've seen that play out quite a bit in recent months.   Michael Hingson  1:00:34 What do you say to the people in there have been consumers who say that we're just not doing things the right way?   Rafi Glantz  1:00:42 I say what I said before, which is it's a journey, it's not a destination, you know, there is no one stop perfect, immediate solution for accessibility? Because it really depends on the website, it depends on how often you're updating it. What industry are you in, you know, medical, and housing have different requirements in many cases than other e commerce stores. But a real the best approach to accessibility, I think, is a comprehensive one that comes at it from multiple angles. So yeah, you want to have best practices. When you're building a website, you want to have all of the alt text and Aria labels and features on there. You also want to have an overlay widget because as you know, Mike, not everybody who's colorblind is colorblind the same way, right. So if you pick like a couple of colors to use on your website, no matter what colors you choose, they're not accessible to everybody. So I think that there's a layered approach to accessibility that can include both best practices, manual remediation after the fact and automated remediation as well, to give you the most complete picture.   Michael Hingson  1:01:48 And that's really as good as it gets that it is a journey, you know, always will be a journey. There are people who rightly say the only true real way to create an inclusive or accessible website or anything accessible is to do it right from the outset. And that's, that's, that's absolutely valid. But that means that WordPress has to build such stringent tools into its system, that any website that's created or any, any system that's created through WordPress has to be accessible before it could be released. Microsoft has to fully include accessibility in everything that it does, right from the outset, not making it an afterthought. Apple needs to do the same thing. But Apple also needs to because it has all these apps that come out of the App Store, Apple needs to mandate a basic level of accessibility that apps beat. And I have not seen that Apple requires that today. So you can create and people create all the time apps that aren't accessible. Nice, I put it that way. Because Apple, in fact, has built a level of accessibility into its products. It's it is made screen readers. And in Apple's case, it's called VoiceOver, it has made a screen reader, a part of the technology that it produces on all Macs is on on iPhones, it's on iPads. They've made their websites pretty usable. But they don't mandate the same thing about the people who come to the App Store and require that abs that websites are excuse me, apps are fully accessible, or at least accessible to the point where they can be and I understand that there are times that websites or apps are going to display videos, or let's not use videos, but images or maps that we don't know how to verbalize yet automatically, but people do need to address those issues. And we're not doing that yet.   Rafi Glantz  1:03:59 Right. And I think there's a really important point that you brought up there that there is some responsibility that lies with these big giant tech companies like WordPress, like Wix, you know, whatever name name a giant company, because, well, it's all well and good to talk about America and say, hey, you know, we need to build accessible websites. But in the developing world around the world, there are there's even less attention being paid to accessibility a lot of the time and even less budget. And that being the case, the only realistic way that many of these websites can be accessible is by these giant providers mandating and providing tools for that to be possible. Because again, I mentioned that, you know, most companies in the United States pay less than $1,000 a year for their whole website. Worldwide. That number is divided significantly. You know, there's a lot of people who pay even less and we're very proud to be able to offer our automated solution which is an important component like we said Have a layered approach to accessibility at less than 500 bucks a year. But I think you'll agree it's hard to convince someone to spend 500 on accessibility if they spent 200. On the website, you know?   Michael Hingson  1:05:11 Sure. Well, and but the reality is, again, the issue isn't mandated that somebody do it. The role modeling really has to be done by those who develop the basic technology. And so those who create WordPress design tools, WordPress that creates its design tools, or Microsoft should have the absolute best screen reader built into its technology right from the outset, and it and it doesn't. Google is the same way any of them, it isn't mandating that somebody else do it. It really needs to start with them. They really need to build in absolut

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996. At the time, most people had a digital camera, like the Canon Elph that was released that year and maybe a digital video camera and probably a computer and about 16% of Americans had a cell phone at the time. Some had a voice recorder, a Diskman, some in the audio world had a four track machine. Many had CD players and maybe even a laser disk player.  But all of this was changing. Small, cheap microprocessors were leading to more and more digital products. The MP3 was starting to trickle around after being patented in the US that year. Netflix would be founded the next year, as DVDs started to spring up around the world. Ricoh, Polaroid, Sony, and most other electronics makers released digital video cameras. There were early e-readers, personal digital assistants, and even research into digital video recorders that could record your favorite shows so you could watch them when you wanted. In other words we were just waking up to a new, digital lifestyle. But the industries were fragmented.  Jobs and the team continued the work begun under Gil Amelio to reduce the number of products down from 350 to about a dozen. They made products that were pretty and functional and revitalized Apple. But there was a strategy that had been coming together in their minds and it centered around digital media and the digital lifestyle. We take this for granted today, but mostly because Apple made it ubiquitous.  Apple saw the iMac as the centerpiece for a whole new strategy. But all this new type of media and the massive files needed a fast bus to carry all those bits. That had been created back in 1986 and slowly improved on one the next few years in the form of IEEE 1394, or Firewire. Apple started it - Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, and others helped bring it to device they made. Firewire could connect 63 peripherals at 100 megabits, later increased to 200 and then 400 before increasing to 3200. Plenty fast enough to transfer those videos, songs, and whatever else we wanted. iMovie was the first of the applications that fit into the digital hub strategy. It was originally released in 1999 for the iMac DV, the first iMac to come with built-in firewire. I'd worked on Avid and SGI machines dedicated to video editing at the time but this was the first time I felt like I was actually able to edit video. It was simple, could import video straight from the camera, allow me to drag clips into a timeline and then add some rudimentary effects. Simple, clean, and with a product that looked cool. And here's the thing, within a year Apple made it free. One catch. You needed a Mac. This whole Digital Hub Strategy idea was coming together. Now as Steve Jobs would point out in a presentation about the Digital Hub Strategy at Macworld 2001, up to that point, personal computers had mainly been about productivity. Automating first the tasks of scientists, then with the advent of the spreadsheet and databases, moving into automating business and personal functions. A common theme in this podcast is that what drives computing is productivity, telemetry, and quality of life. The telemetry gains came with connecting humanity through the rise of the internet in the later 1990s. But these new digital devices were what was going to improve our quality of life. And for anyone that could get their hands on an iMac they were now doing so. But it still felt like a little bit of a closed ecosystem.  Apple released a tool for making DVDs in 2001 for the Mac G4, which came with a SuperDrive, or Apple's version of an optical drive that could read and write CDs and DVDs. iDVD gave us the ability to add menus, slideshows (later easily imported as Keynote presentations when that was released in 2003), images as backgrounds, and more. Now we could take those videos we made and make DVDs that we could pop into our DVD player and watch. Families all over the world could make their vacation look a little less like a bunch of kids fighting and a lot more like bliss. And for anyone that needed more, Apple had DVD Studio Pro - which many a film studio used to make the menus for movies for years. They knew video was going to be a thing because going back to the 90s, Jobs had tried to get Adobe to release Premiere for the iMac. But they'd turned him down, something he'd never forget. Instead, Jobs was able to sway Randy Ubillos to bring a product that a Macromedia board member had convinced him to work on called Key Grip, which they'd renamed to Final Cut. Apple acquired the source code and development team and released it as Final Cut Pro in 1999. And iMovie for the consumer and Final Cut Pro for the professional turned out to be a home run. But another piece of the puzzle was coming together at about the same time. Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid, and Dave Heller built a tool called SoundJam in 1998. They had worked on the failed Copeland project to build a new OS at Apple and afterwards, Robbin made a great old tool (that we might need again with the way extensions are going) called Conflict Catcher while Kincaid worked on the drivers for a MP3 player called the Diamond Rio. He saw these cool new MP3 things and tools like Winamp, which had been released in 1997, so decided to meet back up with Robbin for a new tool, which they called SoundJam and sold for $50.  Just so happens that I've never met anyone at Apple that didn't love music. Going back to Jobs and Wozniak. So of course they would want to do something in digital music. So in 2000, Apple acquired SoundJam and the team immediately got to work stripping out features that were unnecessary. They wanted a simple aesthetic. iMovie-esque, brushed metal, easy to use. That product was released in 2001 as iTunes. iTunes didn't change the way we consumed music.That revolution was already underway.  And that team didn't just add brushed metal to the rest of the operating system. It had begun with QuickTime in 1991 but it was iTunes through SoundJam that had sparked brushed metal.  SoundJam gave the Mac music visualizers as well. You know, those visuals on the screen that were generated by sound waves from music we were listening to. And while we didn't know it yet, would be the end of software coming in physical boxes. But something else big. There was another device coming in the digital hub strategy. iTunes became the de facto tool used to manage what songs would go on the iPod, released in 2001 as well. That's worthy of its own episode which we'll do soon.  You see, another aspect about SoundJam is that users could rip music off of CDs and into MP3s. The deep engineering work done to get the codec into the system survives here and there in the form of codecs accessible using APIs in the OS. And when combined with spotlight to find music it all became more powerful to build playlists, embed metadata, and listen more insightfully to growing music libraries. But Apple didn't want to just allow people to rip, find, sort, and listen to music. They also wanted to enable users to create music. So in 2002, Apple also acquired a company called Emagic. Emagic would become Logic Pro and Gerhard Lengeling would in 2004 release a much simpler audio engineering tool called Garage Band.  Digital video and video cameras were one thing. But cheap digital point and shoot cameras were everwhere all of a sudden. iPhoto was the next tool in the strategy, dropping in 2002 Here, we got a tool that could import all those photos from our cameras into a single library. Now called Photos, Apple gave us a taste of the machine learning to come by automatically finding faces in photos so we could easily make albums. Special services popped up to print books of our favorite photos. At the time most cameras had their own software to manage photos that had been developed as an after-thought. iPhoto was easy, worked with most cameras, and was very much not an after-thought.  Keynote came in 2003, making it easy to drop photos into a presentation and maybe even iDVD. Anyone who has seen a Steve Jobs presentation understands why Keynote had to happen and if you look at the difference between many a Power Point and Keynote presentation it makes sense why it's in a way a bridge between the making work better and doing so in ways we made home better.  That was the same year that Apple released the iTunes Music Store. This seemed like the final step in a move to get songs onto devices. Here, Jobs worked with music company executives to be able to sell music through iTunes - a strategy that would evolve over time to include podcasts, which the moves effectively created, news, and even apps - as explored on the episode on the App Store. And ushering in an era of creative single-purpose apps that drove down the cost and made so much functionality approachable for so many.  iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie were made to live together in a consumer ecosystem. So in 2003, Apple reached that point in the digital hub strategy where they were able to take our digital life and wrap them up in a pretty bow. They called that product iLife - which was more a bundle of these services, along with iDVD and Garage Band. Now these apps are free but at the time the bundle would set you back a nice, easy, approachable $49.  All this content creation from the consumer to the prosumer to the professional workgroup meant we needed more and more storage. According to the codec, we could be running at hundreds of megabytes per second of content. So Apple licensed the StorNext File System in 2004 to rescue a company called ADIC and release a 64-bit clustered file system over fibre channel. Suddenly all that new high end creative content could be shared in larger and larger environments. We could finally have someone cutting a movie in Final Cut then hand it off to someone else to cut without unplugging a firewire drive to do it. Professional workflows in a pure-Apple ecosystem were a thing.  Now you just needed a way to distribute all this content. So iWeb in 2004, which allowed us to build websites quickly and bring all this creative content in. Sites could be hosted on MobileMe or files uploaded to a web host via FTP. Apple had dabbled in web services since the 80s with AppleLink then eWorld then iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe, the culmination of the evolutions of these services now referred to as iCloud.  And iCloud now syncs documents and more. Pages came in 2005, Numbers came in 2007, and they were bundled with Keynote to become Apple iWork, allowing for a competitor of sorts to Microsoft Office. Later made free and ported to iOS as well. iCloud is a half-hearted attempt at keeping these synchronized between all of our devices.  Apple had been attacking the creative space from the bottom with the tools in iLife but at the top as well. Competing with tools like Avid's Media Composer, which had been around for the Mac going back to 1989, Apple bundled the professional video products into a single suite called Final Cut Studio. Here, Final Cut Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Color (obtained when Apple acquired SiliconColor and renamed it from FinalTouch), Compressor, Cinema Tools, and Qmaster for distributing the processing power for the above tools came in one big old box. iMovie and Garage Band for the consumer market and Final Cut Studio and Logic for the prosumer to professional market. And suddenly I was running around the world deploying Xsan's into video shops, corporate taking head editing studios, and ad agencies Another place where this happened was with photos. Aperture was released in 2005 and  offered the professional photographer tools to manage their large collection of images. And that represented the final pieces of the strategy. It continued to evolve and get better over the years. But this was one of the last aspects of the Digital Hub Strategy.  Because there was a new strategy underway. That's the year Apple began the development of the iPhone. And this represents a shift in the strategy. Released in 2007, then followed up with the first iPad in 2010, we saw a shift from the growth of new products in the digital hub strategy to migrating them to the mobile platforms, making them stand-alone apps that could be sold on App Stores, integrated with iCloud, and killing off those that appealed to more specific needs in higher-end creative environments, like Aperture, which went ended in 2014, and integrating some into other products, like Color becoming a part of Final Cut Pro. But the income from those products has now been eclipsed by mobile devices. Because when we see the returns from one strategy begin to crest - you know, like when the entire creative industry loves you, it's time to move to another, bolder strategy. And that mobile strategy opened our eyes to always online (or frequently online) synchronization between products and integration with products, like we get with Handoff and other technologies today.  In 2009 Apple acquired a company called Lala, which would later be added to iCloud - but the impact to the Digital Hub Strategy was that it paved the way for iTunes Match, a  cloud service that allowed for syncing music from a local library to other Apple devices. It was a subscription and more of a stop-gap for moving people to a subscription to license music than a lasting stand-alone product. And other acquisitions would come over time and get woven in, such as Redmatia, Beats, and Swell.  Steve Jobs said exactly what Apple was going to do in 2001. In one of the most impressive implementations of a strategy, Apple had slowly introduced quality products that tactically ushered in a digital lifestyle since the late 90s and over the next few years. iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iLife, and in a sign of the changing times - iPod, iPhone, iCloud. To signal the end of that era because it was by then ubiquitous. - then came the iPad. And the professional apps won over the creative industries. Until the strategy had been played out and Apple began laying the groundwork for the next strategy in 2005.  