Podcast appearances and mentions of brian exactly

In this episode of The Building Texas Business Podcast, I spoke with Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, about the region's economic development. We explored the five major industry clusters shaping the area: maritime logistics, aerospace, tourism, healthcare, and petrochemicals. Brian shared updates on aerospace innovations at Ellington Field, including projects by Intuitive Machines and Axiom, while highlighting new opportunities in defence manufacturing. I learned about Project 11, an initiative to expand the Houston port's capacity for larger vessels. Brian explained how this infrastructure project connects to the broader transportation network, particularly the role of trucking in regional commerce. We discussed how the partnership works with legislators and industry leaders to address challenges like insurance costs and maintain economic momentum. The conversation shifted to leadership approaches and team dynamics in Texas business. Brian described how maintaining diverse projects keeps his team engaged and motivated. We explored how the Houston area supports entrepreneurs through community partnerships and mentorship programs while adapting to technological changes like AI integration. Our discussion wrapped up with a look at workforce development in the region. Brian explained how educational partnerships are building talent pipelines across industries. We covered the importance of aligning training programs with business needs while fostering collaboration between municipalities, educational institutions, and industry partners. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I spoke with Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, about the economic development in the Houston Bay Area, focusing on the recruitment, retention, and expansion of primary employers. We discussed the significant industry clusters in the region, including maritime logistics, aerospace, tourism, healthcare, and petrochemicals, and their impact on the area's economic growth. Brian highlighted developments at Ellington Field, including contributions from companies like Intuitive Machines and Axiom, as well as the emerging opportunities in defense manufacturing and procurement. The episode explored the scale and impact of the Houston port, emphasizing Project 11's role in expanding the port's capacity and the importance of logistics and innovation for regional prosperity. We delved into the leadership style necessary for motivating teams and managing diverse projects, underscoring the Texan entrepreneurial spirit characterized by ambition and a collaborative approach. Brian shared insights on the vibrant business ecosystem in Texas, driven by a skilled workforce, affordability, and a supportive community fostering partnerships and mentorship opportunities. Finally, we addressed challenges like insurance costs and the importance of regional solidarity, as well as efforts to mitigate natural disaster risks and promote responsible development in the area. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About BAHEP GUESTS Brian FreedmanAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Brian Freedman, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. Brian shares how his organization works to recruit, retain and expand primary employers in the greater Houston Bay Area region. Brian, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for joining us today. Brian: Hey, thank you, Chris. Honored to be here and great to catch up. Chris: Yes, likewise. So let's start with you. You're the president and the organizational name's kind of long it's Bay Area, houston Economic Partnership. Tell the listeners a little bit about what that organization is and what it does, to kind of put the rest of our conversation into context. Brian: Sure, so BayHEP is the short version of it. So we're the Regional Economic Development Group and kind of the, as I like to say, in the Houston-Galveston region. We're three o'clock to six o'clock on the watch, face right. So we kind of go out 225, all the municipalities and cities going out east and then going down south 45. We go a little west of 45, but really that 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock and we're really focused on how do you recruit, retain and expand primary employers in the region with the idea that if you can get great companies located here and have a group of industry clusters that are cranking away every day, that we can have a great place to live. We have great involved residents that are in this area and opportunities for the folks who live here and kind of build what the future will look like for this region. So a lot of good stuff going on and, happy to get into that a little further, we do economic development, recruitment, retention projects. So how do we get companies here? We do some grants and then we're a membership organization is how we're funded. So we have about 300 members, 19 municipal members, Harrison-Galveston County, the port, the airport system. It's really how do you get the leaders of a region to work together to advance what we're doing here. Chris: Wow, I mean that's it sounds like it's easier to say and harder to do coordinating that many organizations and trying to get everybody pulling the same direction. Brian: Yeah, it's a lot of fun and we get to work with a lot of great folks. That's how we met Chris, is that, you know, through some of our mutual connections. But yeah, you know, it's really when you can get generally like-minded folks thinking about what the future of a region will look like and pretty aligned and working towards that effort, it's more of a well, it's just fun and you can create a lot of impact and we're seeing that and I'll be happy to dive into some of the specific projects we're working down here. But I mean, you guys do it too at Boyer Miller. Y'all are working with clients all over the spectrum of types of industry and you have to adapt to what's coming up, what's at you, and be ready for that kind of stuff. Chris: Yeah, no doubt. So yeah let's jump into some stuff. Let's talk first, because when I think of your area, obviously the first thing that comes to mind is NASA and all that's going on around that, and that leads me to technology and innovation. So what are some of the emerging technologies or trends that you're seeing that are kind of helping shape the future of Texas and kind of the business opportunities, at least in your region and for Texas? Brian: Yeah, so I call it kind of the big five on the industry cluster. So everybody thinks about this area for NASA, which we love right, because it really is a crown jewel out here, but I call it the big five right Maritime and all the associated logistics with the port aerospace and aviation, so nasa, but also the great work that the airport system is doing with ellington and hobby, tourism and recreation, health care and all the hospitals that have campuses down here, and then specialty and petrochemical and the energy industry partners and every one of those ecosystem has a ton of stuff going on. So I'm happy to talk about some of those more granular. But a couple of observations. One is that often overlooked in this community and really an asset to the greater Houston region is Ellington Field, ellington Airport, the Spaceport and, if you haven't seen or heard about it, the work that's going on at the Spaceport. They have three new beautiful buildings. One is occupied by Intuitive Machines who just put the first commercial lander payload on the surface of the moon. One is occupied by a company called Axiom that's building the next generation of commercial spacesuits and the next generation space station, and Collins who do spacesuit design in our building and maintaining the current spacesuits. They've set up huge facilities down there and so new stuff coming on. But I'm equally excited about just across the runway is the 147th Reserve Group. So there's a reserve unit out there, a reserve base, and the defense opportunities are pretty exciting. So that's highlighted by the 147th. But almost every branch has a reserve unit out there, save the Space Force, and we're working on that. And so the opportunities with defense manufacturing to come out to do more work in Houston and some of their innovation units and, as mundane as it sounds, some of the procurement opportunities, because when it comes to contracting, having a group of folks here would be a great opportunity for Houston businesses to then pipeline the work that they're doing into the broader defense industry, which can be really exciting. One other thing I'll mention, chris, is if you just look at the path of predictable growth for Houston, right, it keeps going out and we see that on our freeways every day. So there are growing pains that come with that, but for our region it's that steady march down Interstate 45. And so while Clear Lake Lake City are starting to get to fully built out and we're looking at what is the next generation of building look like, what's redevelopment look like For communities Dickinson, hitchcock, santa Fe, to some extent Texas City. Although they've got quite an industrial complex too, there's still space, and so it really brings up the opportunity of we can handle big projects, and whether they're industrial or tourism, there's a lot of opportunity that comes with that. And so, as folks you know, as we get built out further and further, those cities that were, they've always been important cities for the regional ecosystem, but they become major players, and so it's exciting to be able to work with them on that stuff. Chris: Sounds like a lot of opportunity for real estate development. Both residential, retail, commercial, industrial kind of all sectors are going to be playing a big part in that ongoing development in your region. Brian: Exactly right, and part of the the fun part is, you know, every municipality has different targets of what they view their economic development to look like, and so we get to work with all those cities where some may be really focused on industrial, some may want to be bedroom communities and be focused on residential. Our task is to support those municipalities in this region and identifying good players to bring to the table. So who are people that we do want to partner with that can follow through on the projects that can complete them and make them successful? Chris: That's great. I think I saw recently in the news the state of Texas, I think it's had something along these lines, but it's like a fund for the space-related projects and I know I don't know the name and you'll help me with that, but I seem to recall the governor being in town and making some big announcement right after the first of the year. Tell us a little more about that. Brian: Recall the governor being in town and making some big announcement right after the first of the year. Tell us a little more about that, exactly, right? So last legislative session, primarily spearheaded by State Representative Greg Bonin, who's also a Princewood resident he's a neurosurgeon by day and State Representative Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee during the legislative session he had this kind of vision of how does the state become a major player in the aerospace community. That's been primarily a federal and private industry ecosystem and so under his vision and with support of the state legislature and certainly the governor, they put a bill that kind of outlined a direction for the state to engage and the resources behind it. It does a couple of things. One was it allocated about $200 million that would go to Texas A&M to build this A&M Space Institute, and they've actually located that property. It will be built on the edge of the campus of Johnson Space Center, so for those familiar with this area, right on Saturn Lane. $200 million building and, as A&M's laid it out, it will have a giant lunar rock yard and a giant Mars rock yard, with the idea that everybody who's going to be doing hardware testing to send vehicles to the moon or Mars is trying to figure out where they're going to do that testing. And it's very expensive to build, obviously. And so companies are making the decision whether they're going to build that themselves and own it or go lease it somewhere. And if they're going to lease it, where do you go to find a giant brockyard to simulate the surface of the moon? And well, the state of Texas answered that question. So what was so unique about that vision was that everybody who's in that ecosystem now wants to come through Houston Texas to do that work. And so with that comes the. You know they'll be have their lab space there, but they may need offices, they're going to be hiring people, and so you know it really is an exciting project. They had their groundbreaking right at the end of last year. I've seen surveyors out there and they think they're going to have it open in 2026. So an aggressive timeline to get that bill. The other part to that bill was they appropriated $150 million for a grant program to incentivize sort of space leadership projects in the state of Texas, and so they have to set up a whole, basically administration portion of this. So they selected nine individuals to serve on the Texas Space Commission who will review those proposals and evaluate them and make awards. Who will review those proposals and evaluate them and make awards, and then they'll also help advise the state on how they can keep their leadership position in the space industry. The first of those awards about 20 million were released a little over a week ago. A couple of them were studies for best use for really cool stuff hypersonic corridors where to be landing sites. And then another one that is to build assets and capabilities for the Space Force in El Paso to have more of a Space Force presence in the state of Texas, which is pretty exciting. So I'm optimistic about what's to come for them. Chris: Yeah, that sounds very exciting, especially the concept of the $200 million grant to A&M and what that will do to attract other businesses that might relocate somewhere else and bring them here, and then all the ancillary things around hiring and jobs et cetera. So that's very exciting news and I think it'll be just around the corner. Let's maybe talk a little bit about. You mentioned Maritime and the port, and most Houstonians People know the Houston port is a significant asset for our area. Anything going on there that's new and exciting, any kind of innovation that you see when you're working with those entities and, I guess, the port authority itself. Brian: Yeah, well, maybe the first thing when you talk about the port is you're absolutely right just how important they are to this well, to all of Houston, but to the country I mean. The scale of the port is hard to appreciate when you just look at the numbers. But the numbers are just staggering. The amount of capability that comes through there and the innovation really is on the logistics and management for how they move, whether it's container, you know, container containers, the container terminal organization and how that whole orchestra is operated, and the capabilities from there is that the crane's getting stuff unloaded, then onto the trucks or rail or whatever. The mechanism to get it out and then get it distributed to wherever it's going is pretty incredible, and so we're fortunate to have them. We just hosted the new port CEO, charlie Jenkins, who's a phenomenal leader, has a career in service of the port, is the right guy to lead that organization into their next chapter. But he made this comment kind of in passing that the port's operations are about a $3 billion a day operation, you know, and you just go like a day of economic impact that go into that. The scale is really something impressive and that's all the trickle out and secondary effects. But it's amazing, the big thing that's going on with them right now is Project 11. That's the deepening and widening of the channel that'll allow additional capacity to go in there, and it's really writing the story for what the next chapter of the port's future is and Houston as a trading hub is, and so it'll allow for larger ships to come through. The additional investments they're making will allow faster turn and movement of all the goods that are on there. So a lot of good stuff going on. I guess the last thing I'll say is anybody who's driven 225 sees all those trucks and I drive it pretty regularly and see that too and as much as nobody likes driving next to a giant 18 wheeler, every one of those trucks is jobs and prosperity for our region, and so the next time you're driving there and you see a hundred trucks going down 225, that's our economic prosperity moving around our region and, candidly, around the country. It's good stuff. Chris: It's a good point. Yeah, I mean it's. You wouldn't want the roads to be empty and no trucks moving. I mean that's not a good sign. So feel blessed that we have all that you know in our area and driving all kinds of different prospects and opportunities for people. So when you are working with, let's talk a little bit about these member organizations and all the different moving parts you know what are you doing? How do you, I guess, keep things organized and people kind of moving in the same direction? Just, I would think that in itself is a full-time job. Brian: Yeah, it's a lot, but you know it's good stuff. I guess I'll start with a phrase that I kind of live by, which is we have a lot of stuff going on and so we'll find something to get on about. Right, we can always find something to work together on, and so, if you kind of start with that attitude, there's a lot of common issues that really require a lot of work but you can get maybe not perfect alignment, but general directional alignment. And so you know, one of the big issues we're working with right now is insurance. Right, we're all dealing with it. I'm sure you've gotten your insurance bill, but whether it's home or your business insurance, all those things, and so you can find a lot of commonality and ideas about hey, how can we work with our state leaders, potentially our federal leaders, with the insurance companies themselves, to try to manage the cost of doing that and find ways could it be grouping, doing kind of what they do in medical where you can have these larger groups or other mechanisms to try and help mitigate some of the costs? For that I'm getting a little granular, but you can find these little pockets where you can go move the ball down the field and get general alignment and so we spend a lot of time doing that. But we are very fortunate that our membership and generally this is kind of a Texan spirit type thing is hey, how do we go get some stuff done? Right, we want to go work on some stuff we want to go work on together. Generally it's a rising tide mentality and I spent a good portion of my career in industry and there are times where we compete like crazy and that's fun and, you know, makes great products and great opportunities for our customers. There are a lot of times where we need the tide to rise and finding alignment about that we try to be an outlet for that and keep things running. Right Is that we have not a big staff but a staff that can help make sure that. You know, our members are doing a lot of this stuff as volunteers, right, but they're bringing ideas to the table. So how can we make sure that they're staying engaged, that we're checking in on them, that we're helping carry these things and that we're creating a forum to have the right discussions and bring leaders together so we can invite in elected officials over relevant stuff, the right industry players, and bring them to the table and figure out what we can do, and then I guess the last thing I'll say is that manifests itself. We have a very active state legislative agenda. That we're going to be spending a fair amount of time in Austin, federal priorities. That we work with our congressional delegation and then very on the ground working with our municipalities and all the companies that are out down here to make movement. Probably talk all day about little one-offs. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Well it is. You know legislature is in session, so I know that creates a busy time for you. You talked a lot about some of the opportunities and I hope we can talk some more about that, but I do want to ask you at this point what are some of the headwinds that you see you know this region and specifically kind of where you are. You know that could be out there. That you see you know this region and specifically kind of where you are. You know that could be out there that you've got to try to deal with, to get ahead of or navigate through. Brian: I'll start with. It's a great time down here. Just the way that each one of those big five industry clusters is going about is that it's a. You know they're all doing well and have a lot of opportunity that's on the horizon or that they're in the midst of right now, but certainly you know, a few headwinds. One of the things that we're always worried about and we work actively is just natural disaster flood mitigation and storm surge and making sure that we're resilient and prepared for the future, and so the risk from some incident happening. I'm more excited to talk about, when it comes to that, all the things that we're doing to mitigate that. In terms of flood mitigation, the coastal barrier protection work that we've been spending a lot of time on. That's the Ike Dike. It has a lot of names, but most commonly known is that but a system to protect us from storm surge. So one is the risk of natural disaster I don't like it, but it's a real thing, right? The second is that we're in the you know how do we have responsible development? And so when you have a project that comes online, there are, you know, reasonable concerns from citizens saying, hey, is this the best thing to be doing with this piece of land, and so anytime you're talking about a development that's going to take a field and turn it into a thing, people get concerned about that and that's perfectly reasonable for them to be concerned and want to do that. And so part of what I spend time doing is addressing like, hey, here's why this is worthwhile, here's why this funds your local municipality and build more parks so we can have the resources and the tax base that justify expenditures that come elsewhere and make through that. But just the ability for the public's ability to impact development, as it happens, is important. But for them to do that knowing all the ground truth, knowing what the trades are and understanding that, so that if they are concerned about something that they come with that from an educated knowledge base and so that's out there. And then I certainly don't want to get political, but anytime there's an administration change, there's just priorities that get changed. And so we're still waiting to understand all of those. We're kind of watching how things are shaken out in Washington DC and we'll adapt and make sure that we're doing everything we can to put our region in a great posture with whatever those priorities are at the end of the day. Chris: So yeah, to that last point where you're kind of right in throws that change. Right now that's happening pretty fast, so you got to stay on your toes. Let me take you back to the Ike Dike, because that you know something to get after Harvey. Hurricane Harvey got talked about a lot. You don't hear much about it anymore. Any kind of updates for the listeners. That might be curious. Is it really going to happen and, if so, what's really going on down there to make sure it doesn't happen? Brian: And if so, what's really going on down there to make sure it doesn't happen? Yeah, so it's still moving along, you know, and with some enthusiasm. So a couple of big milestones. One is that in December of 22, it became a formal project of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It was authorized by Congress as a project, so that says, you know, they can now go focus on that. And so the next big question becomes how do we pay for it? To answer that, the state stepped up in a big way in the last legislative session and they had previously formed what's called the Gulf Coast Protection District. That is the local entity for that project. That will work with the US Army Corps of Engineers. So that group exists and has monthly meetings. They actually have an office in our suite. We lease an office to them them and they have their meeting in our conference room two out of every three months and then they do a rotation on that. Third, and they've been funded to the tune of about a half a billion dollars from the state of Texas. So they're ready to take significant action. We've been working with our federal partners about identifying where the big dollars come from for that project. It's going to be expensive and it's going to take a long time, but it will be likely done in phases and so that allows it. Where you don't need this one giant tranche of money all at once, you can do it sort of in a series and address the most important aspects of that, like the gates, some of the initial most highly populated areas, in phases. But we got to get federal appropriations for it. So in addition to the state entity being in our office, actually the US Army Corps of Engineers is on the fourth floor of this building and so all of the players for that project are in one building in our area right here, so that when what I'm hopeful for is if Corps moved in about six months ago, anytime an elected leader wants to come down and meet, they'll get every leader for that project in the same building and often meeting in our conference room or one of the core conference rooms. But a lot more can get done. There's sort of the opportunity for water cooler conversations between the state and the fed folks, and so I'm optimistic that the cadence just from that proximity will be helpful to that effort. Chris: Very good, that's good to hear. Let's change conversation a little bit. So, as I said, you're the president of BHEP. You mentioned your staff. Let's talk a little about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's evolved kind of as you've been in this role? Brian: Yeah, well, I don't know that I can quantify terribly well, but I'm a kind of hey, all hands on deck and let's all just lean into wherever we're going. Right, and I kind of have that expectation of our team that we're have a clear set of priorities generally around the growth of this region and the projects that we're undertaking and that we're just leaning into them all the time and focusing. That I've been. You know I love getting down and into projects and so that's as I've been on this journey. That's been one of the big focus points to me is that you know you need a team to get this amount of stuff done and the size of these projects and the scope and so the ability to trust in the team and lean on them and let them go run with the ball is really important. I've been extremely fortunate that we have a great staff and we have a great membership base that we can lean on to help go bring those things to fruition. But it's a lot of fun coming to work. I think the team has a great time and enjoy the work that we do and you can see the difference that we make because there are buildings. We can point to that, wouldn't, you know, if not for the work of us and the leaders in this community wouldn't be there, and I'm looking forward to seeing that one on Saturn Lane with giant Texas A&M buildings sticking out of it coming through. Chris: It sounds like it's going to be impressive with the rockyards and all. But, you know, it made me think, though your team has a lot on its plate, I would think at times it may feel overwhelming. So, you know, what do you do to kind of help keep the motivation and keep the energy level up for a team that probably, at some points is, you know, starting to get to the end of the rope or run out of gas? Brian: Yeah, diversity of projects and lots of different stuff to work on. I'm guessing and actually I'd kind of turn that question on you, chris, because I can only imagine the type of stress that you guys live under, especially working big cases and big projects. There's one part that is, hey, we're just all in this together, right, and the esprit de corps that comes with. We're tackling big projects and that's just part of what comes with it. But there's another part where you just need to shift gears for a little bit and work on something different and give yourself a little recharge time. But how do you guys deal with it? I'm curious how? Chris: Boyer Miller, yeah that's a fair question to turn around on me. I would say it's similar. I think it's. You know to me that you can't underestimate the power of a team and if you have the right people on the team, there's some self-motivation just within that group, Right. And then I think it is the. We are fortunate to have very diverse type projects. We practice in all industries. So we may be doing a, a deal or a project, but it's in a different industry and there's different nuances that make it exciting. And at the end of the day I think it's the one point you highlighted on you can point to something and we're helping clients achieve their goals. So we can, you know, point to a deal that's been done or, you know, maybe it's a merger of two companies, or one that's grown and now has a new building and doing whatever. But you can point to those successes that you, where you've helped the client achieve, you know something really big for them and their business and their life. And so I think all of that continues the motivation. Yes, sometimes at the end of a big deal, you need just a little bit of a breather, but you just jump right back in and get going. So it makes it fun. Brian: Well, if you'll let me share. So you and I first met in person, had an opportunity to meet at one of your big forums, and that was a bunch of your customers and clients were there, and I love meeting new folks, as you probably saw, and I you know, walking around just saying, hey, I'm Brian, what do you do? And almost every one of them I would ask like, hey. So how do you know Chris, how do you know this group? You know, have you worked with them? And they all had a story. That was exactly that. You know, whatever thing it was that you helped them. We did XYZ project and it was awesome. We use them all the time for all these things. It was just very striking how passionate your customers, your clients, are with the help they've gotten from you guys, and so, anyway, that is extremely commendable and what I've seen from your team has just been amazing. Chris: Well, I appreciate the feedback. It's always good to get that, especially from different sources. So you know, like I think, we're always trying to create raving fans so that they'll keep coming back and tell their friends. So you get a unique seat and I think it's similar. You kind of analogize back to us. I think we get a unique seat to work with Texas entrepreneurs, and that's a pretty cool thing to do, in my view. What's, what would you or how would you describe the Texas entrepreneurial spirit if you could, based on your experience? Brian: Yeah well, I'm a native Texan. I have this hypothesis that part of the reason we're such a proud bunch is that when you go through I don't know if you grew up in Texas, chris but then also this sense of like we can do big things and big audacious things and we can make big asks and ask big questions and go get it done. And so we see a lot of that down here. And so you know, if you were sitting in I'll make this up Iowa and you said you know I want to have a space business and we want to go put hardware on the moon, and you know your neighbors would look at you and kind of scratch their head and in Texas they'd go oh yeah, that's intuitive machines and they're down the street, you should go. You know, go talk to them. They'd love to work with you. So that kind of spirit is really something special. When I was in industry I traveled all over the country working projects. There's something very special about this region, this community, this state, and that translates into why people want to come here. You know we keep Texas and Houston keep winning all these awards for business, new businesses coming here, people moving here, and that's not by accident, it's not by coincidence. It's because we have a great, great story to tell, whether that's workforce and the capabilities, the affordability of being here, the caliber of people you can work with and who your competitors are, and the level of intensity in the game that we play here is high and that creates the right ingredients for a really thriving community, for entrepreneurs, but also for industry any size. Chris: Right, very good. So what advice would you give to entrepreneurs out there that might be looking to start a business, let's say specifically, kind of within your region? If not, maybe beyond that in Houston? What's? Some of the advice you might give them if they wanted to get involved in some of the all the things you've been talking about. Brian: Yeah, dive in. It's a great community and a great ecosystem and there's a reason people are investing here and making a great run at it. We try to make that as easy as it can be. Now it is not easy. There's no illusions that starting a company you know scaling and growing a company all those things are very challenging. So the question I find myself asking I don't know that I'm in a position to give you know this immense amount of wisdom about these things, but what can we as a community and we as an organization be doing to help that entrepreneur? How do we help them build a relationship so that if they're having trouble with a permit, they know who to go ask, who to go talk to If they have a big idea, who might be good partners If they want to bounce something off, a retired executive who they might go talk to about that has the right skillset, so that we can create the conditions for them to be successful? And so that's really how we find ourselves interfacing that ecosystem is how do we put the right players together to go make things happen? Chris: Very good. So the other thing I'm curious to know is what do you see? You mentioned your five big industries. What have you observed of those industries working together to create innovative ideas to help each other? You got to move forward. Brian: Yeah, there's been a lot of. So workforce has been one of the biggest, especially over the last few years, where there's been this really high intensity competition amongst folks. And I wouldn't be surprised if you have been in some of that with, you know, recruiting and retaining high talent attorneys, right Is that? That's been, and so we've spent a lot of time and I've observed a lot of our members in this community go with that as a spirit of, hey, we're not really doing anybody any good If we're just poaching each other's people and you know, and creating pain points and friction between senior executives and those kinds of things. Let's go look at other communities and go figure out hey, what are the best universities and how do we get the professors that are training the students in it to send resumes to our area, right, and that we have a coalition of companies, not just one company has a relationship with one professor and that company benefits from that it's. How do we build that relationship as a community and say to them hey, we have a very strong demand signal, let's work together on things like that and so feeding that workforce pipeline so we're not divvying up the pie, we're growing it. And so, on the workforce side. I hate to be cliche because everybody's talking about AI, but we've had a couple of membership meetings about it. We've been working with partners about integration of it. We've adopted different technologies that have come out of it. But that stuff really, I mean it's the wave that we're living in right now, and so the integration of that into systems, both the how to do it and the mitigation of risk. I think I saw over the weekend that the new DeepSeek had a big not terribly surprised, but had a giant data leak and compromise, and so when you know when you're using that, I can only imagine, chris, I'd be curious how y'all are integrating it. But you know everything you put in there. You got to assume that at some point, somebody you don't want to have access will at least have the opportunity to have access to it, and so you have to be quite careful about how you integrate it. I, just as an aside, how are you guys using it much? Have you all banished it? What's the? Chris: Well, I'd say it's a little bit of both. I mean, we are definitely looking at and finding ways to integrate it. We've adopted a policy, but it starts with, as you mentioned, with us. It starts and stops with maintaining client confidentiality. So there's some systems out there through recognized kind of legal researchers. So Westlaw comes to mind, where they developed AI tool that is solely within their database. So it's secure, it's, it's all legal. You don't have to worry about we were still spot. You still have to check things right the human element of that. But if you're searching, for example, using the AI tool within Westlaw, you don't have to worry about the fake cases you've seen in the news. But our attorneys, you know, if you're going to use it, it has to be approved through the firm which are only a handful. You can't use anything outside and everything has to be double checked by a person to make sure for accuracy, etc. But so it is. I mean, the confidentiality side is a real concern, not just for law firms, for everybody, any company using it, and unfortunately that's just gonna be more and more what we see right. The more that we're moving everything to cloud, you're going to have people coming after it to try to. You know, on the bad side of that and certain countries it's not illegal to be a hacker. So it's just, you know, that's the world we live in now. Yeah Well, you know, brian, this has been a very interesting conversation and the you know, the last time we spoke I came away with the same feeling, and that is, we talked a lot about a lot of opportunity going on in the three to six o'clock region of greater Houston and we didn't even scratch the surface, I'm sure. But my takeaways have been it doesn't matter what industry again, I said earlier, you always kind of automatically think of space and NASA, but it's every type of business you could think of. An industry you could think of Sounds like you've got ample opportunity for businesses and entrepreneurs to start, grow, expand and be there and thrive. Brian: Well, perfectly said, and I think we get a recording. I may use that in some of our promotional material. Chris, that's exactly right. Great time, great place to be and welcome folks to reach out to us to help however we can if they're interested in looking at opportunities down here for that Before I lose you. Chris, one of the favorite questions that you had sent over that I wanted to ask you that you didn't get a chance to ask is what your favorite recreation vacation spot in the state of Texas is. Chris: Well, I'll answer that. I was about to ask you that. I would say if it's kind of a vacation spot in Texas, it would probably be anywhere along the Texas coast to relax a little bit and get some fishing in. Brian: Perfect. Chris: How about you? Brian: We are huge campers, like we love going camping. My kids are eight and 11 and we have state parks pass, and so any day I'm in a state park is a good day for me. But Inks Lake is one of my favorites and McKinney Falls between the two of those. Those are my top two right now, but we've probably been to Keene and we're just checking off the box to hit them all, and maybe we'll upgrade to National Parks as we get a little bit older. But I love our visiting our state park system. They're just absolutely wonderful. Chris: That's great. Okay, last question You're native Texan, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Brian: Oh, I feel like that question is going to get me in trouble, but if you made me choose, I'd pick barbecue. I'll eat it all day, every day, as it shows how about you, how about you? Chris: I think it's a tough one, so I've had some guests. You know, it depends on the day. I probably lean Tex-Mex more than barbecue. But I love the restaurants now that are combining the two, so brisket tacos or brisket nachos or something like that. It's a great combination. Brian: Yeah, there should be an answer all of the above there. Chris: So we're getting close to the rodeo time in Houston, so I have to go with barbecue for now and then back to Tex-Mex, I guess. Brian: Well, I look forward to seeing you at the kickoff event, where we get to go sample a little everything. Deal, that sounds good. Well, I look forward to seeing you at the kickoff event, where we get to go sample a little everything. Chris: Deal. That sounds good. Brian, thanks again for taking the time. Really appreciate your friendship and definitely appreciate what you and your team are doing for all the things business down in the Bay Area. Brian: Well, right back at you, Chris. Thanks for your leadership and all the great work you're doing with your team. Appreciate the opportunity to visit with you today. Thank you. Special Guest: Brian Freedman.

