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How SaaS Founders Can Scale with Smart Link Routing, Partner Channels & Pricing Strategy | Scott Cate - SaaS Fuel PodcastSelling to strangers is hard—especially in SaaS. So how do you break through the noise, bypass the red tape, and sell to enterprise customers without burning out?In this episode of SaaS Fuel, Scott Cate, founder of 301.pro, shares how his SaaS leverages dynamic link routing, context-based personalization (down to weather and time of day!), and partner-led growth to scale—without relying on ads or VC funding.Key Takeaways00:00 - Intro to smart QR code routing02:12 - Breaking into enterprise markets without brand recognition03:13 - Smart link routing & personalization explained04:09 - Last week's highlights + guest intro05:19 - Scott Cate's backstory & 301.pro origins06:25 - How dynamic link routing solves hidden problems09:05 - Selling to strangers is HARD10:58 - How pricing changes when targeting enterprise vs SMB15:20 - Why 301.pro moved away from SMB customers17:12 - $500/month pricing: Who it's for (and not for)18:15 - AI-driven image personalization for massive brands19:06 - Why time of day, location & weather boost conversions22:24 - Frictionless experiences = higher ROI23:27 - Real-world examples with Chevy & California healthcare25:50 - The invisible magic of great SaaS27:04 - Split testing & proving ROI with data29:05 - The Open Graph image hack that boosts click-through rates32:30 - Pricing models & the power of partner channels35:04 - Why small-ticket SaaS often fails to scale37:06 - The impossible enterprise sales cycle39:10 - Why 301.pro sells through agencies (not directly to enterprise)41:08 - Bootstrapping vs VC funding mindset44:21 - Scott's dream of buying Bitly (maybe)45:13 - Final thoughts on bootstrapping, scaling, and growthTweetable Quotes"If you have a problem big enough, our $500 a month feels like zero. If not, it feels like robbery." — Scott Cate"Selling to strangers is almost impossible... unless you borrow trust from someone who's already inside." — Scott Cate"Time of day, weather, and location. These aren't just variables—they're revenue drivers." — Scott Cate"The best tech feels invisible. Users don't notice it—they just enjoy the result." — Scott Cate"Friction kills revenue. Every extra click is money left on the table." — Scott Cate"Bootstrapping means I own it. Full control, full responsibility—and that's by design." — Scott CateSaaS Leadership LessonsPartner Channels Unlock EnterpriseAgencies often have the trust, relationships, and budget access SaaS founders lack when approaching big enterprises.SMB Pricing Can Be a TrapA $10/month SaaS needs tens of thousands of customers to survive. Scaling with enterprise pricing ($500+/month) can be more sustainable—with fewer customers.Context Personalization Drives ConversionsTime of day, location, and even the weather dramatically affect buying behavior. Personalized images and links can boost conversions by 18% or more.Frictionless Experiences = More RevenueWhether it's QR codes that skip landing pages or links that auto-detect language, removing friction directly increases sales.Bootstrapping Gives You ControlKeeping equity and profits lets founders avoid the pitfalls of chasing VC-fueled hypergrowth,...
On today's episode, our guest is Lauren Schuman, VP of Product Growth at Bitly & former Sr. Dir. of Product Growth at MailChimp. In this episode, we discuss: How Lauren created product-led growth (PLG) as a discipline at MailChimp and turned it into a systematic growth engine The turnaround story behind a failed product launch, and how it led to a 183% spike in adoption overnight Why lagging engagement pushed her to lead a ground-up rebuild of MailChimp's core email editor to improve growth Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenschuman/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Lauren Schumann 03:09 Transition to E-commerce and PLG 07:15 Joining MailChimp and Early Challenges 09:50 Implementing PLG at MailChimp 13:43 Navigating Organizational Politics 19:03 Improving User Experience at MailChimp 19:26 Defining Key Customer Journey Metrics 20:30 Challenges and Solutions in Email Activation 21:40 Balancing Core Competencies and Expansion 22:59 The Role of AI in Product Management 24:50 Human Touch in the Age of Automation 27:48 Future of AI and Personalization 34:50 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page (https://www.youtube.com/@LaunchPod.byLogRocket)! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr). Special Guest: Lauren Schuman.
Join us for an exciting interview with Mark Josephson, CEO of Bitly, Co-founder of Castiron, and has served as Senior Vice President of Revenue and Marketing at AOL, as he shares his journey and insights with David Cogan, the renowned host of the Heroes Show and founder of the Eliances community. Don't miss this chance to hear from a leader in digital innovation! castiron.me
NCCE 2025 Week in Seattle WA - FAAF206In this 206th episode, I share my daily reflection posted on BlueSky and TwiX @bryoncar, also Youtube Shorts FreshAirAtFive, from Feb 24th-28st, 2025.Check out the WHOLE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST I put together with all the listens mentioned below:>>> bit.ly/E206FreshAirAtFivePlaylist
This week on Marketing O'Clock: Ads are now linking their way into Bitly users' URLs with new interstitial ads. Reach Planner becomes AI's newest playground for ad optimization. Google is tightening the reins on customer match lists with a new update. Imagen 3 is now generating pixel-perfect people for your ads. Plus, all the digital marketing news you missed this week!Visit us at - https://marketingoclock.com/
Marketing your auto repair shop can be overwhelming, but with the right tools, it doesn't have to be. Brian and Kim Walker break down essential marketing tools and tech to make the process easier, more effective, and even enjoyable.Discover how to simplify your social media strategy with tools like Meta Business Suite and Canva, optimize your website performance with SEMrush and Google Analytics, and create better customer engagement with NFC tap technology and HiHello digital business cards. They also dive into practical tips for video content creation, email marketing, and measuring ROI to ensure your efforts are paying off.If you're ready to elevate your marketing without the hassle, this conversation will equip you with the insights and tools you need to succeed.Thank you to our friends at RepairPal for providing you this episode. RepairPal's Certified Network of shops are trusted by millions of customers each month. Learn more atRepairPal.com/shops. Are you ready to convert clients to members? App Fueled specializes in creating custom apps tailored specifically for professional auto repair businesses. Visit Appfueled.com to get started today. Keep your shop top of mind on the mobile device they love.Show Notes with TimestampsIntroduction to the Episode (00:00:01) The podcast introduces the hosts and sets the stage for discussing marketing tools.Marketing Tools Overview (00:01:22) Brian discusses the importance of using effective marketing tools for auto repair shops.Social Media Planning (00:02:39) Kim emphasizes the need for strategic planning in social media marketing.Meta Business Suite (00:03:32) Discussion on using Meta Business Suite for scheduling posts on Facebook and Instagram.Social Media Scheduling Tools (00:04:11) Kim shares various tools for scheduling social media content, including Plantable and Hootsuite.Canva for Graphics (00:05:14) Introduction to Canva as a user-friendly graphic design tool for non-designers.Accessing the Meta Planner (00:05:39) Instructions on how to access the Meta planner within Facebook's business settings.Facebook Group for Shop Owners (00:06:07) Promotion of the Auto Repair Marketing Mastermind Facebook group for shop owners to share ideas.Tracking Social Media Engagement (00:08:10) Importance of using link shorteners like Bitly to track social media engagement.Link Tree for Instagram (00:09:12) Discussion on using Link Tree to manage multiple links from an Instagram bio.Search Engine Optimization Tools (00:10:21) Brian introduces SEO tools that can simplify the process of optimizing website content.SEMrush Overview (00:10:57) Detailed look at SEMrush as a comprehensive tool for SEO tasks.Ahrefs for Backlink Audits (00:12:21) Introduction to Ahrefs for managing backlinks in competitive SEO environments.Local SEO Tools (00:13:51) Discussion on Local Viking and Local Falcon for tracking Google Business Profile rankings. UVA's Auto Biz IQ (00:14:37) Mention of a specific tool for auto repair shops to analyze local SEO performance.Digital Advertising Planning (00:14:49) Importance of careful planning in digital advertising to avoid unnecessary spending.Using Google Sheets for Ads (00:15:53) Emphasizing organization with spreadsheets for tracking and analyzing digital...
Marketing your auto repair shop can be overwhelming, but with the right tools, it doesn't have to be. Brian and Kim Walker break down essential marketing tools and tech to make the process easier, more effective, and even enjoyable.Discover how to simplify your social media strategy with tools like Meta Business Suite and Canva, optimize your website performance with SEMrush and Google Analytics, and create better customer engagement with NFC tap technology and HiHello digital business cards. They also dive into practical tips for video content creation, email marketing, and measuring ROI to ensure your efforts are paying off.If you're ready to elevate your marketing without the hassle, this conversation will equip you with the insights and tools you need to succeed.Thank you to our friends at RepairPal for providing you this episode. RepairPal's Certified Network of shops are trusted by millions of customers each month. Learn more atRepairPal.com/shops. Are you ready to convert clients to members? App Fueled specializes in creating custom apps tailored specifically for professional auto repair businesses. Visit Appfueled.com to get started today. Keep your shop top of mind on the mobile device they love.Show Notes with TimestampsIntroduction to the Episode (00:00:01) The podcast introduces the hosts and sets the stage for discussing marketing tools.Marketing Tools Overview (00:01:22) Brian discusses the importance of using effective marketing tools for auto repair shops.Social Media Planning (00:02:39) Kim emphasizes the need for strategic planning in social media marketing.Meta Business Suite (00:03:32) Discussion on using Meta Business Suite for scheduling posts on Facebook and Instagram.Social Media Scheduling Tools (00:04:11) Kim shares various tools for scheduling social media content, including Plantable and Hootsuite.Canva for Graphics (00:05:14) Introduction to Canva as a user-friendly graphic design tool for non-designers.Accessing the Meta Planner (00:05:39) Instructions on how to access the Meta planner within Facebook's business settings.Facebook Group for Shop Owners (00:06:07) Promotion of the Auto Repair Marketing Mastermind Facebook group for shop owners to share ideas.Tracking Social Media Engagement (00:08:10) Importance of using link shorteners like Bitly to track social media engagement.Link Tree for Instagram (00:09:12) Discussion on using Link Tree to manage multiple links from an Instagram bio.Search Engine Optimization Tools (00:10:21) Brian introduces SEO tools that can simplify the process of optimizing website content.SEMrush Overview (00:10:57) Detailed look at SEMrush as a comprehensive tool for SEO tasks.Ahrefs for Backlink Audits (00:12:21) Introduction to Ahrefs for managing backlinks in competitive SEO environments.Local SEO Tools (00:13:51) Discussion on Local Viking and Local Falcon for tracking Google Business Profile rankings. UVA's Auto Biz IQ (00:14:37) Mention of a specific tool for auto repair shops to analyze local SEO performance.Digital Advertising Planning (00:14:49) Importance of careful planning in digital advertising to avoid unnecessary spending.Using Google Sheets for Ads (00:15:53) Emphasizing organization with spreadsheets for tracking and analyzing digital...
A SEAT at THE TABLE: Leadership, Innovation & Vision for a New Era
Almost everyone in a senior leadership position these days feels the pressure of a business environment that has become increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the pressure to drive both growth and profitability has never been more intense.The pain is being felt by large-scale organizations, as well as start ups as the market becomes much less forgiving that it was even a year or two ago.Today we are joined by Mark Josephson, a three time CEO who's successfully built, led, raised capital for and sold companies - including Bitly, AOL Regional and Castiron - across multiple stages of growth.He currently coaches CEOs and senior leaders in the strategies and insights they need to drive growth and success while maintaining balance.In this episode Mark will be discussing:- Surviving an acquisition- The hidden challenges of running a startup- What he refers to as ‘multi-hyphenated' careersUSEFUL LINKS:Connect with Mark Josephson: www.markjosephson.netLearn about the Current Sitiuation in Sourcing: thecurrentsituation.netVisit A Seat at The Table's website at https://seat.fm
In dieser Folge spricht Dr. Sebastian Voigt mit Christoph Jost, Gründer und Managing Director von FLEX Capital, über die Strategien und Hebel, die Private-Equity-Firmen wie FLEX Capital nutzen, um das Wachstum ihrer Portfoliounternehmen voranzutreiben. Christoph erklärt, wie FLEX Capital durch eine Kombination aus strategischen Investitionen, kontrolliertem Einsatz von Preisstrategien und wachstumsorientierten Maßnahmen den Wert ihrer Unternehmen steigert. FLEX Capital (a.k.a. Founders, Leaders and Executors – multiplied with Capital) zählt für viele zu den Rising Stars der PE-Szene. „Pricing ist ein faszinierender Hebel. Wenn Du die Preise smart nutzt, verdoppelst Du den Wert der Firma und hast 3x Geld gemacht.“ Christoph Jost beschreibt Pricing als einen der wirkungsvollsten, aber zugleich sensibelsten Hebel, der mit Bedacht eingesetzt werden muss. Statt vorschneller Preisanpassungen setzt FLEX Capital auf Transparenz und Kundenvertrauen. Ein Beispiel verdeutlicht diesen Ansatz: Eine von FLEX Capital übernommene Softwarefirma aus Köln hatte ihre Preise seit 15 Jahren nicht angepasst. Durch die Inflation entstanden so erhebliche reale Verluste. Gemeinsam mit den Gründern entwickelte FLEX Capital eine faire Preisstrategie, die nicht nur die Profitabilität wiederherstellte, sondern auch den Mehrwert für die Kunden klar kommunizierte. Über den Gast: Christoph Jost ist Founder & Managing Director bei FLEX Capital, einer Private-Equity-Gesellschaft, die auf Investitionen in wachsende Tech-Pioniere in der DACH-Region spezialisiert ist. FLEX Capital verwaltet derzeit rund 450 Millionen Euro über zwei Fonds und Co-Investitionen. Zuvor war Christoph Gründer und CEO von ABSOLVENTA Jobnet und hat mehrere erfolgreiche Unternehmen durch strategische Investitionen und Verkäufe begleitet, darunter Egoditor GmbH (verkauft an Bitly) und Passion 4 Gästezimmer GmbH (verkauft an FUNKE Mediengruppe). Zusätzlich ist er als Non-Executive Chairman bei verschiedenen Portfolio-Unternehmen von FLEX Capital tätig, darunter Proxora, lawpilots und die EVEX Group. Christoph hat Betriebswirtschaftslehre an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München studiert.
Mark Josephson is a seasoned CEO, entrepreneur, executive coach, and host of the podcast Critical Moments. With over 30 years of experience leading venture-backed and private equity-backed companies, he has guided organizations from startups to large-scale success, culminating in multiple acquisitions, including Castiron, Bitly, and Outside.in. Known for his real-world insights and practical strategies, Mark helps CEOs and senior leaders achieve growth while maintaining balance. A passionate leader and storyteller, he brings a unique blend of experience and authenticity to every conversation, drawing on his journey as a leader, coach, and lifelong Bruce Springsteen fan.
Georgiana is a strategic advisor, author and speaker who's passionate about turning customer value into revenue-generating outcomes. Marketing online since 2000, she began her track record as a marketing executive and product growth advisor in 2010 working with high-growth, B2B SaaS like Unbounce, Sprout Social, Bitly, Appcues, SparkToro, Invoice Simple and more. Questions and topics we covered in this interview include: The origins of Forget The Funnel (and why funnels are bad for business) What Customer-Led Growth is and why it comes before all other growth models (like product-led, sales-led, marketing-led, or community-led) How do marketers begin to learn from their customers? What's the best way to collect product feedback? What's the best way to implement that feedback? + How does marketing champion and facilitate this process with other departments? You're a prolific advisor to several big name startups, what does it take to become one? Georgiana's advice on how to become a startup advisor And more! Important Links You can say hello to Georgiana on LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/ You can find me on LinkedIn here- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennysoto Get her book on Customer-Led Growth™ here - https://www.forgetthefunnel.com/customer-led-growth/book Check out her podcast with cofounder Claire Suellentrop here - https://pod.link/1713510690 Past guests of The People of Digital Marketing include April Dunford, Amanda Goetz, Melissa Rosenthal, Bill Macaitis, Miruna Dragomir, Andrew Capland, Erik Newton, Andy Crestodina, Sarah Bedrick, Michael Wieder, Dan McGaw, Kathleen Booth, Foti Panagiotakopoulos, Tommy Walker, Lea Pica, Maya Grossman, Sara Pion, Margaret Kelsey, and more. Music for this podcast comes from www.davidcuttermusic.com
This episode is from Drive 2024, our first-ever in-person event for B2B marketers in Burlington, Vermont. Dave hosts a marketing leadership panel with Peter Mahoney, CCO of GoTo, Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly, and Amrita Mathur, Head of Marketing at Zapier. These marketing leaders open up about their experiences and share actionable advice to help you lead, manage, and set goals for your marketing team. Dave, Peter, Tara, and Amrita cover:Why business literacy is so important for marketing leadersHow to set goals for your marketing teamEach panelists biggest career risks — what worked, and what did notPractical frameworks for managing short-term demands while staying committed to long-term goalsTimestamps(00:00) - - Intro to Peter, Amrita, and Tara (07:04) - - One Piece of Advice for Marketing Leaders (14:32) - - How to Set Goals For Your Team (23:43) - - Framework for Short-Term vs Long-Term Pipeline Goals (26:17) - - Budgeting for Short-Term vs Long-Term Goals (28:47) - - How to Work with a Difficult Counterpart (31:10) - - Panelists' Biggest Career Risk That Worked (35:55) - - Panelists' Biggest Career Risk That Did NOT Work (38:31) - - How to Lead your Team When You're in a Leadership Rut (46:52) - - How to Navigate a New Leadership Role (50:16) - - Making Uncomfortable Decisions as a Leader (53:29) - - Does CEO = CMO? (55:12) - - When to Reconsider Your Strategy (58:37) - - Closing Remarks Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***This episode of the Exit Five podcast is brought to you by our friends at Calendly. You've probably heard of Calendly. And you probably have used it to schedule meetings with people outside your company.But did you know you can also use Calendly on your website to increase conversion and create a better hand off experience with sales? Speed to lead is everything and that's why B2B marketing teams today use Calendly to convert leads the moment they're ready to talk to sales. Instead of doing the whole follow-up late dance, you can book meetings right within the forms on your website. And Calendly has the routing and integrations you need to make sure your prospects get booked with the right sales rep.Smith.ai increased their website bookings by 26% using Calendly. And Katalon, the all-in-one test automation platform, was able to increase their conversion rate 3X using Calendly.Join over 20 million users who count on Calendly to simplify meetings, save time and drive revenue revenue by removing the friction from your website. Visit calendly.com/exitfive to get started with a 14-day free trial.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more
Steven Tey is Founder & CEO of Dub.co, the open source link management infrastructure platform for modern marketing teams. Their open source project, also called dub, has almost 18K stars on GitHub and is used by teams at companies like Vercel, Raycast, and Perplexity. In this episode, we dig into starting Dub.co as a side project and how it ultimately turned into a company, their initial positioning as a Bitly alternative, their focus on great design and how that shows up in all parts of their product and marketing, how analytics unlocked much higher ACVs and value for customers, how getting a top Hackernews post helped drive early momentum, their vision to become an end-to-end attribution platform & more!