That mobile revolution was built in part on the creative influences of Apple. Tools that came after, like Instagram, made it even easier to take great photos, connect with friends in a way iWeb couldn't - because we got to the point where “there's an app for that”. And as the tools weren't needed, Apple cancelled some one-by-one, or even let Adobe Premiere eclipse Final Cut in many ways. Because you know, sales of the iMac DV were enough to warrant building the product on the Apple platform and eventually Adobe decided to do that. Apple built many of these because there was a need and there weren't great alternatives. Once there were great alternatives, Apple let those limited quantities of software engineers go work on other things they needed done. Like building frameworks to enable a new generation of engineers to build amazing tools for the platform! I've always considered the release of the iPad to be the end of era where Apple was introducing more and more software. From the increased services on the server platform to tools that do anything and everything. But 2010 is just when we could notice what Jobs was doing. In fact, looking at it, we can easily see that the strategy shifted about 5 years before that. Because Apple was busy ushering in the next revolution in computing.  So think about this. Take an Apple, a Microsoft, or a Google. The developers of nearly every single operating system we use today. What changes did they put in place 5 years ago that are just coming to fruition today. While the product lifecycles are annual releases now, that doesn't mean that when they have billions of devices out there that the strategies don't unfold much, much slower. You see, by peering into the evolutions over the past few years, we can see where they're taking computing in the next few years. Who did they acquire? What products will they release? What gaps does that create? How can we take those gaps and build products that get in front of them? This is where magic happens. Not when we're too early like a General Magic was. But when we're right on time. Unless we help set strategy upstream. Or, is it all chaos and not in the least bit predictable? Feel free to send me your thoughts! And thank you…

Today is January 26, 2021, and for this Tuesday Tips episode we're covering How to Setup Your M1 MacBook for Web Development Let's dive in! ---- The worst part (or perhaps the most fun for some) of getting a new laptop is setting up everything you need as a web developer. Adding programs and tools that you had installed over the many years of ownership of your previous laptop can seem daunting. With the release of the new Macbook M1 laptops, there are some interesting new considerations as well that you may not be aware of. So, let's jump in and get the basics set up so you can hit the ground running developing your next project. ---- The first thing you should install is Rosetta 2, which allows you to run Intel-based software on the new ARM chip. Because Apple has created their own chips they needed a way to provide backward compatibility with programs that do not yet support ARM and Rosetta 2 is that solution. ---- Homebrew will be the best way to add the other software and tools on our computer, so we want to install that next. A quick tip that is good to know is when you go to open the built-in Terminal in the Applications folder: right-click, select Get Info, and check the Open with Rosetta box. ---- There are a lot of tools to consider when setting up your Macbook from scratch, so one of the quickest ways to add a lot of the important ones is to use a script. I recommend the script created by the author of the original post that this is based on, but feel free to use a different one or modify this one for yourself. Opening the download script folder in your terminal you can choose to run the install script or modify what will be installed from the brew-installs.sh file. Once you're satisfied, run the script. Some of the tools and applications included in the script are: MongoDB node git zsh Firefox Chrome VSCode Zoom Slack Discord Notion and more... ---- Something that is not included in the script is nvm because there have been difficulties installing this with the ARM chip. To get around this you will have to use a curl command and make a couple of modifications afterward. ---- Git was installed with the brew install script so make sure to configure the settings and use a personal access token to authenticate GitHub. ---- Make sure to use the Settings Sync plugin to keep all of your VSCode settings in sync with a stored GitHub gist. ---- You should now be all set to start developing! Thanks to the script many tools and applications were installed for us, minimizing the manual install process. ---- Today's Tuesday Tips was adapted from a post on the Logrocket blog. ---- Want to know more? Head to fewdaily.com for more of today's topics and other front-end web content! If you liked what you heard be sure to rate, review, and subscribe on your platform of choice. That's all for today, tune in tomorrow! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Welcome back to another episode. And I told you in the intro with this episode was about, but Holy moly. I only had one lesson to share with you as my biggest business lesson of 2020. I only had one, but now I have two, I have two because there was a surprise lesson that happened in my life yesterday when I was recording this. And since I want people to laugh, I want people to smile. I want you to laugh. I want you to smile. And I want everybody just to realize that there's humor and happiness and joy in everything that we do. I tell you the story, because. It wasn't a joyous moment in the moment, but after I had to laugh a little bit.So the theme of today's podcast is the biggest business lesson I learned of 2020. I'm going to amplify that or support that with the biggest personal lesson I learned at 2020, which I learned two days ago, no, yesterday, yesterday. So let me tell you a story and I think I might have to sneeze, but I did.Let's see, see if I can make through that season. Bless you now should go away. So yesterday. I decided that I really, really want less material things in my life. And I've made this decision. I made this decision about a year ago and I've been like slowly, you know, eliminating things, you know, removing things that don't use, not hoarding things, watching Marie Kondo, like crazy.And I'm just in love with creating more space in my life and space to be present, space to be with myself not having the weight of things. And so yesterday I was like, I'm going to clean my wife and kids are out of town and I'm like, I'm going to clean. So I was like, I'm going to redo my ice bath, cleaned my ice bath so I can take my ice bath and clean the garage. I'm gonna start getting rid of some stuff. And so I'm like on fire, right? I got the garage open. I cleaned my ice bath, refilled it. And then I was like, Oh, I have to feed our pet snakes. So I go to the freezer, I get their food and I have to defroster food. So I put it in a Ziploc bag and I throw it in the sink and we have two sinks in my kitchen. Like a smaller vegetable sink is the one I was using. So I was like, Oh, I have to warm up the water. So they threw them in and then I just turned the water on to warm up and I didn't plug the drain. And I was like, okay, I'll be right back. It'll warm up. I'm gonna run outside real quick and get something. I think I left my phone outside.So I walk away and I go outside and then I get my phone and I got wrapped up in what was happening outside. Like I did something with the ice bath. I cleaned the garage and maybe like five minutes passed, maybe five minutes, maybe, maybe 10 minutes. And I was like, I gotta go inside. And I opened my door and it sounded like a waterfall in my kitchen. And I have this island in our kitchen. It's just this big island in the middle. Cause I used to use the kitchen for TV shows and movies when I was a food blogger. And so I have this massive Island like Crescent shaped and the front edge is like an eight foot round edge. And the sink is on a higher level and there was a water pouring over the front of the ledge and over the edges of the counter. And I thought it was dreaming. I thought I was having a nightmare. I didn't even know what to do. And so it's like, Oh my God. And in the past I'm going to get angry. And I was like, well, the water's already out.What am I gonna do? So I turned the water off.I move the bag. And so what had happened was when the water started filling the bag, cause I didn't think this went through the bag, got pulled into the drain cause that's what happens and then it plugged it. And so it created this plug. So unplug the drain. I go to grab every towel. We don't have any towels. They're all dirty. I'm trying to find them. I run to my garage, get towels from a sauna and I go frantic. Like I was going to do a workup, but this turned into my cardio and I was like, I have five minutes to clean up my entire kitchen before I ruined my house, the hardwood, the cabinets, there was water everywhere.And