About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links Referenced:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is bought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups.  If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, thats V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out.Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a year, which means it's once again time to have a promoted guest episode brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. Joining me for a second time is Brian Mullen, CMO over at InfluxData. Brian, thank you for agreeing to do this a second time. You're braver than most.Brian: Thanks, Corey. I'm happy to be here. Second time is the charm.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year to put it mildly and I tend to have the attention span of a goldfish of most days, so for those who are similarly flighty, let's start at the very top. What is an InfluxDB slash InfluxData slash Influx—when you're not sure which one to use, just shorten it and call it good—and why might someone need it?Brian: Sure. So, InfluxDB is what most people understand our product as, a pretty popular open-source product, been out for quite a while. And then our company, InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB. And InfluxDB is where developers build IoT real-time analytics and cloud applications, typically all based on time series. It's a time-series data platform specifically built to handle time-series data, which we think about is any type of data that is stamped in time in some way.It could be metrics, like, taken every one second, every two seconds, every three seconds, or some kind of event that occurs and is stamped in time in some way. So, our product and platform is really specialized to handle that technical problem.Corey: When last we spoke, I contextualized that in the realm of an IoT sensor that winds up reporting its device ID and its temperature at a given timestamp. That is sort of baseline stuff that I think aligns with what we're talking about. But over the past year, I started to see it in a bit of a different light, specifically viewing logs as time-series data, which hadn't occurred to me until relatively recently. And it makes perfect sense, on some level. It's weird to contextualize what Influx does as being a logging database, but there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be.Brian: Yeah, it certainly could. So typically, we see the world of time-series data in kind of two big realms. One is, as you mentioned the, you know, think of it as the hardware or, you know, physical realm: devices and sensors, these are things that are going to show up in a connected car, in a factory deployment, in renewable energy, you know, wind farm. And those are real devices and pieces of hardware that are out in the physical world, collecting data and emitting, you know, time-series every one second, or five seconds, or ten minutes, or whatever it might be.But it also, as you mentioned, applies to, call it the virtual world, which is really all of the software and infrastructure that is being stood up to run applications and services. And so, in that world, it could be the same—it's just a different type of source, but is really kind of the same technical problem. It's still time-series data being stamped, you know, data being stamped every, you know, one second, every five seconds, in some cases, every millisecond, but it is coming from a source that is actually in the infrastructure. Could be, you know, virtual machines, it could be containers, it could be microservices running within those containers. And so, all of those things together, both in the physical world and this infrastructure world are all emitting time-series data.Corey: When you take a look at the broader ecosystem, what is it that you see that has been the most misunderstood about time-series data as a whole? For example, when I saw AWS talking about a lot of things that they did in the realm of for your data lake, I talked to clients of mine about this and their response is, “Well, that'd be great genius, if we had a data lake.” It's, “What do you think those petabytes of nonsense in S3 are?” “Oh, those are the logs and the assets and a bunch of other nonsense.” “Yeah, that's what other people are calling a data lake.” “Oh.” Do you see similar lights-go-on moment when you talk to clients and prospective clients about what it is that they're doing that they just hadn't considered to be time-series data previously?Brian: Yeah. In fact, that's exactly what we see with many of our customers is they didn't realize that all of a sudden, they are now handling a pretty sizable time-series workload. And if you kind of take a step back and look at a couple of pretty obvious but sometimes unrecognized trends in technology, the first is cloud applications in general are expanding, they're both—horizontally and vertically. So, that means, like, the workloads that are being run in the Netflix's of the world, or all the different infrastructure that's being spun up in the cloud to run these various, you know, applications and services, those workloads are getting bigger and bigger, those companies and their subscriber bases, and the amount of data they're generating is getting bigger and bigger. They're also expanding horizontally by region and geography.So Netflix, for example, running not just in the US, but in every continent and probably every cloud region around the world. So, that's happening in the cloud world, and then also, in the IoT world, there's this massive growth of connected devices, both net-new devices that are being developed kind of, you know, the next Peloton or the next climate control unit that goes in an apartment or house, and also these longtime legacy devices that are been on the factory floor for a couple of decades, but now are being kind of modernized and coming online. So, if you look at all of that growth of the data sources now being built up in the cloud and you look at all that growth of these connected devices, both new and existing, that are kind of coming online, there's a huge now exponential growth in the sources of data. And all of these sources are emitting time-series data. You can just think about a connected car—not even a self-driving car, just a connected car, your everyday, kind of, 2022 model, and nearly every element of the car is emitting time-series data: its engine components, you know, your tires, like, what the climate inside of the car is, statuses of the engine itself, and it's all doing that in real-time, so every one second, every five seconds, whatever.So, I think in general, people just don't realize they're already dealing with a substantial workload of time series. And in most cases, unless they're using something like Influx, they're probably not, you know, especially tuned to handle it from a technology perspective.Corey: So, it's been a year. What has changed over on your side of the world since the last time we spoke? It seems that well, things continue and they're up and to the right. Well, sure, generally speaking, you're clearly still in business. Good job, always appreciative of your custom, as well as the fact that oh, good, even in a world where it seems like there's a macro recession in progress, that there are still companies out there that continue to persist and in some cases, dare I say, even thrive? What have you folks been up to?Brian: Yeah, it's been a big year. So first, we've seen quite a bit of expansion across the use cases. So, we've seen even further expansion in IoT, kind of expanding into consumer, industrial, and now sustainability and clean energy, and that pairs with what we've seen on FinTech and cryptocurrency, gaming and entertainment applications, network telemetry, including some of the biggest names in telecom, and then a little bit more on the cloud side with cloud services, infrastructure, and dev tools and APIs. So, quite a bit more broad set of use cases we're now seeing across the platform. And the second thing is—you might have seen it in the last month or so—is a pretty big announcement we had of our new storage engine.So, this was just announced earlier this month in November and was previously introduced to our community as what we call an IOx, which is how it was known in the open-source. And think of this really as a rebuilt and reimagined storage engine which is built on that open-source project, InfluxDB IOx that allows us to deliver faster queries, and now—pretty exciting for the first time—unlimited time-series, or cardinality as it's known in the space. And then also we introduced SQL for writing queries and BI tool support. And this is, for the first time we're introducing SQL, which is world's most popular data programming language to our platform, enabling developers to query via the API our language Flux, and InfluxQL in addition.Corey: A long time ago, it really seems that the cloud took a vote, for lack of a better term, and decided that when it comes to storage, object store is the way forward. It was a bit of a reimagining from how we all considered using storage previously, but the economics are at minimum of ten to one in favor of objects store, the latency is far better, the durability is off the charts better, you don't have to deal—at least in AWS-land—with the concept of availability zones and the rest, just from an economic and performance perspective, provided the use case embraces it, there's really no substitute.Brian: Yeah, I mean, the way we think about storage is, you know, obviously, it varies quite a bit from customer to customer with our use cases. Especially in IoT, we see some use cases where customers want to have data around for months and in some cases, years. So, it's a pretty substantial data set you're often looking at. And sometimes those customers want to downsample those, they don't necessarily need every single piece of minutia that they may need in real-time, but not in summary, looking backward. So, you really—we're in this kind of world where we're dealing with both hive fidelity—usually in the moment—data and lower fidelity, when people can downsample and have a little bit more of a summarized view of what happened.So, pretty unique for us and we have to kind of design the product in a way that is able to balance both of those because that's what, you know, the customer use cases demand. It's a super hard problem to solve. One of the reasons that you have a product like InfluxDB, which is specialized to handle this kind of thing, is so that you can actually manage that balance in your application service and setting your retention policy, et cetera.Corey: That's always been something that seemed a little on the odd side to me when I'm looking at a variety of different observability tools, where it seems that one of the key dimensions that they all tend to, I guess, operate on and price on is retention period. And I get it; you might not necessarily want to have your load balancer logs from 2012 readily available and paying for the privilege, but it does seem that given the dramatic fall of archival storage pricing, on some level, people do want to be able to retain that data just on the off chance that will be useful. Maybe that's my internal digital packrat chiming in at this point, but I do believe strongly that there is a correlation between how recent the data is and how useful it is, for a variety of different use cases. But that's also not a global truth. How do you view the divide? And what do you actually see people saying they want versus what they're actually using?Brian: It's a really good question and not a simple problem to solve. So, first of all, I would say it probably really depends on the use case and the extent to which that use case is touching real world applications and services. So, in a pure observability setting where you're looking at, perhaps more of a, kind of, operational view of infrastructure monitoring, you want to understand kind of what happened and when those tend to be a little bit more focused on real-time and recent. So, for example, you of course, want to know exactly what's happening in the moment, zero in on whatever anomaly and kind of surrounding data there is, perhaps that means you're digging into something that happened in you know, fairly recent time. So, those do tend to be, not all of them, but they do tend to be a little bit more real-time and recent-oriented.I think it's a little bit different when we look at IoT. Those generally tend to be longer timeframes that people are dealing with. Their physical out-in-the-field devices, you know, many times those devices are kind of coming online and offline, depending on the connectivity, depending on the environment, you can imagine a connected smart agriculture setup, I mean, those are a pretty wide array of devices out and in, you know, who knows what kind of climate and environment, so they tend to be a little bit longer in retention policy, kind of, being able to dig into the data, what's happening. The time frame that people are dealing with is just, in general, much longer in some of those situations.Corey: One story that I've heard a fair bit about observability data and event data is that they inevitably compose down into metrics rather than events or traces or logs, and I have a hard time getting there because I can definitely see a bunch of log entries showing the web servers return codes, okay, here's the number of 500 errors and number of different types of successes that we wind up seeing in the app. Yeah, all right, how many per minute, per second, per hour, whatever it is that makes sense that you can look at aberrations there. But in the development process at least, I find that having detailed log messages tell me about things I didn't see and need to understand or to continue building the dumb thing that I'm in the process of putting out. It feels like once something is productionalized and running, that its behavior is a lot more well understood, and at that point, metrics really seem to take over. How do you see it, given that you fundamentally live at that intersection where one can become the other?Brian: Yeah, we are right at that intersection and our answer probably would be both. Metrics are super important to understand and have that regular cadence and be kind of measuring that state over time, but you can miss things depending on how frequent those metrics are coming in. And increasingly, when you have the amount of data that you're dealing with coming from these various sources, the measurement is getting smaller and smaller. So, unless you have, you know, perfect metrics coming in every half-second, or you know, in some sub-partition of that, in milliseconds, you're likely to miss something. And so, events are really key to understand those things that pop up and then maybe come back down and in a pure metric setting, in your regular interval, you would have just completely missed. So, we see most of our use cases that are showing a balance of the two is kind of the most effective. And from a product perspective, that's how we think about solving the problem, addressing both.Corey: One of the things that I struggled with is it seems that—again, my approach to this is relatively outmoded. I was a systems administrator back when that title was not considered disparaging by a good portion of the technical community the way that it is today. Even though the job is the same, we call them something different now. Great. Okay, whatever smile, nod, and accept the larger paycheck.But my way of thinking about things are okay, you have the logs, they live on the server itself. And maybe if you want to be fancy, you wind up putting them to a centralized rsyslog cluster or whatnot. Yes, you might send them as well to some other processing system for visibility or a third-party monitoring system, but the canonical truth slash source of logs tends to live locally. That said, I got out of running production infrastructure before this idea of ephemeral containers or serverless functions really became a thing. Do you find that these days you are the source of truth slash custodian of record for these log entries, or do you find that you are more of a secondary source for better visibility and analysis, but not what they're going to bust out when the auditor comes calling in three years?Brian: I think, again, it—[laugh] I feel like I'm answering the same way [crosstalk 00:15:53]Corey: Yeah, oh, and of course, let's be clear, use cases are going to vary wildly. This is not advice on anyone's approach to compliance and the rest [laugh]. I don't want to get myself in trouble here.Brian: Exactly. Well, you know, we kind of think about it in terms of profiles. And we see a couple of different profiles of customers using InfluxDB. So, the first is, and this was kind of what we saw most often early on, still see quite a bit of them is kind of more of that operator profile. And these are folks who are going to—they're building some sort of monitor, kind of, source of truth for—that's internally facing to monitor applications or services, perhaps that other teams within their company built.And so that's, kind of like, a little bit more of your kind of pure operator. Yes, they're building up in the stack themselves, but it's to pay attention to essentially something that another team built. And then what we've seen more recently, especially as we've moved more prominently into the cloud and offered a usage-based service with a, you know, APIs and endpoint people can hit, as we see more people come into it from a builder's perspective. And similar in some ways, except that they're still building kind of a, you know, a source of truth for handling this kind of data. But they're also building the applications and services themselves are taken out to market that are in the hands of customers.And so, it's a little bit different mindset. Typically, there's, you know, a little bit more comfort with using one of many services to kind of, you know, be part of the thing that they're building. And so, we've seen a little bit more comfort from that type of profile, using our service running in the cloud, using the API, and not worrying too much about the kind of, you know, underlying setup of the implementation.Corey: Love how serverless helps you scale big and ship fast, but hate debugging your serverless apps? With Lumigo's serverless observability, it's fast and easy (and maybe a little fun, too). End-to-end distributed tracing gives developers full clarity into their most complex serverless and containerized applications, connecting every service from AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS to DynamoDB, API Gateways, Step Functions and more. Try Lumigo free and debug 3x faster, reduce error rate and speed up development. Visit snark.cloud/lumigo That's snark.cloud/L-U-M-I-G-OCorey: So, I've been on record a lot saying that the best database is TXT records stuffed into Route 53, which works super well as a gag, let's be clear, don't actually build something on top of this, that's a disaster waiting to happen. I don't want to destroy anyone's career as I do this. But you do have a much more viable competitive threat on the landscape. And that is quite simply using the open-source version of InfluxDB. What is the tipping point where, “Huh, I can run this myself,” turns into, “But I shouldn't. I should instead give money to other people to run it for me.”Because having been an engineer, where I believe I'm the world's greatest everything, when it comes to my environment—a fact provably untrue, but that hubris never quite goes away entirely—at what point am I basically being negligent not to start dealing with you in a more formalized business context?Brian: First of all, let me say that we have many customers, many developers out there who are running open-source and it works perfectly for them. The workload is just right, the deployment makes sense. And so, there are many production workloads we're using open-source. But typically, the kind of big turning point for people is on scale, scale, and overall performance related to that. And so, that's typically when they come and look at one of the two commercial offers.So, to start, open-source is a great place to, you know, kind of begin the journey, check it out, do that level of experimentation and kind of proof of concept. We also have 60,000-plus developers using our introductory cloud service, which is a free service. You simply sign up and can begin immediately putting data into the platform and building queries, and you don't have to worry about any of the setup and running servers to deploy software. So, both of those, the open-source and our cloud product are excellent ways to get started. And then when it comes time to really think about building in production and moving up in scale, we have our two commercial offers.And the first of those is InfluxDB Cloud, which is our cloud-native fully managed by InfluxData offering. We run this not only in AWS but also in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It's a usage-based service, which means you pay exactly for what you use, and the three components that people pay for our data in, number of queries, and the amount of data you store in storage. We also for those who are interested in actually managing it themselves, we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which is a software subscription-base model, and it is self-managed by the customer in their environment. Now, that environment could be their own private cloud, it also could be on-premises in their own data center.And so, lots of fun people who are a little bit more oriented to kind of manage software themselves rather than using a service gear toward that. But both those commercial offers InfluxDB Cloud and InfluxDB Enterprise are really designed for, you know, massive scale. In the case of Cloud, I mentioned earlier with the new storage engine, you can hit unlimited cardinality, which means you have no limit on the number of time series you can put into the platform, which is a pretty big game-changing concept. And so, that means however many time-series sources you have and however many series they're emitting, you can run that without a problem without any sort of upper limit in our cloud product. Over on the enterprise side with our self-managed product, that means you can deploy a cluster of whatever size you want. It could be a two-by-four, it could be a four-by-eight, or something even larger. And so, it gives people that are managing in their own private cloud or in a data center environment, really their own options to kind of construct exactly what they need for their particular use case.Corey: Does your object storage layer make it easier to dynamically change clusters on the fly? I mean, historically, running things in a pre-provisioned cluster with EBS volumes or local disk was, “Oh, great. You want to resize something? Well, we're going to be either taking an outage or we're going to be building up something, migrating data live, and there's going to be a knife-switch cutover at some point that makes things relatively unfortunate.” It seems that once you abstract the storage layer away from anything resembling an instance that you would be able to get away from some of those architectural constraints.Brian: Yeah, that's really the promise, and what is delivered in our cloud product is that you no longer, as a developer, have to think about that if you're using that product. You don't have to think about how big the cluster is going to be, you don't have to think about these kind of disaster scenarios. It is all kind of pre-architected in the service. And so, the things that we really want to deliver to people, in addition to the elimination of that concern for what the underlying infrastructure looks like and how its operating. And so, with infrastructure concerns kind of out of the way, what we want to deliver on are kind of the things that people care most about: real-time query speed.So, now with this new storage engine, you can query data across any time series within milliseconds, 100 times faster queries against high cardinality data that was previously impossible. And we also have unlimited time-series volume. Again, any total number of time series you have, which is known as cardinality, is now able to run without a problem in the platform. And then we also have kind of opening up, we're opening up the aperture a bit for developers with SQL language support. And so, this is just a whole new world of flexibility for developers to begin building on the platform. And again, this is all in the way that people are using the product without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.Corey: For most companies—and this does not apply to you—their core competency is not running time-series databases and the infrastructure attendant thereof, so it seems like it is absolutely a great candidate for, “You know, we really could make this someone else's problem and let us instead focus on the differentiated thing that we are doing or building or complaining about.”Brian: Yeah, that's a true statement. Typically what happens with time-series data is that people first of all, don't realize they have it, and then when they realize they have time-series data, you know, the first thing they'll do is look around and say, “Well, what do I have here?” You know, I have this relational database over here or this document database over here, maybe even this, kind of, search database over here, maybe that thing can handle time series. And in a light manner, it probably does the job. But like I said, the sources of data and just the volume of time series is expanding, really across all these different use cases, exponentially.And so, pretty quickly, people realize that thing that may be able to handle time series in some minor manner, is quickly no longer able to do it. They're just not purpose-built for it. And so, that's where really they come to a product like Influx to really handle this specific problem. We're built specifically for this purpose and so as the time-series workload expands when it kind of hits that tipping point, you really need a specialized tool.Corey: Last question, before I turn you loose to prepare for re:Invent, of course—well, I guess we'll ask you a little bit about that afterwards, but first, we can talk a lot theoretically about what your product could or might theoretically do. What are you actually seeing? What are the use cases that other than the stereotypical ones we've talked about, what have you seen people using it for that surprised you?Brian: Yeah, some of it is—it's just really interesting how it connects to, you know, things you see every day and/or use every day. I mean, chances are, many people listening have probably use InfluxDB and, you know, perhaps didn't know it. You know, if anyone has been to a home that has Tesla Powerwalls—Tesla is a customer of ours—then they've seen InfluxDB in action. Tesla's pulling time-series data from these connected Powerwalls that are in solar-powered homes, and they monitor things like health and availability and performance of those solar panels and the battery setup, et cetera. And they're collecting this at the edge and then sending that back into the hub where InfluxDB is running on their back end.So, if you've ever seen this deployed like that's InfluxDB running behind the scenes. Same goes, I'm sure many people have a Nest thermostat in their house. Nest monitors the infrastructure, actually the powers that collection of IoT data collection. So, you think of this as InfluxDB running behind the scenes to monitor what infrastructure is standing up that back-end Nest service. And this includes their use of Kubernetes and other software infrastructure that's run in their platform for collection, managing, transforming, and analyzing all of this aggregate device data that's out there.Another one, especially for those of us that streamed our minds out during the pandemic, Disney+ entertainment, streaming, and delivery of that to applications and to devices in the home. And so, you know, this hugely popular Disney+ streaming service is essentially a global content delivery network for distributing all these, you know, movies and video series to all the users worldwide. And they monitor the movement and performance of that video content through this global CDN using InfluxDB. So, those are a few where you probably walk by something like this multiple times a week, or in our case of Disney+ probably watching it once a day. And it's great to see InfluxDB kind of working behind the scenes there.Corey: It's one of those things where it's, I guess we'll call it plumbing, for lack of a better term. It's not the sort of thing that people are going to put front-and-center into any product or service that they wind up providing, you know, except for you folks. Instead, it's the thing that empowers a capability behind that product or service that is often taken for granted, just because until you understand the dizzying complexity, particularly at scale, of what these things have to do under the hood, it just—well yeah, of course, it works that way. Why shouldn't it? That's an expectation I have of the product because it's always had that. Yeah, but this is how it gets there.Brian: Our thesis really is that data is best understood through the lens of time. And as this data is expanding exponentially, time becomes increasingly the, kind of, common element, the common component that you're using to kind of view what happened. That could be what's running through a telecom network, what's happening with the devices that are connected that network, the movement of data through that network, and when, what's happening with subscribers and content pushing through a CDN on a streaming service, what's happening with climate and home data in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of homes through common device like a Nest thermostat. All of these things they attach to some real-world collection of data, and as long as that's happening, there's going to be a place for time-series data and tools that are optimized to handle it.Corey: So, my last question—for real this time—we are recording this the week before re:Invent 2022. What do you hope to see, what do you expect to see, what do you fear to see?Brian: No fears. Even though it's Vegas, no fears.Corey: I do have the super-spreader event fear, but that's a separate—Brian: [laugh].Corey: That's a separate issue. Neither one of us are deep into the epidemiology weeds, to my understanding. But yeah, let's just bound this to tech, let's be clear.Brian: Yeah, so first of all, we're really excited to go there. We'll have a pretty big presence. We have a few different locations where you can meet us. We'll have a booth on the main show floor, we'll be in the marketplace pavilion, as I mentioned, InfluxDB Cloud is offered across the marketplaces of each of the clouds, AWS, obviously in this case, but also in Azure and Google. But we'll be there in the AWS Marketplace pavilion, showcasing the new engine and a lot of the pretty exciting new use cases that we've been seeing.And we'll have our full team there, so if you're looking to kind of learn more about InfluxDB, or you've checked it out recently and want to understand kind of what the new capability is, we'll have many folks from our technical teams there, from our development team, some our field folks like the SEs and some of the product managers will be there as well. So, we'll have a pretty great collection of experts on InfluxDB to answer any questions and walk people through, you know, demonstrations and use cases.Corey: I look forward to it. I will be doing my traditional Wednesday afternoon tour through the expo halls and nature walk, so if you're listening to this and it's before Wednesday afternoon, come and find me. I am kicking off and ending at the [unintelligible 00:29:15] booth, but I will make it a point to come by the Influx booth and give you folks a hard time because that's what I do.Brian: We love it. Please. You know, being on the tour is—on the walking tour is excellent. We'll be mentally prepared. We'll have some comebacks ready for you.Corey: Therapists are standing by on both sides.Brian: Yes, exactly. Anyway, we're really looking forward to it. This will be my third year on your walking tour. So, the nature walk is one of my favorite parts of AWS re:Invent.Corey: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And thank you for your time today. I will let you get back to your no doubt frenzied preparations. At least they are on my side.Brian: We will. Thanks so much for having me and really excited to do it.Corey: Brian Mullen, CMO at InfluxData, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that you naively believe will be stored as a TXT record in a DNS server somewhere rather than what is almost certainly a time-series database.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinksCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead  to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous nonsense.   Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. And my guest is titled as the Chief Marketing Officer at InfluxData, and I don't even care because his bio has something absolutely fascinating that I want to address instead. Brian Mullen is an accomplished dealmaker is how the bio starts. And so many of us spend time negotiating deals, but so few people describe ourselves in that way. First, Brian, thank you for joining us. And secondly, what's up with that?Brian: [laugh]. Well, thanks, Corey, very excited to be here. And yes, dealmaker; I guess that would be apropos. How did I get into marketing? Well, a lot of my career is spent in business development, and so I think that's where the dealmaker part comes from.Several different roles, including my first role at Influx—when I joined Influx—was in business development and partnerships. And so, prior to coming to Influx, I spent many years building out the business development team at Twilio, growing that up, and we did a lot of deals with carriers, with Cloud partners, with all kinds of different partners; you name it, we worked with them. And then moving into Influx, joined in an BD capacity here and had a couple different roles that eventually evolved to Chief Marketing Officer. But  that's where the dealmaker comes from. I like to do deals, it's always nice to have one on the side   in whatever capacity you're working in, it's nice to have a deal or two working on the side. It kind of keeps you fresh.Corey: It's fun because people think, “Oh, a deal. You're thinking of mergers and acquisitions, and how hard could that be? You just show up with a bag of money and give it to people and then you have a deal closed.” And oh, if only it were that simple. Every client engagement we have on the consulting side has been a negotiation back and forth, and the idea is to ideally get everyone to the point where they're happy, but honestly, if everyone's slightly unhappy but can live with the result, we'll take that too.And as people go through their own careers it's, you're always trying to make a deal in some form: when you try to get a project approved, or you're trying to get resources thrown at something—by which I generally mean money, not people, though people, too—it's something that isn't necessarily clearly understood or discussed very often, despite the fact that half of what I do is negotiating with AWS on behalf of clients for better contractual terms. The thing that I think takes people by surprise the most is that dealmaking is almost never about pounding the table, being angry, and walking out, like you read the world's worst guide to buying a car or something. It's about finding the win for everyone. At least that's the way I've always approached it.Brian: That's a good point. And actually that wording that you described of finding a win for everybody, that's how I always thought about it. I think about it as first of all, you're trying to understand what the other party—and it could be an individual, it could be a company, it could be a group of companies, sometimes—you're trying to understand what their goals are, what their agenda is and see how that matches with your own; sometimes they're opposing, sometimes they're overlapping. And then everyone has to have some perceived win  in a deal. And it's not competitively; it's more like you just have to have value, that is kind of what the win is – having value in that deal.And so that's the way I always approached it. And doing deals, whether you're in BD or sales, or if you're working with vendors and you're in a different functional role, sometimes it's not even commercial, it's just about aligning resources, perhaps. Our deal might be that you and I are both going to put a collective effort into building something or taking something to market. In another scenario might be like, I'm going to pay for this service that you're delivering, or vice versa. Or we're going to go and bring two revenue-generating products together and take them to market. Whatever it might be, it doesn't matter so much what the mechanics are of the deal, but it's usually about aligning those agendas and in having someone get utility, get value on the other side.Corey: I think that people lose sight of the fact as well, that when you're talking about a service provider—and let's be clear, InfluxData has launched a cloud platform that we'll talk about in a minute—this is not the one-off transactional relationship; once the deal is signed, you've got to work with these people. When they host parts of your production infrastructure, whether you want to admit it or not they're your partner more so than they are your vendor. It has to be an ongoing relationship that people are, if they at least aren't thrilled with it, can at least be happy enough to live with, otherwise it just winds up with this growing sense of resentment and it just sort of leads nowhere.Brian: Yeah, there really is no deal moment. Yes, people sign agreements with companies, but that's just the very beginning. Your relationship evolves from there. We're delivering a product, we're delivering this platform that handles time-series data to our customers, and we're asking them to trust us with their product that they're taking out to market. They're asking us to handle their data and to deliver service to them that they're turning into their production applications. And so it's a big responsibility. And so we care about the relationship with our customers to continue that.Corey: So, I first really became aware of time-series data a few years back during a re:Invent keynote when they pre-announced Timestream, which took entirely too long to come to market. Okay, great. So, you're talking about time-series data. Can you explain what that means in simple terms? And I learned over the next eight minutes that they were talking about it, that no, no, they couldn't. I wound up more confused by the end of the announcement than I was at the beginning.So, assuming that I have the same respect for databases as you would expect for someone whose favorite data store is Route 53—because you can misuse it as a beautiful database—what is time-series data and why does it matter in 2021?Brian: Sure, it's a good question. And I was there in that audience as well that day. So, we think of time-series data as really any type of data that's stamped in time, in some way. It could be every hour, every minute, every second, every half second, whatever. But more specifically, it's any type of data that is generated by some source—and that could be a sensor sources within systems or an actual application—and these things change over time, and then therefore, stamped in time in some way.They can come at different frequencies, like I said, from nanoseconds to seconds, or minutes and hours, but the most important thing is that they usually trigger a workflow, trigger some sort of action. And so that's really what our platform is about. It allows people to handle this type of data and then work with it from there in their applications, trigger new workflows, et cetera. Because the historical context of what happens is super important.And when we talk about sources, it could be really many things. It could be in physical spaces, and we have a lot of IoT types of customers and use cases. And those are things like devices and sensors on the factory floor, out in the field, it's on a vehicle. It's even in space, believe it or not. There are customers that are using us on satellites.And then it can also be sources from within software, applications, and infrastructure, things like VMs, and containers, and microservices, all emitting time-series data. And it could be applications like crypto, or financial, or stock market, agricultural type of applications that are themselves as applications emitting data. So, you think about all these sources that are out there from the physical world to the virtual world, and they're all generating time-series data, and our platform is really specially designed to handle that kind of data. And we can get into some details of what exactly that means, but that's really why we're here. That's what time-series is all about.Corey: And this is the inherent challenge I think we're seeing across the entire industry slash ecosystem. I mean, this is airing during re:Invent week, but at the time we are recording this, we have not yet seen the Tuesday keynote that Adam Selipsky will take to the stage, and no doubt, render the stat I'm about to throw at you completely obsolete. But depending on how you count them, there's somewhere between 13 and 15 managed database or database-like services today that AWS offers. And they never turn things off and they're always releasing new things, supposedly on behalf of customers; in practice because someone somewhere wants to get promoted by launching a new service; good for them. Godspeed.If we look into the uncertain future, at some point, someone's job is going to be disambiguating between the 40 different managed database services that AWS offers and picking the one that works. What differentiates time-series from—let's just start with an easy one—something like MySQL or Postgres—or ‘Postgres-squeal' is how I insist on pronouncing that one. Let's stay away from things like Neptune because no one knows what a social graph database is and I assure you, you almost certainly don't need one. Where does something like Influx work in a way that, “Huh. Running this on MySQL is really starting to suck.”Brian: When and why is it time to consider a specialized tool. And in fact, that's actually what we see a lot with our customers is coming to us around that time when a time-series is a problem to solve for them is reaching the point where they really need a specialized tool that's kind of built for that. And so one way to look at that is really just to think about time-series in general as a type of data. It's rapidly rising. It's the fastest growing data category out there right now.And the reason for that is it's being driven by two big macro trends. One is the explosion of all these applications and services running in the cloud. They're expanding horizontally, they're running in more regions, they're in many cases running on multiple clouds, and so it's just getting big—the workloads are getting bigger and bigger. And those are emitting time-series data. And then simultaneously, you have this  growth of all these devices and sensors that are coming online out in the real world: batteries, and temperature gauges, and all kinds of stuff, both new and old, that is coming online, and those sources are generating a lot of time-series data.So typically, we're in a moment now, where a lot of developers are faced with this massive growth of time-series data. And if you think about some data set that you have, that you're putting into some kind of traditional database, now add the component of time as a multiplier by all the data you have. Instead of that one data, that one metric, you're now looking at doing that every one second in perpetuity. And so it's just an order of magnitude more data that you're dealing with. And then you also have this notion of—when you have that magnitude of data, you have fidelity, you're taking a lot of it in at the same time, I mean, very quickly, so you have  batch or stream data coming in at super high volume, and you may need that for a few minutes or a few hours or days, but maybe you don't need it for months and years.And so you'd maybe dropped down to kind of a lower fidelity for the longer-term. But you really have this  toggling back and forth of the high fidelity and low fidelity, all coming at you at pretty high volume. And so typically what happens is, is when the workloads get big enough, the legacy tools, they're just not equipped to do it. And a developer—if they have a small set of time-series they're dealing with, what is the first thing they're going to do? They're going to look around and be like, “Hey, what do I have here? Oh, I've got Mongo over here. I've got Splunk, or I've got this old relational database, I can put it in.”And that's typically what they'll do, and that works fine until it doesn't. And then that's when they come around looking for a specialized tool. So, we really sit in Influx and, frankly, other time-series products really do sit at that point where people are considering a specialized tool just because the workload has gotten such that it requires that.Corey: Yeah. Taking a look at most of the offerings in the space; anything that winds up charging anything more than a very tiny fraction of a penny—from what you're describing—is going to quickly become non-economical, where it's, “Oh, we're going to charge you”—like using S3: every, I think, 1000 writes cost a penny—“Oh, we're just going to use S3 for this.” Well, at some of these data volumes, that means that your request charge on S3 is very quickly going to become the largest single line item in your bill, which is nothing short of impressive in a lot of cases, but it also probably means that you've taken a very specific tool—like an iPad—and tried to use it as something else—like a hammer—and no one's particularly happy with that outcome.Brian: Yeah. First of all, having usage-based pricing is really important. We think about it as allowing people to have the full version of the product without a major commitment, and be using it in test scenarios and then later in the very early production scenarios. But as a principle, it's important for people that just signed up two hours ago using your product are basically using the same full product that the biggest customers that you have are using that are paying many, many thousands or tens of thousands per month. And so the way to do that is to offer usage-based pricing and not force people to commit to something before they're ready to do it.And so there's ways to unlock lower pricing, and we, like a lot of companies, offer annual pricing and we have a sales team that worked with folks to basically draw down their unit costs on the use of the platform once they kind of get comfortable with their workload. So, there's definitely avenues to get lower price, and we're believers in that. And we also want to, from a product development perspective, try to make the product more efficient. And so we basically are trying to drive down the costs through efficiencies in the product: make it run faster, make queries take less time, and also ship products on top of it that require developers to write less code themselves, kind of, do more of the work for them.Corey: One of the things I find particularly compelling about what you've done is it is an open-source project. If I want to go ahead and run some time-series experiments myself, I can spin it up anywhere I want and run it however I see fit. Now, at some point, if I'm doing this for anything more than, “Oh, let's see how I can misuse this today,” I probably want to at least consider letting someone who's better at running these things than I am take it over. And as I'm looking through your customer list, the thing that strikes me is how none of these things are quite like the other. We're talking about companies like Hulu is probably not using it the same way as Capital One is, at least I certainly hope not. You have Texas Instruments; you also have Adobe. And it sort of runs an entire gamut of none of these companies quite look alike; I have to imagine their use cases are also somewhat varied, too.Brian: Yeah, that's right. And we really do see as a platform, and with time-series being the common problem that people are looking to solve, we see this pretty broad set of use cases and customer types. And we have some more traditional customers like the Cisco's and the IBM's of the world, and then some  relatively new folks like Tesla and Hulu and others that are a little bit more recent. But they're all trying to solve the same fundamental problem with time-series, which is “How can I handle it in an efficient way and make use of it meaningfully in my applications and services?”And we were talking earlier about having some sources of time-series data being in, kind of a virtual space, like in infrastructure and software, and then some being in physical space, like in devices and sensors out in the real world. So, we have breadth in that way, too. We have folks who are building big software observability infrastructure solutions on us, and we also have people that are pulling data off of the devices on a solar panel that's sitting on a house in the emerging world, right? So, you have basically these two far ends of the spectrum, but all using this specialized tool to handle the time-series data that they're generating.Corey: It seems to me that for most of these use cases and the way you describe it, it's more about the overall shape of the data when we're talking about time-series more so than it is any particular data point in isolation. Is that accurate, or are there cases where that is very much not the case?Brian: I think that's accurate. What people are mostly trying to understand is context for what's happening. And so it's not necessarily—to your point—not searching for one specific data point or moment, but it's really understanding context for some general state that has changed or some trend that has emerged, whatever that might be, and then making sense of that, and then taking action on that. And taking an action could mean a couple of different things, too. It could be in an observability sense, where somebody in  an operator type of mode where they're looking at dashboards and paying attention to  infrastructure that's running and then need to take some sort of action based on that. It also, in many cases, is automated in some way: it's either some series of automated responses to some state that is reached that is visible in the data, or is actually kicking off some new series of tasks or actions inside of an application based on what is occurring and shown by the time-series data.Corey: You know what doesn't add to your AWS bill? Free developer security from Snyk. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are, finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, repos, and pipelines. And Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like CodePipeline, EKS, ECR, and oh so much more.Secure with Snyk and save some loot. Learn more at snyk.io/scream. That's S-N-Y-K-dot-I-O/screamCorey: So, we've talked about, you have an open-source product, which is the sort of thing that most people listening to this should have a vague idea of, “Oh, that means I can go on GitHub and download it and start using it, if it's not already in my package manager.” Great. You also have the enterprise offering, which is more or less, I presume, a supported distribution of this—for lack of a better term—that you then wind up providing blessed configurations thereof and helping run support for that—for companies that want to run it on-prem. Is that directionally accurate, or am I grossly mischaracterizing [laugh] what your enterprise offering is?Brian: Directionally accurate, of course. You could have a great job in marketing. I really think you could.Corey: Oh, you know, I would argue, on some level, I probably do. The challenge I have is that I keep conflating marketing with spectacle and that leads down to really unfortunate, weird places. But one additional area, which is relatively recent since the last time I spoke with Paul—one of the cofounders of your company—on this show is InfluxDB Cloud, which is one of those, “Oh, let me see if I look—if I'm right.” And sure enough, yeah, you wind up managing the infrastructure for us and it becomes a pay-per consumption model the way that most cloud service providers do, without the really obnoxious hidden 15 levels of billing dimensions.Brian: Yes, we are trying to bring the transparency back. But yes, you're correct. We have open-source and we have—it's very popular—we have over 500,000-plus instances of that deployed globally today in the community. And that's typically very common for developers to get started using the open-source, easily recognizable, it's been out for a long time, and so many people start the journey there.And then we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which it's actually a clustered version of InfluxDB open-source. So, it allows you to basically handle in an environment that you want to manage yourself, you manage a cluster and scale it out and handle ever-increasing workloads and have things like redundancy and replication, et cetera. But that's really specifically for people who want to deploy and operate the software themselves, which is a good set of people; we have a lot of folks who have done that. But one of the areas that's a little bit more recent is InfluxDB Cloud, which is really, for folks who don't want to have anything to do with the management; they really just want to use it as a service, send their data in—Corey: Yeah, give me an API endpoint, and I want you to worry about the care, and the feeding, and the waking up at two in the morning when a disk starts filling up. Yeah, that is the best kind of problem from my perspective: someone else's.Brian: Exactly. That's our job. And increasingly, we've seen folks gravitate to that. We've got a lot of folks have signed up on this product since it launched in 2019, and it's really increasingly where they begin their journey, maybe not even going to the open-source just going directly to this because it's relatively simple to get started.It's priced based on usage. People pay for three vectors: they have the amount of data in; they have number of queries made against the platform; and then storage, how much data you have and for how long. And depending on the use case, some people keep it around for relatively short time, like a few days or a couple of weeks. Other folks have it for many, many months and potentially years in some places. So, you really have that option.But I would say the three products are really about how you want to run it. Do you care about running the, kind of, underlying infrastructure and managing it or do you just want to hit an endpoint, as you said.Corey: You launched this, I want to say in 2019, which feels about directionally right. And I know it was after Timestream was announced, so I just want to say first, how kind and selfless it was of you to validate AWS's market, which is, you know how they always like to clarify and define what they're doing when they decide to enter every single market anywhere to compete with everyone. It turns out, I don't get the sense that they like it quite [laugh] as much being on the other side of that particular divide, but that's the best kind of problem, too: again, someone else's.Brian: Yeah, I think that's really true.Corey: The challenge that I have is that it seems like a weird direction to go in as a company, though it is clearly based upon a number of press releases you have made about the success and market traction that you found, it feels, on some level, like it is falling into an older version of an open-source trap of assuming that, “Well, we wrote the software therefore we are the best people you could pick to run it.” That was what a lot of companies did; it turns out that AWS has this operational excellence, as they call it, and what the rest of us call burning through people and making them wake up in the middle of the night to fix things before it becomes customer-visible. But from the outside, there's no difference. It seems, however, that you have built something that is clearly resonating, and in a big way, in a way that—I've got to be direct with you—the AWS time-series service that they are offering has not been finding success.Brian: Thank you for saying that, and we feel pretty excited about the success we've had even being in the same market as Amazon. And Amazon does a phenomenal job at running products at scale, and the breadth that they have in their product lineup is pretty impressive, especially when they roll out new stuff at AWS re:Invent every year. But we've been able to find some pretty good success with our approach, and it's based on a couple of things. So, one is being the company that actually develops and still deploys the open-source is really important. People gravitate to that.Our roots as a company are open-source, we've been a part of and fostered this community over many, many years, and there's a certain trust in the direction that we're taking the company. And Paul, our founder who you mentioned, he's been front and center with that community, pretty deeply engaged for many, many years. I think that carries a lot of weight. At least that's the way we think about it. But then as far as commercial products go, we really think about it as going to where our customers are, going to where developers are. And that could mean the language that they prefer, the language of preference for them. And that could [crosstalk 00:22:25]—Corey: Oh, and it's very clear; it seems that most database companies that I talk to—again, without naming names—tend to focus on the top-down sale, but I've never worked in an environment where the database that will be used was dictated by anyone other than the application developers who are the closest to the technical requirements for the workload. I've never understood this model of, “Oh, we're going to talk to the C suite because we believe that they're going to pick a database vendor based upon who has box seats this season.” I've never gotten that and that probably means I'm a terrible enterprise marketer, on some level. But unlike almost every other player in the database space, I've never struggled to understand what the hell your messaging has meant, other than the technical bits that I just don't have quite enough neurons to bang together to create sparks to fully understand. It is very clearly targeted at a builder rather than someone who's more or less spending their entire life in meetings. Which, oh, God, that's me.Brian: [laugh]. Yes, it's very much the case. We are focused on the developer. And that developer is a builder of an application or service that is seeing the light of day, it's going out and being used by their own end-users and end-customers.And so we care about going to where those developers are, and that could mean going and making your product easily used in the language and tool that customer cares about. So, if you're a Python developer, it's important for us to have tools and make it easy for Python developers. We have client libraries for Python, for example. It also means going to the cloud where your customers are. And this is something that differentiates us as well, when you start looking at what the other cloud providers are offering, in that data—like it or not—has gravity. And so somebody that has built their whole stack on AWS and sure they care about using a service that is going to receive their data, and that also being in AWS, but—Corey: It has to live where the customers are, especially with data egress charges being what they are, too.Brian: Exactly.Corey: And data gravity is real. The cloud provider people pick is the one where their data lives because of that particular inflection in the market.Brian: Absolutely true. And so that's great if you're only going after people who are on AWS, but what about Google Cloud and what about Microsoft Azure? There are a lot of developers that are building on those platforms as well, and that's one of the reasons we want to go there as well. So, InfluxDB Cloud is a multi-cloud offering, and it's equal experience and capability and pricing on each of the three major clouds. You can buy directly from us; you can put it on any of your cloud bills in one of those marketplaces, and to us that's like a really, really fundamental point is to bring your product and make it as easy to use on those platforms and in those languages, and in those realms and use cases where people are already working.Corey: I'm a big believer in multi-cloud for the use case you just defined. Because I know I'm going to get letters if I don't say this based upon my public multi-cloud is a dumb default worst practice for most folks—because it is, on a workload-by-workload basis—but you're building a service that has to be close to where your customers are and for that specific thing, yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense for you to have a presence across all the different providers. Now, here's the $64,000 question for you: is the experience as an InfluxDB Cloud customer meaningfully different between different providers?Brian: It's not. We actually pride ourselves on it being the same. Using InfluxDB, you sign up for InfluxDB Cloud, you come in, you set up your account, create your organization, and then you choose which underlying cloud provider you want your account to be provisioned in. And so it actually comes as a secondary choice; it's not something that is gated in the beginning, and that allows us to deliver a uniform experience across the board. And you may in a future use case, maybe somebody wants to have part of what they're building data living in AWS and maybe part of it living in Azure, I mean, that could be a scenario as well.However, typically what we've seen—and you've probably seen this as well—is  most developers are—and organizations—are building mostly on one cloud. I don't see a lot of  multi-cloud in that organization. But we ourselves need to be multi-cloud in order to go to where those people are working. And so that's the distinction. It's for us as a company that delivers product to those people, it's important for us to go where they are, whereas they themselves are not necessarily running on all three cloud products; they're probably running on one platform.Corey: Yeah. On a workload-by-workload basis, that's what generally makes sense. Anytime you have someone who has a particular workload that needs to be in multiple providers, okay, great, you're going to put that out there, but their backend systems, their billing, their marketing, all the rest, is not going to go down that path for a variety of excellent reasons, mostly that it is a colossal pain, and a bunch of, more or less, solving the same problems over and over, rather than the whole point of cloud being to make it someone else's. I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak to me about how you're viewing the evolution of the market, how you're seeing your move into cloud, and how you're effectively targeting folks who can actually care about the implementation details of a database rather than, honestly, suits. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Brian: They can go to our website; it's the easiest place to go. So, influxdata.com. You can read all about InfluxDB, it's a pretty easy sign up to get underway. So, I recommend that people get their hands dirty with the product. That's the easiest way to understand what it's all about.Corey: And if you do end up doing that, please tell them I sent you because the involuntary flinch whenever people mention my name to vendors is one of my favorite parts of being me. Brian, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Brian: Thanks so much for having us on. It was great.Corey: Brian Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer—and dealmaker—at InfluxData. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long, angry comment telling me that you work on the Timestream service team, and your product is the best. It's found huge success, but I've just never met any of your customers and I can't because they all live in Canada.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don't work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling. The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible and using multivariate testing. As an example, the agency may “cross-reference data out of Amazon” with data from its analytics platform on the ecommerce side.” The Basement markets its clients through an often complex, multi-touch, multi-channel approach. Larger companies may have as many as 150 datapoints across their consumer journey from “high level impressions down to ecommerce platform conversions.”  Brian has found that insights gained by analyzing data about consumers in the lower funnel can provide information on how the consumer got there and what the consumer will do next. The agency measures its success through outcomes, which, Brain explains, ensures accountability. Brian says his agency's focus has always been on growth, but growth “has to be calculated.” When asked about his agency's culture, he says simply, “Stay fascinated,” and then expands on the thought, adding, “Stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated.” Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: thebsmnt.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Phillips, Co-founder and CEO of The Basement based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here, Brian. Why don't you start off by telling us about The Basement and where the firm excels? BRIAN: The Basement is an integrated agency, and there's probably some backstory there of how we got to be an integrated agency with roots in a production company. It's sad but true, but one of our greatest strengths is being able to deliver on what we say we can do. I've sat at many tables with brands that are unsatisfied with whoever their partners are, and sometimes it's as simple as just being able to deliver. I think as a production company, at the beginning that was what we prided ourselves on, and over time we've evolved to include that same delivery mentality against the consumer journey and a fully integrated offering of technology and creativity and measurements with the consumer journey in mind. We've had a lot of success with brands. We're not afraid to talk about outcomes. Actually, we prefer talking about outcomes, and we prefer the accountability that comes with that. We've been very fortunate to align with some great brands, and they acknowledge and accept our approach. It's turned out to be very impactful for both their business and mine. ROB: Are those brands typically more consumer-facing, or is there some B2B in there as well? BRIAN: Mostly consumer-facing, but we do have some B2B. Certainly there are major differences there. But we really approach our work systematically and through a proprietary framework that we've developed. Technologies roll in, audiences roll into it, but at the end of the day we're still performing the same services against that framework for B2B and B2C. ROB: Interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that framework. I think you have some brands that are of a pretty big size, and their go-to-market with customers is probably very multi-touch in a way that would often be hard to measure and hard to be accountable for, but that very much seems to be what you've leaned into. BRIAN: Yeah, there's no question. It seems like the majority of our clients are that way with the multi-touch and the omnichannel approach. I think it's important when we start talking with a brand that we're all aligned on accountability, and where we're going to hold ourselves accountable and where the brands are going to be accountable. Throughout that initial phase where we're working on strategy, we have to come to consensus on how we're going to measure success. Measuring that success along the consumer journey is something that we work together on and then we measure against. So that becomes, in my opinion, a lot easier to have dialogue and to have fruitful conversations and collaborations if you're aligning at the beginning. And that approach has been the core of what we do and how we build our integrated offerings. ROB: What sorts of things are you measuring for brands? BRIAN: Oh, man. [laughs] One of our larger brands that we work with that is a consumer brand, we're measuring 150 datapoints across their consumer journey, and that's everything from high level impressions down to conversions through their ecommerce platform and everything in between. At that point we're managing all media, all what we call destinations – places where consumers engage, whether that be social channels, whether that be their enterprise websites. We're going to build that infrastructure inside of that journey so that we can extract as much data as possible. Then we want to analyze it. We want to understand if there's any insights we can gain in the lower funnel that can impact how the consumer's getting there and what the consumer's doing next. And we've got case studies where we've seen and applied insights that were upper funnel, that were on the advertising layer, where we were able to test what type of product mix through display ads – we would run multivariate testing and we noticed that these certain product mixes with color combinations and words were effective. That then translates all the way down to the way we communicate on our website and what products we show on the website, how we're driving conversions through the performance funnel online. That cross-analysis is very important to us. We use and leverage a lot of technology, don't get me wrong; technology is extremely important to our business. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that our core teams that work with the brand are analyzing that data, and we're looking for those insights and we're trying to figure things out on behalf of the brand. Machine learning is helpful. Obviously, it's a trend and it's going to be here. It already has changed the business and it's going to continue to change the business. But at the end of the day, I think you still need to have humans involved in that analysis, and that's something that we do very diligently with our clients. ROB: It's fascinating because a lot of marketers think about knowing how to track marketing when they can track the individual user all the way around the internet, when they can get a hard link through to conversion, that sort of thing. Certainly, you will have that in cases on the ecommerce side. But it almost sounds like on the broader consumer/general market side – maybe they bought something on Home Depot's website or Costco's website or Amazon or someplace where you can't sink into the data – it sounds like maybe you're still pulling on the stages of the customer journey at a macro level to see what's pushing down the funnel. Is that how you're thinking about it? You know what the stages are, you know what people are doing; even if you can't link each person, you can still see the echoes of what you've done up-funnel. BRIAN: Exactly. That's exactly right. Amazon's a great example where we can get data out of Amazon and we can get data out of our analytics platform on the ecommerce, and we have to cross-reference those. We have to understand why this happened versus something else happened. My background is kind of an interesting background, but it certainly comes from the creative side. I often talk to my team and in general about the importance of the consumer journey and looking at it very similar to figure drawing. The way that I learned figure drawing is you have positive and negative space, and the positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works. But with figure drawing, you need to leverage and use the negative space as templates to help you define and form your positive space. I relate that to marketing and the consumer journey in a way that says sometimes things don't work, but understanding why they don't work and having the measurements in place to understand and help define – that helps us define what's going to work and what didn't work. So we really want to look at the positive and the negative space. I think there's an idea or a wish for marketers and agencies to say, “We just want to find all the positive and that's it. That's what we want to base everything on.” We try to look more holistic than that, because we think we can get a lot of definition and a lot of insights out of the things that don't work. ROB: It's fascinating to hear such a – there's sort of a disciplined line of thinking around the creativity that probably frees you up to be creative in other ways. It's interesting how it echoes right into marketing. It almost sounds like we're talking about planetary physics or something while we're at it. BRIAN: Now you're really going to get me going. [laughs] ROB: Oh, how so? BRIAN: I study science. I don't read many business books; I never did. I mean, I've read marketing and business books, but I've found that the focus on our business and the focus on science, everything from natural order to epigenetics, is something that I've been really focused on over the past year and a half and applying that level of thinking. To your point, you mentioned the word discipline, and I think that's certainly a strength of the agency and it's something that my business partner and I have always strived for. If I were to analyze my career, I think a systematic, more scientific approach to creative is something that I've always done. The parallels of science and creativity are just so fascinating to me. ROB: I think you can't just drop epigenetics into the conversation without actually helping those of us who think we know what that is, but maybe we don't. [laughs] Can you give a definition of what that is and maybe how it ties into, if it does tie into, your work and marketing? BRIAN: Any of the scientists in your audience may say, “He's completely off,” so I'll use the caveat that this is how I've interpreted it. The genes that we have as humans are what I would consider more binary. They do simple on and off. They can't define the entire character of a person. They may define the way you look, they may define other parts of your genetic makeup, but epigenetics is a newer science that is the study of the chemicals that are how the genes are expressed. What's so fascinating to me and what really got me interested in the concept is that these chemicals, these imprints of chemicals can become part of your genetic makeup that you can pass down to your children. There may be a certain way that you move or the way that you stand that wouldn't necessarily be part of a gene. A gene doesn't have that in it, but epigenetics have put that imprint on you because of the way that things have happened through your environment. That is what I find so fascinating about it – that study of behavior and getting all the way down to that science to say these behaviors can actually be explored through genes. Tying that to marketing – I think this is way, way future-focused, but when that data becomes more readily available and people start mapping it, which they are now, how does that bring the science of genetics into the targeting of how people are buying and selling products? That is the stuff that I find fascinating and I read about. ROB: Is this something in the neighborhood of a gene drive or something like that? Is that what we're talking about here? Or am I completely out of the neighborhood? BRIAN: What did you call that? ROB: A gene drive, where they can take certain things and introduce them – like they can introduce sterilization into the mosquito population not by shooting a mosquito into a crisper or anything like that. It's called a gene drive. Basically, they can introduce this trait into the population in this external way. BRIAN: I'm not spending a lot of my time and energy on what they're going to do with that innovation. [laughs] I do think that the future of medicine is going to be more tailored based on the structural variations within people's genes. So I do think that's going to change medicine as a potential outcome. But right now, my fascination and interest has just been the data and what happens when that source, that mapping has been done, what you do with it. It's like Tesla having all the data of people driving their cars. ROB: I see. So, you're able to measure things you've never been able to measure before to get insight you've never been able to draw before, just by how deep you're able to look into the picture. BRIAN: Right. That's what we keep doing as society. We keep finding new ways to extract data, and that is a parallel to the way we look at our framework and the way that we work with our clients. How can we extract meaningful data from the journey? It's just going to get smarter and more robust, and the systems are going to be in place and the first party data is going to be there. It's an interesting time, for sure. ROB: You've alluded a couple of times to your own background and your own origin story. What is the origin story of The Basement? What made you decide to start the firm, and what have been some key inflection points along the way? BRIAN: How far do you want me to go back? I think there's some relevance to the first brush of creativity. For the record, I'm about 6'6” and I come from an athletic family, and I was a basketball player. There was a point in my life where I thought I was going to go play basketball. Certainly not professionally, but in college. And I was always an artist. When I was in high school – this was in the early to mid-'90s – I met a graffiti artist from Chicago. That culture didn't really exist in Indianapolis in a meaningful way. That culture really didn't exist in the common culture of society. Hip-hop culture was in its infancy, really, at that time. I became fascinated by that art form. I think one of the key powers or superpowers, if you will – and for the record, I think superpowers change over time. At that time in my life, one of the things that defined me was defiance, and I think that carried through my career, from graffiti art to wanting to be an animator when I saw the movie Toy Story. That became my goal. My dream was to be a character animator. That's what my career set off into: how can I make animated films or shorts or whatever? I didn't really have a definition. I ended up in architecture, and I spent a number of years in architecture. It was at this period when the internet was becoming relevant. It was getting introduced to businesses. This was pre-broadband. Everyone was on dial-up. We were just at that point in society where the internet and how people engaged online was being defined. Then I became really interested in creating these very rich, high-end experiences that eventually became online, for lack of a better term, engagements. That's how my career started. I was doing that in architecture, and at one point my business partner and I met, and I was frustrated with my career and the ceiling that I saw for myself and the work I wanted to do. I wanted to work at Pixar. I left. I just quit my job. I convinced my business partner to start a business. He was certainly more of a marketing business mind than me at the time. I was very much an artist and a producer. The combination of the two of us has worked out really well. And we left. He left McDonald's Corporation, where he was a very successful regional marketing director, and I was this young, probably cocky kid who was doing 3D animation and interactive 3D online and virtual worlds, and we took off. We ended up becoming one of the first digital agencies in Indiana, and from there we started The Basement because we saw a void with traditional agencies that didn't have an understanding of digital. We saw that as an opportunity and a void in the market and serviced agencies for the first 5 or 6 years of our business as a high-end interactive studio, doing animated TV spots, doing Flash games. We made a number of video games, we made a number of TV spots, we did a number of very high-end, rich websites for consumer brands and national product launches, until we saw an opportunity. We were really good at building the destinations and the engagement points with consumers, and we would always ask the agencies and the people we were working with, “How are we getting people here? What's the narrative? What's that consumer narrative and how do we extend it?” That's where we started to take on more direct clients. We had clients that were at agencies that went to the brand side and wanted to hire us directly. It really started to snowball, and then we built a media business, and now we have a full national internal media business and analytics business, and obviously creative is still there, still a studio. We still produce a lot of work in-house. There's a ton of content that gets produced along with consumer journey. Being able to build that content against a very robust media strategy that's looking at data, looking for data, that's the kind of integration that we've built. In a very, very short, run-on sentence, that's how we got to where we are. ROB: Brian, you mentioned something that I think is very common, which is that a creative firm starts up to work on a particular practice area that other agencies aren't focused on, and you'll either take a referral or you'll get white-labeled under them on the engagement – and then there's this jumping off point that has to come around to grow more. That's that graduation from taking other people's subprojects and leftovers and engaging the clients directly. How did you change the mindset and make that jump in the business? Because a lot of people get stuck there. BRIAN: I really give a lot of that credit to my business partner. We also have one of our vice presidents who took the client services part of the business. We all worked really hard together, and my business partner's background in the agency was account service. He knew that business. He knew it very well. He's very disciplined, and he understands how to build systems, and again, echoing the points that we made, we think systematically. So we built systems that will hold ourselves accountable, and we made sure that we were honest with each other and collaborated. We're transparent. I think that transparency was a very important key for us with our clients throughout. If we can do something, we'll tell you we can do it. If we can't do it at that time, we're going to be honest with you and we'll tell you when we can do it. That formula worked really well for us. I've always been an advocate for hiring people that are better than you, and that is what we did. At that time we had to build a culture, and we built a culture around growth not only for our clients, but for ourselves and for the individuals that are within the company. We fostered the culture, and that culture helped organically make us better. That is I think equal weight in the success of that adoption and being able to change and being able to recognize how something needs to improve. That's, again, been a big part of who we are. We have a tagline, which really is the definition of our culture, and that's “Stay fascinated.” Our culture is defined by stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated. That idea of staying fascinated is see something bigger than yourself, see something that we can become collectively. When you see something and you strive for something and you strive for growth, things need to change and things get better. That's how we define our culture, and that's how we were able to improve. Because I'll tell you right now, our account service business was not great when we started. It was good. We've made it great. ROB: It sounds like by being honest with yourself and with your clients – both of which takes discipline, which we said before – you were able to avoid getting yourself in the deep end in some areas and say no to the things that were too big while also growing into bigger and bigger capabilities along the way. BRIAN: Yeah. We expanded our services along the way. Again, very, very proud today. We've had tremendous growth over the life of the agency, and we still plan to grow. We are going to continue to grow. Thinking of it from a biological standpoint, organisms grow to the point where they peak and they start to decay. We feel that we're not even close to decaying. Growth has always been a part of our strategy, but it has to be calculated. We've said no to things that we knew we weren't going to be able to deliver against, and that I think is very important and has defined us by saying no to things versus saying yes to everything. That was a really good business lesson that we've learned along the way. And preservation of culture, because you can say yes to things and short term you can grow revenue, you can make more money – but at the peril of what? That was something we've always been very protective of: the culture, the people, the dynamics within the team. Because as we recruit and we want to hire the most talented people, then you have to protect them and you have to make sure that they are in a position to do what they're great at. The point I made about superpowers evolving – as I got further in my career and further into the growth of business, that became part of my role and what I strive to be good at. ROB: It's quite a journey, Brian. Thank you for sharing. I feel like there's a lot more we could pull on; I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Brian, when people want to get in touch with you and with The Basement, how should they connect with you? BRIAN: Certainly the website for The Basement, and that is thebsmnt.com. That's the easiest way to get a hold of us. We love challenges, and we love brands that want to swing above their weight class. We're actively looking for new partnerships. I really appreciate you taking a moment to have me on and talk about this business that we've built out of Indianapolis, which is not typically known for advertising. ROB: If people don't know, there's a lot there. ExactTarget didn't get as long in the sun as people might've wanted it to, but that was a big deal out of Indy, right? BRIAN: Oh my goodness, yes. ExactTarget has been a fantastic story, and Salesforce is there. Yeah, things are changing. There's no doubt. Things have definitely changed and momentum is with our city right now. ROB: Got that Atlanta to Indy connection with Pardot and Salesforce and all that. We appreciated ExactTarget as well. It was good for our ecosystem. BRIAN: Good. ROB: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to have you on. Be well. BRIAN: Likewise. Thank you again. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

My guest today is Brian Watkins, former VP of eCommerce for Bulletproof 360, the diet and supplements company. This is Part 2 of the interview where we explore how he grew the Bulletproof business.This is the free edition of Marketing BS. Premium subscribers got access to part 1 of Brian's interview yesterday and twice the content every week.You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).This interview is sponsored by GoToWebinar:Save up to 23% on GoToWebinar Annual Plans!GoToWebinar eliminates the headache and hassle from webinar hosting. No matter your goal or skill level, you'll quickly see why so many choose GoToWebinar for easy virtual event management, performance data, videos, polls, and email invites and reminders. Try GoToWebinar for free today!TranscriptEdward: This is part two of my interview with Brian Watkins. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as head of ecommerce at Bulletproof 360.Brian, can you start by explaining what Bulletproof does?Brian: Bulletproof is a health and wellness brand started by Dave Asprey about six or seven years ago now with the goal of radically improving your own life. What Bulletproof does is basically develop a line of supplements, protein powders, MCT oils, and just a variety of healthy intakes primarily driven around the ketogenic diet. But it resolves, at the end of the day, around the Bulletproof diet, which Dave Asprey created with the idea that by bringing in healthy food into your system you can have better energy, gut health, and mental performance.Edward: What are the main products that Bulletproof sells that drive the majority of its revenue?Brian: There are six main product lines. There's MCT oil, which is modified coconut oil, which is a high fat, low carb, zero carb enhancer for food and diet. There's a supplement business so vitamins and other items that you can take for mental clarity, energy, and immunity. There's protein bars, protein powders, ready-to-drink coffee, and packaged coffee. Those are the six main product lines that are offered to incorporate different parts of the Bulletproof diet throughout your day.Edward: That's a pretty wide variety. It's practically a packaged-goods firm. Are some of those more important than others, or they're all fairly evenly divided?Brian: Back in the day, when it first started, Bulletproof is highly focused on the biohacker. There's a lot around what MCT oil was, and Bulletproof truly developed that category in time. But then also the supplement of a collagen protein regime and then also supplements created with the biohacker community was focused on and looked for.As the company has grown, we've grown beyond what a biohacker is to help maximizers—people that just care or are naturally invested in their health. A lot of this runs back to my days of considered purchases within jewelry because if you're going to be consuming something that you want to know about, there's a little bit more research and a little bit more pause. It made sense as we shifted from biohacking to broader consumer goods, how could we bring education in the consumers along in that process?Edward: Initially, your customers were primarily people who knew your founder, who read his books and were bought into his philosophy rather than his products?Brian: Dave started by blogging (more than anything else) about his own personal journey with food, and energy, and health. He ended up using content in building this foundation and then starting to provide very simple rudimentary products they wanted just falling because they were asking for. Dave, can you get us this? Can you show us this? Can you provide this for us? That then developed into what we know today. As you go down, it ships because what you had day one was a highly knowledgeable person making these purchases. Fast forward today, Bulletproofs at Whole Foods, and Walmart, and Target and it changes the overall value proposition of how you communicate the brand, the brand values, and also what it can do for you in terms of performance onto a single package as you're walking down the shelf.Edward: How do you do that, beyond the fact that he has built a reputation for himself and has a blog and has a book? How do you broaden the awareness and consideration for Bulletproof beyond that core audience?Brian: There's a couple of things. This is what brought me to the company is the product's work. One, people are making these purchases and then coming back like, wow, I can feel a difference. You start with just a very basic repeat-and-referral. You're developing these core pockets of influencers that are starting to communicate out. From that, you can build a foundation.When I think about Bulletproof, especially on the digital acquisition side, we started from the bottom of the funnel and moved up. We were very focused on repeat-and-referral businesses building our email communication and our content. What we did unique about the content is we didn't just spend time talking about the Bulletproof diet, ketogenic diets, or about these products. We went back and said, what are the things we're trying to solve? Are you having a problem with sleep? Are you having a problem with your energy? Are you having midafternoon crashes?What we would do is create content that was more solution-oriented. What that allowed us to do is move up the funnel and get highly qualified prospecting traffic to our brand where they weren't aware of the brand, but they were aware of their issue. We were able to provide a solution both in content and also product recommendations that would help expand that group over time.Edward: I often think of many products as being either Tylenol or vitamins. Either they're solving a specific problem, or they're making your life better in a way that you weren't even aware that you needed. It sounds like Bulletproof started, hey, we make your life better in a way you didn't know you needed and then shifted to be, no, we can solve these specific problems. Were you doing search marketing for people searching for how do I improve my sleep?Brian: We did some of that—this goes back to analytics [...]