This week on Product Coffee, Kevin Gentry talks with Matt LeMay, a product leader, consultant, and author known for his work with Google, Mailchimp, Spotify, and Bitly. Matt shares his journey from musician and music journalist to product management, highlighting how his communication and team-building skills from his music career translated into tech. They discuss the importance of goal clarity, embracing facilitative roles in product management, and balancing creative work with business needs. Matt also previews his upcoming book on 'Impact First Product Teams,' offering advice on setting high impact, high specificity goals to drive team success. The episode ends with Matt reflecting on the challenges and joys of writing his new book and his broader views on maintaining balance between professional and personal creative projects. Episode Resources: Kevin Gentry on Linkedin Matt LeMay's Website Timeline: 00:23 Meet Matt LeMay: Product Leader & Author 02:00 Matt's Journey into Product Management 03:25 From Musician to Product Manager 09:20 Career Growth & Key Lessons 12:25 Embracing Facilitative Work in Product Management 21:07 Challenges & Insights in Agile Transformation 28:00 Resource Allocation & Team Collaboration 28:09 High Specificity in Goal Setting 28:51 Consulting Insights on High Impact Goals 30:42 Challenges of Innovation Teams 32:39 The Importance of Specific Goals 34:11 Project-Based vs. Team-Based Approaches 41:58 Writing Process & Creative Work 48:09 Balancing Work & Creativity 51:04 Homework & Plugs Check out our website @ productcoffeepodcast.com ☕️
In this episode of the Compile Swift Podcast, host Peter Witham interviews Joe Fabisevich, an experienced iOS developer and indie app creator. Joe discusses his journey in app development, including his work at notable companies like Twitter and Bitly, and his transition to creating his app, Plinky. Plinky is a link-saving app designed for quick and customizable link organization. It features share extensions and an open API. Joe shares the app's origin story, which stemmed from his need to save and share links with his wife, Colleen. He emphasizes the app's speed, customizability, and extensibility, making it suitable for various users and workflows.The conversation also touches on Joe's experience of getting Plinky featured in the App Store shortly after its launch, which he describes as a validating moment. He credits his wife, a product marketer, for her support in the marketing process. Joe highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation in app development and the value of connecting with users through customer support.Listeners are encouraged to check out Plinky and follow Joe on social media.Plinky AppPlinky NewsletterJoe on ThreadsBoutique on GitHub(00:00) - Introduction (00:41) - Joe Fabisevich (02:07) - Plinky (11:13) - A tool for everybody (16:12) - Sharing is caring (16:58) - Boutique data (26:34) - Free Coffee (28:46) - Being featured on the AppStore (33:59) - Customer connections (40:20) - Become a Patreon member (40:40) - Motivation (47:24) - Thanks Joe (48:48) - CompileSwift.com Become a Patreon member and help this Podcast survivehttps://www.patreon.com/compileswiftPlease leave a review and show your supporthttps://lovethepodcast.com/compileswiftYou can also show your support by buying me a coffeehttps://peterwitham.com/bmcFollow me on Mastodonhttps://iosdev.space/@Compileswift Thanks to our monthly supporters Adam Wulf bitSpectre Arclite ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. In this episode, he speaks with Hilary Mason, co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door, a startup creating a platform for interactive storytelling experiences within works of fiction. Hilary has also worked in machine learning and data science, having built a machine learning R&D company called Fast Forward Labs, which she sold to Cloudera. She was the chief scientist at Bitly and even a computer science professor. Samuel wanted to talk to Hilary not only because of her varied experiences but also because she has thought deeply about how to use AI productively—and far from naively—in games and other applications. She believes that artificial intelligence, including the current crop of generative AI, should be incorporated thoughtfully into software, rather than used without careful examination of its strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, Samuel, who often considers non-traditional research organizations, was eager to get Hilary's thoughts on this space, given her experience building such an organization. Produced by Christopher Gates Music by George Ko & Suno
If you're building a racecar, friction is bad news. But when you're building an onboarding experience for your software product, things are a little more nuanced. This week, we're dialing into why the pervasive push for a frictionless user experience in your product onboarding isn't just overrated—it might be undermining your growth potential.At some point, SaaS founders and product managers started taking for granted that friction in the user journey was always a bad thing. But that so-called “best practice” isn't always the best because it doesn't account for your potential customer's context. And as we know, context is everything when it comes to their decision-making process.In fact, your customers often *need* friction to convince them to keep using your product.How can you tell good friction from bad to make sure your users get to key moments of value, educate your potential customers, and unveil what really matters to them?On this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast, Ramli John shares why “remove all friction” is a best practice we should forget. Georgiana and Claire also share why friction gets a bad rap, when to add it in or remove it, and how customer insight unlocks how to add profitable friction for your SaaS. Discussed:Why “remove all friction from your product onboarding” became a best practice and why it's not actually helpful advice.The difference between unnecessary friction and useful friction and how good friction can help users keep going in your product, including real-life examples.Why customer intel is essential to getting new users to moments of value when you're adding and removing friction.Key moments:1:56 - Ramli John shares his favorite flawed best practice: “You have to remove all friction from the user journey.” This advice isn't universal — friction can be helpful and add value to the user experience. 5:31 - Georgiana and Claire second Ramli's take and break down what friction is, why it gets a bad rap, and why it shouldn't (at least, not always).8:29 - Claire describes “Exhibit A” of unnecessary friction: a lengthy demo form where sales don't actually use all the information gathered. The questions may be intended to create a better experience, but it's a chore to fill out — and the friction's unhelpful.11:47 - Georgiana walks through examples of products where friction is good, like Canva's approach to catering the product experience and Wave asking for the user's logo to show what an invoice would look like.15:26 - Sometimes “best practices” are in direct conflict with what customers want, which is why customer knowledge is critical. Georgiana shares an example of how Bitly introduced friction to educate customers based on Jobs to Be Done research and the resulting use cases. 20:27 - Claire shares how it can hurt you to remove friction when you shouldn't, using an analogy from IKEA. If it's the user's first tim Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/ Follow Claire on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairesuellentrop/ Read the uber-practical Forget The Funnel book: https://forgetthefunnel.com/customer-led-growth/book Check out Forget the Funnel's website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/ Get the free Forget the Funnel workbook to help you implement Customer-Led Growth: https://forgetthefunnel.com/workbook
In this episode of Omni Talk Retail Technology Spotlight Series, hosts Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga dive deep into the revolutionary world of 2D barcodes with experts Carrie Wilkie from GS1 US and Ayub Mohammed of Bitly. Discover how these small squares are reshaping retail, from supply chains to consumer engagement. Key moments include: 0:08 - Introduction to the future of barcoding in retail 3:50 - The fascinating history of barcodes and their evolution 10:26 - How 2D barcodes are revolutionizing food safety and waste reduction 16:51 - Unlocking consumer engagement through connected packaging 21:37 - ROI for retailers implementing 2D barcode technology 24:51 - How grocers can differentiate themselves with advanced barcoding 27:27 - The future of retail technology and connected packaging With the Bitly Connections Platform, users can manage and track all of their 2D Barcodes and Short Links in one place while getting robust insights into consumer behavior including where and when they are engaging, down to their geographic location, referral source, and time of scan. To learn more, head here: https://bitly.com/pages/resources/press/bitly-introduces-2d-barcodes Join us as we explore how these tiny codes are making a massive impact on inventory management, product traceability, and personalized marketing. This episode offers valuable insights into the future of shopping experiences and brand interactions. #RetailTech #2DBarcodes #ConsumerEngagement #SupplyChain #futureofretail Music by hooksounds.com *Sponsored Content*
"Sometimes the Death card means transformation—and sometimes it just means death." Cecily Sailer, founder of Typewriter Tarot and host of YOUR CREATIVE AND MAGICAL LIFE podcast, joins Steph Grossman and Bianca Pérez in the basement to discuss the new horror film TAROT (2024), directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, and (loosely) based on the 1992 YA horror novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams. SHOW NOTES Cecily Sailer | typewritertarot.com YOUR CREATIVE AND MAGICAL LIFE Podcast | yourcreativeandmagicallife.buzzsprout.com Mystic Messages Tarot Deck | typewritertarot.com/shop/mystic-message-deck Tarot for Creative Spirits Workbook by Cecily Sailer | typewritertarot.com/shop/tarot-for-creative-spirits ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES Gemini Gospel | Bianca Pérez's debut poetry chapbook, published by Host Publications hostpublications.com/products/gemini-gospel. Can't buy right now? Shelve it on Goodreads! "Likeness" | Steph Grossman's latest horror-tinged short story, published in Joyland Magazine. Free to read. Bitly link: bit.ly/mirrorstory Basement Girls Podcast Store on Bookshop.org | bookshop.org/shop/basementgirls --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/basementgirls/support
Unlock the secrets to boosting your Amazon sales without crossing the line with product inserts as we team up with our Freedom Ticket instructors, Kevin King and Rafael Veloz of Share It Studio. This episode is your ticket to understanding how to legally and effectively use product inserts to build your brand and keep customers returning for more. Ditch the confusion and stay ahead of the competition with actionable insights and real-life examples, including Kevin and Rafael's success stories with calendar sales and customer-retaining newsletters. Prepare to transform your customer experience and drive repeat purchases with inventive strategies that resonate with your audience. We'll reveal the power of no-code apps as lead magnets, the smart use of QR codes, and how to craft calls to action that balance immediate sales with long-term loyalty. Rafael's Telly award-winning expertise shines as we navigate the nuances of customer engagement, ensuring your marketing efforts are not only effective but also compliant with Amazon's stringent policies. Wrap up with a toolkit of marketing finesse, from leveraging QR codes for product-related apps to utilizing calls to action that truly speak to your buyer persona. Whether it's offering warranties, discounts, or even prize draws, we've got you covered with legal and effective strategies that hook customers in. This episode is brimming with tactics and takeaways tailored to help you master the art of Amazon product inserts and skyrocket your e-commerce success. In episode 564 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kevin, and Rafael discuss: 00:00 - How To Build An Unbreakable Brand With Product Inserts 00:59 - Advanced Amazon Product Inserts Discussion 08:57 - Leveraging Mail Leads for Calendar Sales 09:09 - Maximizing Sales Through Package Inserts 13:59 - Strategies for Amazon Product Insert Cards 18:10 - Enhancing Customer Feedback With QR Codes 26:35 - Amazon Review and QR Code Guidelines 27:15 - Prohibited Methods for Soliciting Reviews 31:02 - Generating Effective QR Codes for Customers 34:45 - Dog Treat Sample Pack Promotion 36:34 - QR Codes and Call to Actions ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Is it okay to do product inserts on Amazon? If so, what can and can't you put on those? We bring on Kevin King and expert guest Rafael to answer these questions and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we have our monthly special. This is called Seller's Edge, and this is actually a unique one, a new thing that we're doing, where we recorded live a module that's actually going to go mainly in the Freedom Ticket program about advanced Amazon strategy, and this one's going to be all about Amazon product inserts. There's a lot of misconceptions out there and so we brought on some people to talk a little bit about it. Now, the main core of this workshop that we did is actually in Freedom Ticket, all right. So. if you guys don't have a Freedom Ticket, any Helium 10 paying member has access to it. So, if you're a Platinum member, make sure to go into your Freedom Ticket account or your Helium 10 account and then hit Learning Hub. You can get the full details. Bradley Sutton: What we're going to have here is some clips from that training and then we're going to have a lot of the Q&A. What we did we did this live, where a lot of people were watching this training and they were giving a lot of questions like hey, what's okay to put in inserts, and can I send people to another website, and can I do this and can I do that? Kevin King got a little riled up there a little bit on some of the questions we were asking. So again, we're going to just give you some of their presentation just a little bit, and then mainly focus on the questions that you guys were answering. I'm positive. A lot of these questions are the same exact questions that you might have on inserts as well, so let's go ahead and hop into it. Kevin King: So I met today's guest Rafael around 2019, maybe 2020. But it was in 2020 where I really first got to know him. The guys over at PickFu actually came to me and said, hey, we're going to run this contest with like four different agencies and we want to feature your product. And at that time I was doing a hand sanitizer as a company called Germ Shark and I said I'm sure they said these guys are going to compete, they're going to create videos, they're going to create images, they're going to create A plus content. And then you get to go through it all, Kevin. You get to decide which one you like the best, and then it's up to you whether you want to go with them and pay them or not, if you, if you like it enough. And so, uh, Rafael's company, uh, Share It Studio was one of the winners. There was two, two companies that actually kind of came close uh, real close to each other, and one of them I liked one of their things and then them I liked the other thing, but a Share It Studio did the best job overall and they ended up creating a really a kick-ass video for us and a whole bunch of really cool content. So that's where I got to know him and you know this guy. His background wasn't necessarily an Amazon seller. He was a three-time telly, award-winning marketer and filmmaker, and then he decided to go out on his own and he saw this need in the Amazon space, where there's just not a lot of good agencies creating good, good imagery and video content. So in 2018, he founded Share It Studio and as a marketing Amazon specific marketing agency. Kevin King: Now they do a few things. It's not Amazon, but they focus on Amazon and it's they really want to set themselves apart, but not just saying, okay, we'll create some pretty pictures and we'll make some nice videos, but it's data driven. So they're actually looking at the data, looking at what it is that they actually need to do. What are the trigger points that are going to make people buy? Not just create a beautiful video that looks great, but what can they say, what can they do? What about those first three seconds? And just create a really custom, bespoke package of creative services just for Amazon sellers on the Amazon platform. They look at everything from. They do everything from PPC videos, premium A plus content, images, branding and a whole lot more, and they're really good at what they're doing so. Kevin King: Rafael is going to be coming on in just a minute and sharing us today specifically on package inserts, and before I bring him on, I want to talk about package inserts for just a second, because there's a lot of, what I believe, misinformation out there when it comes to package inserts. There's a lot of people that say you should not use package inserts on Amazon. You will hear that on Facebook groups. You will hear that from some of the people that help fight against Amazon. They say don't use package inserts, don't do it, you're putting yourself at risk. I 1000% disagree with that. 1000% disagree with that. I think there are certain things that you should not do on a package insert. Those anything you know people say well, you can't direct traffic off of Amazon. Bs, yes, you can. What you cannot do is put your package insert or your URL. If you read the terms of service carefully, Amazon says you cannot direct traffic off of Amazon, but that's on Amazon. That means that don't put your URL in your product photos. Don't put something in, don't email you know, using the customer follow-up something to take them off of Amazon. Anything on the Amazon platform in imagery or text. You cannot send them off of Amazon to do something that is against the rules. But when it comes to your package insert, all the big brands look at Sony, look at any of the big brands they have package inserts for warranty registrations, for accessories, for different things. It's totally fine in my opinion. But there is a line you have to draw and this is where a lot of people get in trouble and some people don't understand where that line is. Kevin King: You cannot do anything to influence reviews on Amazon, and that means in the old days people would say please leave us a five-star review, click here and they would take you to the review page. You can't do that. You can't put a smile and five stars. Five stars is a kind of a trademark icon of Amazon. That kind of indicates give us five stars. You can't do that. You can't say something like if you have trouble with this product, please email us. Don't contact the buyer, don't contact Amazon or contact where you bought it. If you have trouble, contact us. Otherwise, please leave us a review on Amazon. That's directing negative traffic to you, even though that's a good thing to do. You want to take care of the situation that's indirectly directing negative remarks that might have been a bad review to you. There's other ways to say that. You can say something like if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, something like that that has no indication of. If there's a problem or there's something wrong, we want to fix it. And I understand you're trying to steer bad things away and you're trying to be good, but that can be seen as as as a negative. Or what happens a lot of times is people will have some sort of innocent package insert and then they will, they will send that and send it to a warranty page or some sort of registration page and then in the follow up sequence so everything is clean, but in the follow up sequence there's something that's a little gray or shady and that's where people get into trouble too. So but if you're doing the package inserts right, and I think you're totally fine and there is a way to do them you know I get a lot of Amazon packages and a lot of times I throw the package inserts out. Kevin King: I mean, it's one of the first things. I used to look at them to see what other people were doing. But now, obviously, I probably get 20 Amazon packages a week. I probably look at one package insert and that's what Rafael is going to show you today is some ways to make sure that that yours is the one that I'm looking at, and there's a reason that I only look at. One is because most of them suck. They're little business cards or they don't have good graphics, or they don't catch my attention or they're buried in the package in the wrong place. There's a whole number of reasons that I don't look at where there's no value to looking at it. It's just a bunch of text, or they all look the same. There's ways to stand out, and I use a package insert, and my calendar business is one example that I like to give, and what I do is I put a four by six card in there and I say congratulations, you've won a free calendar. That's what the package insert says, and what that package insert then says, because I'm selling calendars. Calendars are like selling milk they go bad. Kevin King: So right now we're in May of 2024. Most people don't want to pay full price for a 2024 calendar. The year started five months ago, so it's hard to sell them. So if I have extra calendars left over, I got to get rid of them. I can throw them away, I can donate them somewhere, I can try to liquidate them, but what I do is I use my extra calendars as a premium and so I say congratulations, you've won a free calendar. Just pay $10 shipping and handling and you can go to my website and get the URL out there and enter this code to get the calendar for $10. Or you can send a check or money order in the mail. A lot of people send checks or money orders in a physical envelope in the mail to my post office box and it works really well and I get a lot of leads that way. What do I do with those leads? The next year I've got 17,000 people on this list. The next year, when my calendars come out, calendars are pretty much bought between mid-November and mid-January. That's the big two months that most of the sales happen. You're selling 400, 500, 600 a day of some titles, but in September people aren't really thinking about 2024 like last year, so they're buying like two or three calendars a day. But that's where I use my list and I send them out. Kevin King: If I have their email, I send an email and I also send a physical postcard through the mail to them and says hey, the new calendars for 2024, or, in this case coming up 2025 are out. You can buy them directly from me and pay $9.95 shipping and handling, or you can go to Amazon, if you're a Prime member, and buy them on Amazon and get free shipping. And what does that do? It allows me to launch my product completely with no PPC, no launches, no having to do Vine reviews, no, nothing. Because people go and I have four different titles and a lot of them. They buy all four, so that gets them in the frequently bought together. And then they also buy other calendars so they might buy a motorcycle calendar or something like that. So then I start showing up on these motorcycle calendars as customers who looked at this or viewed this or those sections. And I started this flywheel going and I'm selling two or three a day in September and I just ride that wave all the way up and I do zero PPC for these calendars. I do zero launch and that's the power of a package insert. And then I can sell these guys other calendars that are not available on Amazon. Kevin King: I do it for my dog products with a dog sample packs. I do it with a lot of things, but in nowhere in there and no my emails, nowhere do I ever ask for a review? Do I ever indicate five stars? Do I ever indicate anything that's manipulating the system? It's all above board and I've been doing this for 20 years and there's nothing wrong with it. Usually, if you dig deep and someone says I got in trouble for package inserts, I didn't do anything, look deep into their package insert or into their funnel and you're probably going to see that there is something that's a little on the edge there. So if you keep your nose clean and do this right, it can be powerful. And so Rafael is going to come on right now and he's going to spend some time showing you some really cool ways to actually do package inserts. Hey Rafael, how are you doing, man? Rafael: How's it going, man? Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's an honor. Kevin King: Appreciate you coming on and doing this man, this is going to be great. I'm looking forward to seeing what you got. Learn a few things myself, hopefully. Rafael: All right guys. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I am the Founder and CEO of Share It Studio. Actually, my background was in law. I went to law school. I did four years of law school in Venezuela and then I went to filmmaking because I hated law so that's like a really little fun fact. And then I started working and I graduated from filmmaking. I started doing filmmaking, I moved to New York, etcetera. I worked in a lot of companies CNN, Nickelodeon and then in 2018, I was working for Nickelodeon and I decided to quit because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to get out of that rat race, which I think a lot of us maybe were there and wanted to escape. So, yeah, so let's get started. Rafael: So this is a little bit of what we do at Share It Studio. I just wanted to give you a glimpse. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just trying to give you a glimpse of what we do. So we only focus on creating content. Why I feel like a jack of all trades is a master or none. We like to specialize in one thing, one thing only, and anything that has to do with visual and visually enticing or visually manipulated. You could say a little bit that buy or that conversion, so anything that has to do with videos, listings, et cetera. So what are product inserts? You can read this, I know you can, but in my own words it's a way to give the customer more experience, right, to give them more value. The more value you give, the more value you're going to get in return. So it's a powerful tool, obviously, to enhance the customer's experience. You can request feedback, you can promote your repeat purchases. It's all going to depend on the product itself. It's the same thing to have a product insert for supplements for a hand sanitizer than for a garlic press, for example. Those are consumables. You can repeat them. The garlic press, you can probably buy one when it breaks. But if it breaks too fast, it means the bad quality garlic press, right? So, depending on your product, I would say try to steer and try to analyze and strategize that product insert. Rafael: Okay, let's keep going. So do's. Some basic do's. Deliver value. This is like just a general thing in life. Let's go into newsletters. I don't read newsletters. I find newsletters actually very boring or they're all the same. But I came across and I'm trying to plug this in in any way. But I came across one a few months ago which is Kevin King's newsletter right, the Billion Dollar newsletter and there's so much value that I actually enjoy reading them. That's because it's given me value, like a bunch of value. If it wouldn't give me value, I just would discard it, archive it or read it or delete it, et cetera. So make sure you deliver value. It's the most important asset. If you do not deliver value, you're not going to get anything in return. Some ways you can deliver value additional usage guidelines, care recommendations, general insights, coupons, customer experience. There's a lot, a lot of ways. Right, make sure you maintain informativeness, meaning that you are talking about your product's advantages or attributes on the product. That's dependent on the product. Again, these are all dependent on the product that you have. It's gonna. It's not a, it's not a one. It's not a cookie cutter, it's not a cookie cutter template, it's more of a. What do I have? What fits into this mold type of situation from my point of view, at least in my experience? Rafael: Encourage reviews. You want to avoid 100% encouraging any positive reviews or avoiding getting, or encouraging avoidance of getting negative reviews. Like Kevin said at the beginning, that goes against Amazon's TOS and, just like the taxman, the Amazon man is also going to find out at some point. Okay, so I would say, steer away from that. So politely, solicit feedback from the customers. As simple as your feedback matters could help. Extend support. Again, it depends on the product, but extend support If it's maybe it's a product that it costs I don't know a hundred bucks, most likely if that product is a little bit faulty or people don't understand that because it's hard to assemble, or something you can extend support, maybe a video, maybe a hotline, maybe an email I don't know something that gives them support. Um, cross selling if your product, you can match it with other products. For example, I'm going to show you an example in a bit of a baby product. But let's say you sell in the baby category and there's a lock and you're selling a lock um securing mechanism for the door for babies, right, and you and you can also cross promote the outlet protector for babies. So you know you kill two birds with one stone. Rafael: Don'ts. Avoid soliciting positive reviews, guys. Do not do that. That's like bad, bad, bad. Referring from cherry picking reviewers, such as what Kevin said, like hey, if you're having a bad experience, you know, come back and we can help you before you leave a bad review. That's a no-no. Steer clear from external links. Like Kevin said, Amazon wants everything in their ecosystems. What I've seen recently, though, is that they send them to a landing page, but the payment processing takes them directly back to the Amazon page. So what does that mean? That means that, from the product insert, it takes you to the landing page. You gather data from there, like the pixels, the Facebook pixels well, that's not Facebook anymore, it's the Metapixel, et cetera. Now you have marketing data from there, and then it redirects them back to Amazon. I've seen that recently. Eliminate misleading information, false hesitations, exaggerated claims, deceptive details. You want to be as transparent as possible and as truthful as possible. Remember, giving value is about being real, maintaining real, and abstain from manipulation. Definitely abstain from manipulation, because that's also you're trying to cherry pick that review. Okay, and avoid interfering with packaging. This is more on your end. You don't want to have a package that's extremely hard to open because of the product insert, because it's not going to give value to the customer experience, and customer experience is everything. All right. So it's a simple thank you enough. It could be, but you know it's there's not more, so it's basically wasting your money. Rafael: So if you want to win and if you want to actually get results, you should definitely take action. So things you should include you in your insert cards. Things I would include that we've included with our clients is warranties, how to guides, how to take care of the product, benefits of our products, guidelines, but it's going to depend again on the product. I want to make sure that everybody understands that it depends on your product. But, in summary, if you want to get value, you should get value. That's a rule of thumb in life. Actually, we should all get value in life, so we can get something valuable as well. So type of products, inserts or strategies. So review hunting that's like the most basic one, right? You want to get reviews. The most reviews you get, the better. I'm gonna show you some examples afterwards. You can put up a QR code and ask for feedback. You can use jokes, for example. So you put the joke and then you put the answer. Kevin usually actually does this. He puts stump bases in the beginning of the email newsletter and then at the end, he gives you the answer. This allows him, this allows that you read through the whole thing and then you have a reward at the end, which is kind of cool. So, for example, for this one, this is plainly emotional. Hey, scan this QR code and speak your mind. That's it. I just want your feedback, and your feedback means the world to us. It's very important. You're being sincere, trying to be as sincere as possible. Rafael: This is some of the content with this. For this seller, we also did that his packaging and he inserted it. And also, you added more value. He's not in a lead generator. So if you want to watch this video, it's time to install this. Watch this video, right? So you scan this QR code. Basically, it takes you to a landing page. It asks you for your email to unlock or to send the link of the video to that email. So, right there, you're getting more information. A simple joke is cool. So what type of candy is never on time? Chocolate, you get it, I didn't know. So ChatGPT helped us with that, by the way. So, yeah, so after they peel it, okay, and then, hey, since we're here, share your experience with our candies, and then they scan your codes. You know you're asking for it. All right, this is for stickers. Rafael: And another type of strategy is free purchase marketing. So there's a couple of things you can do. You can add custom coupons and you can add also cross-selling. So a coupon is you'll we all know what well, maybe there's new or sellers. Here's coupon is just basically a way that you give them something, a discount or, yeah, a discount for the next purchase or the new purchase or something, and cross-selling or it could be even an external coupon and cross-selling is when you promote something, another product, okay, based on that product, that at least simulates or in some way it connects with the main product that they just bought. So, for example this is the example I was going to give you it's a baby clear outlet plugs, right, and the baby toilet plug. So, welcome to Parenthood. Since you bought this, we want to help you. Here's more things that you can get and you're going to get these products. You head to storefronts and you get some offers from those products. Boom, so they're buying this, but they're also, oh, these guys also sell this, because maybe when they get this through their Amazon. They're like oh, I also need this. So you're cross-promoting that seller. Okay. Rafael: So list building it's extremely important as well. As we all know, Amazon is their own ecosystem and they have the last say in everything. So, like Kevin was saying about his calendars, it doesn't matter if he sells them on Amazon or not. He has a list. So Kevin doesn't even need PPC because he has a whole list already. So that's one of the things that you should be doing list building. So it's basically just as a gift. You can create a strategy. Number one is a gift. Basically, you create a lead magnet from your website or app and you just tell the customer like hey, you want this, we need this in return, and they gave you this, which is this well, you can ask for several thousand information, email, phone number, et cetera. Or strategy to a newsletter. You know, create a newsletter with interesting content to promote, to promote it and put it in your insert card. You're giving value. For example, we have a client that he sells bonsais. I didn't know this, but bonsais are very much. It's like a culture, like there's like a thing for bonsais and people are really into it. So they read newsletters, they read articles, they see videos, they watch videos. Part of this newsletter is giving value to them, so that's how they're building their list, also through social media. Rafael: This is, for me, the best strategy up to date, which is an app. Why? it's also going to depend on the type of product you have. But why the app? Because the app you're always going to have them there. There's nothing more intimate right now, technology-wise, than the phone for a human. It literally holds our work, our life, our secrets, our laughs. Like, if you leave your house without your phone, most likely you're gonna return back home just to get your phone, because it's literally a third arm that we don't have. So by having that, you have so much access to that particular buyer. For example, this is QR an app that it's going to help you, you know, work out and it's going to give you a workout. It's a workout app, right? This is the one I'm using for to get ready to for BDSS in Hawaii soon Kev. I'm just kidding, I don't have a six pack, so this app is going to help you that and there that you can promote also other types of products. For example, I have another app which is a scale. I bought a scale and that scale helps you track your weight through the app. And through the app, sometimes I get push notifications which is hey, we just launched this product, would you like to look into it? Or hey, we saw that you're hitting your fitness goals. We have this new product that can help you reach those fitness goals, et cetera. So there, you're going to give a lot more value. And what are they doing? They're just cross promoting, they're cross selling. So that's, I mean, I think that's brilliant. Rafael: Remember, one step at a time. It's depending on your level of being a seller. If you're in stage one and you just launched your product, focus on reviews. If you want to do everything at the same time, great. But if not, if you want to take it step by step, focus on reviews, then focus on repurchase marketing and then build in a list all right, but this is a must at the end. If you want to build a brand, building a list is a must. Another thing if your package is, you don't want to create it in any way possible, like you know, maybe you don't want to destroy or interrupt this opening process you can add it to a label like the top, because you all know that it can only be a sticker, for example, every bottle or not every bottle. Most of the bottles have a seal on top right, so if they have a seal, why not put it there? They either way have to open it up, so why not put your discount or give them that value there? For example, these are supplements. Hey, next bottle you get 50% off. If I like them, I'm going to use that 50% off coupon 100%. Rafael: So another thing that you could be doing, which I love this one is A-B testing. Marketing, just like life, it's not one plus one equals two. Marketing is just trial and error. Trial and error. Obviously, you're spending a bunch of money. You're investing a bunch of money into your future, so you want to mitigate that fail as much as possible. For example, when we were doing Kevin's videos for the Germ Shark, we ran like 100 pick food tests. We were actually the company that ran the most pick food tests. Why? Because we want to mitigate the most amount of errors as possible. We didn't come out of the studio we're like, oh, let's just create this, it's going to be a winner. No, we tried it out a lot of times. So what you could do is, in your packages you can have two QR codes and see which one converts the most, depending on your product. Again, and you know, get creative and that's it. Um for overachievers, make sure that you're evaluating your KPIs. So repeat purchasing metrics. Are they buying this again? Is this working? Is it not working? Brand loyalty metrics. Are they going back? Are they not buying back off Amazon influence, Amazon attribution, advertising and sales. Percentage of off Amazon sales. For example, Kevin gets a lot of off Amazon sales because he has that list right and that is it. Kevin King: That was good, good stuff, Rafael. I want to just do something real quick before we get into answering specific questions. Come and listen to what I'm about to say. You, absolutely positively, can send people out of the Amazon ecosystem. Okay, you do. You can put your social media links. You can put a link to your website. You can do that. Quit following for the misinformation that's all over Facebook that people are talking out their ass, that don't know what they're talking about are doing. Quit it. Quit spreading this stuff. I see this in the chat and it pisses me off because you're wrong. This is one of the reasons I created Freedom Ticket back in 2017, when Manny Coats came to me and said hey, do you want to create Freedom Ticket? One of the reasons I did is there's so much misinformation out there. Quit falling for it. You can absolutely do it. There's certain things you cannot do. Raphael showed you that Bradley just posted in there like you, don't want some people to go buy this on Target instead or Amazon's competition, but if you're going to create an app, that's a brilliant thing. You can create apps with no code software now, with AI, you don't even have to be a programmer. You can go and create a very basic app and say it's a great lead magnet, download this app. You know, he said he showed the example of the one that's for monitoring your weight. Um, which is probably a little bit more elaborate, but you can create a very simple little app. People are more likely to download a cool app that goes with their product than they are. Um, you know, if I'm doing dog treats, I could do a dog training app. You know it's got a few videos embedded in it and it's a great lead magnet. Kevin King: You can send people off. What you cannot do is anything around reviews or influencing reviews or something like that. But you can send people off, you can capture information. Just don't do anything that would hint at influencing reviews. That means putting five stars. That means saying leave us reviews and then putting five stars under it to say, kind of imply that you want five stars To say if you have a problem, contact us. Otherwise, go leave a review on Amazon. Don't do anything, don't offer discounts. If you leave us a review or if you do that, I'll give you a coupon. Don't do anything like that to incentivize reviews on Amazon. That you cannot do, and don't even do it on your own website, just so that there's no gray area there. But you can send people off and they can buy things on your website too. Okay, so I want to get that straight. Okay, so quit falling for the misinformation, quit. Bradley Sutton: All right, tell us how you really feel, Kevin. But let me start pulling up some questions. First of all, we answered Oleg. Oleg says Kevin answered my question before I even asked. That's perfect, all right. So let's just-. Kevin King: No, I think Kane says you can't. Yeah, they don't want you sending to other marketplaces, like that's what Kane just said here. You can go to your own website and they don't want you sending people over to Target or to eBay or over to a competing website. I would steer clear of that kind of stuff. Saying our product is available and you put the Amazon logo, the Target logo, the Walmart logo, that is a no-no. But taking them to your own website to do after-sale warranty, to get an app, to get some sort of other accessory for your product that's, an add-on to the product, or to grab a coupon for their next order on Amazon, all that is fine. Kevin King: Hope says that coupon codes last for 30 days on Amazon. Then you have to create a new one. So you can't. What you do is you put a, you create a QR code you can use Bitly or whatever your favorite QR code tool is and create one that goes to a specific landing page and then you update that page every 30 days. You create a new coupon and you just update the page. You update that page so that QR code stays the same. So even if your product doesn't sell for a year, you're updating the page, not the QR code to a specific place. That's an easy workaround. Rafael: Yep, and also not even coupon codes. Maybe you want to offer something new now, that QR code that Kevin's saying that you can update. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your QR code, basically. Bradley Sutton: I have one here. I know what I saw here that would have got this flag, but I just want I'm curious about what Kevin saw. Maybe you saw this one. But Maria says hey, I know somebody who had an insert that said let us know how we did Leave us a review on Amazon. We value your opinion. With a QR code below which said for a free book on the dangers of what their product was working to protect. Scan the QR code and Amazon close the listing, force the seller to remove these inserts. The seller did not ask for positive reviews. Is it not okay to ask for reviews at all? I know what I saw here, that that might have triggered it. What about you, Kevin? Kevin King: That's an incentive. You're basically I mean it doesn't directly word for word say it, but that can be read as an incentive that if you leave us a review, we're going to give you this free book. You can't do that. That's a no-no and that right there is an example of you've got to keep your nose super clean on anything around the words reviews and you're tying them together. They didn't say hey, go leave us a review and we'll give you a free book, but they tied them together in that same paragraph and you can read into that. That's kind of what they're implying. Don't do that. That will get you in trouble. As far as number of QR codes, I would never do more than two and put them on opposite sides of the page or opposite one at the top, one at the bottom, or opposite sides on the bottom so they don't get crossed. But I would never do more than two. One is best. You always want people to take one directed action. One action is always better than multiple and confusing them. But if you have a valid reason, you could put two, and I think that would. That would be okay. Bradley Sutton: All right. Mahak said how do I generate QR codes to direct customers? So there's, you know, any QR code generator can do it Helium 10 Portals. If you have access to Helium 10, you've got access to Helium 10 Portals you can create the QR code there. You know, Rafael showed some examples of QR codes in his presentation, but pretty much any QR code. Rafael: And also Mahak, it's not just creating the QR code. Make sure it's something like Kevin said, like it's in their face, like they want to see it, they want to scan it and it's not just like scan this, because most likely they're not going to scan it. You want to get, I would say, 5%, 10% of those QR codes scanned at least. If you're getting less than that, you should re-evaluate how you're presenting that insert packaging. Kevin King: Hope what you just asked is a no-no. Can I ask for an honest review in an email follow-up after they enter the review on a landing page? No, don't do that. Basically, Amazon will see as like you're filtering reviews. So you're saying, go leave us an honest review on our own landing page. They're typing it and, even though you made the confirmation page, may automatically say, uh, please, uh, you know, be kind and post this to Amazon or somewhere whatever. Amazon could see that as that you're filtering. Like if they left you something negative, then you're not asking them to do it, and if there's something positive, you are asking them to do it. So don't, don't do that. You can ask, you can say on your we love reviews, please leave us an honest review. That general wording by itself, with nothing else around it. Any other stuff about a free book or something is like way down the page or somewhere else or not even on there. That should be okay. You got one um. Bradley Sutton: Marcy says how many QR codes per insert do you think is acceptable? I've got one for my YouTube and one for my Facebook group. I want to add one for man. She wants QR codes all over the place. I want to add one for a 10% off, a coupon with an attribution tag so I can get the brown referral bonus. What do you guys think? Kevin King: Uh yeah, I just answered that. I said don't do more than two, don't do more. Rafael: Okay, I would present it. Marcy, maybe I would present the 10% in a different way. Maybe not a QR code, maybe it's just like literally just a code. But again, that does expire, like Kevin said. But I'm with Kevin 100%, I wouldn't do more than two. Like you saw in the light bulb example that I gave you, there was one at the top, one on the bottom. It wasn't next to each other, because it can get tricky like that. You want to separate. Even the color was separated in the package. It was like a different color in the background. So you want that separation as well. Kevin King: Tadara is asking can we add samples of other products and inserts or offer to send free samples? Yeah, you can add samples as an insert, especially with little accessories. Here's a free. If you're selling something sewing, here's a free button kit. Or here's a free bead kit or something. You know we have 16,000 other colors available on Amazon. Here's a free sample as a gift. You know there's little gifts like that work. I mean there's a video. Rafael will understand this there. Back in the day before that everything was digital, I had to order to do all of our video production. We had ordered beta tapes and we had ordered these big beta tapes, uh, and HD tapes, uh, these, you know, they're big like squares that you put in the big cameras and we'd order them out of this company in Philadelphia and every time they would send me these, these packages, uh, with my shipment of 10 tapes you know these tapes were like a hundred dollars a piece or something I would get two little packages of M&Ms, like you see at Halloween, the little, tiny, little sample size packages of M&Ms, and during the summer they didn't put those in there because, but instead they put a note sorry, due to the heat, these might melt, you know, and so they wouldn't put them in and it would always tick me off that I didn't get those two little packages of M&Ms. These are, you know, 20 cents. But the fact that I would get those in there was a thing so surprising people with a gift can be great. Kevin King: Another thing that I've done with a power to insert on my dog products is I've offered us I've had where I sell antlers, I sell bully sticks, I sell duck treats, I sell a variety of other dog treats, and what I'll do is I'll make a sample pack and I'll say get a free sample pack of all of our seven dog treats on Amazon that we sell on Amazon. I'll put a picture of the Amazon listing photo and actually you know and put it, put it on there and say we'll send you a sample pack with this along with a coupon. Just pay $7.95 shipping and handling. It costs me like $4 to send it out. $3 basically covers the cost. I send them a sample pack through the mail. That way. They have to give me their address, they have to give me their phone number because I'll say this is for how we deliver delivery, updates and shipping tracking numbers is by phone, so give me a valid phone number and then we send that sample pack out and in. There is a sample pack, and then there's a coupon that says get this on Amazon. I mean 20% off your first order, your first bag, use this coupon, it works really well. And then I capture their name and email address and I'm driving stuff back to Amazon. I'm creating this whole circle and it works really, really well. Rafael: Amelia has a good question. Bradley Sutton: So Amelia said here can you improve our current package design? If yes, would the insert card and the package design be connected to our current branding design and what would the creative process be behind this? Rafael: okay, um, I don't want to do any sales right now, but yeah, we can help you. But just in case, um, the insert, I would say that you do need to, um, to keep it harmoniously, um, I would say like it should be aligned to your branding. That's why it's a branding. It should be aligned to your branding. And if you can actually put it within the packaging, maybe you wanna save money in the insert cards and you wanna put it on top of the lid of the box or something like that. You could do that depending on your budget. So many questions that I have to be able to answer that correctly. But, yes, and the process you do it is what I was talking about. You should have understanding the product, the niche, the buyer persona, their needs, their troubles, their fears, everything that you can gather from them and give them to that, okay. So maybe if it's a fitness product, I'm trying to get fit for BDSS. Okay. So for me, it was getting something to help me maintain my weight scale, understanding where I should eat, what time I should eat. So when I was looking through products to help me with that, the insert cards or the products like the hero images gave me that it was like, oh, this scale has an app. It was through the hero image. I was like, okay, let me check this out, and that's how I got hooked on that scale. So yeah, I hope that answers your question, amelia. Bradley Sutton: All right, we got a question from Joseph, who's got a scenario here. He says all right, I've got this QR code. Says something to the effect of learn more about the benefits of our product here. Takes them to an about page on our brand website, which website is also a Shopify D2C website that has a shop page. Is that permissible? Kevin King: That's a gray one right there. Um, I would that. That's a gray one that one could be seen as either way. Um, I would probably, if I would probably, cordon off that Shopify page. Uh, I think Shopify allows you to do this. I think Esther Frystone has a landing page that goes on top of Shopify that allows you to corner off the rest of your Shopify site, like to focus it on a single product. Um, I mean, if they get creative and they hit a bunch of buttons and they might go back to your homepage, but I would avoid any confusion there. That's a gray one. Rafael: A question really quick from Henry. He says that all products need to have warranties. I'm not saying that your product shouldn't have a warranty, definitely if you want to include warranties. 100%. But what I'm saying is that what's going to take action to scan that QR code? Is it going to be the call to action for a warranty or is it going to be a call to action to like hey, for your next product, if it's a vitamin, for example, that you know they're going to repeat the consumption, here's 10, 15% off. I'm not saying don't include it, of course, 100%. If you want to include it, I include it. But when you say the call to action, what's going to be that action that's going to make them scan it? Is it going to be the warranty or is it going to be, depending on the product? That's what I'm trying to say there, just in case. I don't want to make any confusions there. Bradley Sutton: I was just saying Lance is wondering how to get in contact with Rafael. You can be connected directly to them at hubhelium10.com and just type in ShareIt Studio. They're all over social media as well. Rafael's on LinkedIn. If you're in Helium 10, the easiest way is just go to hubhelium10.com and enter ShareIt Studio and you'll be able to even see. Maybe if you're a certain member of Helium 10, you might get certain discounts with them as well if you're logged in on that page. Rafael: If you're seeing this, this is my insert card. If you're seeing this, if you say Bradley and Kev are the best, we'll give you a really good discount. Bradley Sutton: There we go. I like that. Kevin, you had a question you said you wanted to answer, or was it someone else? Kevin King: I just saw one. Someone said they're doing a. Where did it go? They offer a 100-pound Amazon voucher prize draw each month. It's an image or video tagged on Instagram or TikTok. Each image uploaded gets one entry in the drawing. Opinions, please. Yeah, I don't see any problem with that. That should be totally fine and that's good marketing. Yeah, so you should be totally fine with that. Rafael: Angela Reategui. I hope I'm not butchering your last name, Angela. She asked can I include a QR code for free e-book? Uh, yes, we've done it with clients, especially in the home and kitchen, like food sector. It's worked really well with them. Uh, so yeah. Kevin King: Kane's like says can we offer discounts only on Amazon? Can we offer coupons for our own website? Um it, you can offer a coupon for your own website but, like for accessories or something, I wouldn't do it for the same product. I wouldn't say, come and buy, you know this exact same product. Or you don't want to do stuff where you're putting people into their, into your flow. You know, if it's a subscribe and save type of product, Amazon's probably not going to like it too much that if you're trying to get them to come to your subscribe and save on your Shopify site versus you're on Amazon, that that's a gray area, and so I would. I would just stay away from something like that. But offering them a discount hey, you know you just bought this blender. We have an accessory kit. As an Amazon customer, you get 20% off. It's not sold on Amazon, it's only available directly from us. Then yeah, that should be fine. Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, guys, thank you for all the great questions. We're going to be back here next month with another guest, Rafael, Kevin. Thank you so much for joining. Don't forget to reach out to Share It Studio, hub.helium10.com. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed that training. Don't forget again, the full, actual detail of the training, without the Q and A and all that other stuff, is in the Freedom Ticket course. So go to your learning hub inside of Helium 10. And if you have no idea what Freedom Ticket is, want to get more information, just go to h10.me/ft for freedom ticket. And let us know if you're watching this on YouTube or somewhere else. What other advanced topics would you like us to do? A deep dive, Q & A and bring an expert on with Kevin? Let us know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube or another place. Until then, we'll see you guys in the next episode.