so ended up cleaning it up really quick, no damage. I actually took the drawers out of the, out of the kitchen and I went and put them in my sauna. I have an infrared sauna and I was like, Oh, it's dry in there. It'll do that. So I did that. Everything's fine. I get it all upno damage. I saw all the water, it stopped from going under the cabinets, everything, but I mean, ther e was water everywhere.I ended up finding like 18 to 19 towels and then I even had to use some of my clothes to get the water up. And the whole time I'm cleaning, I was just laughing. Like I was literally laughing and I was laughing because no matter what it had already happened, like, I couldn't be mad at it. If I was upset, it wasn't going to pick the water up any faster. If I was angry, it wasn't going to pick the water any faster. If I was like, Oh, I'm so aloof. I can't believe that happened. It's not going to make the water cup up faster. The only thing I could do. The only thing I could do was just cleaned it up and laugh about it.So I put on some music and for like literally 15 minutes, I was like Pippi Longstocking with sponges and clothes and towels on my feet, running around in the kitchen, cleaning all the cabinets and I just laughed. And then what was hilarious is I wanted to clean. Well, I had to take everything out of the kitchen cabinets because of the water. And so I ended up emptying out like every kitchen, cabinet and drawer. And so I ended up cleaning the whole kitchen and decluttering and creating space. And so silver lining. I thought that was funny. You can laugh at my misfortune. You can imagine me running in with my pink shoes, into the kitchen, seeing water freaking out, running around the house, getting all the towels, putting towels on my feet, skating around the kitchen, like Pippi Longstocking, cleaning the fork, picking up the water and then decluttering.And so at the end result was I told the universe that I wanted to declutter. And I wanted less of my life. And apparently I was just a little not present to what that would look like. It didn't look like I thought it would, but it ended up looking like just what I needed to laugh and joyful. And so I just flooded the kitchen to clean the cabinets. And then at the end of the day, I was four boxes latch of less of kitchen clutter that I haven't used in years because it was all food blogging stuff. And then I'm going to donate to somebody use who can use it. And then I got to the end result. And so I laughed about it.So that was my personal lesson. Be present. I'll be really present. And here's my biggest lesson don't ever leave the sink unattended don't ever leave the sink unattended. So now let's get into my biggest business lesson of 2020. My biggest business lesson of 2020 is everything you do starts with your heart. Every single thing, you do start with the heart.If your heart is not connected to your messaging, into your marketing, then nothing else you do will work. And this is what I like to remind people of normally, or most of the time we start on this path of entrepreneurship or business, because we have figured out a solution to a problem. We have solved something that we know can help other people, or we have figured out something that could help other people or figured out a product that could help other people or found a product that we were passionate about that could help other people. And when you come from that passion, Even though in the beginning we work long hours sometimes, and it feels hard. It's almost like we have this unlimited gas tank. We have this like unlimited fuel to keep going because we believe in the purpose. We believe in the passion. We believe in the product. We believe in the solution. We're like, we're going to do this. And it doesn't matter what a drive comes from. Like we just keep going and going and going. And then we go, and then at some point for me, what ended happening was my heart was in, it created the results. And then I got to disconnection from my heart and I got into the numbers and the logic. And once I get into the logic, I was sitting there trying to sell features and benefits instead of enrolling people in their beliefs. And so what ends up happening is I start making logical thinking decisions.I'm like, logically, this is what a customer journey will look like. Logically, this is what a purchasing decision will look like. Logically, this is what the product should say. Logically this is what the label should look like. And there's only one big problem in that zero purchasing decisions are based on logic. They're all based on emotion and we know this. And so what we have to be present to is to ensure that if we're logically thinking about a customer journey or logically thinking about a product or logically thinking about a business or logically thinking about something that we also have to create the space to put the heart back into the logic. Because if we are trying to speak to people's hearts with logic, it's going to go right over their head. You can't speak to their head and get their heart. You have to speak to their heart. And so we have to make sure that we know who we serve and how we serve them at an emotional level at an E Q level at a feeling level, at a belief level. Which is why, when I teach the captain's assessment, I have the three levels to it, the rocks, the reefs, and the Shoals, the rocks are the surfacey things.Those are the logical things, right. But the reefs and the shoals, those are the feelings. Those are beliefs. Those are, what's going to shift their identity. Those are the things that are move the needle for people, right? Because somebody can come to me and they can be like, George, I have an email marketing problem. And I can ask questions, right? And they're like, yeah, email's hard. And my customers don't want to hear from me and vice blah, blah, blah, blah. And I can give them all the tools I can be like this is the email to write. This is the email to write. This is what you want to say. This is the automation. This is where you put it in. And that's only going to put a bandaid on it because they're going to do those things to check the box. But then the result is going to end up the same because they still think email is hard. But the inverse is they come to me, I have an email problem. We break it down and they think email is hard. And then we talk about what's required for them to think email is easy. We've just eliminated a barrier for them emailing their customers.So they weren't emailing in the first place because they thought they were hard. So if I give them a tool to get them to email their customers, they're still gonna think email is hard and eventually it's going to dissipate and end up right back where they started. Or my customers don't want to hear from me. And so then they don't email them because they think what they have to say is that valuable or people don't want it. And so I can tell them what to put in an email. I can tell them how many times to email them, but that email has never to be their full expression or their full force or their full power or their full light. Because it's dimmed by the belief that people don't want to hear from them. So if we sit down for a couple minutes, like I do in the eternal flame method, like our email course, and we shift the belief, it's like, no email gets to be easy and people want to hear from you. Then the tool doesn't matter because then you're just going to realize I can write an email every day and then people want to hear from me every day. And all of a sudden there's no filter between is what I'm about to say, going to be for my audience, because you already know your audience, you have a belief. And so you just start showing up in your power to share with them. And then we use the tools as rocket fire, rocket fire, rocket fuel fire accelerant, right. Then amplify that message.But in business, in entrepreneurship, you have to know. And I mean, you have to really know at a cellular level who you serve. And most of the time you have to know these people better than, you know, yourself or better than they know themselves.should say, because you have to know yourself to know them, but you have to know them better than they know themselves. And so this is where you've heard the outages in marketing. You know, we give people what they want to sell them what they need, right. Or we sell them what they want to give them what they need, pick your direction on that one. But what that simply saying is that you have to take the time to put your heart into everything that you do. Because on the other side, if you're like, Oh, they want to supplement, let's say didn't want to weight protein. Nobody goes and buys weight protein for the protein content or cause they love taking whey protein. There's a deeper rooted belief underneath it by taking this protein. I'm going to get stronger by getting stronger. I'm going to have more confidence. Like those are the feelings.When you think about Apple, Apple is one of the best examples of this I've ever seen. And it's one of the things that I point out, right? Because Apple and Android, Android being an operating system, or the two big players here, right. Apple only owns I think 3% of the market, but 97% of the revenue. It was like, yeah. Okay and I was like, but look at their commercials. Apple, doesn't tell you the features