. We would take all the search marketing information, all the keyword information. You'd also be using the Google search webmaster information to understand keyword volume. If you think about a three-dimensional Rubik, you could understand where's the keyword traffic coming from, what issues are out there.We can then overlay that with the Bulletproof product line, which product lines are doing immunity versus health versus energy versus sleep. Then you could understand the phase of that consumer either based on their search queries—have they already been to the website or whatnot—within this very dimension. Then you have a consumer journey you can communicate to. Is this a prospecting visit, is this a repeat purchase, or is it the subscriber that might be thinking about unsubscribing? You can tailor these journeys to each of these consumers, and we used it across three channels at all times. You had the digital side for sure. Out there, either Facebook look-alikes or Facebook prospecting and Google-branded terms and non-branded terms, depending on what the ROI was. But then we also integrated that very tightly into look-alikes and [...] within Facebook, and then we also did physical mail as well—direct mail. With that, we were touching people across multiple communication channels with their need-solution in mind. That's what helped to elevate the awareness of the brand.Edward: How did you target with direct mail? Was it broad-based, or did you have the equivalent of look-alikes on your direct mail?Brian: We started by focusing on just our existing consumer. Step one was saying look, we know—from our email database—how many of our physical mail addresses have been purchasing or moved to inactive. We started by doing very basic inactive work, which is, hey, we haven't seen you in three months. We've sent you a ton of emails. You haven't opened them, so we're going to send you a physical email. We'll give you a small offer to see if we can get you to re-engage on our website.Edward: How did you know those people hadn't switched to buying at Whole Foods?Brian: We don't, technically. We don't have a single source to a thread online and offline consumer consumption. But what we found is that it's an issue around convenience. If people would typically have shifted to one medium or the other, if they like that, it doesn't matter what we're trying to communicate with them. It's not going to happen. How we thought about our value proposition fell into four lines across all of our channels. The first one was the price. We made sure that Bulletproof maintained the same price. If you're going to buy something at Whole Foods, Walmart, or online, you'd find within 5% or 10% depending on the pricing strategies of certain retailers, but the price would be the same. It definitely was online. The second thing was product selection. Whole Foods was only going to offer two or three items within a protein powder versus online, where we offer the entire assortment. You had a different set of selection. Convenience, nothing could beat that up. You're already at Whole Foods checking out and you're buying that. We can't win on that.Ecommerce convenience is around shopping at home, delivery from home. If you have Amazon, you could have fasted delivery. Then you're left with the brand experience. It's a long way of saying that we knew consumers for passing back and forth between channels. They weren't necessarily passing back and forth because of price. Even by incentivizing some of the 10% coupon or 20% coupon, we typically found they stayed in the channel that they wanted to be in versus having people optimize between channels overtime.Edward: When you found someone who had dropped out of your online purchase channel and you sent a direct mail to them, the assumption was they dropped out of the online channel. They hadn't switched to Whole Foods, they just dropped out completely. I assume you ran a test and control. You held back some people, sent direct mail to others, and saw whether the reactivation made sense in the long run.Brian: Exactly right. What we found is it absolutely did. It had almost a 2X improvement with our test sample size, and we do this for 3-, 6-, 9-, 12-month lapse customers so we could track and see their interaction over time. The other thing you can do is you can go back through and see—if you're using Amazon or whatnot—you can also start to mirror in your shipping addresses across multiple platforms as well. Those other ways to consider overtime, narrow that list of who is inactive versus who is just maybe moved on to a secondary channel.Edward: Talk to me about the Amazon channel. How did you work with Amazon?Brian: You got to love them in Seattle, and there's no doubt they're highly successful. But it's hard to be a brand on Amazon—I say that cautiously. At Bulletproof, we ran a 3P relationship. That means that we were managing our own data on our own pricing within the Amazon ecosystem, and that was important to us because it goes back to this, we wanted to have consistent pricing. We didn't want people to figure out or feel like there is differentiated pricing between our channels. We've grown to be one of the largest 3P sellers within Amazon. We use FBA, fulfilled by Amazon. We ship our product to Amazon, Amazon executes, and ships our product out to the consumer. But what's hard is that when you're in that Amazon ecosystem, you get two types of buyers. One is, you have people who are very brand loyal. It's just more convenient. To be on Amazon, you're going to get it in two days, you can add it to a broader order. Some of their subscription tools are just cleaner. You have brand loyalists that are already on Amazon that have a great LTV, and then you have this group there just discovering.What's hard about that is how do you stay top of mind in your Amazon search results. Because unless you have a brand recall, there are so many places within a page for Amazon to compete against you, either from their own brands or their 1P brands, which are brands that they're buying the merchandise for and selling on behalf of the other brand, or just other product placements and advertising. You're constantly trying to work that piece of it.And then you have to respect part 3 of that is there's a lot of data that shows if you look at where Amazon searches occur—and I don't have this data but Amazon does—but if you were to geolocate people as they are on an Amazon app, what you'll find is there's a lot of people shopping in an aisle at Target, pulling up an Amazon search result. Not because they plan to buy on Amazon or check the price, but because they're looking at the reviews. They're looking for a clean way to know what is the best product to look on the shelf of Target. They're not going to target.com. They go to Amazon because that's a large market. You also have to plan that to create credibility in some of your offline channels as well.Edward: You need the reviews on Amazon in order to drive conversion rates in other places. Is that just an assumption or do you have any data to make sure that's actually happening?Brian: There's a decent amount of research that shows that that is occurring. We never did. I'd have to think through it a little bit more, but I don't think we ever did a tremendous amount. We never plotted our review rates on Amazon to our conversion rates across channels or our adoption rates across channels. In general, if we found that we had a lower product rating in general on Amazon, that was a weaker product across our entire assortment. Is that just because it was a weaker product, to begin with, or was it an Amazon umbrella effect? We don't know. But when you talk to a lot of people working within Amazon advertising within the VC community for CPG goods, they do talk about this additional conversion effect, where Amazon advertising now is lifting overall conversion across a lot of channels outside of just Amazon.Edward: Amazon is definitely a distribution channel for you, people who are looking for Amazon and the review factor. Would you find that it was effective at all for discovery?Brian: It is if you're willing to make that investment. The question there goes into the efficiency of that listing and how are you going to get promoted. The key thing within Amazon is to be on the first page. If we're not doing branded keyword searches, but you're just typing in protein powder. The first question is, are you on that front page? Because if you're on that front page, you need to pay to make sure you're on that front page. If you're on that front page, the question is, are you getting the right traffic, the right keywords, and the organic lift you want to have? That's the key thing to brand awareness or prospecting marketing. When you go out and bid on the keywords of protein powder, it is so highly efficient out there that it goes back to the days of Google where it's probably break-even at best. Then you have to have that following and understanding which says, a first-time protein buyer on Amazon, what's the likelihood they will rebuy your brand on the second purchase? What you'll find is there are certain categories because what we've got at Bulletproof is you research that there are certain categories in certain product lines to have a high propensity of repeat and branded options. Those are the areas where we would spend exponential dollars in or incremental dollars in to promote those products. These just aren't going to be Amazon products that we can do profitably, so we leave that as a distribution solution to our loyal brand followers, but we're not going to use that for prospecting within that ecosystem.Edward: Did you use any of Amazon's display network stuff or only on their merchandising, only on their core search results?Brian: We did display as well. When you think about Amazon display, we viewed it as there are three different ways to apply it. Once again, I'll go back to the marketing funnel in reverse order which is, you could do display advertising around the realm of loyalty.Which one of the benefits of selling supplements is I know that there are 30 capsules in that bottle, which means in about 30 days you need to repeat order. What we do is we run loyalty display campaigns to go re-find those consumers if they had not already placed an order to date.Edward: You are using retargeting, not so much like look-alike audiences.Brian: On a delayed basis, retargeting. That would be one channel. The second channel would be straight retargeting right after they first did their search. That's remarketing. They've probably already seen our results once, chase them down for the next three days, don't know if they've made a purchase or not, make sure that they know about Bulletproof, and then the final one is that prospecting look-alike.What's the benefit of what Amazon does there in their display network is they have a tremendous amount of sub-genres and look-alikes, and so you can use that to mirror it over time. The hard part about Amazon display—and they definitely heard it a lot from us—is that they like to report out on view-based conversions.One of the difficulties with the display is trying to understand the role of view-based, which might make sense at the prospecting level. But it sure doesn't make sense when you get down to this reactivation loyalty level because you only want to spend that if you know it's driving an incremental unique conversion. It has to get down to that click-through because I already know they're converting. I need to know if that display ad drove that conversion or we got them from some other means, and that makes the data very difficult in those situations.Edward: I'd imagine that if you're retargeting, so many of those people are going to come back and buy from you anyway. If you're going to give them credit to anyone who sees the view, effectively, you're just stealing all this attribution you would have had anyway.Brian: There'd be a lot of meetings where they'd come and be like, oh my gosh, you should triple your display budget. It's going incredibly well. I can't take any of that money to the bank because those conversions were happening at a consumer level, but we couldn't attribute back to that channel. That's such a critical piece to this when you get down to the lowest part of the funnel is understanding what role that final conversion piece is. We wanted to use Amazon display more and more for loyalty and for cart abandonment, but we couldn't effectively always deploy it in a way and therefore, it's left in middle effectiveness in terms of a channel.Edward: Let's talk about your physical distribution and retail. How do you drive more sales there? Is it the same thing, hey, get on end carts and do lots of demos?Brian: Yeah. That's one more like, yeah, you should talk to our retail and brand group. Edward: Fair enough because you were only doing ecommerce.Brian: I was only doing ecommerce. I'll tell you two things. One is that it goes back to the days of Ritani, they play off of each other. There's something to be said that when you move your product into Whole Foods, Sprouts, Walmart, or Target and people see it, that's going to help grow the overall awareness of the brand. There's no doubt. The flip side is when we're doing the right things online and we're getting our information out there and we're showing it to people, that's going to help the in-store as well. What we would do a lot of times in store—which goes back to being an ecommerce person, where you can track that transaction, you can track that conversion so much easier—is you find things like we would do in-store demos. It's just really hard to understand. By the time you put a demo team in there—are they a product expert and people are trying it—and then you look at that store lift both that day and then 30, 60, or 90 days later, I'm not convinced that in-store demos truly drive a real change. I think the retailers love it because it's a value add to their consumers walking the aisles pre-COVID, but I'm not sure the economic proposition is there.Edward: Is it the equivalent of a view-through conversion?Brian: Yeah, in my mind it is. It absolutely is. Maybe that's why I don't end up helping out on the in-store marketing is because it's harder for me to quantify that next dollar. I feel confident when I say, hey, I'm going to put a dollar into this channel. I have a 90% degree of certainty I'm going to return X% back, be it two-time, three-time, or four-time [...].When I do an in-store demo or when I do high-level brand impressions and campaigns, I'm told, in 3-6 months, what we hope to see is a lift of X%, and that's important at some point. I always joke around like I appreciate the people of Budweiser when they run the six Super Bowl ads because I think they're hilarious. But as a marketer, I would have such a hard time trying to justify that sixth spin because I couldn't quantitatively put it back into where that sale occurs based on that investment.Edward: Brian, this has been fantastic today. Before we go, tell me about your quake book and how it changed the way you think about the world.Brian: I'll give you two because they are the very far extremes of book reading. One, I'm a huge Dr. Seuss fan. Maybe I created the lowest bar ever for Marketing BS. But Oh, the Places You'll Go! is an outstanding book to create perspective around one's journey. especially if you've ever done a day-one startup or gone through really hard career items. That book summarizes what it feels like and the highs and the lows. The other one that comes around with management is—Gallup produced a book several years ago called 12. It's around the 12 questions of employee engagement. That was a game-changer for me because when you influence people, you have three ways to influence them. You have role power. Being a previous CEO or head of the department, you walk around with this red neon light that says, I can fire you. It turns out people are going to laugh at your jokes and they're going to do what you say you do. That's role power.You can also have expertise power where you can walk in, and because you've done this for so long or you know the patterns better, the people are going to follow you because you've done it and you have this understanding that they don't have.But the real power is around relationship power. The book of 12 talks about highly engaged teams and how do you create engage-core forces over time. It all goes back to a high EQ and emotional understanding of teams. When I finally realized that and understood how to develop teams like that, it's just been a complete game-changer to how I look at my career and how I managed teams going forward.Edward: Brian, thank you so much for being here. This has been fantastic.Brian: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

Chenda Bunkasem is head of machine learning at Undock, where she is focusing on using quantitative methods to influence ethical design. In this episode of Experiencing Data, Chenda and I explore her actual methods to designing ethical AI solutions as well as how she works with UX and product teams on ML solutions. We covered: How data teams can actually design ethical ML models, after understanding if ML is the right approach to begin with   How Chenda aligns her data science work with the desired UX, so that technical choices are always in support of the product and user instead of “what’s cool” An overview of Chenda’s role at Undock, where she works very closely with product and marketing teams, advising them on uses for machine learning  How Chenda’s approaches to using AI may change when there are humans in the loop What NASA’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL) evaluation is, and how Chenda uses it in her machine learning work  What ethical pillars are and how they relate to building AI solutions What the Delphi method is and how it relates to creating and user-testing ethical machine learning solutions Quotes From Today’s Episode  “There's places where machine learning should be used and places where it doesn't necessarily have to be.” - Chenda “The more interpretability, the better off you always are.” - Chenda “The most advanced AI doesn't always have to be implemented. People usually skip past this, and they're looking for the best transformer or the most complex neural network. It's not the case. It’s about whether or not the product sticks and the product works alongside the user to aid whatever their endeavor is, or whatever the purpose of that product is. It can be very minimalist in that sense.” - Chenda  “First we bring domain experts together, and then we analyze the use case at hand, and whatever goes in the middle — the meat, between that — is usually decided through many iterations after meetings, and then after going out and doing some sort of user testing, or user research, coming back, etc.” - Chenra, explaining the Delphi method.  “First you're taking answers on someone's ethical pillars or a company's ethical pillars based off of their intuition, and then you're finding how that solution can work in a more engineering or systems-design fashion. “ - Chenda  “I'm kind of very curious about this area of prototyping, and figuring out how fast can we learn something about what the problem space is, and what is needed, prior to doing too much implementation work that we or the business don't want to rewind and throw out.” - Brian “There are a lot of data projects that get created that end up not getting used at all.”- Brian Links Undock website Chenda's personal website Substack Twitter Instagram Connect with Chenda on LinkedIn Transcript Brian: Hi, everyone, Welcome back to Experiencing Data. This is Brian O'Neill, and today I have Chenda Bunkasem on the line, an AI research scientist in question, right? You're not quite sure is that what I just heard? Chenda: [laugh]. Yeah, there's debate within the scientific community about titles. So, you know, you always have to be skeptical. Brian: Exactly. So, maybe we could jump into whether or not you're a scientist, and what the heck you're doing with machine learning and AI. I saw C

Brian Lawson and his brother left their jobs in engineering, IT, and software development to found WebMO (Web Marketing Optimizer), a digital marketing agency. From the beginning, they focused on optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, not just studying digital marketing tactics, strategies, and analysis, but digging into the “behind the scenes” mechanics. Today, WebMO is heavily data-driven, does everything digital marketing, and serves a large number of diverse and predominantly small-businesses nationwide. WebMO's “super-detailed” understanding of Google Analytics, conversion tracking, visitor engagement metrics, and the conversion heuristic enables the agency to fully understand clients' market spaces. Over the years, the agency built their own analytical tools. The combination of three major Google data points – Google Analytics, a company's Google Search Console data, and the data compiled in a company's Google my Business listing – provides a clear understanding of a company's “true space in the market.” Education is the beginning of WebMO's relationship with its clients. Brian loves to break down complicated technical concepts. He is used to speaking to groups of people, and loves running free workshops to help business owners understand complex concepts. As a result of this proactive training, WebMO became a Google Partner. When Google introduced the Grow with Google program, which encourages small business organizations, chambers of commerce, public libraries, agencies, and other organizations to participate in live feed educational workshops, WebMO was on board. Because of the huge number of people who have gone through WebMO's workshops, Google recognizes the agency as a “high impact partner.”  Education on how Google works, Brian says, “is absolutely critical.” After defining a client's market space, the agency evaluates the client's unique situation, and then makes recommendations. Because Brian's agency works with smaller companies with smaller budgets, “testing” the market and quantifying the response works well. Instead of spending thousands of dollars for a huge campaign, the clients may spend a few hundred. WebMO is then able to quickly show them the ROI on that investment. Brian says, “If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap.” Covid-19 changed the agency's operations. Although WebMO has been unable to meet with clients in person, it continues its educational outreach through weekly updates. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Yelp are constantly tweaking their policies . . . WebMO is working to keep clients aware of these changes. One of Brian's more recent presentations covered “how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this [Covid-19] situation is having on your business.” Brian explains that Covid-19 has affected businesses in several different ways. Companies that provide such things as bartending services for parties are devastated. For other companies, like air conditioning repair companies and plumbers, it's business as usual. For the last category, exemplified by companies that sell cleaning supplies, provide in-home nanny services, and medical professionals who are still working, traffic has gone “off the charts.” In addition to having its own clients, WebMO partners with agencies that need an invisible number cruncher. When asked what he would have done differently when he started his agency, Brian said, he should have been “a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most.” He seems to be doing that now. Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: www.web-mo.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Lawson, Owner and Co-founder of WebMO, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Hey, thanks, Rob. I appreciate you having me on. ROB: Brian, it's great to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about WebMO and what makes WebMO great? BRIAN: Awesome. We are, as you mentioned, a Tucson, Arizona based digital marketing agency. I've always introduced our company as being a little different than quite a few others in our space because of our backgrounds. The co-founders, myself and my brother, come from a much different background than the typical marketing agency background. A lot of times people that provide the types of services that we provide, like websites and digital marketing and SEO and Google and YouTube and Facebook and all that, tend to come from either the design world or sometimes a traditional marketing background. Our backgrounds were in engineering, IT, software development, all those things. So, from the very beginning, we started approaching all of these digital marketing tactics and strategies and analysis with a much greater emphasis on the machinery, the real techy stuff that's lingering behind the scenes. You think about Google as one example; Google's a company that has 20,000 engineers and 300 designers. So, taking that real math-based, almost “super nerd” approach, if you want to think about it that way, is a good way to approach it given the kind of issues we're dealing with. We tend to be – again, compared to most – a little more data-driven, a little more analytical. We definitely tend to be sometimes a little skeptical of other things that some others in our industry are saying. That gave us the foundation for a very unique and somewhat successful agency. ROB: It sounds like that would also shape the sort of client who comes to you and resonates with you. What sort of clients are drawn to and resonate with this approach? BRIAN: We have a pretty large variety of clients, which thankfully serves us well when things in the market go up or down. We don't really specialize in any one kind. We have some larger end clients that pretty much just engage our services purely for the data analysis part of what we do. We're one of the few agencies who have a complete understanding of all the things going on with Google Analytics and conversion tracking and embracing some of the math that's in our industry, like visitor engagement metrics or the conversion heuristic. We really get super detailed on that. But interestingly, that overall idea is also very appealing to a small business. If you're a house painter and you've been through multiple agencies so far and no one's really been able to figure it out, when they hear that story, it's like, “Whoa, these guys are super into this stuff and they're really technical and analytical.” In a way, it gives that client a reason to believe that maybe this time will be different. Our industry, digital marketing, is old enough now to where most businesses out there have had at least one or two or more experiences with other efforts, and most of them haven't been exactly what they were hoping for. So as an agency – and I would say this to any agency – one of the things you have to really get out there for a client is a reason to believe that this time, things will be different. For us, it's that. It's our unique value proposition, that idea that we're going to take a closer look at the data, but because we have this deep level of understanding of how this stuff works, we're going to find a way to get things happening that maybe weren't happening before. Now, on top of that, I also happen to be a business owner, and I have been a business owner for 30 years, so when I'm talking to another business owner, it's like, “Oh yeah, you get it. You understand.” So a lot of our clients – I'd say the majority of them – definitely fall into the small business category, with a few exceptions being some of those higher end companies that want to bring us in for the analytics side of things. ROB: Very interesting. What sort of toolkit do you bring to bear on that analytics problem? I think people look at tools all the time, and often having right thinking is much more important than the tools, but having good execution is also helpful along those lines. What's your go-to? BRIAN: We've actually done a lot of in-house compilation things, if you want to think about it that way. We're very heavy on the technical side. We have a team of 23 people total, very heavy on the techy side. A lot of developers and programmers. Because of our background being software developers/app developers, we really didn't have to rely on finding third party solutions to do most of what we do. We were able to grow them from the ground up. One example is, for instance, if you're trying to analyze a company's visibility. Let's say you've got a local PC repair guy, whatever, and they want to really understand how they're doing online. We rejected this idea of rank reports way before everyone else did. Even when we entered into this business probably close to 10 years ago, we immediately looked at that model and said, “This doesn't make any sense.” Clients were getting these reports that said “Hey, you're #3 on this term and #6 on that term,” and it all seemed so useless, honestly. Clients were already saying it was useless because they were looking at these reports and saying, “Whatever. Yeah, you found that I'm #3 if I type this exact phrase or whatever; what good does that do me? What do I get? Am I going to get a prize for this? What's the reward?” So we almost right out of the gate rejected that model and said rank reports are about useless, especially when it comes to local visibility. We started creating our own analysis tools that combined, at the time – and now more than ever, in today's market – the three major data points in Google, which is the data that's being accumulated, of course, in Google Analytics, your Google Search Console data, and all the data that's being compiled in your Google My Business listing. The only way to get a really accurate understanding of your true space in the market is with all three of those data points being combined. And then taking it a step further – and again, just putting your mind in a small business owner's frame of mind, they say, “Yeah, I get that I have traffic and I understand that all these people are finding me on these different words and phrases, but again, what does it really mean?” So we'll look at a market and say, “You are in Phoenix, Arizona; there are 50,000 searches per month, roughly, for people looking for plumbing repair. As a business, you, Mr. Plumber, are visible about 33,000 of those times.” Like I said, compiling all this data. That's the starting point: understanding your percentage of market share as opposed to just saying, “Hey, you're showing up in the third spot on this particular search term.” Then it just goes from there. If you're going to have any chance of getting a client or winning a new customer, they have to be able to at least see. As a business owner – and of course, we teach them this – the very first question you should be asking is, “How ubiquitous am I? If there's 50,000 people searching per month, how often am I one of those people that at least appears in front of somebody's eyeballs?” That's just one example. ROB: Absolutely, that makes sense. You talked a little bit about your technical background and your co-founder, your brother's background, coming into starting this business. But in particular, what was it that made you decide to start this business when you did? How did you go from the technical background to “I am going to start a digital marketing agency”? BRIAN: It's interesting. A couple things. We're serial entrepreneurs, as most business owners tend to be. From early on, from about the early '90s, about 1991, we had started an IT services company that was pretty much helping businesses with, at the time, the very confusing world of internal LANs and inter-office communication and computer networking and all that, and then branching into internet configuration and everything else. So, I had a very deep, good long list of local businesses that trusted us for pretty much everything technical. This buildup started happening probably around 2009-2010 with clients saying to us, “Hey, you guys are awesome in helping with all this other stuff, but I can't find anybody that can explain this to me or help me with this.” Almost getting dragged into it from that standpoint. We were thinking, “That's interesting, but let's put a pin in it.” Meanwhile, again as serial entrepreneurs, we did a tech startup. It was a home-based internet security product. I won't get into a lot of detail, but we had the old venture capital funding and all that, and we had developed a marketing strategy for that online. And it was good, using a combination of SEO and Google search ads and all the other things. We had it really cooking. After some investors came in, they basically said, “Hey, you guys are engineers. You guys are probably really good at communicating what you know about your product, but you're not marketers. You don't know what you're doing there. Let's hand that over to this agency” – it was in New York City, one of the bigger agencies out there. “Let's let them take care of that part.” We're like, eh, okay, let's see what happens. Sure enough, we watched what they did and we were doing it better. Our results, everything about it was far exceeding what one of the top agencies in the country was doing. So of course, the little lightbulbs go off in our heads, thinking, as soon as this current tech startup is behind us, between the demand that we're seeing from the boots on the ground, all the people out there that were literally begging us to help them, and combining that with the affirmation that we were truly, truly good at this stuff, our course was set. That was about 10 years ago. ROB: It's interesting how oftentimes through that experience in another business, you find out – sometimes it can be wanderlust and you just try to do something different, but in this case you were able to find something that you could do differently and successfully. If I rewind the conversation a little bit, you were talking about some of these rather complex things. I think if you ask a client sometimes to pick an attribution strategy in Google Analytics, their eyes glaze over. It sounds like you have the strength and knowledge to be able to prescribe that for them pretty well. But marketing also requires going one step further when you're working for a client and helping them understand. How do you think about helping these owners understand something like attribution when you get to something like beyond first click, last click, even attribution, and you're trying to tell somebody that an ad gave them 20% of a lead? I think it'd be pretty confusing. How do you think about getting those concepts through to clients? BRIAN: That's a great question. Early on, we really embraced this idea of the client relationship model, starting with education. I'll come back to that in a second, but really making sure that our client is truly educated. We weren't oblivious to the fact that, for the most part, in our industry, the number one reason why clients drift away is because they make a comment that says something like, “I didn't know what they were doing.” They honestly didn't understand what was happening. So first is education. Then it's evaluation of their specific situation. Only after that we make specific recommendations as to what they should be doing. The education side – as it turns out, I love talking about this stuff. I'm a passionate advocate for the entire model of digital marketing. I love getting in front of groups of people and explaining these things. Because of my background working with businesses on the IT side, I spent many, many times in boardrooms and in front of employees from companies, really breaking down very complicated technical things into little anecdotes and analogies and fun ways to think about stuff. So I was always very capable of doing that, and I really truly enjoyed it. We got way ahead of the curve on that and early on started doing workshops, just free education workshops that would be designed to get business owners understanding this stuff. Because they're dying for information. Even today, even though our industry is a little bit more mature, still so many business owners are quite oblivious. They really don't understand even the basics, let alone some of the more complex concepts like you mentioned. So we hopped on that train big time, and interestingly, it led us – because we're also what's considered a Google Partner; we have a Google Partnership status, and about 3 or 4 years ago, Google introduced this program called Grow with Google, where they were encouraging small business organizations, chamber of commerce, public libraries, or whatever to allow Google to do these live feed education workshops. At the time, since we were a partner, they were opening it up to agencies as well, so we started becoming involved in that. We did that so much that we became the only agency, at least in the state of Arizona, that Google recognized as one of its high impact partners. That was strictly because of the sheer number of people that have gone through our workshops. I know that's sort of a long roundabout way to answer your question, but yeah, education on that stuff is absolutely critical. There's also another element as well. There's getting a client to the point to know enough to know that they'll never truly understand it, and then they basically have faith in you at that point. They say, “Okay, I get that it's really complicated. I don't think I fully understand it, but I'm fully convinced that you understand it, and as long as at the end of the day I'm seeing results and I see that you're attentive, that's really the key.” ROB: As we were chatting before we started recording, that background you have in doing this education has really helped in the moment that we're in. We are in the middle of this coronavirus national shutdown, everybody work from home situation. How are you adapting your agency to operate in this new, fully remote environment? What parts of that do you think you might stick with even once we're all back together in person more often? BRIAN: That's a great question. Like we were talking about, I love the live workshop. I thrive in that environment where I can be interactive with people and gauge – if I'm saying something that's flying right over their heads, I can usually pick that up. So the challenge, for all of us really – and this doesn't just go for workshops; it goes for meetings, it goes for everything that we're doing right now – is to try to find a way to offset that disconnect. Like we talked about before, there's no substitute for that live connection. That being said, I think there are also some opportunities right now. I think that as of today – I feel like we're still, sadly, in the early stages of this; we're hopefully maybe a third of the way through, who knows – but I think after we settle into the new normal and people realize that, “Okay, I'm going to be here a while. I can't, even if I wanted to in some cases, be as productive as I was before because I can't do meetings, I can't do this, whatever. I'm stuck at home, not even driving” – I mean, for some people, an hour or two of their day just opened up because they don't have to drive cars. Again, for business owners and for those that are truly entrepreneurial, I think they are going to shift over to this mindset of saying, “You know what? With all this free time, I'm going to use it to make things better. I'm going to finally understand this thing I never really understood before. I'm going to figure out how to program my TV.” Whatever is on their list of things. From a business standpoint, they might actually be more interested in circling back to saying, “When I come out of this, I've always wanted to try Facebook ads, but I don't know how to do it.” So I think there will be an increase in the number of people that are at least interested in listening to or participating in some form of webinar or podcast. I don't think we're there yet; I think people are still in the “I've just got to figure out how to work remotely.” But once that settles in, I think there might actually be some opportunity. Back to your question. We were doing a pretty steady series of live events. We've obviously switched those over to all webinars. Even in the month of April that we're in right now, we've allocated every Thursday morning from 9 to 10 a.m. – we're just doing updates. There's so much information coming out in waves from Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Yelp, and they're all offering money this and credits for that and changing their policies. So, we're allocating that time just to get everyone up to date. But then we're also layering in really interesting topics. Like I think the one we're doing tomorrow is how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this situation is having on your business. This is something anybody can do. You don't have to have this high level of analytical skills to go to Google Search Trends and see whether or not people are searching more often for this, less often for that, or about the same. Once you're looking at that data and saying, “Interesting. People are no longer searching for this; however, they really are searching for that now,” that actually might help you course correct and maybe adapt your strategies a little bit. So yeah, we're still 100% all-in on the education side. Obviously switching over to webinar, for better or for worse, and then hopefully getting back to the normal mode once all of this is behind us. ROB: Are there any interesting examples of the Google Trends shifts you've seen on behalf of clients that you might be able to share? BRIAN: Absolutely. People ask me, “How are you guys doing?” We have such a diverse number of clients that we're really seeing all three scenarios. We're seeing some that are just devastated, sadly. We have clients that specialize in providing bartender services for parties and events, and of course, they're wiped out. Their entire book of business from now through May no longer exists. Our guidance to them is saying all the people that had these events are going to have to reschedule, so even though you're not finding people that are looking to do it right now, you might find them later. We have some that are seeing no impact whatsoever. If you're looking at AC repair or plumbing repair – pipes and air conditioning systems have absolutely no respect for the stay at home orders. If they're going to break, they're going to break. They're not going to wait until everything's normal, so there's no reason why there'd be less search on that, and there isn't. If anything, we're probably going to start to see a sudden uptick of that. People are home more often, and if you're in a state like Arizona where it's going to get into the upper 80s this week, they're going to be putting stresses on systems that they didn't really have to before with their kids at home and working from home. So I would expect they may grow a little bit. The third category of businesses that we work with are actually seeing increases. We have businesses that sell office cleaning supplies. We have businesses that offer nanny services for people that come to their homes and watch their kids. Again, there's a lot of people that have to go to work. All the people in the medical industry. So there's an example of a huge uptick. Their website traffic and the amount of leads they're getting is off the charts. So we really are in an interesting situation where we get to see all three of those scenarios playing out. ROB: That's an interesting mix, and probably encouraging to have that combination of some clients that are needing you a little bit more while some of those other clients maybe need a little bit less while they figure out this time. BRIAN: Right. It's almost like having a stock portfolio. [laughs] It's good to have diversity. You've got your winners and you've got some of them that aren't so good. ROB: When you think about your experience in building WebMO – and it sounds like you have some experience from building prior businesses as well – what are some things you would do differently if you were starting WebMO from scratch that you've learned? BRIAN: That's a good question. I saw that previously, and it's always hard for a business owner to do that, when you see yourself as being like “I've got this figured out.” But I would say in the early years, we found our lane. We found this lane and we were very committed to sticking to it. We were like, “We don't want to build websites, we don't want to do social media, we don't want to get into this, we don't want to get into that.” We were very much specializing in really optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, because we had that down. We mastered those two things. We were probably a little more reluctant than we could've been to just open up and be more responsive to what the market was asking for. There was probably a few years where we just said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Again, hindsight is 20/20. I don't know, maybe it was better to do that. But today, through growing and evolving or whatever, I think the lesson with most small business owners is you have to listen to the market. You have to provide what your client wants, ultimately. You can't be too stubborn about saying, “No, no, this is all you need.” But on the other hand, you can't be running around like a crazy person saying yes to everything and getting into areas that are outside your expertise. I would've probably gone a little sooner into getting more into a lot of the other stuff that we do. Now currently, we do stuff across the board. Of course, we build websites, and we have campaigns running on everything from Spotify to obviously all the social media platforms and LinkedIn and direct email campaigns. You name it, we probably do it, if it's in digital marketing. I probably would've been a little more open to doing that sooner if I could roll back time for a few years. But again, you can't really second guess it too much when you like where you're at currently. We're very happy with where the business is now. It's always tough to say – but if I had done that too soon and I hadn't really mastered it, maybe it would've done more harm than good. It is a tough question, but that's probably about the closest I can get. Just being a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most. That would probably be it. ROB: Are there any new directions that you think you might be getting pulled in, but you're not quite sure yet? BRIAN: There's certain things that I've just never been a big advocate of when it comes to marketing in general. There's certain tactics that I'm not probably ever going to be convinced to do. Things like spam. We're never going to tell a client, “You should be blasting spam out to people's inboxes.” Sending advertisements to people's text messages is to me crossing a line that I just will never feel comfortable doing. Yeah, you know you're going to get email solicitations from people you don't know; you accept that. You know you've got to see commercials when you watch TV. You know you're going to see ads on websites. You know if you're a Facebook user, you're going to see advertisements. But texts to me are our one safe space where we can be sheltered from getting bombarded with ads. We've had clients before say, “Hey, what about these?” and I'm just like, “I don't think so.” I think I'd still be reluctant to do something that I know, anecdotally, people in general just really, really don't like. Even if there's a possible ROI on it, there's probably some areas where I wouldn't feel comfortable taking my clients. ROB: I absolutely understand that, and I totally agree with you about crossing those lines. It's interesting what you mentioned on being pulled toward social earlier and resisting it. In a way, one of the things I end up seeing as I have these conversations is a lot of the people who got really good early at doing the core search ads and that sort of thing stayed away from social when it was fluffy and then came back into it when it wasn't “Hey, let me make a nice organic post that goes viral and gets a lot of activity,” but “Oh my goodness, Facebook ads is becoming sophisticated, and look at these tools we can bring to bear.” I think there may be a theme there. Also the case in email. I think a lot of clients weren't ready to use email intelligently for a while. BRIAN: I would say that's exactly correct, and that almost mirrors precisely how we approached it. I didn't like social media management because of that very reason. It was fluffy, like you said. There wasn't a lot of ways to calculate an ROI. There wasn't as much engineering and math and science behind it. It was way too obvious what you were doing and not doing from a client's perspective. There wasn't anything you could bring to the table other than really clever writing skills. It just didn't go to our core value. It's like, we're math guys, we're science guys; how in the world does that apply to making a clever, quippy little Facebook post? But then, like you mentioned, things got a lot more interesting when some of these more sophisticated targeting tools – that's about the same time we started hopping into it, because then there was a value add. That's the thing. As an agency, as a business owner, or whatever, if you're not doing something that's adding value that's obvious, your lifespan with them is going to be limited. I always explain that with any transaction. You have this perception of value that the client or the customer sees, and if they see the cost being at about the same level – there's a value, there's what you're getting, and then there's the cost that they're paying for it – if that is out of balance, if they feel like “I'm paying too much because they're not doing this,” then it's going to be trouble. The problem that we ran into, and a lot of people ran into with social media management, is that it's so obvious what you're doing. There's no secret. They're looking at your posts, and for better or for worse, they're saying, “That's it? My 16-year-old could do that. I'm paying $1,000 a month. I could just hire a part-time person and have them do it all the time.” So it's really hard to explain or to get across to somebody that what you're doing is something that you're uniquely qualified to do, that somebody else couldn't do as well. About that time when ads became a little more sophisticated or whatever, it fit into – one of our core, principal beliefs is this idea that there are no expert marketers, only experienced marketers and expert testers. So, we started embracing this idea that every single strategy out there is probably worthy of testing. If you're looking at Facebook, if you're looking at Instagram, if you're looking at Spotify, whatever, you don't have to buy into this idea that you spend thousands of dollars and do it whether it's working or not. You just have to take a testing mentality and say, “I'll try it. I'll throw a few hundred bucks at this.” And if you're working with somebody like ourselves, who's very good at analyzing data, with a relatively small budget we can drill right down and say, “There you go. That little budget that you ran for 2 months, here's precisely what it got you. We may have run across the tactic that will work.” On the other hand, some things don't work. It's marketing, right? You're going through your ideas; some things are going to work, some things are going to fail. If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap. That is the beauty of digital marketing. You don't have to necessarily do an ad buy that you're committed to for 6 months. You can actually try a small budget test. I know that was a long circle around, but that mindset of adopting this idea that our job is just to test things for our clients – we just need to execute tests – that then opened up everything. Everything from Yelp to LinkedIn to Bing and YouTube and whatever. That's what got us into that, after that first wave of pure social media management abated a little bit. ROB: That seems like a great principle to carry forward, this idea that you might not say no to something you don't believe is effective; you can test it, and you can even probably keep testing it as long as you are changing something and you're not just in a rut of experimental nothingness. BRIAN: Exactly. That idea of A/B split testing everything from your landing pages or conversion pages to your ad copy – again, the beauty of digital marketing comes back to data. If you have data, you can literally look at it and say, “That ad got a 3% click-through rate and led to this sort of visitor engagement when they got to my website. This ad had a 4% conversion rate, but had lower visitor engagement.” Okay, that's some great information. It's very unique that way. It's extremely hard, if not impossible, to get that level of detail on traditional marketing methods. Radio, TV, billboards, magazines – there's basic things you can do, maybe track phone calls, but the unique thing is you can't get into the mind of somebody watching a TV ad and see how they're reacting to it. When they come to your website or a landing page, based on all the math that we are able to apply to this, you can really understand the people that are there that appear to be engaged, the visitor engagement metric. It's pretty common in our industry. It's exciting to me. I'm super passionate about it. This is the kind of thing where I teach people this in a workshop and a lightbulb goes off. They're like, “That makes sense!” You can actually get a better understanding of if your marketing is even moving generally in the right direction. ROB: You definitely know your numbers, Brian. When people want to find you and WebMO, where should they look you up? BRIAN: You can just go to www.web-mo.com. That's our website. Or you can just type “WebMO Tucson” or “WebMO” Arizona, “WebMO.” You're going to find a few references to us out there. We do work with clients all over the country. We're based in Arizona, but we are definitely nationwide in terms of the clients we work with. We love to partner with other types of agencies. We have a lot of partnerships with website designers, traditional marketing agencies, where we provide these services behind the scenes and basically make you look awesome because we're back there crunching all these numbers and generating all this great data and reports. Meanwhile, you're talking to your client and saying, “Hey, look what we did!” Sot hats a good way to initiate the conversation. Sign up for a workshop. Ask for a free report where we can obviously analyze your market. There's lots of actionable steps once you get to the website. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Brian. Best wishes to you and WebMO going forward. We'll look for you online. Enjoy. BRIAN: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate the time. Stay healthy and safe and all that good stuff. ROB: Indeed. Take care, Brian. Thanks. BRIAN: Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Zach speaks with Dr. Brian Williams, an accomplished surgeon and highly sought-after public speaker who shares his insights on racial trauma, resilience, and social justice. Thrust into the national spotlight in July 2016, Dr. Williams became a voice for racial reconciliation after a Dallas sniper shot 12 police officers at an anti-police brutality protest. At a press conference days after the tragedy, he voiced his concerns as an African-American man with regard to racial injustice and simultaneously decried violence targeted at law enforcement. He now travels nationally inspiring audiences about resilience and social justice at the intersection of race, violence, and medicine. He walks us through his actions that tragic day, talks a bit about his experience with the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board, and offers several pieces of wisdom for young professionals seeking to build effective partnerships for their personal and professional development and journey.Connect with Dr. Williams via LinkedIn or Twitter, and check out his personal website by clicking here.Interested in his podcast Race, Violence & Medicine? Follow this link to listen on a variety of platforms.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and you know what we do. We have authentic conversations with real folks to center black and brown experiences at work, and so if you are working any type of 9-to-5, even if it's your own 9-to-5, or maybe you're working, like, a 3-to-6. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what y'all--you know, if you're out here working, you're grinding, you're at work, you're an underrepresented person, this is the platform for you. And so we have these conversations--and it's not just me talking to y'all or kind of, like, ranting into the ether. It's more so me having conversations with black and brown executives and different types of professionals, public servants, entrepreneurs, educators, activists, creatives, artists, and we're doing this all with the goal of amplifying underrepresented voices at work. And so again, we have a really great conversation. The person that I'm really excited to talk to today and introduce to you all, Dr. Brian H. Williams. Dr. Brian H. Williams is a first-generation college graduate who earned a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the United States Air Force Academy. After six years of active duty military service, he followed a different call to serve and enrolled into medical school at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine. He did his general surgery residency at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts and a fellowship in trauma surgery and surgical critical care at Emory University/Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon completion of his training, Dr. Williams served on the faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where he taught and mentored students, residents, and fellows. Dr. Williams is well-known for his role in treating victims of the July 7, 2016, Dallas police shooting. He was the trauma surgeon working on the seven injured officers who were emergently transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At a press conference following the tragedy, his heartfelt comments about racism, gun violence and policing touched thousands. Unbeknownst to Dr. Williams, his impromptu speech became a viral media event, and his life of comfortable anonymity ended. In addition--Brian: That's a mouthful. [both laugh]Zach: It is, but it's real though. In addition to his work as a trauma surgeon, Dr. Williams travels the country as a thought-provoking speaker sharing his unique insight on resilience, gun violence, and racial justice. He is also an opinion writer featured in the Dallas Morning News and hosts the podcast Race, Violence & Medicine. So y'all, we're gonna have all the links. If y'all don't remember the black doctor who was--it was all on the Twitters, you know what I'm saying, it was all on the social media. If y'all don't remember all that, we're gonna have all of his reference materials in the show notes, but, you know, that will be after y'all listen to the show. Dr. Williams, how are you doing?Brian: I'm doing fantastic, Zach. Thanks for having me on.Zach: Man, thank you for being here. So let's get into it. You were already known within your field, but you were thrust into the national spotlight after treating victims of the July 7th, 2016, Dallas police shooting. You were the trauma surgeon working, and so you were actively, right--like, I remember even in that video, you were--it was clear that you had just got done working. Like, you were--you were working. You know, I'm really curious. Considering your personal experience with police and the history of policing in black communities, what was going through your mind, like, just treating--like, in that situation? Can you talk about just what--of course there's no question as to your oath and your commitment to deliver care, but what I'm trying to understand--so, like, I want to be very upfront with that. What I'm trying to understand though is, considering your own experiences and your own identity, like, what was it like? Was it automatic? Was it just like, "Look, this is what I do?" Like, can you walk us through that experience?Brian: Sure. In that moment, when the officers were coming in, nothing else mattered. I just fell back on my training. So my experiences, my life experiences, that was not a factor in how I approached what I did, and, you know, it's a large team of nurses and doctors and students. So it wasn't just me, although I was the trauma surgeon that was on call that evening at the hospital. But in that moment, I'd give them the same sort of care I give any patient. Like, I do not differentiate based on occupations or race or ethnicity or--you know, all of those ways we try to categorize people as being different. That matters not to me. At the moment, I just saw a human being that was severely injured and critical, and I am trained to do things to try to save their lives. So that was what--like you said, it was automatic. It just was a crisis. My training kicked in, and I went to work.Zach: And so then talk to me a little bit about, like, so--you know, so after the care had been delivered and, you know, after you were done performing surgery and care, again, to the victims, you know, you had the conference. At what point did then, like, all of the emotions and thoughts and things come rushing back?Brian: Well, let me walk through the timeline of those few days. The shooting was on July 7th, 2016, but you may or may not recall that on July 5th, there was a shooting, Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, and on July 6th, that was Philando Castile in Minnesota. And then we had July 7th. So then on July 7th there were actually protests happening all around the country to bring awareness to this ongoing issue. People remember Dallas because of the tragic shooting that occurred there. This is happening all over the country. So I was aware, in those preceding couple of days, of those two deaths, and you could imagine that the public discourse was basically a screaming match about black lives matter and blue lives matter and all lives matter, and there's all this negative talk. So when I went to work on July 7th, I was aware of that but didn't expect this sort of tragedy to occur. A few days later, on July 11th, was when the press conference occurred that you referenced. So there was a couple days between the time of the shooting and the time of the press conference where I pretty much just cut myself off from society. I wasn't watching the news. I wasn't listening to the radio. I wasn't reading the paper. I just was in my own little bubble, because that night was--it's the worst night of my career. It's something I still think about to this day. It just really got to me for a number of reasons, but the big thing was that this was fueled by intolerance and hate and racism, and all of these elements that we don't discuss about in an honest, open manner fueled this event, and to lose any patient--but that happened on a night that was particularly volatile and unfortunately became historic for all of the wrong reasons. And going into the press conference, these were the things that I was thinking about - you know, what's going on in our country? What role am I playing to bring us together? Am I doing enough? What have I done with my life? There was just a mix of a lot of different emotions and thoughts which I didn't have the answers [to] or wasn't really able to process completely, which takes us to the press conference that you mentioned, and that all kind of spilled out in the moment without any plans or preparation. I just planned to sit there, just to be seen, because my wife felt that the country needed to see that there was a black surgeon there that night trying to do the right thing.Zach: You know, so let's talk a little bit about the conference, right? So, like, at the conference following the shooting, you said, quote, "I want the Dallas police officers to see me, a black man. I support you. I will defend you. I will care for you. That does not mean I do not fear you." Can we talk about, like, what you meant here? Like, what does that--and it's interesting, right, because it's almost--one could almost argue that those things are... like, there's a duality there, right? So, like, when you said this, what did you mean?Brian: Right, and that's exactly the word I was going to use. That's the duality that I think many black people in this country deal with. So to break it down into two parts, when I said "I support you," I'm a child of a military veteran. I have a lot of military veterans in my family. I went to the Air Force Academy. I was an Air Force officer. So I know what it means to wear a uniform, I know what it means to serve something greater than yourself. I know what it means to make sacrifices to serve a greater good. So although I'm not a police officer, that sort of ethos is not something that was foreign to me. Zach: And so, you know, because you took all of this--like, you took all of this, right? Like, so your fear, your frustration, your dedication as a public servant and as a consummate professional, and you mobilized that into an effective partnership to actualize change, right? And so here's my challenge though, right? My challenge is I can't look at any point in American history where police have done right by black people. So, like, just the historicity of policing in America for black bodies, and, like, not to mention, like, the pathological narratives that majority media propagates, as well as the institutional systems and laws that make holding police accountable so incredibly challenging. And so I'm really curious, 'cause I--I know that I'm not the only person who has these challenges. I don't doubt that, Dr. Williams, that some species of this has been on your mind at some point of time, and so I'm curious to know, like, with those things in mind, what was your journey to become, like, the chair of the Citizens Police Review Board, and can you explain what it meant to manage through those relationship dynamics?Brian: Yes, I'm on-board with what you're saying as far as the challenges, and I guess we'll get back to that in a second, but as far as the journey to the Citizens Police Review Board, that was--the mayor's office reached out to me about potentially joining the board as a chair, and that was because a prior chair was turning out, so he needed someone new. Now, the Citizens Police Review Board is meant to be this body that will hear complaints from citizens about their interactions with police, and they can bring them to the board, we can deliberate and try to give them some resolution. So that's what the board existed for at that time. I didn't know that the board existed when I was asked. I didn't know what it did. I didn't know if it was worthwhile. I didn't know if I had the time. I had all of these questions about the board, but I asked around and learned about it, and I said--I thought, "Yes, this can be something good for the community. It can be a voice for citizens," and I felt that I could make a positive contribution to all of this. It was definitely challenging. I learned a lot about the Dallas Police Department. I learned a lot about community activists. I learned a lot about various board members in City Hall. So there are a lot of stakeholders working towards public safety, and to bring them all together to come to some sort of collaborative effort to ensure that the public has trust in their police department is challenging, and I think it's actually now an ongoing journey now that the board has been revamped and given more support as far as resources, personnel and a budget, which we did not have when I was a chair. Zach: And so I'm curious though, right, like, when you talk about--it's just interesting, because I don't think that we have a lot of examples in American history when it comes to, like, relationships where the underrepresented voices have, like, actual authority over a majority group and things don't become strained, like, either quickly or over time, and I think authority and accountability is a struggle for anybody, right? So I don't think that that's unique or exclusive to dominant and sub-dominant groups, but I'm really curious about, like, what did it look like, especially--like you said, at the time that you were the chair there was not a budget. Like, what did it look like to really be the chair on this review board and talk about right behaviors? Like, do you feel like you were able to have honest dialogue? Do you believe that there was, like--do you believe that you had the actual authority to kind of, like, drive substantive change? Like, what did that look like for you?Brian: So I think that everyone involved knew exactly who they were getting with me as chair. For one, they saw my statements at that press conference. So I [?] there. Two, I wrote an opinion piece that published in the Dallas Morning News where--actually, I wrote two regarding the police, one that talked about the history of slave patrols and how this distrust in black communities goes back for hundreds of years. It just doesn't happen overnight. And I talked about, you know, police departments have historically been there to maintain control over communities of color. It wasn't about public safety or protecting their rights, it was about keeping communities of color in line. So that is the history with which we need to reckon in order to move forward. So everybody knew exactly what they were getting with Dr. Brian Williams, [laughs] which, you know, had its pluses and minuses. I think the benefit was they couldn't accuse me of having any kind of agenda, right? I was criticized from both law enforcement and, you know, black civilians for the comments I made. And I, you know, received praise as well. So I feel I was pretty much solidly in the middle of all of that that I could equally appeal to and offend anybody that was involved in moving the Police Review Board forward.Zach: So your journey didn't stop there, right? Like, what did you learn about yourself? Like, what were some of the main things that you learned about yourself that then prompted your transition from Dallas into the South Side of Chicago?Brian: Well, and I'll just say, you know, that last comment I was obviously kidding when I said offending people. [both laugh] But I guess the point there was I was moving forward with this mission to ensure a voice for the citizens of Dallas with integrity, and I did not try to have any sort of self-gain from it. It was about serving the city of Dallas and the people of Dallas.Zach: Which is rare, right? 'Cause I think, especially, like, in the political climate that we're in today, right, like, you see these voices, like, on the far right who--like, they're black voices. Like, they're tokens, like, coming and, like, sharing specific talking points and narratives without any, like, real intellectual substance behind them, and I think what really intrigued me about you--'cause I've spent a majority of my life in Dallas, and my mother is still in Dallas. I have family in Dallas, and so I was very familiar with--like, with your work and your statements, and they run very true to me and sensitive for me considering that I'm from that area, right? So what I'm curious about is did you ever feel any pressure to kind of, like, lean one way or the other or take on certain agendas or certain talking points that you yourself didn't agree with from a principle perspective?Brian: The short answer to that is yes, and I should say, you know, I wasn't immediately embraced by citizens that were working on police reform. [They didn't?] know who I was. You know, I was a new quantity, and people have been working on this reform for decades, right? These are Dallas natives that were born and bred here in Dallas, and I was--Zach: The activist culture is deep, right? There's a lot of community servants and activists who have been on the ground. So yeah, I'm right there with you. And it's hard. It's hard to break in, right? Like, when you're new and, like, the main thing you have when it comes to community activism--from what I understand, because I would not consider myself a community activist because I know that I want to respect that work, but what I understand is, like, really it's your relationships--your social capital is, like, gold, right? That's, like, the only thing you have, and if you're unknown, then it's hard to, like, you know, break the ice.Brian: Exactly. And I will say your podcast is a form of activism.Zach: I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Williams, man. You got me blushing, man. [both laugh] Brian: You're doing it, man. You're doing it.Zach: Man, I really appreciate it. So let's talk about South Side, Chicago. Like, you transitioned, you went there. Like, what was the call or the impetus to transition from Dallas to Chicago?Brian: Well, my journey in health care--I mean, I've always been very mission-driven about what I can do to eradicate racial health care disparities, and that is a nation-wide mission, right? That can occur anywhere. Now, as a trauma surgeon, I'm particularly focused on gun violence as well. So South Side, Chicago, you know, there's a lot of gun violence here. It's frequently talked about in the media in ways that aren't--I think that dehumanizes the population that's there living within these violent communities. There was a new trauma center that opened up in the area, and several of my mentors were here at the trauma center, so there was this perfect storm of the mission that I want to serve with a community that was very active in getting this trauma center here built with people I know that had flocked here, and I said, "You know what? I would like to be a part of having impact that will cross generations," right? And I think it's happening right now, and that's why I wanted to join this group here. As far as Dallas, you know, that was not an easy decision. I had been in Dallas--I was in Dallas for 9 years. That's the longest I've been in one spot my whole life. It's now my de facto home. [laughs] If Texas will accept me, it's pretty much my de facto home. I've been moving my entire life as a military kid, as a military officer, you know? I feel home in Dallas. I still follow what's going on in Dallas. I'm interested in what's gonna happen to my home city. Zach: And so, you know, I'm interested, right, in addition to this you're a respected health care leader. Can we talk a little bit about how your work and the legacy of racism impacts health care inequity, right? Like, so you're coming in, and you're in Chicago, and yes, like, you're supporting--there's a gun violence issue in South Side, Chicago, and I--you know, honestly, I really do wish that some folks never found out about Chicago, because I feel as if it's, like, the default when anybody ever wants to pathologize black folks. It's very annoying. It's just like, "Golly, I wish that--anything Chicago, I just wish y'all wouldn't have known about it." But, you know, in your work, can you talk a little bit about, like, how health care inequity shows up, right? Like, that's been an ever-growing talking point or just point of awareness, right, like, in headlines and mainstream media, growing awareness around health care inequity for black and brown folks juxtaposed to majority members, white counterparts. Can we talk a little bit about, like, what you've seen from a perspective of inequity and kind of, like, how you've combated that as a black surgeon?Brian: I would like to see us get to a point where we just get real about what health care disparities are and health care inequities. This is the legacy of racism in this country. It's about health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Like, there are so many things to unpack and address. Health care is one part, and that's where I happen to be, you know, an expert in that particular field, but I recognize that what I do in the hospital is not gonna be enough to uplift these communities in need. And like you said, I don't like to pathologize Chicago either. I'm coming here to help, but I don't know how to talk about it without being offensive to people that live here, right? Like, who am I to talk about their community? So I'm trying to be sincere about my desire to contribute, to uplift the community without being offensive to the folks that live here and are actually gonna be doing the work for a long time. So I completely agree with you that even I feel like an outsider sometimes in doing this work.Zach: So then, you know, I think--and I'm really excited, and I'm thankful that you've been able to come on the podcast, because I think what really intrigued me about having you on, beyond you just sharing your story and the work that you've done and that you do, is around, like, the concept of effective relationships and building relationships with individuals that you may not feel immediately safe with or comfortable with, and I know that that involves a certain level of emotional labor for you, even today, right? I'm curious though, like, if you could give younger professionals any advice about building relationships--and when I say relationships, I'm thinking more like coalitions for your personal and professional development and journey. Like, if you could, like, boil it down to, like, three things, what would they be?Brian: I would say, first and foremost to young professionals, nothing is worth sacrificing your dignity for acceptance. What I mean is that the papers and the promotions and the titles, like, if you have to leave part of who you are at home, if you have to compromise your integrity and your ethics and your purpose to achieve those goals, those goals aren't worth it, so do not hand over your dignity for acceptance. That's one. Two, you need to set your boundaries. If you don't set your boundaries someone else will set them for you, and you may not like them. And actually I believe that if you set your boundaries, that will lead to greater connectedness with people, not less, because you are respecting who you are and what you stand for. You're not letting anyone else compromise that for you. And the third thing is just always keep your end goal in mind. As you're going through life, your profession, like, think about what it is you want to accomplish, where you want to be. If you never lose sight of that, then all that noise and chaos that you encounter on the way, you'll be able to filter through that and not lose sight of the end objective. So people call it your North Star, your purpose, but I think your end goal, whatever that is, never lose sight of that.Zach: Man, Dr. Williams, this has been a great conversation. I just gotta thank you again for being a guest on the podcast. Any shout-outs or parting words before we let you go?Brian: No, Zach. First of all, thank you for--I'm honored that you asked me to be on the show, and I'm glad that we were able to make this happen. And I'm always happy to engage with listeners. They can check out my website, BrianWilliamsMD.com. That's Brian with an I. I'm pretty active on Twitter at @BHWilliamsMD. But if you do drop me a line, email or direct message, I will get back to you. And you talked about making connections. That's one way that I have increased my connectivity with the universe. Thanks again.Zach: Man, thank you so much. All right, y'all, you know what it is. You've been listening to Dr. Williams, surgeon, speaker, educator, public servant, man... just overall dope individual. 'Til next time, this has been Zach. We'll catch y'all next time. Peace.

James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast where we focus a lot on value-add, commercial real estate investing and we usually talk to commercial real estate operators who have been very active buying deals nowadays.  Today, I have Brian Murray. So if you have not heard about Brian Murray, he's the author of the best-selling and award-winning book: Crushing It in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate. And he owns almost 700 units right now on his own and I think out of 700, 600 of it is apartments and 100 units are on office sites. Hey, Brian, welcome to the show.  Brian: I'm really happy to be here, James. Thanks for having me. James: Really happy to have you here. And so tell me about, how did you go from 0 to 600 multifamily 0 to 700 asset classes on your own without syndication?   Brian: Yeah, well, you know, I started 12 years ago and I'm located in Upstate New York. That's quite a bit different market than New York City. But my first property was an office building and it was a distressed office building and from that very first deal, I did a lot of value-adds. Frankly, I really didn't know what I was doing, I was kind of figuring stuff out as I went along but I progressively made that property perform better over a couple of years and added a ton of value. On that deal, I assumed the mortgage and on my second deal, I did an owner/finance situation. It was another property that was half full, I filled it up and refinanced out of both of those and bought three more properties and followed that path the entire way. Which is find well-located properties that were not well managed or had some other large value-add component, exercise that value add and then refinance, take cash out and buy more properties. And that's the exact path that I followed to get to where I'm at today. James: That's crazy, which is good. I mean, that's the model that, I mean, it's an absolute value-add model, which is basically the theme of this podcast. And so did you buy and then improve it and then refinance the money out or did you sell it and I didn't get that far, can you clarify that? Brian: Yeah. So I refinance the money out. I am primarily buying hold, still to this day. But especially in the first 10 years, I think I sold one or two properties, smaller properties, for the most part, during that time. I am selling some of my smaller properties right now to redeploy those funds into larger properties, but my strategy has really been buying hold. James: Awesome. Awesome. So before we go further, I want to clarify about your book, Crushing It. I mean, I remember asking this question to you when we met face-to-face. So did Gary take the 'Crushing' name from you or you took it from him? Which one is that?  Brian: You know, so his book, Crushing It, came out about a year after mine but he launched a book called Crush It prior to when mine came out. But he took the Crushing It and you know, but that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's all good.  James: Well, it must be a good name because both of you are like a best seller, you know, in your own domain. So awesome. So right now what's your plan? I mean you own this many units on your own and what's your plan right now?  Brian: So right now, I'm really focused on diversifying. I was really excited to do my first Mastermind, which was last year, which is how you and I met and I met some great people at that Mastermind and highly recommend that to other people; surround yourself with other folks that are doing what you're doing. But when I went off to this Mastermind, it was really eye-opening for me because pretty much everybody there was doing syndication and it was a model that was really new for me and I just learned a ton about what people were doing.  And my model has worked great for me up to this point, but I've reached a size, we're growing purely organically. It's becoming more challenging to maintain that pace of growth. I think also with valuations at a higher point, it's more and more challenging each year to pull that much value-add out with refis. I think another factor that's come into play is I've been very, very dedicated to putting every dollar that I've earned back into my real estate. That's been a been a big part of how I've done what I've done is to continuously reinvest back in. As a result of that, to this point, I've been living fairly frugally and you know at a certain point, you want to not have to put every dollar back in but you know, to maintain that growth rate, I've got to look at other options. I also want to diversify geographically because most of my properties are in one location. And so I'm in the middle of my first syndication right now and I've met so many good people that now, I'm developing partners and looking at new markets and it's very exciting for me. I love to learn, I love to try new things and getting into these other markets and, you know, meeting accomplished people like yourself, it's very motivating. So I'm just super excited about it.  James: Yeah, it's eye-opening when you go and talk to different people who are doing the same level as you are doing much more higher level because you can see a lot of different thought processes and how people do things. So why are you moving towards syndication? I mean, you own like so many units on your own, can you go into a bit more detail on why do you think syndication is going to be beneficial for you right now in this market cycle as well or on your investment side?  Brian: Well, you know syndication, it does open up a lot more opportunities in terms of size. So for example, right now, I'm looking very closely at an apartment complex that's approximately 300 units. It's in a market that's new for me that I've been doing a lot of research on and that would be a real challenge to try to pull off on my own. It really wouldn't be possible right now. So the property that I've purchased strictly on my own, without raising any outside money, I did last year, it was 126 units and you know to try to purchase something that's 300 plus units that wouldn't be possible for me right now. So it's pretty exciting and I think another thing is I really enjoy working with the idea of doing some projects with partners and getting into some of these new markets. So, there's another piece of it that's kind of exciting is, I've reached a point where I've done pretty well for myself and the idea of helping other investors who want to put their money to work to achieve their goals, I think that's going to be rewarding too. That if a project does really well that, it's all those limited partners that come in that can then improve their lives through their investment as well. And if I can be a part of that, I think I'll find that very rewarding.  James: Okay, that's awesome. So scalability is important and you think of helping others as well to make money, especially I think other investors or other GPs who needs your skills, I would say? Brian:  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that's one of the things that's great too is I've found that it's meeting these other people that are doing it, I've got a different experience. So just like I'm learning from people like you, I'm finding that partners I can bring some different perspectives and value to the table as well. So you always want to partner with people that have strengths in areas that are different from you and that's what makes a strong team. James: Absolutely, especially in commercial real estate because the number of knobs that you can tune, there are so many knobs and especially like in multifamily because it's very management intensive compared to the triple net, other commercial properties. Multi-family is very management intensive and it gives a lot of ways to make more money or to scale down or to scale up. Even though you'd be really, really skilled at that but it just gives you a lot more opportunity. And the lease is one year term or six months term; you can quickly raise or reduce rents, it gives you a lot more fungibility, I would say. I mean, you have like SAS, we talked, in the beginning. You have like 600 units multifamily and 100 office space? Brian: Yes.  James: So can we go a bit more detail into the office? What kind of office is it and how did you strategically balance within the 600 and 100 office? Is it optimistic or what did you see and why did you do it?  Brian: So I started off with the office and actually, my second property was retail and so, starting on that commercial side was really interesting. I think one of the things that did for me is really emphasized my focus on customer service and customer care with tenants. And when I tried my first multifamily, I think that there were differences but they're also a lot of similarities. So the value-added approach that I was taking to office retail worked just as well with multifamily. And our focus on really taking care of our tenants as our customers really served us really well in that area also. Over time, as recently as two or three years ago, we had reached a point where up to that point we had more office and Retail and then about two years ago, I would say, we were 50/50 and now we're closer to two thirds, maybe even 70% multifamily with the rest commercial in terms of the makeup of our portfolio. So as time went by, we've really gravitated toward multifamily and that's our 100% focus right now. I think the biggest thing is that there's a number of things we like about multi-family. From our experience with commercial, you've always got a little bit more risk because you tend to have, not always, but you often will have tenants that comprise a disproportionately large percentage of your income and that can leave you really vulnerable if somebody leaves. So, on more than one occasion, we've had a commercial property where someone that takes up more than half of the space in that property, leaves unexpectedly. And then you've got with one tenant leaving, you have a property that is negative cash flow. And if you don't have a portfolio in place to support that, that can be devastating and it's really not fun even if you have a portfolio to perform it. And then when you go to backfill that space, it's more challenging in commercial properties because you oftentimes have to find the exact right tenant for that space, for that location, for the tenant mix and the property, for the configuration of the floor plan. There's a lot of things that you know, different commercial tenants are looking for.  If you just adjust the rents up and down or maybe offer some concessions, a lot of times, the market doesn't immediately react to that. So turning that dial like you do in multifamily, you have less control. So if you're looking for a particular type of commercial tenant, it could be, it's not unusual for us to sit on a vacant space for one two or more years before the right tenant comes along and fits in and takes that space. With multifamily, you've got those dials that you can turn and say, Hey, you know, we're going to run a special. We're going to bump rents, we're going to drop rents and you usually will see a pretty quick reaction from the market to the changes that you make and from my perspective, that's better.  You always want to have more control and the ability to adjust with your market, adjust to combat your competition and different things like that. And frankly, we've enjoyed working with the tenants. I think there's a perception out there that a lot of people would love to invest in commercial because they think they have this idea that working with white collar tenants would be much better, wouldn't have the problems but in our experience, they can be more challenging. They can be more demanding and sometimes even unreasonable with what they're looking for and you don't usually find that as much with the residential tenants in multifamily. We do primarily workforce housing and the people that we deal with there, tend to be good down to earth people and reasonable. So we appreciate that.  James: And when you talk about office, this is the normal office tenants, I guess?  Brian: Yeah full-spectrum, mostly professional tenants. We've got plenty of medical tenants. We have lawyers, accountants, all types, we've got not-for-profit offices, engineers and architects that would pretty much any type of white-collar professionals. James: Got it. That's very interesting. So when was the aha moment that, hey, I should do multifamily because you are focusing a lot on office, what was that triggering moment where you say, okay, I may need to look at this multi-family? Brian:  Well, I don't know if there was a specific moment. I think it happened gradually over time. When we had about 50/50 multifamily and Commercial, I think one of the big things was watching the performance of the two halves of the portfolio and seeing which half was performing better and part of it had to do with the types of value-add projects we were finding and I thought we were better able to execute on the value-adds on the multifamily side. And that portion of our portfolio just kept outperforming the commercial side and I just saw in the market that we're in, more opportunity there and I felt like it was more stable income based. So, I think I think it just happened gradually over time and you kind of tend to slowly move in the direction that's performing well and where the needs are in your Marketplace. James:  Got it. So all the deals that you have done on multifamily, how did you choose? I mean all these deals are in Upstate, New York, is that right? Brian: Yes. James: So you may not choose the city because that's where you live, the area. But how did you select the submarket? Okay, this deal is good in this submarket, what are the parameters that you looked at When you look at a deal in multi-family? Brian: So, we have a really close familiarity with the subtleties of the market and so it's fairly nuanced like there's not one overarching thing. One of the primary drivers of the market where we are is not that far away is a fairly large military base. And so one of the factors that we look at is, well, we definitely welcome military tenants, we have shied away from the properties that are closer to the military base and tend to have a really high percentage of military population. That's just because there's so much turnover, lenders are less excited about lending those properties because they know that long-term, there could be downsizing. A base could close, there's exposure with that. So we have gravitated within our region to the areas that are maybe we will have some military but not be all military and into the communities where people want to live, in the parts of the city that we feel are strong and good safe locations and convenient locations for the major employers in the area. James: Got it. Got it. And on average right now, what is the price per door in that market? Because I never talk to anybody from New York who's buying multifamily. I mean, Upstate, New York,  New York City, but in general, can you give us some guideline on price per door? What cap rated stabilize deals are being bought right now? Brian: Yes, absolutely. So it's a really, really wide range. So that's what I would say at first. The most recent stabilized property that we purchased we paid about 60,000 a door. There are properties selling in the area, 80,000 plus per door, not that often but a lot of the properties we've got, we've purchased a couple of decent sized properties at auction. We've purchased a lot of distressed properties.  The 126 units that we purchased last year, we paid in the 40s per door and that's pretty low for this area actually, but also the occupancy was below 60% when we bought it and it had a lot of deferred maintenance. So I do feel like we got a fair deal and a good deal on that because there was so much upside but there was a reason that it was priced that low. And so you can come along properties in this area that have low price point sometimes even down into the 30s per door, but usually, there's a reason why they might be in severe distress. But for stabilized properties, I think you're mostly looking at maybe 50 to 70 a door.  James: Okay. You also mentioned that you're looking at other markets now?  Brian: Yes. James: And why is that and what're your criteria to look for in other markets?  Brian: So the number one reason is really a risk management type of approach. Where anybody who's come in and taken a close look at our business and one point even a few years back, I had some graduate students come in and they analyzed it and everybody said, hey, you're kind of crazy. You've got all your properties concentrated right here in this one city and now they're all within maybe half an hour drive of that City and there's a lot of risks involved to that.   So if that City that I focused on starts to decline or say that military base that's not that far away, if they downsize then that all affects my portfolio. So I've known for a long time that it would be wise to diversify geographically and it's time to do that. Another factor is frankly, this is not a huge City. It's not a big area that I'm in and we've got limited opportunities for growth here. There's a limited number of properties that come onto the market and realistically, it's time for us to look to other places. So it's a variety of things. James: So let's say you're looking at a new city, a city A and a city B, what do you look for in that city that you think is going to be appealing to you?  Brian: Well, I think there's a variety of different factors. Probably the number one thing that makes the city appealing is job growth, job creation. Being located in Upstate New York, it's not a strong area for job growth. There are pros and cons to being in a market that's undesirable. So I have less competition. I can buy things at much higher cap rates and I can get properties to cash flow better if I have less competition and higher cap rates. So, there's sometimes you can look at it and say, hey, if you're in a market that's less desirable, sometimes you're getting properties at a great deal and there's something to be said for that. But as I look to new markets, I'm trying to find something where cap rates haven't dropped too far and you can get a reasonable return but you've got that benefit of healthy growth in population and jobs. But I think because I'm looking for more geographic to looking for a market that's going to show more stability, it's on an uptrend and just like any other place, no matter what market I'm looking at, I've realized over time just how critical the specific location with any city is.  So almost any City has their good parts and the bad parts and so you could take any market that you choose and break it down into all different, more and less appealing locations. And so, I wouldn't just throw and say, hey, this one city is great, even though the population is growing and you and I talked about a property not that long ago that you are familiar with the location and you very wisely were like, oh, that's not the right deal. It might be a good city, but that's not the right part of the city. James: Correct. So, I mean, you are sitting in Upstate New York, you looked at the entire nation. Can you give us the top three cities that you think that you want to delve in?   James: Brian, so you are sitting in Upstate New York, and you looked at the entire nation, you know how multifamily works because you own 600 on your own. So you just briefly outline what are the things that you look for in a city. So can you name like top three cities that you think that you want to be involved in that you think has a strong growth story?  Brian: Well, it's a work in progress for sure. And what I would say is sort of the candidates that I've narrowed it down to the commonality would be they tend to be the places that people are migrating to and being in Upstate New York where a lot of people are leaving the area, I want to look toward the places they're going.           And so, primarily in the Southeast, pretty much our candidates or everything from starting in probably North Carolina going down to Florida and you know all the way over to maybe the little bit in Texas, but I think Georgia is an interesting market that a lot of people are pursuing. I'm partnering on a project in Kentucky right now and we're looking at North Carolina and there are some very attractive markets in Florida as well.  