Ever think to yourself, "Sure, I can network with strangers confidently... as long as they go first?" Do you ever wish you had the chutzpah and perfect words to break the ice as a mompreneur, even if you're introverted? Want access to my frameworks and easy-to-use follow-up insights – the exact ones I've used to land big-name podcast interviews with people like Suzy Batiz or GaryVee? Welcome to episode 222. Bookmark this episode to learn exactly how to go first to strike a conversation with a contact and find your most authentic way to turn them into a real connection! Free Resource: From Contact to Connection: The Go First Networking & Follow-Up Playbook for Mom Entrepreneurs SIGN-UP for playbook: https://bit.ly/hypernetworking • Easy to follow steps to craft your networking outreach goal • Research necessary to not ask silly questions or feel awkward • Unconventional follow-up ideas and timing that will not come across as thirsty/ pushy • Templates that you can tailor based on your business goals and personality • Worksheet to uncover ways to add value to contacts and make everyone feel good The urgency stems from the fact that many of us, as I coach moms who are entrepreneurs, have been out of the market for a while. Some of us have taken a hiatus, perhaps due to a recent child or the pandemic keeping us home and away from others. But mompreneurs are back, and we need to catch up! This can naturally lead to a dip in confidence when re-entering the scene and engaging with people who haven't experienced a similar break. Right? That's why I wanted to equip you with some language that's practically copy-and-paste ready, like Mad Libs, allowing you to tailor it to your specific outreach goals. So here is a real-life question that I got from a mom business owner. She said: I just got back into networking after a pause from having two kids. I don't have a problem talking to someone if they talk to me first? It's usually the opening, the conversation with a stranger, that isn't about the weather or something irrelevant. And then after the meeting, I want to know what to say afterwards to follow up with a give and not just "taking". Tune in for my answer to her question, which I suspect is on your mind too, if you're reading this. And while you're here, grab this free resource I made specifically for my fellow mompreneurs, founders, and creators who need to be more strategic about their networking efforts. These skills can take your business to the next level, whether you're looking to find new partners, build corporate relationships with decision-makers, secure podcast guests, or find mentors who can open doors to the right rooms – where the real conversations happen and where, if mentioned, you could transform your vision. TRANSCRIPT Now before I answer that question, I just need to ask you, like, do you have outreach goals as a business owner? Because if you don't, I think we just need to like level set right there. Here's where I'm going with this right now in my nine week group coaching program, fertile imagination in access, which is what I'm going to rename it from action. What we're going through is how to actually knock your business goals out of the ballpark, right? So let's just imagine that you want to bring in an extra 50 K and you're figuring out how to engage with the right stakeholders, be in the right rooms, have the right conversations. That is what needs to happen. You need to really be specific. Like who do you want to talk to? And to be very honest, you could absolutely use AI and get some ideas, but coming from someone who tried that pertaining to just pitching podcasts, for example. AI wasn't as helpful as I had hoped. It really is something that requires your own personal touch because you're going to have the wisdom necessary to understand how can I look through LinkedIn, for example, for precisely the person I need on my team or I need to speak to. So have an outreach goal. That's like step number one. And that is where I come in and I support mom entrepreneurs who may have never approached their business in this way, through the use of hyper networking, which I'll get into in this episode. Now let's go back to the language that this person might use in order to strike up a conversation with a complete and total stranger. So let's imagine that you are, On LinkedIn, right? So that's one way that you're conducting this outreach efforts in order to build strategic partnerships or find mentors who are light years ahead of you, not individuals where you feel like you both are in the same boat. And just kind of feeding each other information that you've gotten online. So here's one way that you might want to approach this. So as this person is sharing, she wants to get back out there. It's been some time. Step one is you need to know who you are. Like you need to realize and rebuild your confidence, right? Like, who are you to talk to person A, B, or C? So as an example, let's imagine that you wanted to get in touch with Sarah Blakely. Now, I'm not saying you have to talk to someone that is a billionaire or someone that might feel so out of reach at first. There is a way to build up your confidence to get to that level, but here's the reality of it. Someone like Sarah is getting all these inbound LinkedIn messages that are totally ridiculous. A lot of them are like copy and paste pitches, invest in my business, or, Oh, I admire you so much. Can I work for you for free? Like these are the sort of messages someone like Sarah is getting. So if you are genuine, sincere, and you honestly approach someone like Sarah, and then of course, there's other things that need to happen to get her attention. Then you will stand out. That's just like the first step there, right? So step one, what's your intention? I think intention really matters. So before you put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard, definitely, what is your intention, right? Are you looking for a relationship with someone like a Sarah or whoever, Whereby you really want to not just take from them, but you want to give them a sense of like either admiration, appreciation, or just like a real conversation. I know this might sound like not of value, but do you know how valuable it is to have a real conversation with someone who gets pitched all the time and you're there being yourself and you're there being your mom self? Like. I tell my clients all the time, let's imagine you wanted to engage with Warren Buffett, right? You're not a billionaire. Okay, fine. You're not Warren's cousin or nephew or son, but imagine that there was like a baby in a room. Tell me that that baby is not going to make someone like Warren Buffett giggle and tell me that just providing an opportunity for Warren to giggle is not a value. Like really, really take that in. Like someone who is pitched all the time by disingenuous people. Is actually having a real chat with someone that's like a mom who gets the struggle, who gets how hard it is to pursue her outreach goals or her business goals. So really figuring out like who you are and the value that you bring to the table upfront before typing anything is step one. And it's really hard for moms because a lot of the value that we might bring to a conversation with someone who has these financial markers of success, a lot of the value that we bring is not quantifiable. It really isn't. And so it's really on us to reimagine what actually matters in terms of like authentic human engagement. So that's the first piece of the puzzle. The second one is the following. So if you're reaching out to someone, what's really, really important, and I'm thinking LinkedIn, because that is how I helped a client just yesterday. But if you're reaching out to someone, you need to understand, like, why exactly are you reaching out to them? And we've got to cut through the bullshit, like for real, for real, for real. Why are you reaching out to that person? Okay, because if there's any sort of like hint or tint of I just want to reach out to you because I want you to give me money, like someone's going to smell that on you, even though you can't technically smell LinkedIn, but they're just going to tell like certain phrases that you might use will feel kind of like icky or weird or whatever. So you got to be really like clear on what, like why are you reaching out to this person? So let me give you an example, let's imagine that like legit, you want someone to be on your board of advisors, like strategically, that is something that you can bring to the table. If you're having a conversation with one of these very amazing human beings. It might not even be someone that's like billionaire light years ahead of you. It might be someone who just has visibility into a new sector that might help you achieve your outreach goals, i. e. your business goals. So in the case of my client just the other day, for her, she really wants to reach out to people that are in the health insurance space, right? And what was really interesting is that she has a board of advisors. She has a board of advisors and she knows that she needs someone who is a medical professional. So what is it that she did or I guided her to do? I said, okay, great. So name a health insurance company, whatever it might have been in her case, it was Kaiser Permanente. And now tell me the actual job title of the person who's a medical professional that you feel would be like the perfect bulls eye pick to serve on your board. Now, I didn't connect those dots up front, but after the fact, that's where I said we were going. Here's the thing. People like to feel special. Everybody has an ego. And if you have an opportunity to really cater to someone's ego, like let's say you have a podcast, let's say you have a blog, let's say you have a vlog, a YouTube channel, or A board of advisors, or you could like literally make it up and say, and now I have a board of advisors and a spot that's enough of a reason for someone and you to engage. Right? So that's what we did. We're like, okay, great. So let's be real specific here. So you want to have a relationship with someone at Kaiser Permanente and you want it to be a, and it's so hard for me to say this, a neonatologist person. Right? Right. So that's what we did. He was like, all right, let's find exactly the bullseye target that we would like to engage with. And the invitation would be to serve on the board. That's not what you say out of the gate. Instead, what you might say out of the gate is the following. So you're looking at someone's LinkedIn profile and you're saying to yourself, okay, this person, I don't want them to ignore my connection requests, right? So that means that you have to write an actual note. And that's probably obvious, but what do you put in that note? So you got to lead with something that is like about them. If you start with the, thank you for your time, happy to connect. Saw you the other day. That is so boring. I want you to connect with someone and say, Hey, I saw that you are a Neo blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Cause it's hard for me to say. And I noticed that you have spent some time in the ex care unit, right? So this is all based on. What someone writes in LinkedIn, or I noticed that you are a, and you could name the job function if you want to make it really easy on yourself. And I noticed that you went to Berkeley, which is definitely a place where women's rights was really like. Top of mind, right? So you got to make it specific. It's like, no, this person isn't like making a mistake and reaching out to me. They actually want to talk to me because I very specifically have a certain experience or I wrote something in my LinkedIn profile that this person read. So if you up front in your LinkedIn outbound first connection, say that, that's going to automatically get someone's attention, right? And then when you could say, as an example, so you're saying like, Hey, essentially you're saying I am reaching out because you are this based on your experiences in that it leads me to believe that you might be interested in a conversation pertaining to this other topic, whatever that topic is pertaining to your outreach goal. And your company vision next sentence would be something like, I felt encouraged to reach out to you because that's another way that you might want to lead. Right? And again, you're saying exactly what you're reading on LinkedIn, right? Or maybe you heard a podcast where they were on, or maybe you saw them in the media. So that's actual language you could use to strike up a conversation that has zilch to do with the weather. All right, great. So now you have this like first point of connection. And so someone accepts the connection. Then what? Here's the reality of it. Chances are, although you wrote that information in LinkedIn, that person didn't read it like with any sort of level of depth. So they might not respond to that initial like three sentences outbound. But if they connected, what I suggest you do is go on to LinkedIn, go into their contact info and specifically email them. Okay. Here's why, why do people go on LinkedIn? They're looking for business relationships. They're looking for a job right now. We're all mom entrepreneurs. So what's important is that you reach them somewhere that they're actually checking all the time, which is email. So you are going to email them. Follow up. So then the follow up might be as simple as, thank you for the connection, and you might wanna like say a little bit of what you said in that original note. The reason why I reached out to you was A, B, or CI would love to have a conversation with you. Here's my calendar. And then of course, if you wanted to, you could say, having been at the helm of my business, we've been able to do this, whatever that is, bring millions of dollars in donation or sell all these different charge keys. But what we're looking for right now is a thought leader who can add. Some sort of fresh insights in the medical community who would be interested in learning more about organization and potentially serving on our board, which has a minimal, minimal, minimal level of time requirements, right? So you might literally go ahead and start painting the picture, nothing about the weather there, right? So that might be the next step. And here's the thing you're putting your link. To your calendar what I noticed if you're not confident in making the first step from a networking perspective you tend to put extra steps in front of you and that irritates me beyond belief like I would only put extra steps in front of me if I'm nervous like Sean was saying you're not going to Crazy, right? So if I'm talking to someone and like, I don't really, really, really want them to email me back because I'm scared, then yeah, I won't put my calendar link. I'll be like, maybe you'd like to connect with me, let me know. But if I really, really, really, really am clear on. My outreach goals, my company vision and who I really am and how I could add value irrespective of the human being I'm talking to, then I'm just going to cut to the chase because that's what you really, really want. And what I have noticed is the higher you go up in job titles and levels of seniority, the faster those individuals are to just jump on the phone and get to the point. Right? It's not about being too direct or being presumptuous. You could absolutely in that second note say, I understand you're busy and you are under no obligation to respond, but I wanted to just ask you because I felt like I had to. My mission is that important and I know that There must be alignments or synergies. You could literally say this, like, it is okay to wear your heart on your sleeve. Again, all of this is assuming that you really want to talk to this person and you have a very specific ask in your mind. If you don't have a specific ask in your mind, this is what I suggested my client do the other day. She brainstorms a bunch of reasons, a bunch of ways that. The person she connected with, this was her follow up strategy, could actually work with her, how she could help that person, how that person can help her, and how together they're better off, let's imagine, right? Not necessarily in those words, but she had to brainstorm this, so do yourself the favor of preparing, brainstorming. On that note, I want to help you. With a great deal of specificity, I want to be sure that you have the actual language you need to have conversations with people that might intimidate you, right? And so what you will find, and you could absolutely see in the show notes, is Is a link, it is bit. ly, so bit. ly forward slash hyper networking, you can actually go to that link and you can download for free a playbook in this playbook. What I have done. Is really tried to make this like plug and play pertaining to those like first outbound connections. It is called from contact to connection. It's the mompreneurs followup playbook. And I give you my exact networking language in terms of the emails that you could send out the DMS that you could put in and even openers for cocktail parties. So you know how you're like in a cocktail party. And then people are like in these circles that seem Impenetrable. Well, you can absolutely like join in those circles. Okay. Unless you're noticing that like people are like super, super tight and like blocking you from every direction. There are ways for you to insert yourself into existing conversations. And so I've included in my playbook, a couple of ideas as well, but I don't want to overwhelm a mom entrepreneur. I just want to be sure that you have some language. That will get you from feeling intimidated to totally excited about talking to strangers because the generosity of strangers is a real thing. So go ahead and pick up the playbook. It is again called From Contact to Connection, The Mompreneur's Follow Up Playbook. You can pick it up on the link that is in the show notes, wherever it is that you're listening to this episode. Bitly, so bit. ly forward slash hyper networking. It will be in the show notes and you can pick it up for free today and absolutely have some language that you can use and edit pertaining to your outreach goals, pertaining to your company vision for this very year so that this way you don't have to feel like people have to talk to you first. Because here's what happens. If you're the one to initiate a conversation, it puts you in a position of power. It's been said the person that actually like creates the agenda in like a networking meeting or any meeting, that's the person that's controlling where this conversation gets to go. So if you have the chutzpah, the confidence to actually go first during networking, engagements, then it is a hundred percent better for you because then you get to lead where the conversation goes. And notice, I didn't say anything here about the weather at all. Like, let's, let's go to this other topic. So let's say that you want a little bit of help pertaining to Having a conversation in a live setting, a live setting. Again, I will have some language for you, for a mom business owner specifically, because I'm a mom. I'm an entrepreneur and I a hundred percent know what it is to be. What is, is, what is the word? I don't know why it's escaping me. Not undervalued, but like people just don't expect me. And I'm little too. People don't expect me to have the audacity to go up to like the people that are on panels or the speakers at the end of an event. So people just don't assume that I'm going to go and just like go in for the, for, for the quote unquote kill. Right. In a very positive way. So that is why I wanted to have this playbook for, for us, for mom entrepreneurs, because I'm going to tell you If you have decided to nurture a human being, Through any method, be it adoption, birth, be it as this loving and doting like auntie, like you've got, you've got guts beyond, beyond other people, like to take in like another human being and to like help them grow is one of the most courageous things. I mean, it's the most courageous things. I've ever done personally, and let me be honest, I've got to ask for that courage every single morning, right? So, for us to be held out of these right rooms, right conversations, and right contacts, I'm gonna call bullshit on that, and I want Us as mom entrepreneurs who have had to like start, stop, pause businesses to catch up and exceed outpace anyone who didn't have to step out, pause, or iterate based on growing or having a family. So that's why I want you to pick up that playbook today. Go to bit. ly forward slash hyper networking. Okay. So then now you're in a live networking event. And here's the thing, I was having this conversation with a mom who has a product. And I asked her, I was like, right now you and I are on a 15 minute zoom conversation. So you just said that you are not so into networking, which I don't know. I had to ask, I was like, well, what do we call this? Like I had reached out to her. I didn't know her. She didn't know me. And we're on zoom in my mind. I'm networking in her mind. It's connecting. And I don't see it as so different when you're in a happy hour setting or you're in a venue with a lot of people. So let's just get to that place, right? One to many networking. You're at an event. I'm thinking to myself when I went to Podfest actually in Orlando, Florida. So. For me, I get off the plane, I'm a mom, I have three kids who are at home, I gotta make this count. Like, my husband is on call for childcare, I spent a lot of money to get to Florida, and it's time away from my kids. So how can I make this count? The moment I stepped into Florida, or landed, I just started networking. I will be networking on a plane if that is okay. I have an opportunity for me and I have, I've actually gotten a podcast guest on a plane. So beyond that, let's imagine that now you're going to an event, you're there and it's like a bunch of people, it's buzzing and people have already established their like circles, right? Impenetrable circles. So what is it that I did that has nothing to do with the weather? Well, I approached a group of individuals who I thought were part of a meetup for authors. That's just what was on the schedule, so I was like, oh, maybe they're the meetup for authors. Here's where the really big point of differentiation is. I approached that group of total and complete strangers already having conversations. And I said, hi, my name is Melissa. You guys look like you're having a really interesting conversation. Is this the author meetup group? Now that was like an honest question, but thinking back, maybe I could have made that up as an excuse to start. Engaging with these humans turns out this was not the author meetup group. I could have been like bright red tail between my legs. Oh my God. Oops. I'm sorry. Bye. But I said, you know what? No, there is value in conversations with every single human being. This happened to be the group of neurodivergent podcasters. And so for me, I was like, Oh, this is really cool because I strongly believe that I can learn brand new things and apply them to my business from people who have done things differently, especially if you think differently than me, as an example. So I was like, Oh, I'm sticking around. And then of course, I started talking to the different individuals who bring a completely fresh way of looking at the operations of business, of making marketing simple. And as I was having conversations, the group kind of like fizzled out and so it was just me and one other person who happens to be neurodivergent. And so I was just asking her questions. Be curious. It is okay. This person was also a mom. So that's a shared experience for us. But what was not shared was that she had an approach to marketing that was super, super linear. And I was like, Oh my God, this is like mana from the heavens or mana from the heavens. So I just asked for more information around that. What's the point? Here's the point. The excuse that I had was not something that was inauthentic or a lie or anything that was like, Oh, I'm here to just take information from you. The excuse was like legitimate. It was like, no, no, no. I'm literally here to talk to the author meetup group. And that's okay. And I want you to feel so confident and bold in who you are and the value you bring to the table by way of your personality, your life experiences, to have the audacity to be real. I think that is how you build the confidence to go first in a networking conversation. Again, you will want this playbook. It is in the show notes. Absolutely. Grab it immediately. So you have a better sense of the openers that you can use, whether you are online or whether you are offline, right? In this universe, it is so important to gather as much power as humanly possible. And one way is by actually Going first, you want to set the agenda. You want to establish who gets to go in your room. You want to establish where the conversation goes and how you would like to follow up. There's so much that's not within our control that as a mom entrepreneur, you have got, you have got, and I feel like repeating this a thousand times. You have got to find ways to set up. This game in a way that you're going to win, right? And this is one way, this is one way. Has this ever gone wrong? Hell yeah, it's gone wrong. Let me give you an example. I was in Australia pre pandemic. We were living there for three and a half years. And I remember. I was at an event where there was this leader of an organization that is for authors, right? I'm not going to name the organization because someone from Australia might be listening, but the CEO of this organization, I wanted to talk to her. And so I was part of the crowd and I went up to her, and I don't know if she was like on her way to the bathroom, but Who cares, right? Like as a mom, we have all held our pee. So I went up to her and she was surrounded by some other people, but who cares? Because again, I know that I have value to contribute. As an example, I have a podcast. I could have her as a guest. That's an example. And so she was trying to escape, not just me, but like the whole crowd. But then I was like, Hey, my name is Melissa. I really love what you do. And I would love to have a conversation with you. And what she went and attempted to do was pawn me off to her assistant. So, how is this going first gone wrong? Well, because if I were to say, oh, okay, I'll talk to your assistant, then that puts me at the same level as everyone else who's trying to reach out to her. Like this person who's the actual decision maker and actual human bullseye target I wanted to talk to. To actually just suggest that I talk to her gatekeeper. You see how that takes me away from my outreach goal. Okay. So what did I do? I said, Oh no, no, that's okay. I wanted to speak to you. See, I know that takes guts. That takes, that takes confidence. And like I said, I think she was off to the bathroom, but for me, it just establishes the idea that no, if you want to talk to some, some, some person that might feel out of reach, like be clear on why you want to talk to them and why you deserve to talk to them and how it can be a positive outcome for the two of you. Okay. Be clear on those things so that you have the guts to just step through the BS that might be thrown at you. If you're trying to talk to a specific person. So, did it go wrong? It did! Like, the pandemic happened afterwards anyways, so we were all distracted, but ultimately, if I really wanted her on my podcast, I certainly would have made the ask, but once I noticed that she was also, like, more soundproofed, How can I say this? An employee, as opposed to an entrepreneur or founder. I realized that her incentives and her, her motivations might not be in alignment with my own, right? So if someone's the employee of an organization, they might not be as open to being a podcast guest on someone that they don't know, right? Cause there's a lot at stake in terms of. Stakeholders and blah, blah, blah. That's what I've noticed. But if they're a founder, if they're an entrepreneur, if they're someone that own the business, then they get the hustle. They get it. They get it and they're all for it. Okay, let me stop. Can you tell I'm like crazy excited about this? I really, really am. But what I want more than anything else is for you, mom, entrepreneur, mom, founder, mom, creator to go to my link and get the actual playbook, right? It'll include, like I said, some language that you can use and also some followup strategies as well. B I T dot L Y forward slash hyper networking. Can I just say something to be super, super honest? I suspect that some moms who have businesses already, I really suspect that, and it would be so amazing if you shared this with one mom friend who has a business, one mom friend who you believe in so much, who you think has so much to offer that might just not be comfortable making the first move in a networking conversation. So please share this episode specifically with that mom. I would be so, so, so appreciative. And thank you for listening to Unimaginable Wellness. I really do appreciate you. And damn, I believe in you so, so, so, so, so, so much. So grab the playbook. It's my free gift for being a beautiful listener and for being a mom. You're freaking courageous as heck. So absolutely enjoy the playbook.