and benefits of the phone. They show you who you will be and what it will feel like by using the phone. Now, occasionally they'll throw in like, you know, a spec or something, but when you see their commercials, they're not telling you about the lens and the glass and the technology and the chip. They're showing you how easy it is to take a photo, how beautiful your photo will look and what that will mean about you. As a person to take that photo, those are all feelings and beliefs, and that comes from them, knowing their avatar, knowing the customer and knowing what they will need to feel, not think knowing what they will need to feel to move on to the next level or to buy the product or to use the phone.And so we'll convince ourselves that logic is the way we'll look at something. And we'll be like, okay, I want to buy this course. I want to buy this car and we'll look at all the feature benefits. But what we're really doing is we're collecting evidence to feel safe. And safety is a feeling, not a thought. Safety is a feeling and not a thought the customer journey when people are being quartered or they're in a journey or they're in your ecosystem, whether on your email list or on your social media or seeing your page ads, they are going to be listening to what you're saying. They're also going to be reading about what you're writing and you might have things like. You know, we have a 30 day money back guarantee. It does this and it does this, but what they're doing is they're reading all of that as evidence that they feel safe enough, that they feel safe enough to trust you, to make a purchasing decision.And so if you stay in logic the whole time, What'll happen is there's never a container, a safety or next step. And this has happened to me. This actually happened to me with our eternal flame email program. I got so disconnected from the beliefs that I had about email marketing that all I was saying is like, yeah, we'll automate your email. This will automate 99% of your email, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it was all logic based and it didn't solve any problems. And what ends up happening is when somebody is afraid of doing email marketing. And then you give them tools without shifting the belief. Email marketing actually feels harder because now it's overwhelming. Now there's more to do of something I already don't like doing. And that was on me. And that's because I was disconnected. I've done email for so many people for so long, so many different companies that I was just like in this different flow when I started getting reconnected to myself and started sending a daily email, I started remembering what it felt like to send a daily email, what it felt like taking her response, what it felt like to see people win.Like if you're watching the video, I just closed my eyes when I said that, because like I was feeling it in my body again. And once I felt. What it was like to do that. And once I felt accomplished on the other side of hitting send and felt accomplished after writing a sequence or felt accomplished after designing a flow, I remembered what it felt like before I got there. I remember when I thought it was hard. I remember when I thought nobody wanted to hear from me when I remembered, when people taught me email was just about selling. And then once I realized that I remember the feeling of where I was versus wearing them now. I knew exactly how to talk to my customer or potential customer to meet them where they are and take them to where they wanted to go, which is what we do, which is what we designed customer journeys.We say it all the time. You have to meet your customers where they are. Well, let me expand that for you. You have to meet your customers where their feelings are, not where their heads are, because a customer's head could be like, I've ready to make a million dollars a month, but their feelings will prevent them from taking action. And until you can really understand them and then speak to their feelings so they feel understood. They feel seen and they feel respected. Their head will play tricks on them, but their head will convince them. They're going to do all of these things while staying stuck. Their head will convince them they want to lose the weight, but they'll never sign up. Their head will convince them that they want the coaching, but they'll never pay. Their head, will convince them that they want to get in shape, but they'll never work out. Because their feelings are stopping them from going their heads, like go to the gym. And they're like, I don't want to, I'm too tired. I'm not good enough those are all feelings.And so when I look back at 2020. The biggest business lesson that I have learned that I'm carrying forward with me and my entire team is carrying forward for the rest of eternity for the rest of my existence in this world of doing what I do and helping people do what I do. Is ensuring that every single thing that we do at some point has a measure or a check-in to get connected to heart. To get connected, to feeling that nothing, nothing remains in the head, nothing remains logical.So I can design a customer journey logically, and I might say people need seven days to write their first email, or they need seven days to create a walking habit, or they need 14 days to lose a pound. Logically, I understand that container and I create the container, but then I fill the container with heart. So logic gets you. The container heart gets you the content and the content. And the feelings that people experience with that content are what dictates their results in their actions.And so as you navigate the rest of your year, whatever, you're listening to be listening as 20 years from now, when I recorded it in 2020, everything that you do has to come from your heart, your team's heart, your company's heart, the company's culture, heart, the lighthouse of the company. It has to come from the heart. And then you have to figure out the bridge to connect your heart to your customer's heart, to understand them so you can take them from where they're feeling to, where they want to go. And so heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart belongs in everything. Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings, emotions, emotions, emotions, emotions. Because last time I checked, there was not an algorithm or a robot buying your products, buying your services or buying your programs. That was a human being that's experiencing an emotion on the other side. There is a reason that they are buying from you or want to buy from you. And that reason is they want something different. They want something better. They want to solve something or fix something and all of that is emotional base thinking. All of it is emotional based thinking. And so you have to use logic to create the container and use your heart to fill the content.So if I could leave you with anything in today's episode, it's that no matter what you do. Do it with intention and make sure you have felt it before you do it. Before you send that message. Before you write that email, before you do that live video, before you do that post, before you do that team meeting, before you design that program, before you launch that ad, before you do product dev. Like look at your product, your physical product, and look at the color and instead of asking yourself, what does this look like? Or how does this look, or you ask your team for feedback, how does this look. Ask them how they feel. When you're asking your customer for feedback, maybe they've completed your program. We don't go and ask them, like, what is your sequence look like? We ask them, like, how do you feel? What did it feel like get into the feeling. The fastest path to legacy, to success, to growth, to scale and to out carrying your competition and building these legacy businesses and putting the heart back into marketing that we do is get connected to your feelings so you can get connected to their feelings and use that empathy to understand what really is going to move people forward.And because there's this cheesy quote, and I keep hearing it so much lately. So I have to say it again. If information IE if logic was the answer, everybody would be rich, happy and in shape, but it's not. People need us to take that logic and create containers and then fill that container with heart that allows them to shift their beliefs, move forward on their goals. Trust us, feel safe with us so they can trust themselves and feel safe with themselves and have the confidence required with the accountability and support of us to accomplish their goals, to buy our product, to use our services, to do all of those things.So my biggest business lesson of 2020, and I think one that I will carry forever. Is you have to put feeling into everything that you do. And my biggest personal lesson is don't leave your sink unattended while you are filling it with water, because it will flood your kitchen. And then you'll end up looking like Pippi Longstocking running around your kitchen with towels on your feet to clean it up. We'll having a good laugh, but that's all I got today. Guys. Remember that relationships always beat algorithms. And remember there's zero way to lose the game by having feelings and using them to build relationships that will always beat algorithms and help you out care the competition.