James: Got it. Got it. Got it. Before I want to go into the deal level analysis that you do, I want to quickly ask this question because you know, it's very unique to you because you had your own deals and now you're going into syndication, right? So what do you think are the skills needed from yourself when you are having your own deals, where you can skip a distribution or whatever happened to the deal is your own problem. So now you're going into syndication, where it involves a lot more people. What do you think is a few skills that syndicators need to be successful in syndication? Brian: Sure. I mean I would say start a start with one of the big ones which is something that I don't have, which is an investor base and that's a whole job unto itself. Over the years doing what I've been doing and getting some acknowledgments for that, I had a lot of people approach me over the years and say, hey, you know, can I invest and I never took them up on that and now I'm doing that. But what I've realized is in getting to know all these folks that are out there that there's a lot of people who are interested in partnering with me who already have those investor bases and have that skill set of managing those investors and taking care of all aspects of that.  So at this point, I'm primarily thinking that I bring more value in the weighing on the underwriting and the property and identifying all the value-add opportunities and making sure that people look at it as more than a spreadsheet because there's so much more. I toured a property last week and was able to uncover quite a few things. The broker that was there. I was one of the last people, they had about 40 tours and I came through and identified some significant value-add opportunities that the broker said no one else picked up on. And I think that that's something I didn't discuss but we've managed all of our own properties that whole time and so, the knowledge that you get from that just brings so much better of analysis to a deal to make sure you're vetting it properly, you're not overpaying, you're also not underpaying and that there might be value there that you're not realizing. That some of the assumptions that you're making for rent growth are real and can actually be feasible for implementation. And so, you know, those are some of the things that I bring and the experience and having the portfolio I have may give lenders a lot of comfort. And so, I'm recognizing that, hey, I could focus on my strengths and bring some things to a partnership and take those areas that I don't have and other people might and partner up. So if someone's going to do it on their own, they've got to have a pretty broad skill set and that's a challenge, to have the operational knowledge and bring that side and also have the people skills and the investor relationships, it's not easy. I have a lot of respect for people that are doing it all. James: Absolutely. So you are two operators, where you underwrite deals, you understand the operation and you're doing your own asset management. You're missing the investor base creation side of it, which I think you are either partnering or slowly building that up so which is awesome. For me, the operators are at the top of the food chain because they are the backbone of the whole deal. They know what's happening in terms of the rents, how many percents of rent increase is happening on each unit? How many units are being turned? What is the make ready period, what's the delinquency? What is the idling unit period? That's a lot of parameters in the multi-family operation which can be optimized and if you know that very well, your underwriting can be very, very solid, I would say.  Brian: And I think you also bring a reality check. I think that the folks that are operating in the syndication space that don't have as much operating experience, it's easy to look at numbers and assumptions in a spreadsheet and it's challenging to actually recognize what that means in terms of the actual human beings who are there living in the apartments, what it means for the contractors and the property managers and whether what you're assuming is even practical. I look at a spreadsheet and I'm looking at it realizing, hey, you know, I looked at it once a day and I told somebody I'm like, do you understand how much drama will be involved in this? So if you haven't done that you don't know. And sometimes that translates into you might need to maybe tone back your rent growth or you might need to say, hey, maybe we implement something like this over time so that we don't have an all-out rebellion on our hands. So, you know, it's a challenge to bring all those things to the table. James: Yeah, I've seen people who come to me, you know, first few deals and say, oh, this is all bills paid, I'm just going to change it to tenant pay bills. I say, well, that's easy. We can see the value. Well, you do not know how much drama you're going to have there and you might not able to do that on a specific property, a specific location. And they say they want to do them; Utility Bill back, they want to increase the rent, they want to charge covered parking, they want to do laundry increase. So many things they want to do at the same time and I can tell you, they don't have the experience actually. But the thing is, a lot of people have been making money even without all the skills. And I always tell them everybody's a champion in a bull market.  Brian: Exactly, yes. A rising tide lifts all ships, right?  James: Correct. So, people may not look at that skill more in detail or give due consideration to that type of skills where the operation is important, but I think it's important if you want to sustain good rent growth across different market cycles. So coming back to underwriting. So right now you are looking at deals, how many percents of deals do you reject immediately by just looking at it?  Brian: Wow, I would say well over 90%.  James: Okay. So the 10% that you have or what do you look for in that 10%? What do you do? What are the steps that you take to look at that 10%? Brian: You know, I think the very, very first thing I do is I look at the T12. I want to start my analysis of a property by looking at actuals. And then I'm going to base the current situation and the actuals, going to kind of weigh that against my own experience. So, how does the target asking price or the whisper price or whatever they have, how does that compare to the actuals?           And then based on my experience looking through those actuals, what do I see that jumps out at me that might create value? And if you look down through and start looking at the comps and really piecing together this puzzle about, what opportunity is really here? Is the valuation based on something that's completely unrealistic? A lot of times, you'll recognize that some brokers are way better than others at doing a realistic model and pro forma and that's much appreciated. Because you see too many where they'll say, oh, you know, the labor is going to be whatever, $300 a door, and you know, hey, that's crazy. Like it should be 1100 a door or 1000 a door in that market and you know, you'll find out that well, it's been managed by the owner and they don't track the labor. But if you see that it's based on the labor is $2000 a door and you know, hey, we could get that to 900 realistically and still do a good job of maintaining that property, then you start to see an opportunity. It's a combination of running numbers and logical analysis based on experience, is really what I would say it boils down to. James: So in a new market, how would you determine payroll and [12:09unintelligible] on property taxes because this differs by market? Brian: Sure. So all those things are going to vary by market, although many of them will fall within a range. So you're going to say, well, in that market it's going to tend to be higher or lower and I will use my best judgment but if it passes a certain level of scrutiny, that's when you want to really get an established reputable local property manager involved who could look at it and say, okay, for this market specifically, these assumptions you've made are realistic or not realistic. The same thing goes with construction costs they could vary and I can look at it and say, I think that new flooring should be this much but hey, maybe in that market, flooring is much more expensive or maybe it's a lot cheaper. So, you know it's going to be within a certain range, but you just need to figure out how you need to tweak it to get to that market.  James: Got it Got it. Got it. I mean since you have your own property management in your own backyard and now I presume you looking at third partying your property management in this new market, is that correct?  Brian: That's correct.  James: So, what would you think is the most important factor to look at that third party property management company? Brian: Well, at this point, I would say yes, we're relying on third-party property managers. We may eventually consider expanding into new markets or operations, but not doing that right now and evaluating the property managers, it's been a very interesting process. I think you need to look at the full picture. I don't think there's any one thing you can look at. For a project that we're underwriting right now, in evaluating the various property managers, of course, we weigh referrals, you know, that's always good to hear referrals but I think one of the things that are appealing about the property manager that we ended up selecting for this project that we're pursuing is they actually specialize in this specific type of property that we're looking at. So, they have a track record and experience of nearly 10,000 units that are specifically C-Class properties that they've done value-add and executed those successfully. And a fair percentage of those are in the specific market that we're looking at and so there's a lot of things that just lined up. I think if I had to pick the one thing from my interaction with this firm because they toured the property with me as well, but I actually was very impressed with their analysis of our underwriting. They actually went through our assumptions and they toured the property on their own before I got there and gave us their own analysis and without us asking, they also toured the comps and gave us some feedback on that. I was impressed. You could tell that they went out of their way to look at the right things. They looked at the types of things that I would look at and they identified things and based on that write-up, I just said, hey, this is a firm that's experienced. They get it. They did a thorough job. They were professional, they were responsive and you know, it really checked a lot of boxes in terms of giving us an overall sense of comfort with the possibility of working with them. James: Awesome. Awesome. Let's go to a bit more on the value-add side because you have done a lot of value-adds because you buy refi and keep it more long-term. So what is the most valuable value-add multifamily from your experience?  Brian: I would say that the most valuable is it's different for almost every property. If I had to pick, you know, I think that sort of the Big Bang low-hanging fruit tends to be the, I'd say, clean paint landscape, kind of like the surface stuff. If a property is dirty and not well kept and then you make it clean and you put a fresh coat of paint and you landscape it, it can change the entire image of property of fairly modest cost and that can have a huge impact. The rent adjustment is sort of obvious, I think everybody looks at that. I guess big picture if the landlord is way undercharging, of course, you know, that's an obvious big easy one, but one thing that we've ended up doing in a number of cases that is less obvious that people almost never talk about is lowering rents. And in the 126 unit that I mentioned earlier, that's under distress, that's the first thing that we did is we went in and by our assessment, they were trying to charge too much which was a major factor in why the occupancy was so low.  So we immediately went in and cut all the rents and that might seem counterintuitive for a value-add person but over the last six months, we've raised the occupancy 25% and one of the big reasons is we lower the rents and so the net change in terms of the net operating income of that property it skyrocketed by lowering rents. So that also further demonstrates that it really varies, you kind of have to you know. It's sort of like if you look at five different people and say, you know, what change would you make in each person to improve their overall wellness? For some people, they might say stop smoking and some people might say, well, that one needs to eat better so you can't kind of really say well, what's the one thing overall?  James: How did you decide to lower the rent? What was the data that you looked at and decide, okay, I just need to reduce the rent here?  Brian: Well, you know, that's one of the fantastic things when you've got so many properties in one market. You know immediately that based on your other operations that something's off. You know when it's low, you know when it's high, you know when the fees don't match what's present in that market or the concessions don't match.  It becomes very simple. If you're going into a new market, you've got to study those comps and do the best you can and hopefully, tour those comps and do your own homework. But it's one of many advantages of having a concentration of properties in one area. In addition to all the many operational efficiencies that you can have is that you have that market specific knowledge that is there's no substitute for.  James: Got it. Got it. So when you decide to lower the rent, I mean it is a counter-intuitive but I think it makes sense in value-add, especially when you go with that kind of low occupancy. You need to do something to bring up the occupancy because once you bring up the occupancy, you can do a lot of other things. Brian: Exactly. James: You can't do it when the occupancy is low and you're adamant about pushing up the rent. So was your thought process, rather than I leave this unit vacant, that's the biggest loss compared to giving [19:48inaudible] $25 or $30 increase that doesn't make sense.  Brian: Yes. That's right. So, you know that's been one of the strategies that I've adhered to and has worked well; you lower the rents and lease it up and then you make improvements as you go and then you raise rents from there. Nothing more expensive than vacant space. The other piece of that which is an advantage of not syndicating is that I have been able in many cases to fund many of the improvements out of cash flow. So with this particular property, we did lower the rents, but the occupancy has been brought way up. So we've just crossed a threshold where now this property is cash flowing again and all that cash flow is going to be directed right back into making improvements, probably, for the next few years at least. And so, that's a perfect example of well, if you're going to syndicate and you need to pay investors, you really can't be investing all of your cash flow back into a property.  So what do you need to do? You need to raise some money up front to pay for those improvements and not count on cash flow so that you can achieve your investor returns and start to get them their money back.  James: Yeah. That's the one thing different with syndicated deal versus owning your own deals. You don't have to raise so much money so you can take your cash flow and just put it back. With a syndication [21:27crosstalk/inaudible] and you may lose deals because you're competing with somebody who has a lot of money versus somebody who is syndicating.  Brian: That's right. James: It's very interesting. So in terms of, I'm going to your personal side, is there a proud moment in your life or not in your life, toward your real estate career, that you think, I would remember that moment throughout my life until the end; can you describe that moment?  Brian: Oh, wow, you know there's been so many moments, but not all good.  James: No, no, the proudest moment where you think you really made a big impact on something.  Brian: I never really expected this but some of the proudest moments that I've had has been since my book came out and I would have never guessed that that would lead to that but some of the feedback that I've gotten from readers that they've shared with me that it's changed their lives that they started into investing and have already built portfolios. And to see the direct link between the book and people, you know, really making improvements in their lives has been extremely rewarding. So I think one of the great things is that I really went into the idea of writing the book just because I wanted to share what I've learned, the mistakes I've made and to help other people, but I never really thought that it would sell very many copies or that people would have that kind of effect and the fact that it did. When I get a letter, a note from somebody, it's been extremely rewarding. So now I kind of remember that I think that's been a big impact.  James: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I get a lot of notes from my books as well and sometimes you don't really take it seriously because for us it's just common knowledge from what we have learned. But some notes do make us think, oh, I really really made an impact on someone. I mean, it's mind-blowing in how many lives can be changed with the things that you share in a book.  Brian: Right, right. Yeah. Absolutely.  James: Yeah. So the next second question is why do you do what you're doing? Brian: Well. You know and it's interesting. I mean actually, in the book I share at one point, this was a few years back, I had somebody come up to me and they said you know, how much is enough? Like you are so greedy, why do you keep going? And I just realized that this person doesn't understand, they missed the whole point that it's just rewarding to take a property that's not performing, that's in distress, that's maybe even a bad thing in a community and to turn it around and make it a better place for people to live. You help the tenants and you help the community and to do that and start to get involved. Like I do meetups now and I met new people and threw those in the book to help other investors, and so, you know, I look forward to going to work every day. I enjoy it. I enjoy the challenge of finding and executing on properties that aren't achieving up to their potential and making a better place for people to live and more profitable at the same time. So I just think it's fun. Like I enjoy what I do.  James: Yeah, it's like a discovery, you're trying to discover these from your paper to the real stuff. Especially when you are underwriting because you're assuming a lot of things and how does that whole assumption become a reality? You know, it's very interesting to see the output of that become [25:42inaudible] people's lives, which is just... Brian: Absolutely. James: So we really had a really good knowledge box from you, Brian. So can you tell our listeners and audience how to get hold of you?  Brian: Sure, you know, your listeners can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn, you know, you can find the book on amazon.com or on the book website is crushingit.info and my company's website is Washingtonstreetproperties.com  And if anybody is interested in reaching out, I'd be glad to hear from them.  James: Awesome, Brian. Thank you for coming and joining us. I think that's it. Thank you.  Brian: Thanks, James, was an honor.

In today's episode, we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jocelyn: Hey y'all, on today's podcast we help Brian figure out if his business idea will make money online. Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started. Shane: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to talk to another member of the Flip Your Life community. You'll have to bear with us. Jocelyn and I are just getting back from a conference, and both of our voices are a little shot. We're still a little jet lagged, but that's not going to hold us back from helping today's Flip Your Life community member, Brian Kelley. Brian, we're tired, but welcome to the show. Brian: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Shane: And Brian's on the road too. He's on the road too. Brian: I absolutely am, yup. Shane: He's in Chicago at a conference, so he might be a little tired too. We're going to go through this now. We're going to fight through it together. How's that? Brian: That sounds great. Jocelyn: We're excited to talk to you today, Brian. You are coming to our event, which is coming up very, very soon so that is super exciting. And I know that you have been taking a lot of action lately which is how you got on the show today, so congratulations for that. And we can't wait to hear a little bit more about it, but before we get there let's hear about you and your background. Brian: All right. I work in restaurants. I've been in the restaurant industry for about 25 years, and I actually love it. I love my job. I'm married with two kids, and the issue I tend to run into is that I'm concerned about our financial future. I like what I do, but both of our kids have special needs, and it requires extra planning for the future. I don't think that there's a way for me to get my family where we ultimately need to be at retirement with just our incomes. So I'm looking to supplement it with something online. Brian: And then the other reason that I've been pursuing it is just because I think it's a lot of fun. I've listened to your Podcast for a long time now, and I've actually been a member for a year. Everything that I learn that's new and sitting down and actually creating a website and stuff is really intriguing to me. I find it exciting, and I like it, so that's kind of why I chose this path. I'm just looking for any bit of success at this point. I think I've done a lot of the base level stuff. I'm up and rolling, and I'm just trying to get that first dollar made. Shane: Dude, I get it, man. I sat there for months and months waiting for any amount of money to flow into my pocket. And what's crazy is we ask our guests on the show, we look for people in the forums who are taking action, filling out success stories, helping other people, and you have just had this flurry of activity. You've been taking all the courses, talking in the forums, coming to the live event in September, and all of this stuff lately. And that's kind of how we were like, "Whoa, what is this guy doing? He is doing everything. We've got to get him on the show, we've got to help him because we really want to reward action takers in the community." What caused this flurry of activity. You said you've been in the community for a year now. What's happened lately or changed or how'd you [inaudible 00:03:42] to get moving forward in your business? Brian: It was two things. It was, one, probably first and foremost, a new idea for a website. And secondly was I just got really angry that I hadn't finished my last idea, that I hadn't succeeded with it. I got mad and determined because of that. So I just committed and said I was starting again and going to try to do it again. Shane: And are you looking to create a full time income right now or is it more like a side hustle like you love your job? Are you looking to create something on the side that's more like, "Hey, now I can make a lot more money and still do this job that I love, and then maybe someday I can use it to get some time freedom back?" What's the ultimate goal right now? Brian: The ultimate goal is to create a full online business. Shane: Right, right, right. Brian: [inaudible 00:04:39] I want now like I really meant it when I said I think this stuff is really fun, and I'm extremely dedicated to it. I don't have to have ... I'm not beating down the door to escape my job. I love it. I love the people I work with. It's not an urgent need, but there is that need. It has to happen over the next 10 to 20 years for sure. Shane: For sure, yeah. Recently I met this guy named Mark Mason. He has a Podcast called Late Night Internet Marketing, and his story reminds me of yours a lot. He was like, "I love my job. I've got a great job. It fulfills me. I love the people I work with. But I like other things too," is what he said. And he's like, "And of course, if anything ever happened I've got this other thing. It's sitting there waiting for me. I've got choices in my life." And that's what online business can do for you. It gives you choices, and it gives you exactly what you need in the moment. Some people may love their job and just want some extra money or some people may love their job, but they're not quite sure how it could handle a recession, so they want to have something in their back pocket to do that. And some people are like, "Man, I love my job right now, but I'm smart enough to look into the future and see I'm going to need something different later," right? Brian: Yes. Shane: All of us should be doing that. Even in our online business right now we do that a lot. We look into the future and be like, "What is our business going to look like 10 years from now? What does it need to look like based on our needs, our kids' needs, our future needs as we get older or whatever?" And we have to think about those things, and it's really cool that you're seeing the flexibility here of, "Hey, let's not get desperate. Let's not get crazy. Let's just build something cool and have fun with it, and it will be there for me if I need it and my kids need it. Brian: Yes. Jocelyn: All right. So you like your job now, but you want some options as far as making extra income, which I think is a great idea. I actually used to work in the restaurant industry too years ago. I don't know if you've ever listened to our Podcast where I talk about I used to work for a commercial dish machine manufacturer. Shane: She puts your dishwasher in the back room is what she did for them. Brian: Right. I heard you say that on the Podcast. I think about it every day when I walk by a dishwasher]. Jocelyn: Yeah. Shane: That's hilarious. You might be the only person that sees a dishwasher and thinks- Brian: I know people who sell this equipment. That's right. Jocelyn: So I actually didn't do a lot of end user work. It was mostly to manufacturers' representatives and that type of thing. But anyway, so yeah I know about the restaurant industry. I've been to many trade shows and all that kind of thing, so I know a lot about restaurant stuff. Anyway, I love that you are trying to branch out and do something different. Let's talk a little bit about that. What have you tried before, and what are you doing now? Brian: Okay. As far as what I've tried before there's probably a list of five or six, maybe more, things going back 10 years all the way starting with Etsy and just trying to make products for Etsy. I looked into doing drop ship stuff for a little while and decided that totally wasn't for me. Most recently when I joined the community I had an idea for online fishing tournaments. I thought it would be really fun to do online fishing tournaments. I have a lot of friends and family that are competitive at fishing, and I thought it was going to be a great idea. The issue I ran into was two-fold. One, it really wasn't ... What I had created wasn't conducive as it was, so the membership model and I really wanted to do that, and it required so much involvement that it just was never going to work with my schedule. I didn't have the time to execute the operation, so I kind of let it die, and I got discouraged because that was my favorite idea at the moment. Shane: What is an online fishing tournament? How would that even work? Would I fish at my house and you would fish at your house and we'd take pictures? Jocelyn: No, this is what I think of. Do you remember there used to be the Nintendo Wii that had those little controllers. There was a fishing tournament on there. Shane: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Jocelyn: That's what comes to my mind. Shane: Oh yeah, we would compete on ... What was ... Brian: Actually it was like real fishing, and it's modeled after the capture, photo, release style of fishing, which is what a lot of kayak fishermen do. So instead of wait it's on links, so I built an app and people could just take a photo of the fish they caught on a fish ruler and upload it. And basically it allowed people to compete wherever they were on the same species of fish. Shane: That's actually a really cool idea though. Brian: It is, but the problem is I had to be there to launch the tournaments, and I had to be there to judge the tournaments, so there were specific times where I would have to wake up at like ... Fishermen wake up at, like, four in the morning, right, to launch a tournament. And then I had to judge it, and then there were issues with faking species. Shane: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian: There's some logistics that ... I still have that website. I have not thrown it away. I still have an e-mail list for it. There's a ton of interest in it. I just can't execute that right now. Shane: Interesting. We'll keep that one in your back pocket, okay? Jocelyn: I have never heard of an online fishing tournament. This is a first. Shane: My nephew comes over. We've got this lake behind our house. And he'll just sit here and catch fish for five hours. He's all by himself, but I could picture that being like what if he was virtually with other people fishing at the same time? Brian: And could win money for if he caught a big fish. It makes it a lot of fun. Shane: What a cool idea? That's an amazing idea. What else did you try? Brian: Oh gosh. We were doing ... I was trying to do something connected to restaurants so I modeled a website after some others I had seen that were basically just promoting websites kind of like an affiliate except it was locations and venues would pay a fee to be listed on the website, and the website would market to people that were traveling to the area, give them itineraries, lists to view, things like that. Shane: That sounds cool. What was the holdup there? It's too hard to get every restaurant in the world on it kind of deal or ... Brian: No, it was honestly ethically I didn't want to promote ... I work at a restaurant. I didn't want to promote my competition, and I didn't think that was the right thing to do. And it was honestly that started out as a way for me to gain a marketing strategy for my own restaurant briefly, and I just didn't feel okay doing that. And also there's a reason that ... I'm very experienced in the restaurant industry, but there's a reason that the things that I'm choosing to do are not related to the restaurant, and that is because I don't want burnout. Restaurant hours are long, so if I were to tackle more restaurant stuff after that I just feel like it's restaurant all the time, and that's just too much for me. I think I'd burn out because [inaudible 00:12:11] something new. Shane: For sure. A lot of people come into the community, and one of the things that you hear online a lot is, "Chase your passion and the money will follow." And there is a lot of truth to that, but like Jocelyn and I usually try to start with something you're more familiar with because it's actually a lot easier to create something and make money with something you're trained for or that you know. But if someone doesn't want to do that there's lots of other alternatives. You don't have to do that, and I totally get the burnout stuff. Shane: Even as much as I used to love football coaching, like I loved it. I ate it, I breathed it, I slept it. I was always on football coaching. But after you start a community for football coaches, you talk to coaches, you go to work and coach, you come home and coach, and you make playbooks, and you go study playbooks, then you use your playbook on Friday night I really felt the burnout. It didn't matter how much I loved or was passionate about coaching football, at the end of the day you've got to do something else, like you've got to do something else. I can totally get onboard with that. Shane: Tell us about your idea now and how did you switch to that, and when did you start it? Brian: All right. My ideal now is to educate people on credit card points, travel points and miles that you can accumulate spending on credit cards and how to cash them in for maximum value to book free trips and vacations. So my website now is learnthepoints.com, and there is a strategy in there which we teach people so they can earn eight to $10,000 worth of free travel in basically nine months. So that's my goal is to have people that are willing to pay for a monthly membership for even if it's a short term be educated on the best way to accumulate these points and to redeem them for the most value. Shane: And also, too, make sure you're paying off the credit card, staying out of debt? Brian: Yes, 100%. Shane: It's always free money, right? Brian: It's free money. Don't spend anything that you weren't normally going to spend and set up automatic payments, pay everything off every month. I came up with this idea. I got shocked, honestly, just recently. My wife and I do not have any debt. It took us a while to get there. We're very credit card averse. I had just never looked into credit card points before. I had heard people talk about miles and flying and all of that stuff, and I just assumed in my head that these were people that fly all the time, and that's how they do this or they're on these big corporate accounts, so that allows them to rack up all these points. And that's just something that's not for me, and I don't apply for credit cards, so when offers come by I don't look into that stuff. Brian: But what happened was we went through a dark time in December as a family, and when the end of the school year was rolling around and it was summertime was coming up, and we were like, "We need a vacation." All I had set aside for vacation for free money was, like, 500 bucks, which is not bad. We can have fun as a family on 500 bucks, no problem. But all of our other money goes to saving. It all goes to retirement accounts or education accounts or you name it. So we've never really taken a really awesome vacation. Brian: It was kind of out of desperation or just, "You know what? I'm going to look into this and see what it's about," that I discovered what the possibility was with credit card points. And then when I realized all these bonus sign up tricks and stuff I just got obsessed and started doing all this research and figured it out and based on that developed a strategy and a plan that's basically going to get us free vacations for the next three or four years for our family. I was like, "This is awesome. How did I not know about this for so long?" I was like, "Hey wait. This could totally be an online business. Other people need to know about this." So I just popped up a website real quick and then got enthused and jumped back into the trainings. Shane: Wow. Brian, what happened in December? Brian: Unfortunately in December we lost our daughter at birth. She died, and we were really excited. We have two boys that are young. They're four and five. Both of our boys have special needs. They're both autistic, and my oldest son has Down's syndrome. We were really excited not just to have a girl in the family but to have what would be most likely our first typically developing child as well. And it was just we were really excited about it, and there were complications during delivery, and she passed away. So it was a really sad time. There's a lot of grief and anger that comes with that, and it really ... My wife and I both went to counseling. We both got help through our church. We had spent probably three months was just like in shock and recovery. And then the next three months was kind of like just rebuilding your life a little bit and trying to return to normalcy. Brian: But after being through those last six months and dealing with that there's just this need for a break like from all of life almost in a way. We work hard. We have separate schedules. It's crazy at the house because the kids are crazy. So I could see it on my wife's face like we need a vacation. Shane: Like an actual remove from the world like- Brian: Like the community pool is not going to cut it this time. We've got to go. Jocelyn: Absolutely. Shane: How did you explain it to your kids? It would be hard enough explaining it to kids who are developing at normal rate. Was it tough? Brian: It was tough because we did a lot of practicing. We did a lot of therapy going up, so we had a doll that we carried for half a year before the due date where we were training the boys on, "Hey, this is Baby Sister, and this is how you hold Baby Sister." It took us three months before they stopped throwing the doll around. We were practicing and training and getting ready, and we had her room ready of course. We found our own special ways to talk about her with the boys and remember her. I feel like we're in a really healthy place thanks to the involvement of others in the communities that we're in mostly. It's always sad. It's just something that you're never going to forget. You don't move on from it so to speak, but you cope better and better every day. Shane: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. I know that's probably really hard to talk about. Jocelyn: That's just heartbreaking. I'm so sorry to hear that. Shane: It is. I'm having trouble even not crying right now, and I stammer over my words for a few minutes. I also want to just kind of highlight that you did recover, and you did move forward, and I love how you harnessed the negative thing to think about something positive like my family needs to more forward. We need to go on a vacation. That's not trivial. That's a thing that's going to help us to take the next step because we have to take the next step. Brian: Right. Shane: And then even to come up with an idea like we have a saying that we always say around our house and around our kids and others is like, "Successful people don't say I can't do that. Successful people say how can I do that?" So you didn't say, "Oh there's only $500 in the bank. I can't go on a vacation." You said, "No, this thing is important for our family. How can we make it happen?" And that's true for life. That's true for online business. That's true for anything like if you're going to be successful you've got to figure out how to do it. So regardless of whatever happens with this online business idea, dude, just the fact that you made that happen, and your family did the thing was totally worth going down that path. Brian: Yeah. Shane: That's a powerful story, man. There's an awesome story in the Bible, I believe it was David's son passed away. I don't want to butcher the Bible, but I'm just going off the cuff here. And he mourned, and then he immediately put on his cloak and got back to work. In the story people were like, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "I have to move forward. I've got other sons. I've got a kingdom I have to do," and I really felt that kind of story coming through when you were telling us that, man. I have no words about something like that, but I am very impressed and inspired by that story you just told me because if that ever were to happen to us I know, "Hey look, Brian got it, he stepped up, we can do this." So anybody else out there listening to this I hope you are really inspired by Brian's story too. Jocelyn: Okay. I am kind of curious, and I'm sure other people are too. So you got this credit card thing going. You started learning about it. And were you able to book something? Brian: We're actually we've racked up a ton of points, and we're saving them. We started kind of at the beginning of the summer, and my wife works for the school district. School's about to start, so we're just deciding what date we're going to book and where we want to go. Shane: That's amazing. Brian: We're kind of lined up and ready. We're all excited now. It's like one of those things where we were really anxious to go anywhere. We would've taken anything, you know what I mean, but now that we've got these points in the bank and we can pretty much go anywhere for free we're like, "Hold up, hold up, let's think about this. Let's pick a really good one." Shane: Right. We get a lot of points too. We're like you though. We're like we hate debt. Credit cards scare us. I pay out credit cards. Any credit card use that we have I pay it off every week, every Thursday. I don't mess around. Every Thursday I sit down. But we use two cards. We have a business card, and we have a personal card. And we put everything on it, like everything. And we pay it off once a week because man those points are like free flights here, free all-inclusive vacation in Cancun. You can just book hotels. Jocelyn: We travel a lot because our daughter's on a travel cheer team, and I got every room last year except for one for free. Shane: Yeah, and that's like nine cheerleading vacations. Nine weekends of the year we're on the road staying two or three nights. And it's just you show up, and you have a room for free. Brian: And what I think is crazy is that there are just so many people that were like me six months ago, had no idea that you could do this. Shane: I didn't know you could do it either because we were Dave Ramsey people too of course. We're like, "Get out of debt. Never use a credit card. Credit cards are evil." And I'm like, "But they're giving you free money. Wait a minute. Let me look at this for a minute." Now, you're not going to get rich off of it, but free money's free money. It doesn't matter how you look at it. Jocelyn: And disclaimer, we do not advocate going into debt to get credit card points. Shane: No, don't go into $10,000 in debt to get $5,000 in credit card points. That doesn't make sense. You're losing money there y'all. Tell us a little bit more about that. Brian: What I try to get people to understand, and I don't know if my message is really good. I'm still trying to perfect it to get it quick because there's a lot of pushback. People just don't know that you can do it. There are credit card fees on some of these cards, but essentially I had $500 in the bank. For $500 you can afford the credit card fees on eight different cards at one time. And if you were to do that you'd have somewhere between, depending on your spending, $8,000 and $12,000 worth of free travel. So it's not that it's- Shane: Right, you're spending 500 for 8,000 basically. Brian: Yeah. If you were going to spend 500 you have two options. You can either spend $500 on your vacation or you can spend $500 on the credit card fees and take a $10,000 vacation. Shane: Yeah, that's incredible. We actually know a guy that does something similar to this. He was a member of the Flip Your Life community. His name's Brad Barrett. Have you ever heard of Brad Barrett? Brian: I did. I started researching everybody. I found his ... He has a Facebook group and a training that he does. And it's awesome. Facebook group is an awesome community. He built something really great there, and his training is very to the point and succinct, and it's good info to. So I really liked looking at his stuff. Shane: Yeah. And he was an accountant, and he really did want out of his job. He just went all in. But he focused. He only went like ... It was to go to Disney. It was straight up to go to Disney. That's how he taught it. And we've met other people who do successfully do this. And I was just at a conference this weekend, and someone was telling me like, "You know, I feel like I've got to invent a brand new thing. I've got to go the blue ocean." You guys hear that blue ocean, red ocean stuff? Brian: Right. Shane: And I looked at him. I said, "No, that's not what you do." You don't have to bake a new pie. You don't have to invent a new recipe. You've got to look around and find a pie, and you just want a slice of that. So that's why we always really encourage people like if you see someone else doing something similar to you that's not bad. That's good. That means that they've figured out how to make money at it, and there's 4 billion people connected to the internet. I promise you they're not selling to all 4 billion people. You just need some of the other people that are interested in that space. It's like abundance mentality. There's more than enough customers out there. You don't have to invent the better mousetrap. You just need to find people that need a mousetrap and sell them one. You're on the right path, and there's definitely something to this. So what's holding you back right now? Is there a mindset issue or an obstacle from doing this? Brian: Okay, so I went back and I watched the Vetting Your Idea video. So I had jumped into this full force before watching that video. I wish I would've watched it first. Shane: Wait a minute. So you're saying you should do the Flip Your Life blueprint in order? Brian: Shane, I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to take this opportunity to tell people to follow the plan the right way. Shane: Right. People jump in all the time, and they're like, "I watched video 12, and it was awesome." And I'm like, "Did you watch one through 11 because they're important?" You've got to do it in order. The Vetting Your Idea course, you know what's funny about that course in particular. I laugh because I'm saying watch it in order. When we made the blueprint, when we created the blueprint that course didn't used to be in there. Yeah, because we were so caught up in helping people find their idea and get started. I kind of looked at it, and I was like, "I go through the process whenever we have a new business and I'm like is someone else doing this? How do I find out if it's making money online?" I have a process that I check things, and I realized we were ... Because a lot of times people get held back, and I didn't want to put too much information in front of someone like I just wanted you to get your idea and start because that's where the real magic is when you start. Shane: But then I thought, "Wow, there's really an easy way to tell if people are making money on this, and I just need to show that to them." So we put that course back in later. I actually made that course after the original blueprint was created so that people could properly vet that, yes, this is a real idea. People are definitely making money online, and I can check it empirically. I can go and say, "That is a 100% truth. This can make money online. I just have to do it." And that's kind of probably what you saw when you watched that with the idea course. Brian: Yeah 100%. So I started looking, and what I found a lot of regarding credit card points and miles there's a ton of people who are offering free courses, and they are using affiliate links for their credit card sign-ups. Shane: Yes 100%. Brian: That is what most, like 95% of what's out there is affiliates for the credit cards, which I don't think there's anything wrong with necessarily although I have started my website and really pushed that I am not an affiliate for the credit cards. Shane: Great differentiator. That makes you different. Brian: Yes. I've also noticed affiliates have different promotions and all that stuff, and sometimes teaching others isn't true. It's just not the best version of the information because they're promoting a specific credit card before another one, so I really wanted to focus on ... yeah. I really want to focus on what's going to be my users, my guests on my site, and what's going to get them the most bang for the buck the right way to do it. I'd rather not get involved with affiliates at all. I'd rather just tell them the truth like if you want to get the most money this is how you get the most money. Shane: So one sticking point is like you're kind of ... You said a lot of other people have went down the road because if I can get you to sign up for the credit card I might get a $100 fee. The bad part about that strategy is you're really relying on a lot of traffic. You've got to have a lot of traffic coming in to make that work because you're not getting any recurring off these credit card points that you get people to sign up for. It's just you get 100 bucks, you move on. You know what I mean? So you almost have to get them to sign up for five at once just to make a good chunk of change out of the beginning. Are you concerned that nobody will pay for it because the other ... Brian: Right. I was concerned that nobody would do a membership for the information. There is a lot of free information out there. It's just that my information's better than the free information that's out there, but I need to be able to convince people that it's worth whatever I'm charging right now I set it up to charge $25 a month. Shane: Right. Brian: I did find at least one site that is doing a membership model, and that gave me hope, but it was hard to find. Shane: To be fair the internet's a big place. You know what I mean? So there's probably other people out there doing it to. If you found one there's probably more. Brian: Yeah, I would think so. There is another aspect to it. Some people are also doing one-on-one coaching and booking trips for people using their credit card points to get the most value for it. So those are some one-offs that I found. But my biggest concern is that looking for validation that approaching this from the membership model setting up a $25 a month membership to educate people and provide them with free tools and resources is something that somebody will pay for, that it'll work. Shane: I would say they would if you position it correctly, right? Because there's an old saying in copywriting where if you can give people free money they'll buy your product. And this is a free money product. It is. It's like if you get the cards you will get free money. You will get the points. So if you can say, "Hey look, I ..." Telling your story is the most critical part of your marketing because you literally did this. You're like, "Look, I have no debt. I have these cards. I've got three vacations, enough money for three vacations over the next three years. I have $8,000 in credit card points. I spent $500 to do it. I made $7,500." This is true. These are all facts. You can check it. It's 100% real, and it happens when you do it this way. So like that's free money. It really is. It sounds so scammy but it's not. It's free money. It really is free money. Brian: It is, yes. Shane: And you've actually done this. Your story is where you have to start with your marketing to convince people that that's going to happen. Jocelyn: I almost feel like this is one of those situations where it's a side-by-side. And what I mean by that is that you have a course on one side, and you list all the benefits of just doing the DIY course. And then on the other side you have your monthly payment, which is the same price as your course, but it just recurs. And you position that as this is the courses plus support from me as you go through this. Shane: Yeah. So it is kind of two products. The content is isolated, but then there's a way to interact with you like I'm going to help you make purchasing decisions, and I'm going to help you. I'm going to walk with you as you spend the money. We're going to have a ... A buddy of mine does a membership, so listen to what this is. He does this membership where basically it's a writing hour. So twice a week he shows up, he does a quick writing tip, and then basically he has, like, 300 members and they all just show up to write together. That's what they do, but it's accountability. It's to ask a question. It's to just hang out really. There's no relieving content involved in the membership, but people love it because they've got somewhere to go in the moment to either get accountability or ask a question. Shane: So it's like you could have a weekly pay off your credit card party. Hey guys, last week we got our groceries. Hey Jim, what'd you do? Oh man, I bought a subscription to Netflix. Okay, let's pay that off. You could keep people out of debt parties. It's not like you're really even answering questions. It's just you show up, and everybody's accountable to stay out of debt while they're accumulating their points. And then they can ask questions to you like, "Well, I found this other card. Is this a good card Brian?" Yeah it is. That's a good card. You should do this. You should do that. Don't worry. You can trust my advice because I'm not an affiliate for that card. Brian: Exactly. Shane: But you can throw stones at the other people like, "Hey guys, all these other people they're recommending cards that give them the best affiliate payout. Not me. Brian you can trust because I'm here for you." I love the idea that the course is separate or they can work with you for real, work with you. And your whole story then becomes so important because now they trust you to join your membership community. So you're not selling them content anymore. You're not selling them the path anymore. You're really just selling you. You know what I mean? And your experience, your coaching, and your leadership. Brian: If I switch this over and change it so I've got this side-by-side thing going on on the website would you market or promote the course, and then when they get to the landing page they would see the course or the membership option then? Shane: I'm going to give everybody that's listening a tip right now. Nobody cares what's in your course. Nobody cares about the course. All they care about is your story. The only thing I would be telling yours like you need to go on this vacation, and you need to have some pictures of it, and you need to be able to talk about it, and you need to be able to blog about it. And everything happens going forward is I had this horrible experience. I knew my family needed vacation. I found a way. We did it. And now I'm bringing the torch back from Mt. Olympus. This is a heroes journey story if there ever has been one. Jocelyn: I agree. And I don't think that the course material is unimportant per se. Shane: Right. It's not unimportant. It's just not the most important. Jocelyn: But I do feel that the most important things are being able to relate to you, can you solve their problem, and then the course material is way on down the list. Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the second thing. Jocelyn: And I think people get this backwards. People always want to do their sales page look at all these wonderful things that I have in my course or program. And they want to give you the 10-minute rundown of every nut and bolt in their program. People don't care about that. People care about can you solve my problem and do I like you? Shane: What most people remember at any event, like let's say you go to a rock concert, when musicians create their set they really focus on the first song and the last song because that's what you're going to remember. It's like a movie. You remember how a movie started. A lot of stuff happens in the beginning, and we all remember the end. You know what I'm saying? Jocelyn: Right. Shane: It's like Avengers. There's like 18 movies over like 20 years, and pretty much it all boiled down to at the beginning Thanos wanted some rocks, and at the end Iron Man fights him. That's what we all remember in between, right? So that's kind of what you're doing here. It's like, "This is my story. This is real. You can trust that it's real because all these other people are only recommending things that pay them good. I'm not because I'm not an affiliate for any of these people. I'm telling you the truth, and inside my community I'm going to help you do it. Shane: So you can have a general list of things like categorical these are the results you'll get inside. Know the first thing you'll buy. Know the first card to get. Know the order that they're going to get. You're more telling the results, but you're not telling the exact courses and all that stuff. There's no reason to. No one cares. But when they get inside we get into detail. Jocelyn: Okay. Shane: First course, blueprint one, second course, blueprint two, third course, blueprint three. That's when you get really into it. Don't try to sell the content. Like you said the content's free. I hate to tell everybody this. All content's free. Every piece of content that has ever existed inside of any course is somewhere free on the internet. Now, can you find it? Is it hard to find? That's where curation and courses come into play. But it's all free. You've just got to figure out how to make your free stuff look better, and your story is the best way to do that. Brian: Okay, great. Jocelyn: Okay, Brian. I think that we have some good ideas about moving forward as far as your product goes. What else do you need help with right now? Brian: I think I'm up to close to 400 people on my e-mail list. That's mainly coming through Facebook and Facebook ads with my lead magnet. However, I have not converted anybody on my e-mail list into purchasing as of yet. Shane: How often do you e-mail your list? Let me ask you a couple questions here. It's a big list. You should've converted something, so let's figure this out. Brian: Yeah. I have an auto responder set up for the first eight e-mails that follow very closely the e-mails in the blueprint. So those go out, and I follow the same timeline, so it's like a couple immediately and then about a week later and then a couple days later. And then there's one at the end two weeks out that's like, "Hey, I'm not going to send you anymore. You'll just continue to get vacation updates from me basically." And I send out whenever I have time to design a new vacation that somebody can take for free I just e-mail that to my whole list. Shane: So basically your e-mail ... So only your auto responder is what's tried to sell this so far. You've only [crosstalk 00:40:30]. Brian: That's true. That's correct, only my auto responder, yeah. Shane: Okay. What if you sent them a message that said, "Hey, I'm doing a live training this week, and I'm going to show you how to get $8,000 for free?" Brian: I haven't done that yet. Shane: Okay. You've got to add more layers to it. The auto responder is just for picking low hanging fruit, the lowest of the fruit. Actually it's like walking under an apple tree, and the apple has already fell off, and you bend down and pick it up. That's where automation comes in. You're never going to convert more than a single digit percentage off of your e-mail list, right? You have to add live Webinars. You have to add weekly Podcasts or blog posts or something. Shane: I'm also looking at your site here, and it definitely needs a facelift. It's just too plain, and it's also too ... It looks too pie and the sky. For example, let's take you. I'm going to describe your website as I go through here. One, at the top you've got all these credit cards. That's cool. Then it says, "Become a member." You know what I'm saying? It's just like okay that's cool. Then it's like a picture of four probably 18-year-old girls running down a beach. That's not Brian. Brian was a dad who had just lost his daughter and went through a dark time. And the rest of his family needed him to step up and help them climb out of the darkness, right? Brian: Right. Shane: So Brian, with his two children and his wife went forward together. I need to see a family here. That's what I need to see. I don't need to see this. Shane: Then the next one is a guy with like a mini Afro and a surf board. He's like, "Whoa, dude, I'm a cool 18-year-old dude on a beach in Thailand making six bucks a day or whatever." That's not Brian, man, I really came home from work at the restaurant and I was tired, and I knew we needed a vacation. So you're not talking to the other guys out there that are like, "Yo, I'm tired. My family really needs me to step up and figure out a way. I've not been able to afford a vacation in three years. What can I do to help my family get a little break?" You know what I'm saying? Brian: Right. Shane: It's just not resonating. The people who are on your list are just not resonating with what they're seeing and hearing in your marketing. Brian: Ah, that makes sense, okay. Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your story is not being told, and that's why nobody's buying anything from you. We tell some pretty deep stories, and we wrestled with how much of our personal life we always want to share on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast or when we speak on stage. And 99% of the time it's be an open book because our stories are what really help someone else. And we told our stories this week. We were at FlynnCon, and we spoke with Pat Flynn on stage, and we told the story of Isaac being mistreated in a daycare center. That's a really hard story to tell when you find out someone was literally locking your child into a bathroom to punish them for potty training accidents at three years old it's horrifying to even say that out loud. But that story always makes people realize how important their kids are, how important their time is. They want to get their kids out of daycare centers and home with them. Shane: I have to tell that story because if I don't then I can't relate to someone enough to make them change their life. So your story has to take over this page. Your family has to take over this page. And you have to say to somebody, "If we did it you can do it too," and that'll resonate more as well. And then showing up live not just in their inbox is going to give you a better chance to convert those. Shane: If you could get 50 of those people to come to a Webinar, and you told us your story like the way we even talked about it off air today before the Podcast started people are going to resonate with that because they're going to look at their kids, and they're going to look at their family, and they're going to realize this guy's for real. If he wasn't for real he'd be signing up for all the affiliate things just trying to get my affiliate check, right? But he's telling me the truth, and I need to listen to this guy, and he can help me. Where do I sign up? So if you could just plant some storytelling overtop of all of this, and then do the work. And I know you're going to do the work because you're an action taker, you could turn this thing around. 400 people, man, you've got members. We just have to get the message right to do it. Shane: I'd love to see your e-mails too. We don't have time to go over every e-mail in your auto responder today, but your e-mails should be telling the story. It shouldn't just be here's all the benefits. It's like in 2018 December this happened. It moves into why you went down the path to the credit cards, and that creates trust, and it shows them like, "Hey, this guy figured it out. I can figure it out. Let's do this." Brian: Okay. Yes. Jocelyn: All right Brian, it has been great talking to you today, and I can't wait to see what you do next. Before we go we always ask our guests what is one thing that you plan to take action on based on what we talked about today? Brian: I am going to ... Since I am out of town right now I am going to set up the side-by-side course versus the membership on the website and just get that done quickly. And then when I get back home I'm going to start taking some pictures with my family and redoing my story on the website. Shane: Love it. I love that you're like, "I'm going to take some pictures with my family. We're putting them on there." That's good. And I want to see the website, so make sure you send it to me in the forums or hit me up, and I want to see the link when you redo it because it'll be awesome. Brian: Will do. Shane: Hey Brian, before we go let me ask you a question. What made you come to Flip Your Life Live? Flip Your Life Live happens in Lexington, Kentucky on September 19 through the 21st of 2019. It's our big Flip Your Life Flipped Lifestyle Podcast family reunion where all of our listeners, fans, followers, and members can come together in one place to hang out together, eat together, work together, and really get inspired to do big things for our families. I always love to hear people's stories. Why did you come to Flip Your Life Live? What made you look at it and go, "I got to go. I just got to go to Flip Your Life Live?" Brian: I wanted to dive all in. I didn't want to leave anything on the table. Really I am not afraid of failure. I am really afraid of not trying, not giving it my all. And I just felt like, "Hey, this is something I haven't done, and I can't say that I gave it all I could if I didn't go." Shane: I love that, man. No regrets, right. I'd rather have a life full of failures than a life full of regrets at the end of it. Brian: Also I'm not paying for the flight, so that helps. Shane: Shameless plug for the credit card points. I love it. That's amazing. Jocelyn: Love it. That is awesome. Shane: Listen. If you would like to join us and Brian in Lexington, Kentucky at Flip Your Life Live this year go to flippedlifestyle.com. That's F-L-I-P-P-E-D lifestyle.com/live. We have a few tickets left, but they are almost sold out, and this will be the last big conference Flip Your Life Live that we do for a while. We are not doing the event in 2020, so you can't go all in next year. You might as well go all in with us and Brian this year at Flip Your Life Live. Jocelyn: And who knows, maybe if you join Brian's membership maybe he can get you a free flight too. Shane: That's right. Maybe you can fly there too. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/live. We'd love to see you at our live event. All right guys, that is all the time we have for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast today. We would love to see you inside of our community as well. Who knows, you may end up right here on the Podcast just like Brian did. So if you'd like to take action today go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can check out all of our membership options. Shane: Before we go today we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today's Bible verse comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-19. The Bible says, "Be joyful always. Pray continually. Give thanks in all circumstances. This is the will of God for your life." Shane: Until next time, guys, get out there, take action. Do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then. Jocelyn: Bye. Links and resources mentioned on today's show: Brian's Website Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information Flip Your Life community PROLIFIC Monthly Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family! Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month! https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

John Cutler is a Product Evangelist for Amplitude, an analytic platform that helps companies better understand users behavior, helping to grow their businesses. John focuses on user experience and evidence-driven product development by mixing and matching various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. In today’s episode, John and I discuss how productizing storytelling in analytics applications can be a powerful tool for moving analytics beyond vanity metrics. We also covered the importance of understanding customers’ jobs/tasks, involving cross-disciplinary teams when creating a product/service, and: John and Amplitude’s North Star strategy and the (3) measurements they care about when tracking their own customers’ success Why John loves the concept of analytics “notebooks” (also a particular feature of Amplitude’s product) vs. the standard dashboard method Understanding relationships between metrics through “weekly learning users” who share digestible content John’s opinions on involving domain experts and cross-discipline teams to enable products focused on outcomes over features Recognizing whether your product/app is about explanatory or exploratory analytics How Jazz relates to business – how you don’t know what you don’t know yet Resources and Links: Connect with John on LinkedIn Follow John on Twitter Keep up with John on Medium Amplitude Designing for Analytics Quotes from Today’s Episode “It’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. My advice is to fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business.” – John “We definitely ‘dogfood’ our product and we also ‘dogfood’ the advice we give our customers.” – John “You know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. […] there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is, fight for it, because you know that it is important, and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem.” – John “It’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want.” – Brian “We got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked, and it’s so powerful” – Brian “Instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to consider, [I sometimes suggest teams] write in plain English, like in prose format, what would be the value that we could possibly show in the data.’ maybe it can’t even technically be achieved today. But expressing the analytics in words like, ‘you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and here is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.’ This method is highly prescriptive, but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience.” – Brian Transcript Brian: My guest today on Experiencing Data is John Cutler who is a product evangelist at Amplitude Software. I have been really enjoying John’s commentary on Twitter and some of his articles on medium about designing better decisions of work tools. If you’re in this space and you’re trying to figure out, “How do I get into the heads of what our customers need? What types of data is actually important to track?” Especially, if you’re looking at longer term outcomes that you want to be able to measure and provide insight on, I think you’re going to enjoy my conversation with John. Without further ado, here’s my chat with John Cutler. All right, we’re back to Experiencing Data, and today we’ve got the cutlefish as your Twitter handle is known, right is it cute-l-fish or cutlefish? John: We’re going to go with cutlefish, not cute-l. Brian: That’s what I thought. John Cutler is here from Amplitude Software, which is a product analytics company, and I wanted to have John on today, not because he is cute necessarily, but because I’ve really been enjoying what you’re espousing about customer experience, and particularly, product management. Which for some of our listeners that are not working in tech companies necessarily, there’s not really a product management kind of role explicitly by title. But I think some of the, as you will probably account to, the overlap between design, user experience, and product is sometimes a gray area. I think some of the things you’re talking about are in important in the context of building analytics tools. Welcome to the show, fill in, make corrections on what I just said about what you’re doing. You’re a product evangelist at Amplitude, so what does that mean and what are you up to over there? John: Well, we’re still trying to figure out the evangelist part because I don’t necessarily sell or evangelize our product, I think our product is great and I like to say it sort of sells itself. But what I’m really focusing on is helping up level teams, now that could be like our internal teams, our customers, but largely to just prospects and teams that have never even heard of Amplitude. What we’re really looking with this role is to do workshops, provide content, I do these coaching sessions with just random teams, so it’s like one hour coaching sessions. But generally trying to fill in the blanks, I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m just going to purchase this analytics tool or this product analytics tool,” and suddenly it’s going to answer all our questions and everything’s going to be fine. But what they don’t quite realize is that you really have to tweak a lot of things about how you work as a product development team to really make use of the great tools that are available. There are amazing tools available. I believe Amplitude is one of them, but there is so many good software as a service products to help product teams. But really at the end of the day, it’s about the team also being aligned and things like that. I really try to take a broad view of what it will take to help people make better products with this role. Brian: Yeah. Can you give an example? I think I know where you’re going with this, but give an example of where someone had to change their expectation? You need to change the way you’re working or let’s figure out what’s important to measure instead of just expecting. I think you’re alluding to like, “Oh, buy our tool, we know what the important analytics and measurement points are that you should care about and we will unveil them.” Instead it’s like, “Well, what’s important to track? Does time on the site matter? Does engagement in the application matter? Does sharing matter? What matters, right?” Can you talk about maybe where there was a learning experience? John: Oh, absolutely. I think maybe a good way to describe this as well is a lot of the learning, a lot of the questions begin way before the team is unwrapping the problem, unraveling the problem. I’m not sure this answers your question exactly but I think we could lead into something more specific. But imagine you’re a team and someone says, “It’s the second half of 2018, what’s going to be on your roadmap?” You think about it and you know what you know and you’ve heard customers tell you things, and the CEO of the company has subtly but not so subtly hinted he’d really like to see X or she’d really like to see X. You put together this roadmap, and at that point once you’ve got people thinking that those solutions are the right solutions, and you force that level of convergence, there’s not a lot of… measurement will not save you at that point, you’ve already committed at that point to deliver those things in that particular setting. One example of a practice that might change to further or amplify the use of measurement would just be not making… committing to missions, committing to move particular metrics that the company believes are associated with mid to long-term growth of the company, and commit to those things instead of committing to build features. An example, a real world example, maybe for someone’s effort, maybe what you’re shooting at before is do they shift from same time on site was important to something else? But for a lot of these teams, it’s shifting from build feature X to something like shortening the time it takes for a team to be able to complete a workflow. That’s the big shift for that. It’s nothing-to-something that makes sense, not necessarily even something-to-something. Brian: One of the things we talk about on the show is designing for outcomes instead of designing outputs. John: Yep. Brian: Because it’s very easy to create assets and create code and things that look like progress. They mask themselves as progress and improvement, and they may not actually return any business value or customer value explicitly. We have to consciously know what the outcomes are that we want let alone measure them. Do you run into the problem when you… If you’re coaching someone and getting them into this mindset of designing around an outcome and building your sprint or your next, maybe it’s even a strategy for the next six to 12 months around outcomes? That the important things to measure are not quantifiable in the tool? Do you work yourself out of a customer sometimes because the tool can’t actually measure what’s important? Does that ever happen? John: That’s a great question because I think that I do a fun exercise with people, which is called let’s predict the success of a relationship. We start with this activity and we just we forget about what we think is possible to measure and we just start mapping our beliefs. The team will say something like, “Well, I think that they shouldn’t have arguments.” Then someone will say, “Well, yeah, but it’s not just,” and maybe they’re talking about their own life like, “Well, we argue a lot, but we resolve our arguments pretty, we become stronger once we have the arguments.” Then the team will sit there and go, “Huh, okay.” It’s not just about the number of arguments, it’s ability to resolve your arguments. Brian: Resolve. John: We keep playing this game and we map our beliefs out to predicting these things, and some of these things we have more confidence about and some of these things we don’t have a lot of confidence about. Some of these things we strike and we get this big messy network of nodes and edges on the wall and that’s what we start working with. What’s really, really interesting is that we actually, as a company, there’s almost always some percentage of these things that we can contribute to in terms of what they can instrument in using our product. It’s not like…we would much rather our customers map the universe of things and acknowledge some things that might be difficult to measure or they’re just beliefs at the moment, they haven’t figured out how to measure them. Because really what Amplitude is very powerful at is doing behavioral analytics about these long standing customer journeys through products and those types of… Anyone who’s done a 15-table join and tried to communicate it to other people in your company and then tweak it and have people collaborate with it just knows how painful that is. That’s the type of pain that we solve. But back to the particular question, all the coaching really centers around mapping all the beliefs, and we’re usually confident that there are ways to measure some percentage of those things using our product, and that’s fine by us. Brian: There’s almost like a meta-question, right? John: I like, I’m meta, yeah, I got it. I’m there with you. Brian: You’re like analytics, you’re an analytics product and you talk to your clients about what’s important for them to measure. But then at some point, you have to know what’s important to measure to know that your customers are getting the value. John: Yeah. Brian: Is it directly…are you interested in what they’re setting up to measure and then that becomes your measurement? Do you piggyback off that or do you… How do you justify that the sprint or the epic we worked on last quarter provided business value? How do you…? John: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we definitely dogfood our product and we also dogfood the advice we give people usually first. To give you an example like in 2018, we had this North Star Metric called “Weekly Querying Users”, WQUs. That seemed about right and we did some analysis and it looked like, “Well, for increasing WQUs, it’s probably going to mean this and this and it’s going to be some early indicator that our monthly recurring revenue is going to keep going up”, etc. But there were obvious problems with that and we saw that. And as 2018 went along, we started to look at it more, and for any SaaS company, there’s a point at which your expansion within existing accounts starts to be really, really important in terms of percentage of revenue that you’re in. We thought, “Well, is that metric, can you hand WQUs to any new team member and say move that or move something that you think moves that,” and then be 100% confident they’re going to make good decisions? It broke down after that. What we did is we shifted to weekly learning users. Now a weekly learning user is not just someone querying, because anyone who uses one of these tools knows you could just sit there and query all day and not get an answer. In fact, querying more might indicate that you are not getting an answer. Not like doing anything with it. A weekly learning user is actually someone who shares some piece of digestible content whether it’s notebook, whether it’s a dashboard, whether it’s a chart, and they share it. We actually have this North Star, which is weekly learning users, we believe these three inputs drive weekly learning users and those are activated accounts. They need to know what they’re doing, they’re broadcasted learnings, which is the ability for the user to attempt to broadcast some number of learnings, and then a metric that is a consumption of learning metric which is the broad consumption across the organization of that particular piece of learning. This is all sounds really heady, why would we go to all these lengths to do this, and Weekly Querying User sounded good. But to us this really encapsulates a strategy. I think that that’s an important thing that a lot of people from pure analytics backgrounds or who are used to sitting with a queue of questions and answering those questions are maybe not used to the idea of moving towards a cohesive strategy as expressed by a number of metrics and the relationships between those metrics. That’s something that we really encourage our customers to do, it’s not data snacking. It’s not like, “Oh, I got this itch today so I’m going to answer this question.” That took a lot of work to come up with that, and we’re confident about those relationships between those things. But more importantly, it helps any new team member like all you need to do is show a skilled product manager or a skilled designer or a developer even and say, “This is our current mental model as described by the relationship between these things. Where do you want to slot in? What do you have in mind?” That’s really, really powerful. I don’t know if that roundabout way of saying we take this really, really seriously. Brian: If I can sum this up, and I’ll need you to repeat part of it, but you have monthly querying users, so what I take that to be is I, the customer, using, paying for the Amplitude software, a querying user means I went in and I looked for content or I literally used a search interface to probably look up an analytic or some stat. You moved away from the number of people doing that and how often they’re doing it as a measurement of your company’s success to this three-stage kind of thing that I heard included sharing some knowledge. But can you repeat what those three grains were? John: Oh, yeah, sure. The North Star is what we call “Weekly Learning Users”, so WLUs. Those are users performing the behavior of interest, which is sharing, distributing some piece of content. Then we believe there are three inputs that explain that metric or three inputs that we really focus on. One is that the accounts are activated, which are meaning that does this account just have a minimum number of people doing that? The next one is broadcasted learnings, which is me, “is the initial attempt to broadcast the learning?” Then consumption is the actual long tail consumption of that particular learning. Let’s say it is a story like I sign up with Amplitude, no one’s really using it all because we haven’t really onboarded and we haven’t really instrumented, we haven’t done any of that stuff. Okay, well, then we get that done, so we get just that we’ve activated, we have at least a certain number of users learning, some amount. I’m in the tool, I’m in a notebook that is really interesting that I’m putting together that tells a story with data, very interesting about the mission that I’m working on. I attempt to invite people to that notebook or get them involved, that’s the broadcast. Then, finally, the consumption of learning would be the accumulated interactions with everyone with a notebook. If that sounds too complex… Brian: Got it. I don’t know, I- John: But the whole idea is for people listening and I think especially folks, designers and other folks is that their experience with analytics might be something very simple like “what percentage of people used feature?” Or something. What they’re not getting is the context, the relationships, and what I’m describing here, there’s amazing belief networks, there’s causal relationship diagrams, there’s just simple stickies and string on the wall, whatever you want to call them. But we’re describing our beliefs as it relates to the data, and I think that, that’s really important. For some background too, I’m not a data scientist, I’ve been a product manager and a UX researcher and that’s been my focus for a long time. It’s not like I’m a pro at this stuff, and even for me, though, it grounds me in what I’m working with and makes my analysis a lot easier. Brian: I imagine you may have some, not resistance, but when you’re working with quote data people or analytics people or data science people in your staff, in Amplitude, are there routine things that you wish they would hear that would sink in or problems that maybe they’re not aware of that you think they should be like, “We need to look at the problem differently.” Maybe you encapsulated that and that’s why you have this three stage thing as a reaction to the data snacking mentality, which is “What data do we provide? Great, they have it, now they can eat it.” Is that their reaction to that or are there other things that… I’m thinking of our listeners, we do have data scientists and analytics type people, and I’m wondering if you were to work with them, it’s like, “Here are the things that I want you to think about here to get our head a little bit out of the tech for a second and into the decision support mentality.” Anything, what would you espouse or advocate? John: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a little bit with a story. I was the PM for search and relevance at Zendesk, like support software. My background is not in information retrieval or the guts of search but very, very early on working on a team with very, very talented people, data scientists, data engineers really, at the end of the day. One thing that I very much advocated for is we needed to be able to get everyone in the same room, we needed to get the people who were experts in what I would just call the actors, the support agents, or the support managers, or the the person trying to get help on their Uber app. There’s experts in that, there’s domain experts. There’s also people who are experts in the surface area, the surface, like the interface. There’s people who are really, really good at searching or finding information on mobile. There’s people who’s very good at finding information on, in our case, like the support agents view in their web browser. Then you had our people who are really smart and creating data as it related to search and they were great at data engineering, etc. The main thing that I noticed was that there’s just a silo-ing, and the people on my team were just craving, craving to be sitting next to someone who understood these other things really well. I think that for a lot of listeners it’s probably you know that, you know that from a first principles angle, you’re like, “Well, I know that there’s a bigger picture here.” I know that just in our case of searching like we knew that raising the mean reciprocal rank of a search term, we are searching it, where does the person click? Do they click on the second item, the fifth item. In theory, raising that would make a difference but when we look more broadly, it really didn’t relate to deflection of tickets and things like that. Our traditional metrics, the way we were measuring success is locally related to search. If we broadened our horizon to what makes a difference for the human beings out there who need their support tickets resolved or the support agents or things, that perspective was so helpful. What I would say to the folks on listening, it’s like you know in your heart you should pair with domain experts and people who know the human problem out there and understand the decisions being made. I think, organizationally, there’s a lot of organizational inertia that discourages that, unfortunately, and so you need to fight for it. I guess my advice is fight for it because you know that that’s important and you know that this is not just a pure data science problem or a pure analytics problem. There’s probably there’s a lot of surrounding information that you need to understand to be able to actually help the business. Brian: Sure, and you’re echoing sentiment I had a Data Center from the Broad Institute on, he was mentioning how much he’s like, “My work is so much more powerful when I have a great domain expert with me who really knows the space.” We met over music, I’m a musician as well and he was trying to explore creativity in the context of jazz. He’s a enthusiast in terms of music, he’s not a musician, but he’s an enthusiast so he understood some of it but he didn’t have the lingo. It’s just interesting when you look at someone working in that space trying to answer a question about like, “How does creativity work in jazz?” They don’t have all that domain lingo. Being on for a change, being the domain expert, it was fascinating for me to be on the other side because usually I’m the hymn advocate, even though I’m not a data scientist, as a designer and a consultant, we deal with this all the time. It’s like, we got to get the right bodies in the room that know the right questions to ask. I can smell when the right questions aren’t being asked and it’s so powerful so I totally agree with you on the need to provide that bigger context sometimes so you don’t just- John: Jazz is just a mistake played more than once, right? Brian: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of them, there’s no wrong notes, just bad choices. John: It’s very easy for them to create the model for that. You’re just making a mistake and play it more than once. Brian: Exactly. John: Then you go back to the top. Brian: Exactly. Well, even that, like play the head again. Well, what’s a head? Oh, okay. Well, it’s just one form of the tune and they cycle through it and play chorus. Well, what’s a chorus? Okay, shit. But even having that, you can imagine that on the business client, this was like a fun side project he was working on. But you can imagine that in a business context where you don’t even know what you don’t know yet about it yet. I hear this as happening, they’re still in the, especially, in the non-tech company space, the more traditional companies that are, “Oh, we have 100 years of data and let’s go, we need to go buy some data scientists and throw them at this pile of data and then magic will come out the other end.” John: Oh, I think that that happens in tech companies, too, though. I think that that’s the number of data scientist friends who’ve been hired in is like some large effort. Then, one, they’re like, “Yeah, and data engineering was the actual problem.” Okay, we spent our first year there just going around in circles on solving that problem, and then, yeah, the number of friends I have who’ve been frustrated by that dynamic, even in tech companies, I think it’s a pretty common, more common everywhere than we would think. Brian: Tell me a little bit about, so we’ve been talking about the analytical part of all this, the quantifiable parts largely but you have a UX research background as well. We talk, on this show, we talk about empathy, we talk about the needs to go talk to people to ask good questions, to ladder up, get into all that. How does that fit in? When you’re working on an analytics tool, can you fill us in on your approach to qualitative research and more the soft, mushy stuff that UX people deal with? John: Yeah, and it’s interesting. For context, I’m not a UX researcher at Amplitude but I’ve done that in prior environments that required the chops. But in talking to teams and doing it, I think so many of the basics apply in the sense that you’re really… Not to overuse the jobs-to-be-done stuff, you’re really, really trying to understand what decision this person is hoping to make. You’re really trying and then what impact that decision has on the rest of the organization and who is involved in it. I think anyone who’s done this knows that even as a UX researcher, if I do like a co-design activity with customers related to anything analytics oriented, it’s just, “Oh, we’re going to do an Excel mock up or you know.” Anytime you get customers involved with that, it’s so easy. If either side, and I’ve been on both sides of this, it’s so easy to forget what you were trying to do. I think that has a lot to do with the exploratory aspect of data in general that we have a gut instinct that if we just saw this stuff organized like this, then it would somehow be valuable for something we have to do. I think that for, and I don’t know if it answers the question, but I think it requires the same chops but also understanding that people just have a hard time, users have a hard time talking about what they are looking at and what they’re hoping to get out of the data when they’re looking at it over and over and over. I think that really, it really you have to use all the tools in the tool shed. To give you an example, there was… I don’t know if you’ve done these things too, I’ll do these exercises where it’s like, “Okay, we’re revamping the app, it’s just going to be this mobile browser with three numbers on it.” That’s it, that we’re not going to have all these fancy charts, we’re not going to have all this stuff. And three numbers and then one piece of narrative advice, like “Consider this or do this.” I love activities like that from a UX researcher standpoint when I’m working with people because it really, really forces them to just get out of their own head to think about it. That’s like a common trick and you probably have a lot more. But, yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question but it’s a lot of the same tools. But I think also you have to really… It’s a job environment, they’re making decisions, they’re hiring these analytics to do a job. But then with this added layer that I think that people are just incredibly, they find it incredibly difficult to talk about the numbers that they’re looking for. Brian: When you say it’s difficult for them to talk about it, are you talking about their digestion of what’s on the screen or their expression of what’s important to them to actually find out? What do I actually want to learn about? Is it… John: Both really, and that’s the thing that I think just makes it doubly as hard. It means that if you show them something, and I think that we can all relate to it too, like any of us who have been shown some mock or some prototype of information on the screen, you can see your gears turning. You’re having to process it and where did this come from? Can I trust it? What is it? We see that all the time just in Amplitude, it’s people… Our understanding of how people experience some of these querying screens that we have, when you actually ask them to just talk through what they’re thinking about as they move through it, it’s just it’s so complex. Data trust, where is this stuff coming from, data over time, their challenges with certain visualization techniques, even if it’s “the right technique” like, “Well, I just need a radar chart.” Just like no you don’t really. But that’s how they’ve been anchored or whatever. It’s just complex. I don’t have a fancy answer, it’s just complex. Brian: What you just told me reminds me of you had mentioned you do this exercise, and I’m wondering if it’s the same exercise that I’ve done as well with analytics tools, especially, in the context of monitoring applications. There’s some system that’s monitoring stuff and it’s supposed to advise you on what should I do next or what happens with something like this? It’s like “instead of thinking about what are all the right stats to do”, it’s “write in plain English like a prose format what would be the value that we could possibly show”, and maybe we can’t even technically do it today. But it’s “express the analytics and words like you should change this knob to seven instead of nine because we found out X, Y, and Z happened. We also think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is how we know that, and there’s your recommendation.” It’s highly prescriptive but it’s an exercise in thinking about the customer’s experience. How close to that can we get to it, where I don’t have to infer from charts or whatever the date of this format is, how close could we get to something that prescriptive and then try to work backwards from that. We probably can’t get right to that full prose. Is it something like that where you jump to this conclusion, like value