Conversations with Zendesk - Interviews about Customer Service, Support, and Customer Experience
On this episode, we're joined by Brad Harris, Global Customer Support Director of Bitly, to discuss Bitly's innovative approach to customer support. Brad details his experiences and strategies, shedding light on the integration of AI and technology in support operations.Key Takeaways:(00:13) Leveraging technology tools for role scalability.(01:09) Exploring AI and innovative technologies for distinct customer bases.(02:16) Differentiating two customer use cases at Bitly.(07:40) Using net promoter score surveys and CSAT to gauge customer feedback.(08:11) The importance of responding to diverse customer support preferences.(08:37) Adapting to varied customer support methods, including chatbots and automation.(09:07) The implementation of an AI chatbot through Ada in Bitly's help centers.(18:13) Discussions on utilizing tools for enhancing customer experience.(19:03) Reflections on the unexpected achievements of AI.(19:32) Continuous efforts to centralize the information needed by customers.Resources Mentioned:Brad Harris - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebradical/Bitly - https://www.linkedin.com/company/bitly/Ada AI Chatbot - https://ada.cx/Join us at Relate, Zendesk's biggest customer experience event of the year: April 16-18 in Las Vegas.Follow Zendesk on LinkedIn for all the latest CX trends, news, and product announcements.Sign up for a free trial at Zendesk.com#CX #CustomerService #CustomerExperience
The Rom-Com Episode! We think this is the Valentine's Episode! It's on theme, but probably still a stretch? Listen to hear, a new trailer for a Rom-Com, a a man whose girlfriend is boycotting his favorite fast food chain, a focus group for a rom-com sequel, and some executives who have to make a tough decision. QR Code Generator presented by Bitly is the company I'm mad at. Written by Bo Segrest Starring:DAN KARLINROSEMARY WESTHENRY LOVELANDBO SEGREST DAN RAMIREZ& MADDY L. If you like the show, help us grow! rate, review, and subscribeFollow us on instagram @modernexhibitspodA part of the Asylum Podcast Network @asylumpodcastsYou can see the cast of Modern Exhibits perform Tuesdays at 8:00pm EST at Improv Asylum Theater in Boston: TICKETS
Never put on a dead man's clothes! Author and culture critic Peter Counter joins Steph Grossman and Bianca Pérez in the basement to discuss how THE SANTA CLAUSE (1994), starring Tim Allen, is actually a movie about body horror, possession, and the sublime. It's basically a yuletide HEREDITARY (in fact, we're pretty sure Santa Claus knows Paiman...). SHOW NOTES Peter Counter | peterbcounter.com Be Scared of Everything by Peter Counter | https://bookshop.org/a/4492/9781988784564 How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory by Peter Counter | https://bookshop.org/a/4492/9781487011994 ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES Gemini Gospel | Bianca Pérez's debut poetry chapbook, published by Host Publications hostpublications.com/products/gemini-gospel. Can't buy right now? Shelve it on Goodreads! "Likeness" | Steph Grossman's latest horror-tinged short story, published in Joyland Magazine. Free to read. Bitly link: bit.ly/mirrorstory Basement Girls Podcast Store on Bookshop.org | bookshop.org/shop/basementgirls --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/basementgirls/support
#118 - Welcome back to another Meet the Mentors episode where my podcast growth coach, Adam Schaueble, and I dish about what makes a good podcast guest and what not to do . . . EVER.We discuss best/worst practices at each stage of the process:Outreachuse the Top 200 charts to find shows to pitch,pitch a mutually beneficial "collaboration,"how NOT to end up in the guest pitch Hall of Shame,unique ways to stand out,what to put on your one-sheet,the best podcast/guest matchmaking service.Preparinghow to show up prepped and polished like a boss.Recordingthe ultimate podcast guesting crime,how to become the kind of guest that gets referred out,being memorable by leaving the listeners with a challenge.Promotionthe benefit of creating unique URLs and landing pages for each specific show,the BEST guests do these two things,how to build link juice and domain authority,leveraging flattery to your advantage.Loom is a service that lets you make videos (5 minutes or less) for free that you can send in your pitches.Here's the impressive video pitch Kris Bryant from Episode #107 sent me. Simple, but memorable.Here's my one-sheet to get your creative juices flowing.ConvertKit lets you clone landing pages lickety-split.Kajabi, Squarespace, vanity URLs and Bitly and the Pretty Links plugin are all ways to create memorable links.Find Adam and listen to his show at PodcastingBusiness.School. Check out his limited series Podcast Monetization Tips.Download Lifestyle Design for Multi-Passionates.Follow me places! YouTube | LinkedIn | Instagram | Pinterest Thinking of starting a podcast of your own? Adam Schaeuble is the MAN when it comes to all things podcasting, and his Podcast Launch Blueprint is packed to the gills with everything you need to take your podcast from concept to launch in four weeks or less!Music Credit:Epic Motivational Trap Beat | ENDGAME by Alex-Productions | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx0_M61F81Nfb-BRXE-SeVAMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US
On this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast, Gia and Claire dive deep into Bitly's journey from a point-solution to a $100m ARR multi-product platform with CMO Tara Robertson. Tara shares how her team leverages customer research to supercharge the SaaS company's product-led growth.Discussed:Using Jobs-to-be-Done research at a SaaS that serves nearly limitless use-cases for customers ranging from B2C and micro-business to a Fortune 100 enterprise. The differences between your customer's “Jobs”, ICP (ideal customer profile), personas, and target audience - and how Bitly develops a nuanced view of its different customer journies to guide its strategy.Building internal alignment at a leadership level through active listening, communication, and setting shared goals. The story behind Tara's cross-functional collaboration with Product to get both teams aligned in their understanding of customers and speaking the same customer-centric language.Key Moments: [3:10] Bit.ly's growth story is evolving beyond the virality of link shortening into the world's leading connections platform, doing over 100 million in ARR.[5:00] Moving from a traditional sales model to building a product-led business and how Tara's marketing team works cross-functionally with Product, Sales, and Customer Success.[7:00] The CEO tells Tara it's time to rethink the way they do marketing. They needed a highly strategic team working in partnership with the Product team to create positioning and shared language, and that required a lot of research.[11:00] Marketing is using personas, Sales are leveraging ICPs, and the Product team is doing user research—how do you get everyone aligned to make the most significant impact across the organization, and what does it mean for the bottom line?[16:00] Finding alignment in the differences between Jobs-to-be-Done and ICP around goals for different teams.[19:26] You don't have to be pro-jobs and anti-persona or vice versa. Tara shares how the partnership between her and the Chief Product Officer was critical to ensuring the teams understood each other to avoid missing out on some “distinguished but niche audiences.[23:00] Tara shares an example of a small customer base that equates to significant revenue, how to find those niche use cases, and the need to create different journeys for different customer jobs.[25:46] The value of being a good communicator, collaborator, and listener as a CMO and how to do that work.[28:30] Tara talks about leveraging the language from the Jobs-to-be-Done research for use on their product pages (and the SEO value). —Check out Bit.lyConnect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn Buy the book: Forget the Funnel book (Paperback, eBook, or audiobook) Visit the website: Forget the Funnel Connect with Claire Suellentrop on LinkedIn Connect with Georgiana Laudi on LinkedIn
With Bianca Pérez out for her Hallowedding (!), WIRED's Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast host David Barr Kirtley joins Steph Grossman in the basement to discuss the '90s animated Halloween classic, The Halloween Tree (1993), as well as Ray Bradbury's 1972 novella of the same name that inspired it. SHOW NOTES Geek's Guide to the Galaxy Podcast | geeksguideshow.com & wired.com/author/geeks-guide-to-the-galaxy David Barr Kirtley | davidbarrkirtley.com Save Me Plz and Other Stories by David Barr Kirtley | amazon.com/Save-Me-Plz-Other-Stories/dp/B09S65RZF5 ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES Gemini Gospel | Bianca Pérez's debut poetry chapbook, published by Host Publications hostpublications.com/products/gemini-gospel. Can't buy right now? Shelve it on Goodreads! "Likeness" | Steph Grossman's latest horror-tinged short story, published in Joyland Magazine. Free to read. Bitly link: bit.ly/mirrorstory Basement Girls Podcast Store on Bookshop.org | bookshop.org/shop/basementgirls --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/basementgirls/support
Got a Minute? Checkout today's episode of The Guy R Cook Report podcast - the Google Doc for this episode is @ Do you compare Bitly to Tiny URL for link shortening ----more---- Support this podcast Subscribe where you listen to podcasts I help goal oriented business owners that run established companies to leverage the power of the internet Contact Guy R Cook @ https://guyrcook.com The Website Design Questionnaire https://guycook.wordpress.com/start-with-a-plan/ In the meantime, go ahead follow me on Twitter: @guyrcookreport Click to Tweet Be a patron of The Guy R Cook Report. Your help is appreciated. https://guyrcook.com https://theguyrcookreport.com/#theguyrcookreport Follow The Guy R Cook Report on Podbean iPhone and Android App | Podbean https://bit.ly/3m6TJDV Thanks for listening, viewing or reading the show notes for this episode. This episode of The Guy R Cook Report is on YouTube too @ This episode of The Guy R Cook Report Have a great new year, and hopefully your efforts to Entertain, Educate, Convince or Inspire are in play vDomainHosting, Inc 3110 S Neel Place Kennewick, WA 509-200-1429
Got a Minute? Checkout today's episode of The Guy R Cook Report podcast - the Google Doc for this episode is @ Do you know that Canva now supports the Bitly app ----more---- Support this podcast Subscribe where you listen to podcasts I help goal oriented business owners that run established companies to leverage the power of the internet Contact Guy R Cook @ https://guyrcook.com The Website Design Questionnaire https://guycook.wordpress.com/start-with-a-plan/ In the meantime, go ahead follow me on Twitter: @guyrcookreport Click to Tweet Be a patron of The Guy R Cook Report. Your help is appreciated. https://guyrcook.com https://theguyrcookreport.com/#theguyrcookreport Follow The Guy R Cook Report on Podbean iPhone and Android App | Podbean https://bit.ly/3m6TJDV Thanks for listening, viewing or reading the show notes for this episode. This episode of The Guy R Cook Report is on YouTube too @ This episode of The Guy R Cook Report Have a great new year, and hopefully your efforts to Entertain, Educate, Convince or Inspire are in play vDomainHosting, Inc 3110 S Neel Place Kennewick, WA 509-200-1429
LeRon L. Barton, a writer, author, and speaker who talks about race, mass incarceration, being Black in tech, politics, business, storytelling, and dating, shares his perspective on Losing friends for speaking out about racism How Color Blindness leads to not seeing all of a person The disease that is poverty How systemic racism limits some people's outcomes, despite having grit If you want to connect more with LeRon, visit LeRon L. Barton – Writer. Speaker. Artist. (leronbarton.com) ========================================== Thank you to our generous sponsor, Munn Avenue Press. As an author myself, I've experienced firsthand their magic in empowering aspiring authors, giving voices like mine the platform they deserve. If you've got a story to tell and a dream, Munn Avenue Press is the ally you need to publish and market your book. They turn books into bestsellers. Visit them at MunnAvenuePress.com to start your publishing journey, just like I did. ========================================== Full bio: LeRon L Barton is a writer, author, and speaker that writes and talks about race, mass incarceration, being Black in tech, politics, business, storytelling, and dating. He has appeared in Black Enterprise, Newsweek, Salon, East Bay Express, and Harvard Business Review. LeRon is also a three-time TEDx speaker that has given talks at the Oxford Student Union, United Way, and Bitly. ================================================ Dr. Wong will be releasing her brand new book, "Cancel the Filter" with Munn Avenue Press. The first 50 reservations will receive a signed copy. Hear real talk about being a working mother! Spoiler: It's a hot mess behind-the-scenes! There are limited copies left! Reserve TODAY!
In this episode, Jackie Cureton, Chief Diversity Officer at Bitly, talks about the importance of meeting people where they are (openness & listening) and "calling folks in" (instead of calling people out). Only by listening deeply, can DEI leaders hear the "whisper of the organization" which helps to create the space for courageous conversations. Jackie also shares about how her strong commitment to her personal rejuvenation practices (physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) sustain her energy, and allow her sit in her power as a DEI leader. Her advice: "Be who you say you are." Learn more about Shirley Chisholm's history. Original music by Lynz Floren.
It ain't fall 'til September 23rd y'all. Hold onto sweet, scary summer for one more day by joining your resident basement girls Steph Grossman and Bianca Pérez in their discussion about the summer camp horror film that started it all: the original FRIDAY THE 13TH. Topics include a brief history of summer camp, the "whodunnit" aspect of the film, Steph's despise of Neddy, cozy horror, feminist subtext, final girls, motherhood, and how the famous "ch ch ch ah ah ah" sound is actually a remix of "kill kill kill ma ma ma" (really! That's what it says!). We also answer questions and comments from a few listeners who also happen to be authors: William Jensen, Brendan Deneen, and Amy Gentry. SHOW NOTES "Summer Camp Has Always Been About Escaping Modern Life" by Livia Gershon | daily.jstor.org/history-summer-camp "Camp Cool, Not School Cool" episode of the Binchtopia Podcast | audacy.com/podcast/binchtopia-42372/episodes/camp-cool-not-school-cool-9a207 ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES Gemini Gospel | Bianca Pérez's debut poetry chapbook, published by Host Publications hostpublications.com/products/gemini-gospel. Can't buy right now? Shelve it on Goodreads! "Likeness" | Steph Grossman's latest horror-tinged short story, published in Joyland Magazine. Free to read. Bitly link: bit.ly/mirrorstory Basement Girls Podcast Store on Bookshop.org | bookshop.org/shop/basementgirls --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/basementgirls/support
In this podcast episode, Amir Bormand interviews Cassie Brown, the VP of Engineering at Bitly. They discuss the importance of the relationship between customer success and engineering teams in improving customer experience. They delve into topics such as feedback loops, improving triage, and ultimately driving adoption and usage. Cassie shares her responsibilities as VP of Engineering at Bitly and the company's mission as a connections platform. Overall, this episode highlights the significance of collaboration between customer success and engineering in enhancing the customer experience. Highlights: [00:02:50] Bridging the gap between engineering and customer support. [00:06:25] Michelin star restaurant analogy. [00:08:27] Investigating and resolving issues. [00:13:22] Building relationships for success. [00:18:22] Service stewardship and bug management. Guest: Cassandra Brown is Bitly's VP of Engineering. She is a people-first leader who manages engineering efforts for Bitly's core product – she ensures that the functionality takes into account user experience and that Bitly can scale and provide a quality experience for all of our users. Before Bitly, Cassandra earned a Master's in Computer Information Systems and held roles at Cloud Elements and Oracle. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandradbrown/ --- Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Tech Trek, and we would appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate and review us on your favorite podcast player. Want to learn more about us? Head over at https://www.elevano.com Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests? Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
Sean O'Connor is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean discusses his transition from an individual contributor to management and shares why he chose Datadog, emphasizing the appeal of high-scale problems and the real business nature of the company. They delve into the importance of performance management and observability and cover the cultural and technical challenges Sean faces in managing a diverse, geographically spread team, and discuss the transition at Datadog from a decentralized model to more centralized platforms, the corresponding changes in both technical strategies and people management, and what excites him about Datadog's future, including the integration of security offerings into developers' daily experiences, and the evolution of Kubernetes and internal build and release tooling. __ Datadog (https://www.datadoghq.com/) Follow Datadog on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/datadog/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/datadoghq/), Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/DatadogHQ), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/datadoghq). Follow Sean O'Connor on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanoc/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/theSeanOC). Visit his website at seanoc.com (https://seanoc.com/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with us today is Sean O'Connor. He is the Director of Engineering at Datadog. Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. Sean, thank you for joining us. SEAN: Hi, thanks for having me on. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm super excited to get to talking with you about everything cloud, and DevOps, and engineering. But why don't we first start with just a conversation about what's going on in your life? Is there any exciting personal moment coming up for you soon? SEAN: Yeah, my wife and I are expecting our first kiddo in the next few weeks, so getting us prepared for that as we can and trying to get as much sleep as we can. [laughs] WILL: Get as much sleep as you can now, so...[laughs] I have a question around that. When you first found out that you're going to be a dad, what was your feeling? Because I remember the feeling that I had; it was a mixed reaction of just everything. So, I just wanted to see what was your reaction whenever you found out that you're going to be a dad for the first time. SEAN: Yeah, I was pretty excited. My wife and I had been kind of trying for this for a little while. We're both kind of at the older end for new parents in our late 30s. So, yeah, excited but definitely, I don't know, maybe a certain amount of, I don't know about fear but, you know, maybe just concerned with change and how different life will be, but mostly excitement and happiness. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, I remember the excitement and happiness. But I also remember, like, wait, I don't know exactly what to do in this situation. And what about the situations that I have no idea about and things like that? So, I will tell you, kids are resilient. You're going to do great as a dad. [laughter] SEAN: Yep. Yeah, definitely; I think I feel much more comfortable about the idea of being a parent now than I may have been in my 20s. But yeah, definitely, the idea of being responsible for and raising a whole other human is intimidating. [laughs] VICTORIA: I think the fact that you're worried about it is a good sign [laughs], right? SEAN: I hope so. [laughs] VICTORIA: Like, you understand that it's difficult. You're going to be a great parent just by the fact that you understand it's difficult and there's a lot of work ahead. So, I think I'm really excited for you. And I'm glad we get to talk to you at this point because probably when the episode comes out, you'll be able to listen to it with your new baby in hand. So... WILL: Good. Excited for it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, love that. Well, great. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit more about your other background, your professional background? What brought you to the role you're into today? SEAN: Yeah. Well, like we mentioned in the beginning; currently, I'm a Director of Engineering at Datadog. I run our computing cloud team. It's responsible for all of our Kubernetes infrastructure, as well as kind of all the tooling for dealing with the cloud providers that we run on and as well as kind of [inaudible 02:54] crypto infrastructure. Within Datadog, I've always been in management roles though I've kind of bounced around. I've been here for about five and a half years. So, before this, I was running a data store infrastructure team. Before that, when I first came in, I was running the APM product team, kind of bounced around between product and infra. And that's kind of, I guess, been a lot of the story of much of my career is wearing lots of different hats and kind of bouncing around between kind of infrastructure-focused roles and product-focused roles. So, before this, I was running the back-end engineering and DevOps teams at Bitly. So, I was there for about five and a half years, started there originally as a software engineer. And before that, a lot of early-stage startups and consulting doing whatever needed doing, and getting to learn about lots of different kind of industries and domains, which is always fun. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's great. So, you had that broad range of experience coming from all different areas of operations in my mind, which is, like, security and infrastructure, and now working your way into a management position. What was the challenge for you in making that switch from being such a strong individual contributor into an effective manager? SEAN: Sure. You know, I think certainly there is a lot of kind of the classic challenges of learning to let go but still staying involved, right? You know, as a manager, if you're working on critical path tasks hands-on yourself, that's probably not a good sign. [laughs] On the other hand, if you come, like, completely divorced from what your team is doing, especially as, like, a team lead level kind of manager, you know, that's not great either. So, figuring that balancing act definitely was a bit tricky for me. Similarly, I think time management and learning to accept that, especially as you get into, like, further steps along in your career that, like, you know, it's not even a question of keeping all the balls in the air, but more figuring out, like, what balls are made out of rubber and which ones are made out of glass, and maybe keeping those ones in the air. [laughs] So, just a lot of those kind of, like, you know, prioritization and figuring out, like, what the right level of involvement and context is, is definitely the eternal learning, I think, for me. [laughs] WILL: I remember whenever I was looking to change jobs, kind of my mindset was I wanted to work at thoughtbot more because of the values. And I wanted to learn and challenge myself and things like that. And it was so much more, but those were some of the main items that I wanted to experience in my next job. So, when you changed, and you went from Bitly to Datadog, what was that thing that made you say, I want to join Datadog? SEAN: Yeah, that was definitely an interesting job search and transition. So, at that point in time, I was living in New York. I was looking to stay in New York. So, I was kind of talking to a bunch of different companies. Both from personal experience and from talking to some friends, I wasn't super interested in looking at, like, working at mostly, like, the super big, you know, Google, Amazon, Meta type of companies. But also, having done, like, super early stage, you know, like, seed, series A type of companies, having played that game, I wasn't in a place in my life to do that either. [laughs] So, I was looking kind of in between that space. So, this would have been in 2018. So, I was talking to a lot of, like, series A and series B-type companies. And most of them were, like, real businesses. [laughs] Like, they may not be profitable yet, but, like, they had a very clear idea of how they would get there and, like, what that would look like. And so, that was pleasant compared to some past points in my career. But a lot of them, you know, I was effectively doing, like, automation of human processes, which is important. It has value. But it means that, like, realistically, this company will never have more than 50 servers. And when I worked at Bitly, I did have a taste for kind of working in those high-scale, high-availability type environments. So, Datadog initially was appealing because it kind of checked all those boxes of, you know, very high-scale problems, high availability needs, a very real business. [laughs] This is before Datadog had gone public. And then, as I started to talk to them and got to know them, I also really liked a lot of kind of the culture and all the people I interacted with. So, it became a very clear choice very quickly as that process moved along. VICTORIA: Yeah, a very real business. Datadog is one of the Gartner's Magic leaders for APM and observability in the industry. And I understand you're also one of the larger SaaS solutions running Kubernetes, right? SEAN: Yep. Yeah, at this point. Five years ago, that story was maybe a little bit different. [laughs] But yeah, no, no, we definitely have a pretty substantial Kubernetes suite that we run everything on top of. And we get the blessings and curses of we get some really cool problems to work on, but there's also a lot of problems that we come across that when we talk to kind of peers in the industry about kind of how they're trying to solve them, they don't have answers yet either. [laughs] So, we get to kind of figure out a lot of that kind of early discovery games. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. I like how exciting and growing this industry is around kind of your compute and monitoring the performance of your applications. I wonder if you could kind of speak to our audience a little bit, who may not have a big technical background, about just why it's important to think about performance management and observability early on in your application. SEAN: There can be a few pieces there. One of the bigger ones, I think, is thinking about that kind of early and getting used to working with that kind of tooling early in a project or a product. I think it has an analogous effect to, like, thinking about, like, compounding interest in, like, a savings account or investing or something like that. In that, by having those tools available early on and having that visibility available early on, you can really both initially get a lot of value and just kind of understanding kind of what's happening with your system and very quickly troubleshoot problems and make sure things are running efficiently. But then that can help get to a place where you get to that, like, flywheel effect as you're kind of building your product of, as you're able to solve things quickly, that means you have more time to invest in other parts of the product, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, it's one of those things where kind of the earlier you can get started on that, the more that benefit gets amplified over time. And thankfully, with Datadog and other offerings like that now, you can get started with that relatively quickly, right? You're not having to necessarily make the choice of, like, oh, can I justify spending a week, a month, whatever, setting up all my own infrastructure for this, as opposed to, you know, plugging in a credit card and getting going right away? And not necessarily starting with everything from day zero but getting started with something and then being able to build on that definitely can be a worthwhile trade-off. [laughs] VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I'm curious your perspective, Will, as a developer on our Lift Off team, which is really about the services around that time when you want to start taking it really seriously. Like, you've built an app [laughs]. You know it's a viable product, and there's a market for it. And just, like, how you think about observability when you're doing your app building. WILL: The approach I really take is, like, what is the end goal? I'm currently on a project right now that we came in later than normal. We're trying to work through that. SEAN: I haven't come from, you know, that kind of consulting and professional services and support kind of place. I'm curious about, like, what, if any, differences or experiences do you have, like, in that context of, like, how do you use your observability tools or, like, what value they have as opposed to maybe more, like, straight product development? VICTORIA: Right. So, we recently partnered with, you know, our platform engineering team worked with the Lift Off team to create a product from scratch. And we built in observability tools with Prometheus, and Grafana, and Sentry so that the developers could instrument their app and build metrics around the performance in the way they expected the application to work so that when it goes live and meets real users, they're confident their users are able to actually use the app with a general acceptable level of latency and other things that are really key to the functionality of the app. And so, I think that the interesting part was, with the founders who don't have a background in IT operations or application monitoring and performance, it sort of makes sense. But it's still maybe a stretch to really see the full value of that, especially when you're just trying to get the app out the door. SEAN: Nice. VICTORIA: [chuckles] That's my answer. What kind of challenges do you have in your role managing this large team in a very competitive company, running a ton of Kubernetes clusters? [laughs] What's your challenges in your director of engineering role there? SEAN: You know, it's definitely a mix of kind of, like, technical or strategic challenges there, as well as people challenges. On the technical and strategic side, the interesting thing for our team right now is we're in the middle of a very interesting transition. Still, today, the teams at Datadog work in very much a 'You build it, you run it' kind of model, right? So, teams working on user-facing features in addition to, like, you know, designing those features and writing the code for that, they're responsible for deploying that code, offering the services that code runs within, being on call for that, so on and so forth. And until relatively recently, that ownership was very intense to the point where some teams maybe even had their own build and release processes. They were running their own data stores. And, like, that was very valuable for much of our history because that let those teams to be very agile and not have to worry about, like, convincing the entire company to change if they needed to make some kind of change. But as we've grown and as, you know, we've kind of taken on a lot more complexity in our environment from, you know, running across more providers, running across more regions, taking on more of regulatory concerns, to kind of the viability of running everything entirely [inaudible 12:13] for those product teams, it has become much harder. [laughs] You start to see a transition where previously the infrastructure teams were much more acting as subject matter experts and consultants to, now, we're increasingly offering more centralized platforms and offerings that can offload a lot of that kind of complexity and the stuff that isn't the core of what the other product-focused teams are trying to do. And so, as we go through that change, it means internally, a lot of our teams, and how we think about our roles, and how we go about doing our work, changes from, like, a very, you know, traditional reliability type one on one consultation and advising type role to effectively internal product development and internal platform development. So, that's a pretty big both mindset and practice shift. [laughs] So, that's one that we're kind of evolving our way through. And, of course, as what happens to kind of things, like, you still have to do all the old stuff while you're doing the new thing. [laughs] You don't get to just stop and just do the new thing. So, that's been an interesting kind of journey and one that we're always kind of figuring out as we go. That is a lot of kind of what I focus on. You know, people wise, you know, we have an interesting aim of...There's about 40 people in my org. They are spread across EMEA and North America with kind of, let's say, hubs in New York and Paris. So, with that, you know, you have a pretty significant time zone difference and some non-trivial cultural differences. [laughs] And so, you know, making sure that everybody is still able to kind of work efficiently, and communicate effectively, and collaborate effectively, while still working within all those constraints is always an ongoing challenge. [laughs] WILL: Yeah, you mentioned the different cultures, the different types of employees you have, and everyone is not the same. And there's so many cultures, so many...whatever people are going through, you as a leader, how do you navigate through that? Like, how do you constantly challenge yourself to be a better leader, knowing that not everyone can be managed the same way, that there's just so much diversity, probably even in your company among your employees? SEAN: I think a lot of it starts from a place of listening and paying attention to kind of just see where people are happy, where they feel like they have unmet needs. As an example, I moved from that last kind of data store-focused team to this computing cloud team last November. And so, as part of that move, probably for the first two or three months that I was in the role, I wasn't particularly driving much in the way of changes or setting much of a vision beyond what the team already had, just because as the new person coming in, it's usually kind of hard to have a lot of credibility and/or even just have the idea of, like, you know, like you're saying, like, what different people are looking for, or what they need, how they will respond best. I just spend a lot of time just talking to people, getting to know the team, building those relationships, getting to know those people, getting to know those groups. And then, from there, figuring out, you know, both where the kind of the high priority areas where change or investment is needed. But then also figuring out, yeah, kind of based on all that, what's the right way to go about that with the different groups? Because yeah, it's definitely isn't a one size fits all solution. But for me, it's always kind of starting from a place of listening and understanding and using that to develop, I guess, empathy for the people involved and understanding their perspectives and then figuring it out from there. I imagine–I don't know, but I imagine thoughtbot's a pretty distributed company. How do you all kind of think about some of those challenges of just navigating people coming from very different contexts? WILL: Yeah, I was going to ask Victoria that because Victoria is one of the leaders of our team here at thoughtbot. So, Victoria, what are your thoughts on it? VICTORIA: I have also one of the most distributed teams at thoughtbot because we do offer 24/7 support to some clients. And we cover time zones from the Pacific through West Africa. So, we just try to create a lot of opportunities for people to engage, whether it's remotely, especially offering a lot of virtual engagement and social engagement remotely. But then also, offering some in-person, whether it's a company in-person event, or encouraging people to engage with their local community and trying to find conferences, meetups, events that are relevant to us as a business, and a great opportunity for them to go and get some in-person interaction. So, I think then encouraging them to bring those ideas back. And, of course, thoughtbot is known for having just incredible remote async communication happening all the time. It's actually almost a little oppressive to keep up with, to be honest, [laughs] but I love it. There's just a lot of...there's GitHub issues. There's Slack communications. There's, like, open messages. And people are really encouraged to contribute to the conversation and bring up any idea and any problem they're having, and actively add to and modify our company policies and procedures so that we can do the best work with each other and know how to work with each other, and to put out the best products. I think that's key to having that conversation, especially for a company that's as big as Datadog and has so many clients, and has become such a leader in this metrics area. Being able to listen within your company and to your clients is probably going to set you up for success for any, like, tech leadership role [laughs]. I'm curious, what are you most excited about now that you've been in the role for a little while? You've heard from a lot of people within the company. Can you share anything in your direction in the next six months or a year that you're super excited about? SEAN: So, there's usually kind of probably two sides to that question of kind of, like, from a product and business standpoint and from an internal infrastructure standpoint, given that's where my day-to-day focus is. You know, on the product side, one thing that's been definitely interesting to watch in my time at Datadog is we really made the transition from kind of, like, a point solution type product to much more of a platform. For context, when I joined Datadog, I think logs had just gone GA, and APM was in beta, I think. So, we were just starting to figure out, like, how we expand beyond the initial infrastructure metrics product. And, obviously, at this point, now we have a whole, you know, suite of offerings. And so, kind of the opportunities that come with that, as far as both different spaces that we can jump into, and kind of the value that we can provide by having all those different capabilities play together really nicely, is exciting and is cool. Like, you know, one of the things that definitely lit an interesting light bulb for me was talking to some of the folks working on our newer security offerings and them talking about how, obviously, you want to meet, you know, your normal requirements in that space, so being able to provide the visibility that, you know, security teams are looking for there. But also, figuring out how we integrate that information into your developers' everyday experience so that they can have more ownership over that aspect of the systems that they're building and make everybody's job easier and more efficient, right? Instead of having, you know, the nightmare spreadsheet whenever a CVE comes out and having some poor TPM chase half the company to get their libraries updated, you know, being able to make that visible in the product where people are doing their work every day, you know, things like that are always kind of exciting opportunities. On the internal side, we're starting to think about, like, what the next major evolution of our kind of Kubernetes and kind of internal build and release tooling looks like. Today, a lot of kind of how teams interact with our Kubernetes infrastructure is still pretty raw. Like, they're working directly with specific Kubernetes clusters, and they are exposed to all the individual Kubernetes primitives, which is very powerful, but it's also a pretty steep learning curve. [laughs] And for a lot of teams, it ends up meaning that there's lots of, you know, knobs that they have to know what they do. But at the end of the day, like, they're not getting a lot of benefit from that, right? There's more just opportunity for them to accidentally put themselves in a bad place. So, we're starting to figure out, like, higher level abstractions and offerings to simplify how all that for teams look like. So, we're still a bit early days in working through that, but it's exciting to figure out, like, how we can still give teams kind of the flexibility and the power that they need but make those experiences much easier and not have to have them become Kubernetes experts just to deploy a simple process. And, yes, so there's some lots of fun challenges in there. [laughs] Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. WILL: I have a question around your experience. So, you've been a developer around 20 years. What has been your experience over that 20 years or about of the growth in this market? Because I can only imagine what the market was, you know, in the early 2000s versus right now because I still remember...I still have nightmares of dial-up, dial tone tu-tu-tu. No one could call you, stuff like that. So, what has been your experience, just seeing the market grow from where you started? SEAN: Sure, yeah. I think probably a lot of the biggest pieces of it are just seeing the extent to which...I want to say it was Cory Doctorow, but I'm not sure who actually originally coined the idea, but the idea that, you know, software is eating the world, right? Like, eventually, to some degree, every company becomes a software company because software ends up becoming involved in pretty much everything that we as a society do. So, definitely seeing the progression of that, I think, over that time period has been striking, you know, especially when I was working in more consulting contexts and working more in companies and industries where like, you know, the tech isn't really the focus but just how much that, you know, from an engineering standpoint, relatively basic software can fundamentally transform those businesses and those industries has definitely been striking. And then, you know, I think from a more individual perspective, seeing as, you know, our tools become more sophisticated and easier to access, just seeing how much of a mixed bag that has become [laughs]. And just kind of the flavor of, like, you know, as more people have more powerful tools, that can be very enabling and gives voice to many people. But it also means that the ability of an individual or a small group to abuse those tools in ways that we're maybe not fully ready to deal with as a society has been interesting to see how that's played out. VICTORIA: Yeah. I think you bring up some really great points there. And it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes is that, like, the future is here—it's just not evenly distributed. [laughs] And so, in some communities that I go to, everyone knows what Kubernetes is; everyone knows what DevOps is. It's kind of, like, old news. [laughs] And then, some people are still just like, "What?" [laughs]. It's interesting to think about that and think about the implications on your last point about just how dangerous the supply chain is in building software and how some of these abstractions and some of these things that just make it so easy to build applications can also introduce a good amount of risk into your product and into your business, right? So, I wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about your perspective on security and DevSecOps and what founders might be thinking about to protect their IP and their client's data in their product. SEAN: That one is interesting and tricky in that, like, we're in a little bit of, like, things are better and worse than they ever have been before [laughs], right? Like, there is a certain level of, I think, baseline knowledge and competency that I think company leaders really just have to have now, part of, like, kind of table stakes, which can definitely be challenging, and that, like, that probably was much less, if even the case, you know, 10-20 years ago in a lot of businesses. As an example, right? Like, obviously, like if it's a tech-focused company, like, that can be a thing. But, like, if you're running a plumbing business with a dozen trucks, let's say, like, 20 years ago, you probably didn't have to think that much about data privacy and data security. But, like, now you're almost certainly using some kind of electronic system to kind of manage all your customer records, and your job scheduling, and all that kind of stuff. So, like, now, that is something that's a primary concern for your business. On the flip side of that, I think there is much better resources, and tools, and practices available out there. I forget the name of the tool now. But I remember recently, I was working with a company on the ISO long string of numbers certifications that you tend to want to do when you're handling certain types of data. There was a tool they were able to work with that basically made it super easy for them to, like, gather all the evidence for that and whatnot, in a way where, like, you know, in the past, you probably just had to hire a compliance person to know what you had to do and how to present that. But now, you could just sign up for a SaaS product. And, like, obviously, it can't just do it for you. Like, it's about making your policies. But it still gave you enough support where if you're, like, bootstrapping a company, like, yeah, you probably don't need to hire a specialist to [inaudible 25:08], which is a huge deal. You know, similarly, a lot of things come much safer by default. When you think about, like, the security on something like an iPhone, or an iPad, or an Android device, like, just out of the box, that's light-years ahead of whatever Windows PC you were going to buy ten years ago. [laughs] And so, that kind of gives you a much better starting place. But some interesting challenges that come with that, right? And that we do now, literally, every person on the planet is walking around with microphones and cameras and all kinds of sensors on them. It's an interesting balance, I think. Similarly, I'm curious how you all think about kind of talking with your clients and your customers about this because I'm sure you all have a non-trivial amount of education to do there. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of it comes in when we have clients who are very early founders, and they don't have a CTO or a technical side of their business, and advising them on exactly what you laid out. Like, here's the baseline. Like, here's where you want to start from. We generally use the CIS controls, this internet for internet security. It puts out a really great tool set, too, for some things you were mentioning earlier. Let's figure out how to report and how to identify all of the things that we're supposed to be doing. It could be overwhelming. It's a lot. Like, in my past role as VP of Operations at Pluribus Digital, I was responsible for helping our team continue to meet our...we had three different ISO long number certifications [laughs]. We did a CMMI as well, which has come up a few times in my career. And they give you about a couple of hundreds of controls that you're supposed to meet. It's in very kind of, like, legalese that you have to understand. And that's a pretty big gap to solve for someone who doesn't have the technical experience to start. Like, what you were saying, too, that it's more dangerous and more safer than it has been before. So, if we make choices for those types of clients in very safe, trusted platforms, then they're going to be set up for success and not have to worry about those details as much. And we kind of go forward with confidence that if they are going to have to come up against compliance requirements or local state regulations, which are also...there's more of those every day, and a lot of liability you can face as a founder, especially if you're dealing with, like, health or financial data, in the state of California, for example. [laughs] It puts you at a really big amount of liability that I don't think we've really seen the impact of how bad it can be and will be coming out in the next couple of years now that that law has passed. But that's kind of the approach that we like to think. It's like, you know, there's a minimum we can do that will mitigate a lot of this risk [laughs], so let's do that. Let's do the basics and start off on the right foot here. SEAN: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, it's definitely something I've come to appreciate, especially doing work in regulated spaces is, when you do reach the point where you do need to have some kind of subject matter expert involved, whether it's somebody in-house or a consultant or an advisor, I've definitely learned that usually, like, the better ones are going to talk to you in terms of, like, what are the risk trade-offs you're making here? And what are the principles that all these detailed controls or guidelines are looking to get at? As opposed to just, like, walking you through the box-checking exercise. In my experience, a really good lawyer or somebody who will talk to you about risk versus just saying whether or not you can do something. [laughs] It has a very similar feeling in my experience. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's a lot about risk. And someone's got to be able to make those trade-off decisions, and it can be really tough, but it's doable. And I think it shouldn't scare people away. And there's lots of people, lots of ways to do it also, which is exciting. So, I think it's a good space to be in and to see it growing and pay attention to. [laughs] It's fun for me to be in a different place where we're given the opportunity to kind of educate or bring people along in a security journey versus having it be a top-down executive-level decision that we need to meet this particular security standard, and that's the way it's going to be. [laughs] Yeah, so that I appreciate. Is there anything that really surprised you in your conversations with Datadog or with other companies around these types of services for, like, platform engineering and observability? Is there anything that surprised you in the discovery process with potential clients for your products? SEAN: I think one of the biggest surprises, or maybe not a surprise but an interesting thing is, to what extent, you know, for us, I don't know if this is still the case, but I think in many places, like, we're probably more often competing against nothing than a competing product. And by that, I mean, especially as you look at some of our more sophisticated products like APM, or profiling, it's not so much that somebody has an existing tool that we're looking to replace; it's much more than this is just not a thing they do today. [laughs] And so, that leads to a very interestingly different conversation that I think, you know, relates to some of what we were saying with security where, you know, I think a non-trivial part of what our sales and technical enablement folks do is effectively education for our customers and potential customers of why they might want to use tools like this, and what kind of value they could get from them. The other one that's been interesting is to see how different customers' attitudes around tools like this have evolved as they've gone through their own migration to the cloud journeys, right? We definitely have a lot of customers that, I think, you know, 5, 10 years ago, when they were running entirely on-prem, using a SaaS product would have been a complete non-starter. But as they move into the cloud, both as they kind of generally get more comfortable with the idea of delegating some of these responsibilities, as well as they start to understand kind of, like, the complexity of the tooling required as their environment gets more complex, the value of a dedicated product like something like Datadog as opposed to, you know, what you kind of get out of the box with the cloud providers or what you might kind of build on your own has definitely been interesting. [laughs] VICTORIA: Is there a common point that you find companies get to where they're like, all right, now, I really need something? Can you say a little bit more about, like, what might be going on in the organization at that time? SEAN: You know, I think there could be a few different paths that companies take to it. Some of it, I think, can come from a place of...I think, especially for kind of larger enterprise customers making a transition like that, they tend to be taking a more holistic look at kind of their distinct practices and seeing what they want to change as they move into the cloud. And often, kind of finding an observability vendor is just kind of, like, part of the checklist there. [laughs] Not to dismiss it, but just, like, that seems to be certainly one path into it. I think for smaller customers, or maybe customers that are more, say, cloud-native, I think it can generally be a mix of either hitting a point where they're kind of done with the overhead of trying to maintain their own infrastructure of, like, trying to run their own ELK stack and, like, build all the tooling on top of that, and keeping that up and running, and the costs associated with that. Or, it's potentially seeing the sophistication of tooling that, like, a dedicated provider can afford to invest that realistically, you're never going to invest in on your own, right? Like, stuff like live profiling is deeply non-trivial to implement. [laughs] I think especially once people get some experience with a product like Datadog, they start thinking about, like, okay, how much value are we actually getting out of doing this on our own versus using a more off-the-shelf product? I don't know if we've been doing it post-COVID. But I remember pre-COVID...so Datadog has a huge presence at re:Invent and the other similar major cloud provider things. And I remember for a few years at re:Invent, you know, we obviously had, like, the giant 60x60 booth in the main expo floor, where we were giving demos and whatnot. But they also would have...AWS would do this, like, I think they call it the interactive hall where companies could have, like, more hands-on booths, and you had, like, a whole spectrum of stuff. And there were, like, some companies just had, like, random, like, RC car setups or Lego tables, just stuff like that. But we actually did a setup where there was a booth of, I think, like, six stations. People would step up, and they would race each other to solve a kind of faux incident using Datadog. The person who would solve it first would win a switch. I think we gave away a huge number of switches as part of that, which at first I was like, wow, that seems expensive. [laughs] But then later, you know, I was mostly working the main booth at that re:Invent. So by the, like, Wednesday and Thursday of re:Invent, I'd have people walking up to the main booth being like, "Hey, so I did the thing over at the Aria. And now I installed Datadog in prod last night, and I have questions." I was like, oh, okay. [laughs] So, I think just, like, the power of, like, getting that hands-on time, and using some of the tools, and understanding the difference there is what kind of gets a lot of people to kind of change their mind there. [laughs] VICTORIA: You'd get me with a switch right now. I kind of want one, but I don't want to buy one. SEAN: [laughs] WILL: Same. [laughs] VICTORIA: Because I know it'll take up all my time. SEAN: Uh-huh. That's fair. [laughs] VICTORIA: But I will try to win one at a conference for sure. I think that's true. And it makes sense that because your product is often going with clients that don't have these practices yet, that as soon as you give them exposure to it, you see what you can do with it, that becomes a very powerful selling tool. Like, this is the value of the product, right? [laughs] SEAN: Yeah, there is also something we see, and I think most of our kind of peers in the industry see is, very often, people come in initially looking for and using a single product, like, you know, infrastructure, metrics, or logs. And then, as they see that and see where that touches other parts of the product, their usage kind of grows and expands over time. I would obviously defer to our earnings calls for exact numbers. But generally speaking, more or less kind of half of our new business is usually expanded usage from existing customers as opposed to new customers coming in. So, I think there's also a lot of just kind of organic discovery and building of trust over time that happens there, which is interesting. VICTORIA: One of my favorite points to make, which is that SRE sounds very technical and, like, this really extreme thing. But to make it sound a little more easier, is that it is how you validate that the user experience is what you expect it to be. [laughs] I wonder if you have any other thoughts you want to add to that, just about, like, SRE and user experience and how that all connects for real business value. SEAN: I think a lot of places where, you know, we've both seen internally ourselves and with customers is, you know; obviously, different companies operate in different models and whatnot. Where people have seen success is where, you know, people with formal SRE titles or team names can kind of be coming in as just kind of another perspective on the various kind of things that teams are trying to drive towards. The places reliability is successfully integrated is when they can kind of make that connection that you were talking about. It's, like, obviously, everybody should go take their vitamins, but, like, what actual value is coming from this, right? Nobody wants to have outages, but, like, to do the work to invest in reliability, often, like, it can be hard to say, like, okay, what's the actual difference between before and after? Having people who can help draw those connections and help weigh those trade-offs, I think, can definitely be super helpful. But it is generally much more effective, I think, in my experience, when it does come from that perspective of, like, what value are we providing? What are we trading off as part of this? As opposed to just, well, you should do this because it's the right thing to do, kind of a moralistic perspective. [laughs] But, I don't know, how do you all kind of end up having that conversation with your customers and clients? VICTORIA: That's exactly it. That's the same. It's starting that conversation about, like, well, what happens when this experience fails, which designers don't necessarily think about? What's, like, the most important paths that you want a user to take through your application that we want to make sure works? And when you tie it all back there, I think then when the developers are understanding how to create those metrics and how to understand user behavior, that's when it becomes really powerful so that they're getting the feedback they need to do the right code, and to make the right changes. Versus just going purely on interviews [laughs] and not necessarily, like, understanding behavior within the app. I think that starts to make it clear. SEAN: Part of that, I think that's been an interesting experience for us is also just some of the conversation there around, like, almost the flip side of, when are you investing potentially too much in that, right? Because, like, especially after a certain point, the cost of additional gains grows exponentially, right? Each one of those nines gets more and more expensive. [laughs] And so, having the conversation of, like, do you actually need that level of reliability, or, like, is that...just like what you're saying. Like, you know, kind of giving some of that context and that pressure of, like, yeah, we can do that, but, like, this is what it's going to cost. Is that what you want to be spending your money on? Kind of things can also be an interesting part of that conversation. VICTORIA: That's a really good point that, you know, you can set goals that are too high [laughs] and not necessary. So, it does take a lot of just understanding about your data and your users to know what are acceptable levels of error. I think the other thing that you can think about, too, like, what could happen, and we've seen it happen with some startups, is that, like, something within the app is deeply broken, but you don't know. And you just think that you're not having user engagement, or that users are signing off, or, like, you know, not opening the app after the first day. So, if you don't have any way to really actively monitor it and you're not spending money on an active development team, you can have some method to just be confident that the app is working and to make your life less miserable [laughs] when you have a smaller team supporting, especially if you're trying to really minimize your overhead for running an application. SEAN: Yep. It's surprisingly hard to know when things are broken sometimes. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yes, and then extremely painful when you find out later [laughs] because that's when it's become a real problem, yeah. I wonder, are there any other questions you have for me or for Will? SEAN: How big of an organization is thoughtbot at this time? VICTORIA: Close to 75 people? We're, yeah, between the Americas and the [inaudible 38:31] region. So, that's where we're at right now, yeah. SEAN: Nice. At that size, like, and I guess it sounds like you're pretty heavily distributed, so maybe some of this doesn't happen as much, but, like, one of the things I definitely remember...so, when I joined Datadog, it was probably about 500 people. And I think we're just under 5,000 now. There are definitely some points where there were surprisingly, like, physical aspects to where it became a problem of just, like, where certain teams didn't fit into a room anymore. [laughs] Like, I had surprise in the changes in that, like, dynamic. I'm curious if you've all kind of run into any kind of, I don't know, similar interesting thresholds or changes as you've kind of grown and evolved. WILL: I will say this, we're about 100, I think, Victoria. VICTORIA: Oh, okay, we're 100 people. I think, you know, I've only been at thoughtbot for just over a year now. And my understanding of the history is that when we were growing before COVID, there's always been a very intentionality about growth. And there was never a goal to get to a huge size or to really grow beyond just, like, a steady, profitable growth. [laughs] So, when we were growing in person, there were new offices being stood up. So, we, you know, maybe started out of New York and Boston and grew to London. And then, there was Texas, and I think a few other ones that started. Then with COVID, the decision was made to go fully remote, and I think that's opened up a lot of opportunities for us. And from my understanding in the previous and the past, is that there's a big shift to be fully remote. It's been challenging, where I think a lot of people miss some of the in-person days, and I'm sure it's definitely lonely working remote all day by yourself. So, you have to really proactively find opportunities to see other people and to engage remotely. But I think also, we hire people from so many different places and so much different talent, and then, also, you know, better informs our products and creates a different, you know, energy within the company that I think is really fun and really exciting for us now. WILL: Yeah, I would agree with that because I think the team that I'm on has about 26 people on the Lift Off team. And we're constantly thinking of new ways to get everyone involved. But as a developer, me myself being remote, I love talking to people. So, I try to be proactive and, like, connect with the people I'm working with and say, "Hey, how can I help you with this?" Let's jump in this room and just work together, chat together, and stuff like that, so... And it has opened the door because the current project that I'm on, I would never have had an opportunity to be on. I think it's based in Utah, and I'm in South Florida. So, there's just no way if we weren't remote that I'd been a part of it. So... SEAN: Nice. And I can definitely appreciate that. I remember when we first started COVID lockdown; I think, at that point, Datadog was probably about...Datadog engineering was probably about 30% remote, so certainly a significant remote contingent but mixed. But my teams were pretty remote-heavy. So, in some ways, not a lot changed, right? Like, I think more people on my team were, like, who are all these other people in my house now instead of [laughs], I mean, just transition from being in an office to working from home. But I do remember maybe, like, about six months in, starting to feel, yeah, some of the loneliness and the separation of just, like, not being able to do, like, quarterly team meetups or stuff like that. So, it's definitely been an interesting transition. For context, at this point, we kind of have a hybrid setup. So, we still have a significant kind of full-time remote contingent, and then four people who are in office locations, people joining for about three days a week in office. So, it's definitely an interesting transition and an interesting new world. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious how you find the tech scene in Denver versus New York or if you're engaging in the community in the same way since you moved. SEAN: There definitely is some weirdness since COVID started [laughs] broadly [inaudible 42:21]. So, I moved here in 2020. But I'd been coming out here a lot before that. I helped to build an office here with Bitly. So, I was probably coming out once a quarter for a bunch of years. So, one parallel that is finally similar is, like, in both places, it is a small world. It doesn't take that long for you to be in that community, in either of those communities and start running into the same people in different places. So, that's always been [inaudible 42:42] and especially in New York. New York is a city of what? 8, 9 million people? But once you're working in New York tech for a few years and you go into some meetups, you start running into the same people, and you have one or two degrees [inaudible 42:52] to a lot of people, surprisingly quickly. [laughs] So, that's similar. But Denver probably is interesting in that it's definitely transplant-heavy. I think Denver tends to check the box for, like, it was part of why Bitly opened an office here and, to a degree, Datadog as well. I think of like, you know, if you're trying to recruit people and you previously were mostly recruiting in, like, New York or Silicon Valley; if you're based in New York, and you're trying to recruit somebody from Silicon Valley, and part of why they're looking for a new gig is they're burned out on Silicon Valley, asking them to move to New York probably isn't all that attractive. [laughs] But Denver is different enough in that in terms of kind of being a smaller city, easier access to nature, a bunch of that kind of stuff, that a lot of times we were able to attract talent that was a much more appealing prospect. [laughs] You'll see an interesting mix of industries here. One of the bigger things here is there's a very large government and DOD presence here. I remember I went to DevOps Days Rockies, I think, a few years ago. There was a Birds of a Feather session on trying to apply DevOps principles in air-gapped networks. That was a very interesting conversation. [laughs] VICTORIA: That's interesting. I would not have thought Colorado would be a big hub for federal technology. But there you go, it's everywhere. WILL: Yeah. SEAN: Denver metro, I think, is actually the largest presence of federal offices outside of the D.C. metro. VICTORIA: That's interesting. Yeah, I'm used to trying to recruit people into D.C., and so, it's definitely not the good weather, [laughs], not a good argument in my favor. So, I just wanted to give you a final chance. Anything else you'd like to promote, Sean? SEAN: Generally, not super active on social things these days, but you can find whatever I have done at seanoc.com, S-E–A-N-O-C.com for the spelling. And otherwise, if you're interested in some engineering content and hearing about some of those kind of bleeding edge challenges that I was mentioning before, I would definitely check out the Datadog engineering blog. There's lots of kind of really interesting content there on both, you know, things we've learned from incidents and interesting projects that we're working on. There's all kinds of fun stuff there. VICTORIA: That makes me think I should have asked you more questions, Sean. [laughs] No, I think it was great. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'll definitely check all that stuff out. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Sean O'Connor.
Tune in today as Adrian, Rob, and Lance talk about news of a recent interest rate drop in an article from CNBC “Mortgage demand jumps nearly 28% in one week, as interest rates drop to lowest point in months” Published Wed, Jan 18 2023 7:00am. We'll share our thoughts on this article and then take a deep dive on the best strategies for buying and refinancing in this changing market. Links & Resources Mentioned: Referenced Article: https://bit.ly/interest-rates-drop ROI Disclosures: https://tinyurl.com/msywepvw Adrian Schermer @ Directors Mortgage: https://www.directorsmortgage.com/loan-officer/adrian-schermer Rob Delavan @ Delavan Realty: https://delavan-realty.com Lance Johnson @ ROI Financial: https://roi-fa.com Events: https://roi-fa.com/events Transcript: Adrian Schermer: Hello future millionaires and welcome back to the get rich slow podcast. We're your hosts, Adrian Shermer, Rob Delavan and Lance Johnson. Robert Delavan: Good morning, fellas. Lance Johnson: Good morning everybody. Robert Delavan: Nice to see you, bright and early. Adrian Schermer: Good morning guys. Adrian Schermer: Today we are going to be digging into a fresh topic. You can reach us online at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Amazon, and along with a number of other streaming platforms. We're also on YouTube if you'd like to see our smiling faces. If you'd like to get links to all of this, including our own personal sites, you can go to getrichslowpodcast.com for more information. And today's episode is about mortgage demand. We've seen a jump in mortgage demand as interest rates are dropping. This is going to reference a CNBC article. The link is in the show notes, as well as a quick short link that you can get to through Bitly. And it's pretty interesting. Robert Delavan: Yeah, and this is the end of January, right? So 2023. It's, it applies to right now but what's really interesting is when it's really the concepts that matter here, because rates are gonna go up and down. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, this is real fresh bleeding edge data. I'm usually more interested in seeing how the ninth month, I'm sorry, 90 day rolling averages end up looking. But it's an indicator as we enter a new season, you know, as we break past the holiday, this is as much data as we have so far and we're seeing some indicators. So what are those indicators? Well, there's an increase in mortgage demand by 28% in just one week. As interest rates drop, it's the lowest point it's been in months. Applications to purchase a home increased by 25% week to week, and while that can be a bit anecdotal, again, we want to look at larger totals when we talk about data like this, or I like to. It's still an indicator of where things are trending at least. We'll see how it shapes out. But let's take an aside real quick. Rob, you had a success story to share with us? Robert Delavan: Oh yeah, so my mom actually took a fall three, four weeks ago, Lance, Adrian, you both were very aware of it. Thank you guys for the well wishes there. And just, and initially we thought she really hurt her knee. It really ended up just being kind of a bruise. She's in her seventies, you know, and had some health issues, and this morning was the first time in about three and a half weeks that she came over and... helped me get the kids ready and I took off and had business meetings and all that sort of thing. And she's driving and she's mobile. And she said she she walked around Fred Myers yesterday. And she wasn't sore today. So just a big personal milestone, you know, you guys both know her well and... Adrian Schermer: Such a sweet lady. Robert Delavan: you know, just wishing good things for Marsha and so forth. So Adrian Schermer: Yes. Robert Delavan: that's all, big success story, and my kids were very happy to see her this morning. Adrian Schermer: Oh, I bet. Lance Johnson: Well, mobility is half the battle in retirement, right? So you start to lose mobility and depression sets in and people get heavier and all sorts of medical stuff. So mobility is one of the biggest things that we see with clients. So, Adrian Schermer: Yeah, even if it's a shuffle, if you can keep your legs under you, keep em moving. Robert Delavan: Yep. Hey, just, just yeah exactly. Keep moving. Love it. All right. Keep us, keep us moving fellas. Lance Johnson: So, well, let's start off with the first question to Adrian. With interest rates rates dropping, what does that mean for somebody who recently got a loan? Adrian Schermer: Oh man, you missed out man. Terrible time. You shouldn't have done it. No, I'm just kidding. What it means for someone who's getting a loan is that we're seeing a trend in the direction that you probably were hoping for. We had this great saying that I loved kicking around, marry the home, date the rate. So especially for a lot of buyers, they were looking at their payment as, you know, obviously you gotta qualify for it, you shouldn't grab something that's above budget, but, you may have a lower payment in the future. This may be a temporary thing, you know, based on market indicators and what experts are saying. We were kind of at a high point. So where rates are right now, it's probably not big enough, we'll chew into this more in a second, to justify doing a refinance. But things are moving in the right direction and you should probably be checking out, hey, where's the market at at least every couple of months to try to figure out where that sweet spot is for refi. Robert Delavan: Is there a general rule, and this is actually really Lance and Adrian, like, you know, do you kind of like, is it 1%? is it 2%? You know, and obviously like APR and those conversations go into this, but let's assume everything is equal apples to apples when you start thinking about that, or at least the antennae go up. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, I've heard the 2% rule. What have you heard, Lance? What's the... Lance Johnson: Usually the numbers are 1% when you're doing rate term to rate term versus Adrian Schermer: Mm-hmm. Lance Johnson: somebody does a remodel, they got credit card debts on that remodel, you know, and they have a line of credit and that interest rate is higher versus the current rate, but then the fixed rates have dropped whereas, you know, then that's a little different because now you're consolidating. And then, you know, sometimes like we looked at today, you know. Sometimes 15 year rates and 30 year rates are really far apart. Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Lance Johnson: And so, you know, you could go to that 15 year and really save some money on the backend and it's not going to crush your front end monthly payment. And then sometimes those are interest rates or 25 basis points where, you know, you're better off doing a 30 year and then making payments like that. So it really depends on the spread between those 30 and 15 year and, you know, getting 1% or more so that the fixed closing costs don't really eat away at your refinancing benefits. Robert Delavan: So I'll sum up the concept that you really need to be talking to your financial advisor, your lender, you have to have a plan in place. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, yeah, your mileage may vary right? This is like our phrase of the month but you've got to do the math Lance Johnson: We try to figure out the break even we got to figure out, you know, how long is it you're going to break even on the two mortgages? You know, you could be four years out and who knows, you might not even be in this house. So you then have to figure out the upfront cost versus cost over time scenario. So yeah, I think just having sorts of conversations in refinance after you just did a loan and then usually you have to wait, what, six months to 12 months before you can do that again. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, Robert Delavan: Would you mind, one of you, mind kind of playing out the Reader's Digest 45 second payback period, number of months, interest rate variance, that sort of thing, with actual numbers? Just kind of play with this concept of if you're saving $100. Anyway, I don't want to do it for you guys, but you know the drill. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, and so I'm going to have to play only with hypotheticals here because Robert Delavan: Yes. Adrian Schermer: it's it's there's going to be so much variance, and if you watch some of our episodes about what closing costs consist of, then you'll know this could be thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in range, depending on how you decide to do it, if you decide to buy a lower rate, etc but usually the math is honestly pretty simple. Closing costs divided by savings is one way that we calculate break even point. Generally, if it's less than a couple of years, it can be good, but Lance, I think you might speak with more wisdom to this is the idea that, you know, we saw this as well after 2009 and entering that when rates were lower, we had people where they would come and hop and they would do like three refinances in a row because rates would drop again and then they would do it, and again, and again, and there's a certain point where you do it, and then you do the next one so soon that you, you burn up the money that you saved in the refi, because you got to pay closing costs all over again. Lance Johnson: Yeah, I mean, it is a simple calculation of cost minus the savings per month. You know how many months before you break even and you know, and you have to kind of weigh, do I take a slightly higher rate if they've come down significantly to not do an upfront cost? And it really depends on are you in this house for the next 15 years or, you know, you're in it for the next five years and you're moving on. And that might sway what rate you take versus what upfront cost you take. Adrian Schermer: And I got to say, Lance, you raised a huge point earlier. The 15-year, I cannot stress enough, if you got used to that 30-year payment, if you locked in above 7% when you bought your house, and then a 15-year is potentially in, let's say, the fives, or if we see that slide into the fours .Yes you're going to pay more per month because of the 15-year pay term, right? Like a 15-year, if it was apples to apples, but when you factor in. a difference in rate that is potentially 2% or more, you may find that it is; that delta is much, much smaller, and you might go; I think that's advice that I'm definitely going to be giving my clients when they call for that refi is: Hey, let me just pass you the numbers for a 15 and consider the concept, especially if you're dropping mortgage insurance in the process, let's say, you bought that house with less than 20% down back when rates were, you know, well above 7%, and maybe you didn't do a buy down because you you had this belief with the rest of the market that hey, rates are going to make their way back down. Comparing to a 15 year, I think it's gonna be a super, super smart decision for some people to make, hey, I'm used to this bigger payment. Why don't I turn this into time off my loan instead of a lower payment at this point? Robert Delavan: Yeah, and I've heard Lance give that advice quite a bit over the years is, eh, you want to look at this. What's your cashflow situation? And then of course it comes into like, you know, um, what's your income? Do you have tolerance for that within your budget? Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Robert Delavan: You know, there's a whole domino effect and that's the, I guess that's the piece. And Lance, I think I jumped it on a little bit here on question two for you, but Adrian Schermer: That's good, we rolled through it. Robert Delavan: kind of talking about Adrian Schermer: Lance has taught me to love the 15 year again. I love it. Robert Delavan: kind of penciling out here, so of what works. So. Lance Johnson: Yes, that's been two episodes in a row that you've gone into question two. You… Adrian Schermer: We're just so organic guys. Lance Johnson: yes, yes. Robert Delavan: I get so excited. Lance Johnson: I think we, I think we did answer question two. What sort of savings are we talking about? It does it pencil out if you add closing costs and other fees and you know, you gotta, you gotta look at my big thing is numbers don't lie. Just people lie about numbers. Adrian Schermer: Hahaha Lance Johnson: …and so I think you just let the numbers speak for themselves. Robert Delavan: Right. Lance Johnson: I think a good advisor will point out what is a 30, what is a 15, what is a 5, what is a 7/1 ARM, 10/1 ARM, and those numbers are always changing. So like a month and a half ago, the 5 and 7/1 ARMs were very attractive over the 15 and 30 years, and so 15 and 30 were similar, 5/1 ARMs, 7/1 ARMs were very attractive. Now here we are a month and a half later, and the 15 year's really attractive. and the 7 and 5/1 ARM is really not much different than the 30. And so those change on a week to week basis… Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Lance Johnson: …depending on, you know, the companies are looking what their revenue streams and what they're looking for for portfolio. You know, they package these things Robert Delavan: Mm-hmm. Adrian Schermer: That's a great point, yeah. Lance Johnson: And so, you know, you just got to kind of look at all four and let the numbers speak for themselves, and you know, if you're going to spend cost on on closing costs, you know, try to wrap in as much of the debt, if you have consumer debt, or other things to free up cashflow. And then there's a whole planning sequence that goes along with consolidated debt and stuff. Robert Delavan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Adrian Schermer: Yeah, that's why I've liked working with you, Lance, too, because it's there's a core concept that I want to throw out there. I as a lender, I can't tell you what to do. I could present you a 30 year, 15 year, maybe a couple rate options for both, and you and I, we've worked with clients before who I have felt have chosen the, air quotes, wrong answer. And it just was because it didn't pencil out. Maybe it's buying too much rate, you know, spending too much on an interest rate, in my opinion based on the turn time they have for a property. Having someone like Lance, who is is more obligated towards giving you the advice for your end financials who has the fiduciary responsibility to tell you which path seems the right based on your goals, and just have a second sounding board because at the end of the day, if a client pushes for one product or another, whether I think it's a good idea or not is not my… I can give my opinion and nothing else, at the end of the day, I take the order, and that's part of the way that I'm regulated. I'm not supposed to push people. I'm not supposed to say no, you know, if they want to make a decision like that. Lance Johnson: Yeah, Adrian Schermer: And Lance, I know you've helped a lot of people. Lance Johnson: and I also know in talking with a lot of mortgage brokers, not necessarily you, you're not going to push things, but you're not going to disclose all things. I think you do a better job, but a lot of mortgage broker, here's the two options you have. Well, they have more than two options. It just takes a lot more work to present all options, and so sometimes I like to give more than two options because if you're not pushing something, but you're only given two options and they have 10 options. You're not really disclosing all the options they have. Adrian Schermer: Mm-hmm. Lance Johnson: You're really kind of focusing, narrowing them down to a direction you want to go in. I'm not saying you do this, I've seen this with other mortgage people. And so I often like to throw in ones I know they're not going to do just so they can see what the market is bearing, and so then it's easier to make a decision that this is the better option when you see all options or as many as you can. I mean, sometimes I think you get into paralysis by analysis and some clients get that, and so too many options really debilitates them. Nut too little doesn't give them all the options, so I try to flush those out a little bit. Alright, so Rob, let me give you a question. If I'm a buyer who's on the fence, would now be a good time to purchase? Yes or no? Robert Delavan: Well, it depends, your mileage may vary, right? Yes, if you're in a good spot, good employment, looking for, hey, I just couldn't pay as much or didn't want to pay as much for a home 12 months ago when the market was very different and a seller's market. And now it's a buyer's market or at least the trends are going that way, nationally, and the, we're getting deals. You know, we're able to get closing cost concessions, we're able to get, you know, prices where we're not competing against 30 different; 30 different offers or you know hundred thousand over to get the property and that sort of thing. The flip side of that, the counter argument is, well rates are higher, so the monthly payments more. So, you know and we've and we've covered that, now rates have dropped and we address that a bit in this episode, and then the concept of dating the rate versus buying the house and having a plan in place. So you know the question is, is, I hate to say this, yes and no, or maybe. With that said, what really pushes things over the edge is; where are they at in a life cycle, in addition to their financials and their finances and that sort of thing. Regardless of the, you actually used the term Lance, which I've used before on the market the last six months, it was kind of as rates like really spiked from the threes to the sevens over the last 12 months there was almost analysis paralysis by the entire market in real estate, just like, you know, what the hell do we do? Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Robert Delavan: And payments are so much higher and prices haven't come down that much, and, you know, everybody's just kind of was sitting and waiting and volume in the market just, you know, went through the floor. And now with this, the data that we have, which we quoted and so forth, in this article that we were discussing, things are jumping back up, and in theory, when more people enter into the buying market, that's going to affect demand. So in theory, that would then improve prices or at least stabilize things and kind of pop them up for the spring, which is normal. During that six months or so where the market was, eh you know, kind of sitting, hanging, paralyzed market if you will. People were still, you know, having kids. People were being born, people were dying, people were changing jobs, getting jobs, losing jobs. You know, getting married, all of the things that drive the housing market to do transactions, those were still happening, even though we were seeing a lot less volume. So people were sitting and waiting. Well, at some point, and I think we saw a little bit of it with a little bit of interest rate pressure, there's this, you know, pent up demand a little bit. So we'll see where that goes. It's gonna be fun. I wanna do multiple, well frankly, we'll do multiple kind of state of the market updates and have these types of discussions and podcasts throughout the year of, hey, what's happening in the short term versus the 90 day, six months, 12 months, that sort of thing. But right now I see people jumping in, especially with the data that's been presented here, and my brokerage is seeing an uptick in volume. Buyers are jumping back in. Sellers are saying, ‘well, maybe this spring will be a little better'. We're looking at all of those data points. But the life events aren't changing. Or I guess I should say the life events are still happening. And Lance, you see that every day, I mean… Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Lance Johnson: Yeah, well, I mean, Ithink I tell clients that, you know, we're not probably going to get the deals like we did in 08, 09. Robert Delavan: Right. Lance Johnson: There was, you know, some people might claim that there was felt like there was some fraudulent activity around the, you know, different institutions and stuff. Robert Delavan: Sure. Lance Johnson: and so, you know, fair disclosure and transparency wasn't quite there. Adrian Schermer: Yeah. Robert Delavan: Right. Lance Johnson: And so you had six, six and a half million people lose their homes, which was unprecedented in America. So we're not going to have something like that. But what you are going to have is are they going to be layoffs? Yes, they're already happening. Robert Delavan: Yes, right. Lance Johnson: Are people going to be moving? Yes. Robert Delavan: Yes. Lance Johnson: You know, are they going to have to give up a old interest rate of 2.625 because they got moved from Portland to Nashville or whatever. You know. Robert Delavan: Mm-hmm. Lance Johnson: There's all sorts of stuff. What I'm telling clients is you know selling a weeks with… Robert Delavan: Right. Lance Johnson: …you know 25 offers more planning involved Robert Delavan: Mm-hmm. Lance Johnson: and if it's a rental and you have laws protecting and you have to give disclosures of when they move out and timing of everything's gunna take place and so I tell people get looking, find out where you want to be, do a little bit ahead of time. I just think the cycle's longer right now. Adrian Schermer: Mm-hmm. Robert Delavan: Yep. Yep. Lance Johnson: But when you find that place, you're still gonna have to be ready to act because those diamond and roughs are gonna be there. Robert Delavan: Mm-hmm. Lance Johnson: Good deal, somebody willing, somebody that has to move and they're looking for that first buyer and you're the first or the 15th? Robert Delavan: Yeah, Lance Johnson: …you know, so. Robert Delavan: yeah, and we're getting back to that, and what's probably a good point to tie a bow on that, Lance, is a normal market is balanced. I guess this will probably kind of bring us into the final thoughts here. A normal market is, they say, about six months supply is normal versus we've experienced less than two months, and these crazy hot markets and all of these things, nd at the end of the day, like, ah, we can get better deals, we can negotiate better deals. There are those opportunities out there, and I think that's probably the biggest message is, be ready for that opportunity, you know, and I appreciate you pointing that out. You know, the client has to be ready. Adrian, that client has to be pre-approved. Their finances have to be done you know Adrian Schermer: Yeah, yeah, I would share that opinion with you, and it should vary to, depending on situation. If you're thinking to yourself, I need to, I need to own a house for two years and then I'm out of this town. Maybe this wouldn't be the best time because like you're saying, Lance, you know, we may have a push from unemployment and that may impact values. If you plan to own this house for 5, 7, 15 years, you know, like your kids are going to graduate high school before you move out of this place. Buying represents potentially a lower risk to you because it matters less what happens a year down the road. What matters more is what the value is gonna be at the end of that 15 years. So playing the waiting game and gambling on what the market is going to do, I would probably say if it's the right time for you, don't make that gamble. Instead, just if the right house is there, take advantage like you said Rob of the fact that it is leaning more towards a buyer's advantage market where you can get seller credits, where you can get a little more negotiation, where you don't have to send in an offer without seeing it, that's overestimated value, to enter into a 40 offer feeding frenzy you might be in a more comfortable shopping position, which I personally and I think you guys would agree. I find that more ethical just on the front of, of like it not being a high pressure sales environment necessarily. When you're making a six figure purchase, you can maybe sleep on it and then make an offer and not feel like you're losing position because you didn't slap money on the table the second you walked in the door. Robert Delavan: Yeah, it's awful nice to be able to have a little more even bargaining at the table, so to speak. So final thoughts here, that's a wrap for our episode. I thank everybody for tuning in. We have some exciting stuff moving forward that we're very much preparing for this year, for 2023. As always, our websites are here, we have delavan-realty.com, roi-fa.com, and Adrian at directorsmortgage.com, and then we do have, as always, our disclosures and the specifics of the, if you wanna look up that article, go ahead and jump into that. That'll be in the show notes as well as the PowerPoint. Thank you all for listening, and we'll catch you next time on the Get Rich Slow Podcast. Thank you fellas.