What is customer experience? Is it a specific team within your company? Is it the contact center employees fielding calls from angry and disappointed customers? The truth is, a lot of us don't' really realize what customer experience is until we've had an outstanding experience. One that absolutely blew our socks off. It's the reason that people make YouTube videos of themselves unboxing iPhones and iPads. Because Apple understands that every part of the product is tied to the customer experience. In part 1 of this 2 part episode, we sit down with author, keynote speaker and customer service expert Shep Hyken to talk all about: Best practices around customer service and customer experience Why he thinks that customer experience isn't a department, but a philosophy The “Apple Experience,” and how even something as simple as packaging can enhance customer experience Why happier employees mean a more successful company

What is customer experience? Is it a specific team within your company? Is it the contact center employees fielding calls from angry and disappointed customers? The truth is, a lot of us don't’ really realize what customer experience is until we’ve had an outstanding experience. One that absolutely blew our socks off.  It’s the reason that people make YouTube videos of themselves unboxing iPhones and iPads. Because Apple understands that every part of the product is tied to the customer experience.    In part 1 of this 2 part episode, we sit down with author, keynote speaker and customer service expert Shep Hyken to talk all about:  Best practices around customer service and customer experience Why he thinks that customer experience isn’t a department, but a philosophy The “Apple Experience,” and how even something as simple as packaging can enhance customer experience Why happier employees mean a more successful company

Why did Nintendo Wii and the first Apple phone go through the roof? Because Apple and Nintendo performed radical innovation and envisioned new product-meanings. In this episode, Michael takes us on a journey of finding product-meanings of communication mediums through the use of metaphors. Meanings are embedded in the metaphors we use: So, what colour is a phone call and what transportation means are emails?

I’m still working on my MacBook Pro review. I’ll get that to you all just as fast as possible. Because Apple got so much right with this 16-inch model though, I think, it’s worth going back to see what went wrong with the previous generation of 15-inch. What realities and decisions went into getting us to where we are now. SPONSOR: Brilliant Go to brilliant.org/vector and get 20% off their annual Premium subscription! LINKS: 16-inch MacBook Pro — 24-Hour Review - YouTube BUY: Buy 16-inch MacBook Pro - Apple MORE: Merch: https://standard.tv/vector Gear: https://kit.com/reneritchie Podcast: http://applepodcasts.com/vector Twitter: https://twitter.com/reneritchie Instagram: https://instagram.com/reneritchie Mobile Nations Affiliate Link Policy SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts Overcast Pocket Casts Castro RSS YouTube

Because Apple is doing a big event on Monday, your trusty Space Javelin co-captains decided to throw you cadets a curveball -- which is especially tricky to do in zero-gravity -- and do a shortened "Part 1" version of episode 127 that's out *before* the event. This way, Mike and Charles can cover all the new Apple hardware, OS updates, more stuff coming soon and of course a short preview of what they expect from the Monday "Show Time" Apple event, alongside a few non-Apple scandals and tidbits we want out of the way for "Part 2." After the Apple event on Monday, we'll record Episode 127-b to recap Monday's news, and throw in our usual mix of opinion, outrage, expertise, trivia, and dumb jokes -- and get that to you (very) late Tuesday while it's all still fresh. Report to the Infotainment Omniplex™ deck for an extended stay, cadets, and get ready for an Apple New Stuff-splosion!

This week: Why Apple’s October event could be totally insane! Something very strange is going on with the Mac…  we’ll talk about it. MacBook Pro Touch Bar: our brutally honest opinions Surprise!  Apple’s planning to give away its $1 billion TV shows And stay tuned for an all-new CultCast 2nd Hour: Siri Shortcuts, explained!   This episode supported by   Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.   CultCloth will keep your iPhone X, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad sparkling clean, and for a limited time use code CULTCAST at checkout to score a free CleanCloth with any order at CultCloth.co.   Thanks to Kevin McLeodfor the music you hear on today’s episode.   On the show this week @erfon / @lkahney / @lewiswallace / @bst3r   Mac sales declined in Q3, despite new MacBook Pros https://www.cultofmac.com/582236/mac-sales-q3-2018-gartner/ The third quarter of this year wasn’t a particularly good one for Apple, with Mac sales dropping a significant amount, even though the new MacBook Pros debuted this summer. Apple shipped 4.9 million laptops and desktops in the July-to-September period, according to preliminary figures from market-research firm Gartner. That’s an 8.5 percent decline from the same quarter of last year. But Q3 is supposed to bring fairly strong sales, as it includes the back-to-school shopping season. Not so much this year. At least not for Apple. Its three biggest rivals all saw increases in laptop/desktop shipments.   Apple plans to give away its $1 billion TV shows https://www.cultofmac.com/582218/apple-tv-free-streaming/ Apple’s new TV streaming service will allegedly debut in early 2019 Some have suggested the company would bundle it in with Apple Music for an extra fee or that it would create it as a separate subscription option like Netflix. But according to a recent report, Despite planning to spend more than $1 billion on original content this year, Apple will supposedly give away its original content to customers that already own an iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. Because Apple is giving the shows away for free it’s aiming to create “PG” quality content that has wide audience appeal. Apple is currently making TV shows that are free from gratuitous sex, profanity or violence, although some shows may break this standard.     How to create your first Siri Shortcut https://www.cultofmac.com/579560/how-to-create-siri-shortcuts/   This Siri shortcut keeps an eye on police during a traffic stop https://www.cultofmac.com/578615/shortcuts-siri-traffic-stop/   Siri Shortcuts can now control your HomeKit devices https://www.cultofmac.com/570105/siri-shortcuts-ios-12-homekit/   Use Siri Shortcuts to quickly send photos to your family https://www.cultofmac.com/571411/siri-shortcuts-send-photos/   Use Shortcuts to download YouTube Videos https://www.cultofmac.com/501134/how-to-download-youtube-videos-directly-to-iphone/   How to run Siri Shortcuts from Reminder alerts https://www.cultofmac.com/565129/how-to-run-siri-shortcuts-from-reminder-alerts/  

“People want brands to step in and solve things that government can’t.” With the latest news of #BoycottNRA and the #MeToo movement, it could seem that this is an idea plucked from recent headlines. But the role of business in social issues has been a part of the conversation for centuries. Anne Bahr Thompson is a leading expert on this and author of the new book Do Good.We discussed corporate social responsibility, brand citizenship, and more on this week’s episode of the On Brand podcast presented by Twenty20. About Anne Bahr Thompson With more than 25 years of experience as a global brand strategist, Anne Bahr Thompson is an accomplished researcher, writer and speaker, the pioneer of the strategic framework of Brand Citizenship®, and a Trust Across America 2018 Top Thought Leader in Trust. A former executive director of strategy and planning and head of consulting at Interbrand, the world’s leading brand consultancy, Anne founded Onesixtyfourth, a boutique consultancy, to integrate cultural shifts & a social conscience into brand development. Her writings have appeared in Economist Books, hbr.org, The Guardian, Brand Quarterly, Bloomberg News, and many other publications. Anne’s new book, Do Good: Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit, is available in stores and online now. Episode Highlights ICYMI: Do Good at SXSW. Last week, I mentioned Anne’s work and her new book Do Goodlive episode from SXSW during our where we discussed brands taking a stand socially and politically. Listen now. Did you know … Being a sucker for interesting brand names, I had to start the conversation with a question about the name of Anne’s consulting practice, Onesixtyfourth. I won’t paraphrase (I’m not sure I can paraphrase). It involves three Egyptian gods and an essential ingredient in taking things apart. Curious? You’ll have to listen to the episode for more. SPOILER: It involves leaving room for magic and exploration. Who excels at brand leadership? The usual CSR suspects always show up: TOMS, Warby Parker, Seventh Generation, Whole Foods, and Patagonia. But in 2011, Anne was surprised to see Apple leading the pack at a time when they