Screenlife = Screamlife. In this second installment of their found footage series, Steph Grossman and Bianca Pérez discuss how recent innovations in the genre tap into our internet addictions and round-the-clock "screenlife" to create uniquely contemporary horror stories. Screamlife found footage films discussed include: Megan is Missing (2011), Unfriended (2015), Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), Searching (2018), Host (2020), and *sigh* Dashcam (2022). Also discussed: modern found footage in the form of online urban legends (Slenderman), Youtube videos (Marble Hornets and The Backrooms), and iconic found footage-y posts found on Twitter ("Dear David") and Reddit ("Pen Pal"). SHOW NOTES Gemini Gospel | Bianca Pérez's debut poetry chapbook, published by Host Publications. Can't buy right now? Shelve it on Goodreads! Likeness | Steph Grossman's latest horror-tinged short story, published in Joyland Magazine. Free to read. Bitly link: bit.ly/mirrorstory Basement Girls Podcast Store on Bookshop.org | bookshop.org/shop/basementgirls --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/basementgirls/support
Renegade Thinkers Unite: #2 Podcast for CMOs & B2B Marketers
This is a Tuesday Tips episode where you will hear host Drew Neisser, CMOs, and other B2B experts share their hard-earned wisdom and fresh marketing insights in a bitesize format. Featuring: Grant Johnson of Billtrust, Jean Sabbagh of Equisoft, Peeyush Dubey of TheMathCompany, Alex Diamond of Carbon Mapper, Marshall Poindexter of OpenEye Scientific, Tara Robertson of Bitly, Amy Messano of Altair, and Katrina Klier To see the video versions, follow Drew Neisser on LinkedIn or visit our YouTube channel—The Renegade Marketing Hub! And if you're a B2B CMO, check out our thriving community: https://cmohuddles.com/
Websites and Apps We Recommend That Musicians Use, Because We Use Them. Episode 573: We love these episodes… our favorite websites and apps that musicians should be using, because we use them! What's In Store Music, Plaympe, Publer, Canva, Disco, WeTransfer, Bandsintown, YouTube Community and Bitly. Download Jay Gilbert's Release Planner : https://bit.ly/39EDAyD Download Michael […]
Questions covered in this episode: 1:25 Opening Question: What led Claire and you to start ‘Forget the Funnel'?3:50 Can you talk a little bit about the book that is derived from your consultancy ‘Forget the Funnel'?9:10 Where do you recommend even starting with customer research?18:53 How you've taken the crawl, walk, run, run approach and learning from these insights what survey or interview methods that you've seen that work best?26:16 How you think about then taking the segments that you're learning from prioritizing some segments versus maybe other segments, and then actually operationalizing that?32:34 Who you think should be the champion of customer life growth internally within a company. Should it be maybe its own independent team? Should it be a part of an existing team?36:50 Can just share one piece of insight that has served you well throughout your product marketing career?Want more insights from Georgiana? Check out her Sharebird Profile.Looking to connect? You can find Georgiana here on LinkedIn.
If you like passive income, you probably want to promote affiliate partners. But there are a few things you want to know as you get started, or get more serious about generating affiliate revenue. These 4 mistakes could prevent you from supporting your partners - and your audience from support you can provide. Using UGLY URLS to Promote Affiliate Partners Ugly URLs in social media posts or your emails. I'd like to say this is a rookie mistake but I see a lot of experienced entrepreneurs doing it too. Either their VA doesn't know to ask, or the entrepreneur isn't aware there's a better way. Back in the day people used Bitly for things like this. But with Pretty Links on word press it's easier than ever. And then once you set it, you're not vulnerable to say a platform change that your affiliate partner makes, deeming every single blog post where you put that link broken. It won't go anywhere. SO not only won't it make you sales, it will make you frustrated visitors to your site. Save yourself the trouble. A Pretty Link not only makes an ugly url pretty, it is the one link you'll use all the time when mentioning that product or service you're promoting. Then if you need to, you can go in and change the URL there - in one single place and it updates all the places you've used the pretty link. Include All Your Affiliate Partners in a Single Email I'll admit I come close to doing this once a year every year. That's when we share the Flipping 50 Gift Guide at the holidays. In our Gift Guide we're selective about what we'll include and choose different categories like “stocking stuffers” or “budget-friendly” or “the Victoria's Secret Diamond Bra” equivalent. But there's no denying that any other time of year when your customer ISN'T buying not just for themselves but for a wide variety of people they want to spend a wide variety of money on, this would be a mistake. Now, I DO have a resources page. It's where I share things I'm asked about over and over again. It's where I share things I use and affiliate for and things I use and don't affiliate for, I just am answering the same question so frequently that it's become easier to refer them to one URL, and you guessed it, it's a memorable pretty link: flippingfifty.com/resources. Not Really Investing Time and Energy in Promoting This one is going to tie right into the last so I'm going to lump them together for explanation's sake. If you agree or ask - to promote someone and then all you do is write a blog post and leave the promotion sit there… without actively sharing the post regularly, or driving traffic to it, or including the affiliate promotion in an email, you don't really have your heart in it. If you have hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site regularly, that's one thing. But if you're struggling to hit 5000 visitors to your website a month, chances are that hidden blog post isn't going to attract visitors frequently enough or at the time they need to be there to make any difference at all. If you ask to promote or are invited and agree, do your best. Make a plan in your promotional calendar. With summits for instance, some of you fitness pros listening promoted for the What, When & Why to Exercise for Women 40+ event. And you earned 50% of the sale when people bought the course and or the recordings which was about $34-$60 depending on which they did. If you told people (busy people) about it once on social… 5% if you're lucky, saw it. And they're not, scrolling back through old posts to find your information. So usually a quality promotion is 2 or 3 emails, social media posts, maybe hosting the event host on your social media live. That's really making an effort to make the most sales and support the affiliate and your audience with something they need. Spreading Your Affiliates too Thin One of the reasons you may not have promoted with a consorted effort is because you said yes when it should have been no. You were in the middle of your own promotion and you couldn't promote something else too. Or you were trying to promote several things at once which means no one really gets the attention they deserve. A couple guidelines for affiliates for me. I would rather promote really really well partners who I really believe in. And sometimes it doesn't work. RIght now for instance, I can't be promoting for a great affiliate partner I promoted for last year, because I'm hosting my own summit. I hated to say no, but of course she also couldn't say yes to me, it's just timing. I happen to have 3 other affiliate partners I love, one I'm working into this Resources: (Always>> the Health & Business Pros Business Scorecard: https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/scorecard Marketing to Women Course: https://www.fitnessmarketingmastery.com/copywriting-course
The way our email inboxes operate has changed dramatically with the evolution of the internet and increased awareness and caution around email scams. Email security and privacy have become a top priority for users, resulting in enhanced protection measures and more stringent regulations.With so many changes happening in the email deliverability world, several factors could be affecting your success metrics as an email marketer or a content creator. Email strategies need to be adapted according to the sender's needs and their intended audience.In this episode, Alyssa and Melissa cover how various factors impact deliverability, including email privacy protection, automatic clicks, link shorteners, VSDs, and DMARCs.Key Takeaways [03:50] - Are clicks impacted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection? [09:19] - What should I do if my clicks are inflated from non-human interactions? [11:36] - How do I reduce automatic clicks? [12:07] - Should I use link shorteners? [14:10] - Should I use a VSD (verified sending domain)? [19:00] - Should I set up a DMARC? [24:51] - What is my deliverability reputation score? [26:47] - What can I learn from Gmail's Postmaster Tools? Quotes[11:32] - “Here are a few recommendations we give to reduce automatic clicks. 1) Always use HTTPS links, not HTTP links. 2) Keep your sender reputation healthy. Make sure you're cleaning your list and listening to engaged subscribers. 3) Encourage replies to your emails. 4) Pay attention to the content of your message — make sure that itdoesn't look spammy, and that the links in your emails are not suspicious.” ~ @alyssa_dulin[13:19] - “As far as trying to reduce automatic clicks, using something like Bitly is not going to help you do that. In fact, it's probably just going to increase your chance of having automatic clicks in your email because it's not a trusted domain.” ~ @mel_lambert_ [29:45] - “These small pieces individually might not be overwhelming, but how they all work together in order to help people be the best sender possible gets tricky. So if you feel like deliverability is overwhelming or you just don't know where to start, know you're not alone. It's very understandable.” ~ @mel_lambert_ Links ConvertKit Creator Network Subscribe to the weekly Deliverability Dispatch Newsletter! Subscribe to the monthly Deliverability Defined newsletter! Postmaster Tools – Google Bitly Connect with our hosts Alyssa Dulin Melissa Lambert Stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Facebook Instagram Deliverability Defined Website Try ConvertKit's deliverability in actionIt's now free to use ConvertKit with an audience of 1,000 subscribers or less! Start building your audience and reaching their inboxes: convertkit.com/pricing.
Growing and scaling your customer base requires robust systems, teams, and playbooks that work in lockstep with one another. One of the most impactful teams, yet often least invested in, is customer marketing. From determining the ideal org structure to understanding clear KPIs, the playbook for customer marketing is still being written and is often misunderstood. In this session, we'll discuss key strategies that can be leveraged to build and scale a high-performing customer marketing team. You'll walk away with actionable insights and a clear understanding of how you can improve net dollar retention and unlock growth, regardless of your stage or size. Full video: https://youtu.be/8zgkk0DFQs8 ***** Sage Intacct is a powerful cloud-based financial management system that delivers automation around billing, accounting, and reporting. Voted market leaders by G2, Sage Intacct is the ideal Finance Solution to scale your business. Visit us at sage.com/uk/intacct. What if you could prospect in a single click? And what if that click came with accurate, intent data you need to meet your goals? Meet Klarity with One-Click Prospecting by DemandScience. Let's make your job easier. Visit demandscience.com. SaaStr Europa is back! And this time, we're heading to London for 2 fun-filled days of content, networking, and SaaS. Join us June 6th and 7th for SaaStr Europa 2023. Use code FAVE100 for $100 off tickets at saastrlondon.com. ***** Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the
Engaging in conversion rate optimization is a smart way to ensure you're marketing works harder for you. But is there a way to do this with inclusion in mind? To answer this question, I immediately knew I needed to chat with Talia Wolf, founder of GetUplift, a conversion rate optimization agency trusted by high growth brands like Teamwork, Bitly, Sprout Social, Thinkific, Mercedes, and Dario. Talia's thoughts and recommendations on this topic may surprise you. Get the transcript of the episode here Talia's 'We Optimize' Facebook group Talia on Twitter Get Uplift What inclusive brand type are you? Take this quick quiz to find out how Join the Inclusion & Marketing newsletter
Welcome back to the Think Bigger Actors Podcast! Today I pulled up a chair and chatted with Casting Director, Lisa Zambetti. She cast a slew of things, but most recently, Criminal Minds. We dove deep, and she addressed the State of the Industry right now, shared some HARD DATA on what she's seen with actors that have booked, and gave some GREAT words of wisdom on why the clothes in your closet make the best wardrobe for your characters… I'd never thought of it this way. Don't forget to stick around til the end for D-12 Coaching Shot, where I bring it all together!! ---------------- Watch the video podcast on Youtube + Subscribe: DaJuan Johnson - Think Bigger Coaching for Actors. www.thinkbiggercoaching.com Follow me on the ‘gram! @thinkbiggercoaching and @dajuanjohnson Join the Think Bigger Tribe Facebook group – where a Tribe of like-minded actors come to take their careers to the next level. #skiptheline #seeyouonset CONNECT WITH ME: Instagram: @thinkbiggercoaching TAKE THE QUIZ: www.theselftapequiz.com WHO IS THIS GUY? www.thinkbiggercoaching.com JOIN THE CLUB:www.thebookersclub.com Lisa Zambetti: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/lisazambetticasting/ Mediation: CLICK HERE https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/081-a-little-gift-of-relaxation-from-lisa/id1537283659?i=1000592530173 Bitly link: https://apple.co/3KdcCQj
Whether your company is fully remote, fully in-person, or somewhere in-between, work in 2023 (and beyond) will require healthy and robust digital ecosystems—because that's where so much work takes place day in and day out. Still, wanting a first-rate digital-first workplace and having one are two different things—and there's no one-size-fits-all roadmap to follow. Every team has different needs, so we can expect different journeys. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from each other. In this episode, Aaron and Rodney reflect on The Ready's early years (hat tip to Panera for providing O.G. office space), sharing advice and learnings from the growing pains of yesteryear. Then, as part of our partnership with Slack, they sit down with Kelsey Stevenson, Chief Product Officer at Bitly, to talk about how the growing company is evolving its own digital-first workplace and the experiments they're running to build trust, culture, collaboration—and a very active pets channel in Slack. Learn more about Bitly: bit.ly Connect with Kelsey on LinkedIn: bit.ly/3WX2waV Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to podcast@theready.com Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com
Check out the detailed field guide hereTopics discussed in this episode:01:59 - Connecting emotion and value to drive results07:18 - What to look for when building a marketing team16:26 - Prioritizing efforts on areas of biggest influence21:35 - Setting up a team of highly skilled marketers34:09 - Which partnerships are essential within your organizationThis is a Paddle production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.
ASK A QUESTION TO BE ANSWERED ON THE PODCAST: bit.ly/askcoachdani------------------------------------------------------------Hang out with me in the free Manifest It Sis Facebook Group! The Money Manifesting Magic Course can be found here: bit.ly/MMMForever Podcast listeners get $111 off with code “podcast” Get the 2022 Lifestyle Redesign Workbook Today: https://danifaust.thinkific.com/courses/lifestyle-redesign-workbookDani Faust is a certified Life Coach, Intuitive Energy Healer and Spiritual Teacher currently based in South Florida and holds certifications in EFT, Meditation, Reiki, NLP and Hypnotherapy.I'd love it if you subscribe and leave a review on apple podcasts if you dig the show!Buy Dani a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danifaust(Thank you for your generosity. I appreciate your support more than you know!)Sign Up for the FREE 5-Day Manifesting Breakthrough Challenge!!Take the mini course: Ask Believe Receive today! (bit.ly/abrminicourse)I'm reachable at: dani@okdani.comFollow @TheDaniFaust on instagram@DanielleFaust on twitterDani Faust on youtubeDaniFaust.comThank you for listening! See you next week!Welcome back to the Manifested sis podcast. If you are new, welcome . If you are an OG listener, thank you for coming back and bearing with me during my hiatus. I'm gonna call it a hiatus , but I do owe you an explanation. Um, I was just not sure if I wanted to continue with the podcast. I felt like the episodes I shared.God, I don't wanna say enough. Like there's never enough when it comes to personal development and self-improvement, spiritual awakening, like there's always more to talk about, but I felt like my little capsule of what I was doing felt complete and in my, the way my life, the way my life is set up, , I didn't know if I wanted to.Continue giving weekly episodes that were topical. That just comes from what I'm noticing or something I channeled. I wanted to serve more directly and I didn't know how I was gonna do it, but I pulled my email audience, um, and if you wanna join my email community, you can, the link is in the show notes.But I pulled them on what they wanted to hear and literally going forward. If it is not an interview episode, it's going to be either something channeled or direct q and a from a listener or a one of my Facebook group members or email community members, and I feel like that will be a great way to serve them directly and I'll listener directly as well.no one has a question that that's only, that's unique to them, right? Every question can serve more than one person, so I think that's how we're gonna move forward until it feels wrong. Right now it feels very right, . So if you wanna ask a question to be answered on the podcast, Please feel free to submit it.There is a Bitly link in the show notes for you and I look forward to, to answering. And again, these answers are coming from one woman's perspective. So I also thought that today I should probably reintroduce my
In this episode, I chat with Jeni Long and Sallee Clark AKA, Jeanallee while at TCCA. We chat about their conference experience and how their sessions helped bring magic to TCCA.This is episode 5 of 11 that was recorded at TCCA. Each episode will be released daily for 11 days so make sure you're subscribed to the podcast to hear all about TCCA. Buen Provecho! Connect With Gabriel Carrillo EdTech Bites Website: https://edtechbites.com EdTech Bites Twitter: https://twitter.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites Instagram: https://instagram.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/edtechbites EdTech Bites YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQCZcyW4BkCFQ5P2BLK61xg About Jenallee Together, Jeni Long and Sallee Clark, are known as ""Jenallee"". This dynamic duo has served collectively in education for 40+ years and are currently serving as Innovation Leaders with Castleberry ISD. Jenallee creates content to empower educators with technology tools that enhance learning on their YouTube show, TikTok channel, blog, and Twitter accounts. Jenallee published their first book with Elevate Books EDU, The Microsoft Teams Playbook, in 2021 and they are collaborating authors on the EduMatch book, Amplify Learning: A Global Collaborative. In addition, Jenallee was recently awarded the Top 30 2022 EdTech Influencer Award by EdTech K-12 Magazine. " Connect With Jenallee Jenallee's Website: https://www.thejenalleeshow.com Jenallee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jenallee1 Jenallee on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejenalleeshow/ Jenallee on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheJenalleeShow/ Jenallee's Bitly: bit.ly/jenallee
Renegade Thinkers Unite: #2 Podcast for CMOs & B2B Marketers
This is a Tuesday Tips episode where you will hear host Drew Neisser, CMOs, and other B2B experts share their hard-earned wisdom and fresh marketing insights in a bitesize format. Featuring: Patti Newcomer of FieldRoutes, Jim (JD) Dillon of Tigo Energy, Dave Bornmann of Association Analytics, Tara Robertson of Bitly, and Cary Bainbridge of ABM Industries To see the video versions, follow Drew Neisser on LinkedIn or visit our YouTube channel—The Renegade Marketing Hub! And if you're a B2B CMO, check out our thriving community: https://cmohuddles.com/
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