were being lambasted for supplier relations. Why the disconnect? “Because Apple enriches people’s lives. It’s a huge ‘me’ proposition.” How brands can “do good” in five steps. Anne has broken this down into a five-step process: (1) You have to deliver on trust — have you done what you said you’ll do? (2) Enrichment — how are you enriching customers’ lives? To the previous point, Apple does this. (3) Responsibility — first to your employees and then the environment; this is where the pivot happens between being a “me brand” and a “we brand.” (4) Community — bringing people together through shared ideas. IBM did this with their values jam. (5) Contribution — this final step is when it’s part of the enterprise like Seventh Generation. Taking the first step. If this sounds scary, read Anne’s book for a step-by-step guide. When I asked Anne for a first step, she replied: “Courage. It takes courage to do something that doesn’t have a formula. It takes vulnerability.” Pouncing on a brand vs. giving a brand a chance. In today’s fast-moving media zeitgeist, many brands stumble and many are called out. “You have to punish companies behaving irresponsibly. But anyone who’s trying deserves a chance. We need to come together to solve problems.” What brand has made Anne smile recently? I was worried when Anne said she was going to deflect this question but her reason was insightful. “There’s no one brand. The ones that make me smile are the ones people city in my research.” A valid and data-driven answer. To learn more, go to brandcitizenship.com and connect with Anne on Twitter and LinkedIn. As We Wrap … Before we go, I want to flip the microphone around to our community … Steve Hutt gave us a shout on Twitter for several of our recent episodes. Thanks for listening! Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. Thanks again to our sponsor Twenty20. Your source for on brand photography for your brand. You can get five photos with Twenty20’s one-week free trial at Twenty20.com/OnBrand. Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to iTunes and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

There is no question that Apple is better than Samsung when you measure customer experience and profit margin. While the cost of the devices they sell may be very similar the revenue each of them earn is very different. Why? Because Apple knows that “a brand must be investing and committing to providing the best shopping and service experience possible” *. This enables them to earn more than Samsung. Is your business providing the best customer experience possible? Click here to watch this epsiode on YouTube Facebook: http://bit.ly/2ntaWI7 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gallagherdylan Link used in today's vlog: * https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/24/why-samsung-doesnt-beat-apple-where-it-matters/ "music by Joakim Karud https://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud"

If you catch a snippet of the radio in the morning on your way to work, you’re likely to hear what happened to the Dow Jones overnight. If you read your news online or watch the news on TV it’s likely you’ll hear about the All Ords or maybe the ASX200.  You might even come across acronyms like the NASDAQ and the FTSE. Probably, you know this is something to do with share markets. If you turn your mind to it a bit more, you probably know that the share market is where people buy and sell shares in companies like Telstra or BHP. Maybe you have in mind that the share market is risky and people lose their money sometimes. Well, if this is about the extent of your share market knowledge, you’re not alone, and this episode’s for you. I think it’s fair to assume that you have an interest in achieving financial independence.  That is what we’re all about here. In working towards that goal, building wealth is likely to be an important feature. With wealth you can generate investment income with which you can then live on. Or perhaps you can use that wealth to buy a business, or invest in starting a new business if that’s where your Financial Autonomy goal points you. Or perhaps Financial Autonomy for you means remaining as an employee in a business with a team of people that you enjoy being around, but with the financial resources to resign if ever management changed or something else happened that meant you no longer enjoyed coming in each day. The goal of this audio blog is to provide you with choice in life, and that sort of goal is a common one I see with many of my clients.  Being in a position to say no.  It’s very empowering, and very liberating. One avenue towards financial independence is to build wealth via investment in the share market.  I should make it clear here that what I’m talking about is investing, not trading.  If you’ve listened to the common investment mistakes series you will recall I covered off on the dangers of trying to be a share market trader.  In short, it’s an almost guaranteed way to get poorer. So we’re talking about investing.  Buying shares that you intend to hold for at least a year, and profiting from both the dividend income, and growth in the value or price of the share over time. There are different ways you can gain exposure to the share market.  Your super fund likely has at least some exposure right now.  Later I’ll look at a couple of options for your non-superannuation money, but let’s start by explaining a few of the terms and elements you will come across when you take an interest in investing the share market. There a multiple markets We refer to the share market like it’s one thing, but that’s not true.  All developed countries have their own share market, and some such as the US have multiple markets. There are 60 major stock markets around the world.  There’s a good infographic on world share markets here. Technology is gradually bringing these markets together in a practical sense for investors, but for the moment at least, as an Australian, if you want to buy shares in Apple let’s say, it’s not easy.  Why?  Because Apple isn’t listed on the Australian share market, and it’s not straight forward for an Australian investor to invest in the US share market (where Apple is listed) directly. Our local market is called the ASX. The Australian Stock Exchange.  Should be ASE really shouldn’t it, but presumably someone felt the X looked trendier. On the ASX you’ll find lots of companies you’re familiar with – the banks, the big miners, Woolworths, Telstra, etc.  Of course there’s also plenty there you’ve never heard of too.  About 2,000 companies all up I believe. In the United States the main market is the New York Stock Exchange.  This is the largest share market in the world. On the NYSE you’ll find companies like Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil, AT&T, VISA, and Pfizer. The second largest share market in the world is also in the US – the Nasdaq.  This market tends to be more technology focused, so Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are listed here. There’s also the London Stock Exchange and on and on it goes – typically one per country. You’re buying a piece of a company The next thing to recognise is that when you buy a share, you are buying a small piece of a company. Let’s say you buy a share in JB HiFi.  You are now a part owner of that business. If that business performs well, you will get a share of the profits.  If it grows and becomes worth more, the value of what you own will also rise.  Of course if things go badly – maybe Amazon enters Australia and JB HiFi loses a whole lot of customers, then the business might decline, and so the value of your little piece of the company will do the same. As a part owner you have the right to attend the company’s annual meeting and vote on issues like who should sit on the board of the company. I sometimes have clients tell me that they prefer property investment to share market investment because they can touch a property.  It’s a physical thing.  They don’t feel that with shares. Whilst I can understand that, if you think of the share you bought as a small piece of a company, then you can generally find something physical to attach to that.  Walk into the JB HiFi store.  You own a little bit of this.   Blue chip If you start to take even a passing interest in share market investing you will soon come across the term “blue chip”.  So what does it mean? A blue chip share is a large, high value company.  The expression is usually meant to infer that it’s a company that is so big it will never go broke.  In Australia, the big 4 banks, BHP, RIO, Telstra, Woolworths, Wesfarmers - these are all businesses that would typically be described as blue chip. There is no formal definition of a blue chip company, and you won’t see that as a descriptor on the ASX anywhere. Interestingly, the term blue chip apparently comes from poker, where the most valuable chip was traditionally blue. What to buy So let’s say you’ve decided to dip your toe in the water and buy some shares.  How do you decide what to buy?  Well of course you could come to us for advice, but perhaps initially you just want to have a small go yourself to gain some experience – a great idea. Some important numbers you might come across in your research are the dividend yield and the price earnings ratio.  You’ll come across these numbers in the newspaper and on most share trading websites.  So let’s take a quick look at what these mean. Dividend yield – this is the income rate of return from the share and can be compared against bank interest rates to make it meaningful. Resources companies such as BHP typically pay quite low dividend yields of around 2%, because they tend to pour a lot of their profits into expansion of the business, rather than paying out dividends. The banks on the other hand are more generous, usually paying 5-6%. And then there’s franking credits on top, but that’s for another day. Price Earnings ratio – Commonly abbreviated to the PE, this is a ratio of the price of the share, divided by the earnings per share. So if company XYZ was trading at $10, and in its last earnings notice it declared earnings of $1 per share, then the PE would be 10. That is, its price is 10 times its earnings. Most companies trade on PE’s of between 10 and 20 times. I find PE’s are most useful when comparing companies in the same industry, e.g. the banks, to see which banks the market is rating more highly than their peers. A high PE often reflects an expectation that earnings will grow strongly in the future. In contrast a PE under 10 typically suggests that the market anticipates earnings will decline in future. As an investor you can consider whether you believe the market assessment is correct. Importantly both these statistics relate to the share price on that day. If you already own the shares, and purchased them at some other price, it has no relevance, I guess unless you are thinking of selling. It is also important when considering both of these measures to remember that the earnings numbers they are working off are historical, backward looking – nothing is certain in the future. How else to get started with investing the share market So you’re keen to invest, but don’t really want to get into the nitty gritty of choosing and monitoring shares yourself.  Or maybe you’ve done a bit of that already and decided it wasn’t for you. Fortunately for you, most investors who build wealth in the share market don’t personally do the research, buying and selling.  As happens within your super fund, most people invest via a pooled fund where your money is combined with others and a process is used to spread your investment over many shares to reduce your risk. The most common way to achieve this is through either a Managed Fund or an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). The difference between the two is that with a managed fund you apply to invest directly with the fund manager, quite possibly through an adviser.  And when you want to take your money out, you similarly apply to the fund manager for a redemption. Exchange Traded Funds however are bought and sold on the stock exchange.  This means you can buy and sell more quickly, but it also means you will need to pay some brokerage to your stock broker each time you do so. Another difference is that typically an Exchange Traded Fund is replicating a particular index, such as for instance the ASX200 – the largest 200 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange.  The composition of the portfolio within an Exchange Traded Fund is therefore determined by some sort of mechanical, computerised type process. Whilst some Managed Funds have this investment style too, more often Managed Funds will have a team of people doing research, and making buy and sell decisions based on this research.  Within the industry this is known as Active investing, whereas the approach used by most ETF’s is Passive investing. There is much debate within the investment industry as to whether Active or Passive approaches are best, and in my view each have their place.  But an important thing for you to understand at this point is that ETF’s are usually cheaper than Managed Funds with respect to the management costs associated with running them, and this is because their process for selecting which shares to buy doesn’t require research and analysts. The ETF market is growing increasingly popular, leading to considerable new product development.  Given ETF’s are usually cheaper than their managed fund counterparts, this development is likely to be a positive for share market investors.  

John Gruber on the Apple Watch's success: https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/apple_watch_success Stephen King's pseudonym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman Did you know that Dan has a scifi book coming out soon? Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Caledonian-Gambit-Novel-Dan-Moren/dp/1940456843/ Are you sitting down? Like, maybe in a car? Because Apple has delayed Carpool Karaoke: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-video-idUSKBN17R02R New software can copy anyone's voice. Sort of well: https://lyrebird.ai/demo The Incomparable's Star Wars trailer review did it the old fashioned way: https://www.theincomparable.com/bonustrack/347b/ Uber keeps stepping in it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html Apple's Today At Apple program: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/04/today-at-apple-bringing-new-experiences-to-every-apple-store/ Dan on Apple Watch 3 rumors: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-watch-3-rumors,news-24938.html A Sonos article answers some of Lex's questions: https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2248 Our thanks to Blue Apron (http://blueapron.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode of The Rebound. Blue Apron ships you ingredients and amazing recipes. Learn while you cook and cook meals you'll love. Go to BlueApron.com/REBOUND and get three meals FREE with free shipping. Our thanks also to Audible (http://audible.com/rebound). Audible.com has the perfect solution to finding time to read in your busy life: Get audiobooks and listen to those books you've been meaning to read while on the go! Get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30 day trial membership at audible.com/rebound

This week on AwesomeCast 291, we're talking about awesome things in technology, including: We're kicking off with Kim's Awesome Thing Of The Week - Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition. Talking Go Jane Go from Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition as an option for women travelers. We're also discussing the jelly bean start-up from Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition. Want to check out Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition? Scope out the Work Hard Pittsburgh videos. Because Apple treated Sorg so well, he spent more money on his Awesome Thing Of The Week - Apple TV. We're discussing size for transport as a determining factor of what tech we purchase. Are phones too big? Chilla is sharing his Awesome Thing Of The Week - the new iPad Pro. We're discussing the backlash against XBox for scantily clad dancers. Speaking of Apple, there was an event, and some announcements. We're touching on some highlights. NPR won't promote its podcast? Kim is talking about the "why" of it. After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Follow these awesome people on Twitter: Kim Lyons (@SocialKimLy ), John Chichilla (@chilla), and Mike Sorg (@Sorgatron). Thanks to our Awesome Patreons @ThistleSea & @MikeFedorShow! You can support the show too atPatreon.com/awesomecast ! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.net for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 6:30 PM EST!

This week on AwesomeCast 291, weâ??re talking about awesome things in technology, including: We're kicking off with Kim's Awesome Thing Of The Week - Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition. Talking Go Jane Go from Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition as an option for women travelers. We're also discussing the jelly bean start-up from Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition. Want to check out Start Up Weekend Pittsburgh Women's Edition? Scope out the Work Hard Pittsburgh videos. Because Apple treated Sorg so well, he spent more money on his Awesome Thing Of The Week - Apple TV. We're discussing size for transport as a determining factor of what tech we purchase. Are phones too big? Chilla is sharing his Awesome Thing Of The Week - the new iPad Pro. We're discussing the backlash against XBox for scantily clad dancers. Speaking of Apple, there was an event, and some announcements. We're touching on some highlights. NPR won't promote its podcast? Kim is talking about the "why" of it. After the show remember to: Eat at Slice on Broadway if you are in the Pittsburgh area! It is Awesome! (sliceonbroadway.com) Follow these awesome people on Twitter: Kim Lyons (@SocialKimLy ), John Chichilla (@chilla), and Mike Sorg (@Sorgatron). Thanks to our Awesome Patreons @ThistleSea & @MikeFedorShow! You can support the show too atPatreon.com/awesomecast ! Also, check out sorgatronmedia.com and awesomecast.net for more entertainment; and view us livestreaming Tuesdays around 6:30 PM EST!