conclusion or something like that? John: Yeah, and I do a couple of these like that, one is if I have an Alexa or if I have a tube of crackers or whatever I’m like, “This is the interface now.” You can ask Alexa, that’s your interface. This is a beautiful future world where you just have your smart person, your smart assistant to do these things. Yeah, similar type of, I think, what it does is it creates just enough dissonance to snap people out of just immediately trying to unravel the visualization, which can be I think all of us do that. I think that that’s our instinct whenever we look at something like that. Brian: The default next question is how should we visualize this data that we’ve captured? That’s the itch that we may not be the one to scratch? John: Yeah, but I think that’s also what we can test with, that point, when we’ve got that need to fill, that’s when we can try multiple approaches, I think to see that. That’s my experience, there is that point at which you need to you go back to the drawing board. Although, I would say that depending on the subject, the user in that case or the person you’re working with, some people are really, really good at just the co-design aspect. I don’t know your experience with that, but it seems to have a lot to do with what the people do each day and how they think about visualization and stuff. But I’ve done co-design sessions with people who the next step was, “Well, let’s start thinking about, let’s start drawing, let’s start doing some other things to do it.” I think that depends a lot on the background of the people that you’re working with. Brian: If you were starting over today with Amplitude, is there either a… Not necessarily a feature you would change but is there something that you would approach differently? If someone says, “Hey, we have this JavaScript widget, you paste it in your, all your app or whatever, and we can track almost anything, any activity, whatever. What should we show?” Is there something you would change about maybe how you guys went, the process you went about arriving at the current product that you have? John: That’s interesting. I wish Spencer and Jeffrey were here to answer because they’re the founders of the company. But I think that it’s funny how products have their history about them, so Amplitude, for example, it was a Y Combinator. The founders didn’t go to Y Combinator, they had this fancy voice app or something that they were working on, and this was actually just their effort. They were like, “Well, we kind of had this app,” and they surveyed what was available and then just said, “We really need, there’s a thing, it’s a little different. It’s like an event based measurement thing. We really want to instrument this app and know whether people are using it or not.” That was the founding story, it wasn’t their key thing. A lot of the early customers were folks from Zynga or Facebook or other places that had moved on to other startups and then they wanted something that helped with the 90% of product questions that they had around retention and engagement and complex behavior patterns. Does this behavior predict this or is there a relationship between these things? That’s the founding story, these discerning teams that had a fair amount of autonomy and were tasked with working in these environments and that they wanted a product that they could do that with. When I’m thinking about what I would change as the newcomer to the company, now maybe five years on, was it, yeah, or six years or seven years on, I think it’s what they’re starting to do now, which is interesting. This notebooks feature to me is just so, so, so good and it gets away from a traditional dashboard. But with a notebook, it’s very similar to a data science notebook, you can weave this story and this narrative and you can make the charts live and you can communicate it and you can do those things. As a product manager, that is pure gold to me, and it’s just we’ve started to do those things. I think that the answer would be more of what they’re really digging into now, which is around this learning user concept and how do you create stories with the data to motivate your team and keep everyone aligned and things. I think if it hadn’t existed and I joined a year ago, I would have been like, “Oh, you’re missing this little element like the actual part that integrates it into day to day product development.” But they’ve just started doing that now, so they stole my answer. Brian: Nice, and just for people that don’t know, tell me if I got this right, but the notebooks for people that aren’t data scientist, it’s effectively a collection of both quant data like maybe charts or tables, stats, data collection that you guys have put into some visualized widgets or whatever it may be insights plus qualitative stuff like my commentary on it. Like “Why do we care about this? Well, design is currently tracking these metrics because we’re running a study on dah, dah, dah, and we think we can move this up” and that’s a proxy for this other thing. You can provide all this context in that storytelling mentality so that when someone new comes in, they’re like, “Why do I care about time on site or whatever the metric?” John: Exactly, and that’s the huge thing. One thing that we learned, we’re in this business of teams getting going and it’s like it’s so easy to get to the point where you’ve instrumented your products and any new person joining your company can’t make heads or tails of anything. It’s like you’ve got all these events, are these duplicate events? We’ve invested a lot of time in this taxonomy feature, which helps manage your taxo- It’s way, way, when people try to build this stuff in-house, they just forget about all that stuff. Like, “Oh, it’s just events, it’s semi-structured information, we’re going to put it here and then we’re just going to run queries on it.” But all that’s really, really important, so back to the notebooks thing, one of the biggest use cases we’ve seen in notebooks is people using them to onboard people and orient them with all the available analytics that and metrics and things that are being recorded. That’s actually a really good testament to show that need. Brian: They use it to actually show how they use Amplitude at the- John: Right, it’s pretty meta. Brian: Wow, that’s awesome. John: Yeah, we see them do that or even some of them use it for training like, “Okay, let’s start with this idea that we’ve got this whole universe of users. Well, how would we segment those? Well, here are the key ways that we segment.” Okay, that we’ve gone down one layer, and so I think that that’s kind of cool. But, yeah, for people who don’t know about these data science notebooks, it is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, you can embed charts that are live or you could embed point-in-time charts, you can make comments, and you can do various things. I think for a lot of people who don’t do this for a living, they get intimidated and it’s not, a lot of the stuff is not rocket science, but it’s just annoying to have to go to someone in your company and say, “Hey, can you spend like three or four hours just explaining our information to us.” That’s really hard to do, so these notebooks help with that particular thing. I think that type of stuff is really the future of moving away from just very, very stayed dashboards and things like that. Brian: Right. I don’t know if there’s much in terms of predictive or prescriptive intelligence in the tool, does the tool provide that as well or is it mostly rear view mirror analytics? John: It’s interesting you say that, so we have this new feature called Impact Analysis, and so in Impact Analysis you are able to go from day zero of a particular use of a particular feature and then see the impact that it has on another set of things. We give some statistics and we give some other values in there. So we’re middle of the road moving to more and more complex questions. But one thing that our team realizes that anything… To prevent people from making bad decisions or making poor statements, you need to be so, so, so careful about presenting what you’re actually showing if there’s a correlation between something or even implying that there’s causation without doing the background on it. We’re not completely rear view and we’re in this middle ground, but we’re also going to go on record and say we’re predicting what this value’s going to be in six months. Brian: Right, and the reason, and not just the hype of machine learning, blah, blah, blah, that’s not my main reason for asking was going to lead into my next question, which was do you struggle at all with the expression in the tool of the evidence that backs up any types of conclusions that you’re showing? Do your customers care? Well, how did you guys arrive at this? John: They absolutely care, and so like one of the… We spent a lot of time in the ability, in Amplitude, any data point that you see, usually, if you hover over it, there’s a message it says, “Click to inspect,” or you can create a cohort off of that or you can see the paths to that particular thing. What we really made this effort to do is exactly right, is that people… Working at two analytics companies now, Pendo and now Amplitude, data trust and people being able to unravel what that number means in a way that makes sense to them seems like one of the massive limiters. It’s just that thing that it’s best laid plans start, that’s the entropy that exists with these tools as people use them more and more. There’s just it gets messier, a bunch of hands, a bunch of people are playing around. At least with Amplitude, they try to make a really big effort to like if you want to understand why that number is there and what is behind it, we try to make that really easy. John: But we could always do better because in my mind this is the number one difference between the more data snacking approach like “it kind of looks interesting, that number,” something that you can really pin your business on, which I think is what people… That’s the dream of all this, but then once people start to ask good questions really, it really challenges the tool. Brian: John, this has been fantastic chatting with you, I really appreciate you sharing this with our listeners. Do you have any parting wisdom or anything you’d like to share with people that are maybe working more on the tech side or the data side of the thing and the vents and they’re trying to, “I want to produce more use, whether it’s reports or actually software applications. But we’re trying to provide better stuff, more engaging, more useful…” Any closing advice you might give to someone like that? John: I’m going back to what we were talking about from the UX research angle is that I think that in this area, there’s so much temptation to any one of us who’ve done this is that there’s this constant push and pull between customizability and then this promise of preemptive insights like smart system, it’s intelligent, it’s doing these things. Then so how prescriptive are you? Is what you’re presenting and actually helping someone to do their job. I think that it’s probably reflective of my learning at Amplitude is that really going to human centered design, like really thinking about if the person is able to effectively do their job and really able to answer the questions that they’re answering. I think that what happens is all of us want that, but then we hit this wall and we start to get really some conflating information from users and we start to… Then we’re like, “Well, okay, we’re just going to let them find what they want to find. I think that, that exploratory type of research should be something that’s possible in these tools. In fact, I think that leads to asking some of the best questions when users can do that. But I would really hope that people don’t abandon the idea of being really patient and seeing if before they just throw their hands up in the air and will say, “Well, we’ll just make a query builder and that’s it, that’s it.” Like really seeing if that thing can solve the problem. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s something that’s really been on my mind a lot lately. Brian: Yeah, I talk about sometimes like with clients and people in this space about knowing whether or not you’re producing an explanatory product or an exploratory product. It doesn’t mean you can’t necessarily have some of both but there’s a big difference between the value, like in your case, I’m guessing a lot of these people really want some explanations when they tell us about what we can do to make our software better. They’re not there for fun, but they might run across some things they didn’t know were possible which begins the questioning. But if you put all the effort on them, you’re just shifting the tool effort over to the customer. You’re making it much harder for them to get the value out at which point they may abandon or quit. It’s not just knowing are we explanatory or exploratory or at least there’s this feature or there’s this outcome that this goal that we’re working on, the sprint. But just being aware of that I think is part of the challenge. Like should they be able to walk away with… I should be in the six to 19 apple’s range, whatever that means, like, should I be able to walk away with that level of clarity or not? I don’t know. John: I think that it’s also something like, that’s interesting you said that, because a lot of features that we’re experimenting with, one thing that Amplitude does is anytime you… We built an undo feature, so we try to make it really easy to go really deep and then just back out really gracefully. It’s like infinite, every version of the chart as you work on one is saved. You can back out of it. There’s a lot of features like Save As or you’re built like you could go to someone else’s chart, and if you have some idea of where you want to take it, you could edit it. But you’re not editing their chart, you’re editing a copy and you can think about it. But back to that point is I think that there’s many things that you can do to encourage, that you can juggle those needs concurrently for having definitive things and then also encouraging exploration. We’ve found that with our product as we experiment more. One, I just told you about it, like the ability to telescope into a metric and then do more exploration around it. That didn’t exist before and then we were like, “Oh, well, how about when you hover over any data point and you allow them to inspect that or explore that?” I would say that there are ways to accommodate both at least from our perspective and what we’ve learned. Brian: Right, and I think there’s always some of both of that, and I don’t think most people are going to take everything on its face value. But I hear what you’re saying. One of the things I’ve been recently working on is a UX framework for this called the CED framework, just conclusion, evidence, and data. It’s not necessarily a literal expression of “Where should the screens go? What goes on every screen?” But the concept that when possible, if the tool can provide conclusions with the second tier of being the evidence by which the tool or application arrived at this conclusion. Level three might be really getting into the raw data like, “What are the queries? What was the sequel that actually ran?” Or whatever the heck it may be, there’s times when maybe that data is necessary early on a customer journey. It may just be, “We need to build trust around this stuff.” We can’t be totally black box, but we don’t actually expect people to spend a lot of time at the D-level. We really want them to work in the C level, but it’ll take time and evidence is required sometimes if you’re going… Especially, I got to go to the boss, I can’t just tell him it’s 18, we should be at 18, not 12. It’s like, “Well, how did you arrive at that?” John: We find a lot is the instrumentation rigor is like that’s one of our big problems to solve really is there are these products on the market that do just try to record everything for it. There’s a lot of entropy there and there’s a lot of issues. They’re very fragile, in some ways, so we as a company definitely believe in explicitly instrumenting these events. But at the same time, you’d be amazed how many product teams… There’s this thing called a user story, you write a user story that’s from the user’s perspective, what are you trying to do? Now you would think that like, “Okay, well, we’ll tack on to the acceptance criteria for any story that you’ll use a noun and a verb, and you’ll get these properties and you’ll get these things. Integrating instrumentation on the product level, not necessarily like, “Okay, we’re instrumenting how our servers are working or anything,” but just, “What did the user do?” That’s still relatively new. People who’ve worked in environments that just do that as second nature that, okay, they’re in another thing, but we find that companies even need to change that approach. You’ve mentioned your CED thing like what’s interesting is that extends to the UX of instrumenting. It’s pretty interesting from that, it’s you’re the user trying to draw some conclusion, you’re doing these things. But it’s almost like service design, in some sense, because you need to design the approach to even instrumenting this stuff. It makes your head hurt sometimes. Brian: Yeah, all this stuff makes my head hurt. But that’s why we have conversations, hopefully, we’re knowledge sharing and it’s like giant aspirin conversations or something, I don’t know. But I found this super useful, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people follow you? I know I found you on Twitter. I forget how but what’s your [crosstalk 00:47:23]- John: Twitter is good, I’ve installed a Stay Focused app to prevent more than 20 minutes a day on Twitter. But you will find me eventually there. I write a fair amount on Medium and it’s pretty easy to find me there. Brian: Okay. John: If you just type in “John Cutler product”, I have about 400+ posts on Medium. Some are better than others but- Brian: Awesome. John: … yeah, that’s the best way for right now. Brian: Awesome. Well, I will definitely link both of those, your Medium page and your Twitter up in the show links. Man, John, it has been really fun to chat with you here. Thanks for coming on the show. John: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Brian: Yeah, super. All right, well, cheers. John: Cheers, bye-bye.

My guest today is Gadi Oren, the VP of Product for LogicMonitor. Gadi is responsible for the company’s strategic vision and product initiatives. Previously, Gadi was the CEO and Co-Founder of ITculate, where he was responsible for developing world-class technology and product that created contextual monitoring by discovering and leveraging application topology. Gadi previously served as the CTO and Co-founder of Cloudscope and he has a management degree from Sloan MIT. Today we are going to talk with Gadi about analytics in the context of monitoring applications. This was a fun chat as Gadi and I have both worked on several applications in this space, and it was great to hear how Gadi is habitually integrating customers into his product development process. You’re also going to hear Gadi’s interesting way of framing declarative analytics as casting “opinions,” which I thought was really interesting from a UX standpoint. We also discussed: How to define what is “normal” for an environment being monitored and when to be concerned about variations. Gadi’s KPI for his team regarding customer interaction and why it is important. What kind of data is needed for effective prototypes How to approach design/prototyping for new vs. existing products Mistakes that product owners make falling in love with early prototypes Interpreting common customer signals that may identify a latent problem needing to be solved in the application Resources and Links: LogicMonitor Twitter: @gadioren LinkedIn: Gadi Oren Quotes from Today’s Episode “The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary aspect.” – Gadi Oren “…ultimately, [not talking to customers] is going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer.” – Gadi Oren “Providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work.” — Brian O’Neill “What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of [software analytics] casting an opinion.” — Brian O’Neill “LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business.” — Gadi Oren Episode Transcript Brian: Alright, welcome back to Experiencing Data. I’m excited to have Gadi Oren on the line from LogicMonitor. How is it going Gadi? Gadi: It’s going great. Thank you for having me. Brian: Yeah. I’m happy to have you on the show to talk about not just monitoring, but you’ve done a lot of work on SaaS, analytics products in the monitoring space, software for IT departments in particular. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re doing at LogicMonitor these days? Gadi: Too many years in different industries, I actually spent multiple industries starting from medical imaging. Let’s say in the recent 18 years mostly, some sort of monitoring solutions. I dabbled also a little bit with marketing data analytics. That was not a successful company but I might draw some examples from there. Right now, I’ve recently joined LogicMonitor for an acquisition. I was the founder and CEO of a company called ITculate here in Boston. That company was acquired in April by LogicMonitor and I’m now the VP of Product Management. What LogicMonitor is doing is solving a fairly old problem that still remains, which is monitoring is really difficult. Many companies, as they go, they reach the point where they realize how important it is for them to monitor what’s going on in order to be successful. Then they realize that it’s such a complex domain that they need to develop expertise. It’s just all around difficult. LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need, so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business. Brian: Obviously that’s a hard problem to solve and I’m curious for people that are listening to the show. I imagine a lot what this product is doing is looking for exceptions, looking for things that are out of bounds from what some assemblance of normal is, and then providing that insight back to the customer. Is that a fair evaluation? Gadi: It’s a fair evaluation. There is obviously the question of what is normal, but in general, providing that there’s many ways to define what normal is, then the answer is yes. It’s the ability to give you visibility into what’s going on, first of all, to just see that things work in general and work okay, and then when something goes out of what you define normal, to notify you on that and help you with getting things better. Brian: From your experience in this space, since in a lot of companies that are doing analytics, it may be difficult to define the boundaries of what normal is, such that you could do something like, “Oh, we’ve detected an abnormal trend in sales.” I can’t think of something off the top of my head but I like the idea that the focus of the product is on declaring a conclusion or driving an insight that’s probably derived from analytics that are happening in the background. I would put that in the camp of declarative analytics as opposed to exploratory where it’s like, “Here’s all these data. Now you go and find out some interesting signal in it.” Most customers and users don’t want the latter, they want the tool to go do that job. Do you have any suggestions for how companies that maybe aren’t quite in a domain where it’s black and white, like a binary thing, like this core is either connected or not—if it’s not connected, that’s bad and if it is, it’s good—is there a way, a kind of approach putting guard rails on things or what normalcy is? Do you follow what I’m saying? How do you move into that declarative space? Gadi: The answer is obviously, it depends. The problem is so difficult that you are even having a hard time defining the question. It is very, very difficult. By the way, you called it declarative, I like that. I actually call it in a different way that usually creates a lively discussion. I call it opinionated. Opinionated system. The reason is there’s some evolution, especially with regards to monitoring. But I think it’s the same for other type of systems that are analytic-based. Ten, fifteen years ago, it was so difficult to just gather all the data, that being non-opinionated or nondeclarative for your definition, was pretty good, because people just needed the data and they bought the context themselves. But there’s been a lot of changes since that time. First is the availability of computing. But the other is also the need is much greater now for giving the opinion, giving the bottom line. The system needs to be opinionated and then it can be a variety of things. It’s really multiple types of algorithms that can be used here. A small set of that is what people define today as machine learning and AI. But actually the domain is much larger than just AI. It’s the ability to look at multiple signals and develop in a certain degree of confidence, a conclusion that is derived from those multiple signals. To put it in the most generic way that I can, some of them can be discreet or binary, and some of them can be continuous. How do you look at all that stuff and say, “I think that this is what’s going on”? And even more than that, here is what we think is going on, here’s what you can do about it, or here are a few options for you to act on it. That is the ideal solution that we would like to have. Obviously, we have very, very little of that right now. I think it’s a journey that will take us years to get. Brian: I love that idea of opinionated because I think it softens the expectation around the technology and it also reminds people that it’s never different than when your plumber comes to house and you’re like, “Well, the shower hot water isn’t quite as hot as the sink water.” Maybe he tighten some things, he turns on some faucets, and he gives you an opinion about what might be wrong without actually tearing apart the whole system. We would tend to trust that. He might say, “Well, what I really need to do is X.” Then you make a decision whether you want to pay for that or not. But it’s not like, “If you can’t give me a 100% decision, then I’m unsatisfied.” We accept that opinion. What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of casting an opinion. On that thought then, especially for example, you’re putting a data model in place or something like this is which is going to learn from the information, there may be insights gleaned from some type of computer-based analysis which may be unseen or unexpected by the business. That could be positive or negative. But there also might be some context of what normal or expected is from the end-users. For example, I expect the range to be between 32 and 41 most of the time. I know sometimes it goes up and I have this feeling about X, Y and Z. They have something in their head, you go and do all these technology and it says, “Well, the normal range should be 14 and so we flag the 16 here,” and he’s like, “I don’t care about that. It’s not high enough for me to care.” How do you balance that sense that maybe an end-user has, like, “I track sales,” or, “I’m doing forecasting,” and they have all these experience in their head? Gadi: A couple of things. It depends a little bit about the domain. In some situations where the end result is what’s really important, you can use black box-y type of things like newer networks or things like that, not always but most cases, they tend to be more like black box. It’s like, “Here’s the result. I can tell you why that happen. It’s based on all these training I did before.” In some situations, the result cannot be a black box. It needs to be explained. In those situations, you really need to give people an explanation on why things happen like they are. Monitoring, in many cases, tends to be the latter which is, I want to see the signal and the signal core strength on what was the shape and I want to see how it looked yesterday. If it looks the same, maybe it’s okay. In certain situations, maybe if you have a database and it has a latency of half millisecond which is very small, and then this morning it moved to one millisecond, is that normal? It’s not normal but I don’t care about it because before it gets to five milliseconds, I don’t need to know about it. In those situations, I don’t know if that’s what you refer to by cobwebs or things like that. While the system is learning and can automatically detect what’s abnormal, there is a range to what I care about. I’m going to put a threshold and say, “Only if you cause five millisecond and this is not normal behavior, then I want to see an alert.” Normal could be defined like the signal is two sigmas away from the same day last week. Something like that. There is a different level of approaches, both in terms of how consistent the data processing is and in what type of knobs you should provide to the user in order for the user to develop the right confidence level to use that solution. Brian: I would agree with that. I think there’s a balance there. Actually when we talk about our screening call, you made a comment. It was a good quote. It was something like, “The cutting edge UI is English,” if I recall. Gadi: Or any other language, yes. Brian: Exactly, whatever your interface is. But I would agree with that sentiment that I think the customers and from user experience standpoint, deriving that conclusion first or opinion as you said, then backing out from there, and providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work. What I found over time was, some of these systems, with just watching customers, is they’re very curious about the beginning and if you can build that trust, they start to understand how to trust your opinions. They tend to not hold you responsible as much if an opinion is wrong because they know what went into the math and to the analytics and also what didn’t go into it, steps that they can fill the holes in themselves. Of course, this means you have to know your customer, you need to have some kind of interaction with them. Can you tell me about some of your customer interactions? You’d mention one of your KPIs for your team. Tell us about one of your KPIs for your team. Gadi: Over the years, obviously, you develop professionally and you change the way you approach to do what you do. I’ve been doing different ways of product management. I was a CTO at some point. But my basic attitude is doing product management and building the product from that understanding of what it is we want to build. What I’ve realized over the years is that there is a couple of really important points. One is the more you talk to customers, the more you understand the problem you’re trying to work on. A couple of years into working on a certain problem, you get to a point where you’re so familiar with it that you can pretty much, without talking to customers, generate a lot of really good product for some time. The problem is that this might diverge at some point or you’re going to miss something important. I think that talking to customers all the time is what grounds you to what’s going on. I’ve made my team of about 10 people. We are monitoring how many times they have interaction with customers. I’m going to chart it monthly. I started recently as one of the KPIs and I’m going to just check if certain part of the team is talking less to customers, then why is that okay or not. And then if you have a spike, some of these stopped talking to customers, then we’re going to have a discussion on why that happened because I think ultimately, it’s going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer. Brian: Is it safe to say your team is comprised of primarily other product managers on certain portions of the product and then see up some design user experience reporting to you? Gadi: Yes. I have, let’s say, about 10 people. We’re hiring now all the time. The company’s growing very quickly. Let’s say around 10 people. Most of them are product managers and some are design people. We also have a variety of previous experience in the team, which is really something I liked. Some of them are from the industry and they have built-in knowledge. Some were in engineering before, which I think has also an interesting experience. One or two came from being sales engineers or sales, which has a different aspect of benefit to it. I don’t think I have someone that was a customer before, and if you can have that, that’s really advantageous. I might be able to do that at some point. Brian: I think that’s great. Do you involve your engineers or your technical people, data scientists, whatever with any of these interviews that you do and your customer outreach? Gadi: As much a possible, we will look at the multiple sides and a lot of engineers I work with right now are located in China. In terms of language, we might have sometimes barriers, but absolutely when possible, I know that when I transitioned from engineering to product management, the exposure to customers was very educational for me. Whenever I am able to expose people to customers, I take that opportunity. Brian: You have an interesting position. Maybe this is super common, I don’t know, but you’ve started out in a technical capacity, you have an engineering background, you were CTO, and now you’re in product. I’m curious. As someone that’s looking at holistic product both a business and also some kind of experience you need to do, you need to facilitate in order to have a relevant business. Are there biases that you need to keep in check from your technical background where the engineer in you says, “I want to do X,” and you’re like, “No, no, no”? What are some of those things to watch out for to make sure that you’re focused on that customer experience and not how it’s implemented? Gadi: The question of biases is a wide one. It’s not just about engineering. It’s bias in general. At some point, you obviously get excited about what you’re building and you see all the possibilities. “We can do something a little here, we could solve that problem or this problem,” and then you start developing a preference. It’s very natural. When you realize that this is the case, sometimes you try to just not have a bias, but you can’t. Everybody has one. The problem is, how do you make sure that this bias does not impact when you talk to a customer? It’s very easy to have a customer tell you what you want to hear. Probably the easiest person to deceive is you if you don’t pay attention. This is one of those things. With regards to engineering bias, it’s not very different than any other type of bias. Engineers and makers just really care about working on interesting things and new technologies. Sometimes, there’s a problem and I think the more advanced engineers start to think about, “How would I generalize that problem?” It might be a runaway process where they want to build more than required and that more may or may not be pointing at the right direction. That’s another type of bias. Again, definitely something to watch for. Brian: I want to move on to some other topics only because I can totally spend an hour talking about how important it is to do customer research. I love that you’re doing that and I think the theme here is you’ve actually turned that into a KPI for your particular reports and the product management division at your company, which says that it’s important to develop that habit. I would totally champion that. Gadi: It’s not that I would like it to be. I can tell you I would love it to be. Since you’re opening this, I’ll tell you what could be ideal. But it’s a lot to ask for so I’m not implementing that right now. I do check that people interact with customers and they have written down notes. Written down notes should not only be two lines. It should be telling something. Ideally, somebody can transcribe what the meeting was, but that’s almost impossible. I try but it’s very difficult. What I would have loved to do that we don’t do right now because it’s a lot to ask for, I’d love to have people repeat in their heads and in the notes the meeting and try and extract problem statements. In the past I’ve implemented that in some situations and it was successful. But you have to do it in a continuous fashion over a long time and then you see those problem statements. How many references do you have to every problem statement? It’s really giving you a good visibility into what’s going on. Now, asking that is difficult but clear notes is a good start. Brian: Just to tack onto that, it can be very hard to listen attentively and to draft notes. When I’m facilitating research sessions with a client, is you’ll have one person facilitating and one person taking notes, and then you debrief at the end. Sometimes, it does mean it’s a two-on-one instead of a one-on-one. It doesn’t need to be perfect. You can get better at this over time. That’s one way to get a little bit of a higher quality data. You can also just use something like an audio recorder on your phone instead of handwriting the notes. When that meeting’s over, you grab a phone booth or type room and just talk into a phone. Then you can just have the audio converted to text very simply and quickly with a machine. That way, you’ve got a nice dump of what the conclusions were from the sessions. Traditionally in the usability field and the human factors field, they came out of science background, so they would write these very long reports. Typically, what happens is, guess what, nobody reads the reports. So, you have to watch out for that. We’re doing all the stuff but we’re not taking any action on the information there. I like to highlight real concept, however you go about doing that, but that’s great. Can you talk to me a little bit about engagement with these data products? This is probably a little bit truer in companies that are deploying internal analytics, like non-digital native companies, non-product companies, but they’re having trouble with engagement. Customers aren’t using the services. Do you have any broad ideas on how we can increase engagement from your perspective? How do you make the tools more useful, more usable? What do you have to say about that? Gadi: How do you make the tools more useful? I think it’s a somewhat related question to how do you make your products successful to begin with? I’m going to talk about the new concept other than incremental. If you learn something incremental, I’m assuming you have enough data to place your bets successfully. If you learn a fairly new concept, what I would usually recommend is don’t code it. Try new simulations, Exceling, and modeling, whatever it is that you can to build it without building it. Prototype it and then have a few lead users. Those are users that are excited about this domain and they really care about solving that specific issue enough to work with you effectively. You need two, three, or four of those and you just start working with them. As much as possible, use their data. In the data domain, when we’re doing analytics-related product, part of the user experience in the entire cycle. It’s not just, “Oh, the user interface is the biggest expense.” No. It’s how the data is getting into the system, how is it being acquired, how is it being processed, and how is it being used on the other side when it’s producing meaningful insights. You can test a lot of that cycle without a product or with a very light sort of a product, prototype of the product. I recommend that as much as possible. If you’re going the right way, you will know very quickly and if you’re going the wrong way, also you will know quickly and you can either course-correct or eliminate completely the project and save a lot of time and money. That’s usually something that works really well for a new concept. Now, for incremental, it’s slightly different. Usually, you can use a similar type of approach but you can code something that’s kind of a prototype into your product, show capability, and then usually, you would have a lot more customers that are willing to work with you because it’s a small increment. You can validate early. I guess that’s the bottom line here. Experiment, iterate, validate early. Brian: How is it necessary to code? I don’t mean to use the word code, we’re talking about Excel or whatever it may be. It is necessary to get even into that level of technical implementation in order to do a prototype? I love the idea of working with customer data because that removes some of the classic example I’ve experienced like financial products where I was working on a trading system portfolio management. You’d have a bunch of stock positions in a table and you’re trying to test the design of the table. You have funny prices for, “Why is Apple stock trading at $12? Oh my God, what is going on?” That has nothing to do with the study but you’ve now taken the user out of the— Gadi: You will not get a meaningful […]. Brian: I love that but do you need to necessarily get into modeling and all this kind of stuff if, for example, the goal is to see, would that downstream user take action or not, based on what they’re seeing in the tool if you’re using a paper prototype or something like that? What would you do if it says it’s predicted to between 41 and 44, what would you do next? And you happen to know that that’s a sensitive range. Do you even need to have actual Excel or math happening behind the scenes? Gadi: I can see where this question is coming from. Nine-tenths is just putting a […] and mock-up might really give people a good feeling about where you’re going with this. But I do think that in many cases, not working with real data and even customer data—customer data is not a must—is not going to give you the right answer. I’ll explain when this can happen. There is the case that you mentioned, which I wasn’t even about to mention it, but it’s too late, is the data that you see doesn’t make sense, you’re emotionally detached. You’re not getting good responses from this person. Now, assuming the data is good and if it’s yours, you’ll even connect it much better to what you see. But certain type of problems, you cannot understand, you cannot get a meaningful answer if the data is not real. I’ll give an example. Right now, we’re facing a very specific situation where LogicMonitor is actually now in the process of redoing the UI and fixing usability. I’m told that this is the fourth time we’re doing it and there is a very specific problem of how to do search. We’ve been going back and forth on how does the search results should really show up because the search results are coming back in multiple levels. There’s data with dependency. Results are coming from multiple levels of dependency and need to show up on the same screen in a way that the user can use it. We’ve got to the conclusion that the problem is hard enough to answer and we need to prototype maybe one, or even two or three types of result presentation and just show it to customers. Obviously, we want to code as minimum as possible to do that, that this is something we’re going to do. We usually do it with just wireframes but in that specific situation, we are not only needing real data but we’re actually coding something very minimal, three times, to get the right answer. Brian: I think the theme here is, whether it’s code or whatever material you’re using, there’s a theme of prototyping. I would add that in the spirit of a minimum viable product or what I would call a minimum valuable product—I like that better—is figuring out what is the minimum amount of design, which could include some technical implementation like a prototype, what’s the minimum amount that you need to put out in front of a customer to learn something? To figure it out if it’s on the right track? That’s really what it’s about. In your case, maybe it does take actually building a light prototype, maybe you don’t actually query 30 data sources, and you just have one database with a bunch of seed data in it. You control the test, but at least it simulates the experience of pulling data from many places or something like that, then you can tweak the UI as you evaluate. Gadi: I think it’s a bit of going specific. I think that, again, in many cases you can do wireframes and you’d be fine. But remember, if you’re trying to test a complete flow, you’re testing a flow which may include 10–15 steps of the user for the user interface, and if you can do that with just wireframes where every step that they did produces result to makes sense, and you don’t have to model it at the background, then that’s fine. It’s probably better. But when we are talking about 10–15 steps, sometimes, the amount of effort that goes into the wireframe is big enough to consider a very light background Excel implementation. When it becomes comparable, if doing wireframe is 80% of doing a very light implementation where the background is Excel, or even 70%, then I’ll say, “Hey, let’s do a little bit more of an effort,” and then our ability to test opens up to a lot of other possibilities that are not rigid within that wireframe. So, something to think about. Brian: I would agree if you can get a higher fidelity prototype like that, with the same amount of effort. Absolutely, you’re going to uncover probably exceptions. You’re going to uncover information and an evaluation with a customer that you didn’t probably asked about. There’s so much stuff going on and there’s so much more information to be gleaned from that. The main thing is not falling in love with it too early and not overinvesting in it, such that you’re not willing to really make any change to it going forward. I find that’s the challenge with especially with data products. I’m sure you’ve experienced, there’s a tremendous amount of investment, sometimes, just to get to the point where there’s a search box and there’s data coming back. At the point, you can fool yourself and say, “Oh, we’re doing design iterations,” but in reality, no one really wants to go back and change the plumbing at that point because it’s so hard just to get to that first thing. I think the goal is to not build too much and be aware of that bias to not want to go back and rework what maybe a difficult, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” It’s like, “Yes.” But if no one can get from A to B, then the entire value of the product is moot and it sounds like, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” There’s a lot of stuff going on with getting them from A to B in the right way in that particular case. Gadi: I totally agree. I’ve seen a lot of managers do that mistake. I bet that I did that mistake once or twice in my career. “This is awesome. It looks great. Package it and let’s ship it.” That is a big mistake because then people are telling you, “No, no, no. This is just a proof of concept.” Managers sometimes cannot understand the difference, so it’s a communication problem, it’s setting expectations, and you’re right. Sometimes, the way to avoid it is just not getting to the […] at all and I agree if you can. Brian: Traditionally, from my work and the domain that you’re in, the traditional enterprise tools is that quite frankly, they can suck. The tolerances for quality was quite low, and I think that’s been changing. It’s a slow growth that the expectation that these tools can be hard to use, they’re supposed to be really complicated, and they’re for the very technical user, that’s changing. The customer and end-user is more aware of design. I’m curious. Do you find that that expectation is going up? And do you find that new technology is making it easier to provide a better experience? Or is that being negated by the fact that, in your particular domain, you’ve got cloud and on-premise? I can see the challenge is going up. Just as well as some of the tools might get better, the challenge might get harder, too. Is it net out? No change? What are your thoughts? Gadi: No. It’s not the opposite vectors that are actually pointing to the same direction, I think. What you’re saying is, I believe, no longer the case. I don’t know. Maybe in some old banks somewhere in Europe where they’re old-fashioned. I still heard that some banks in Germany are based on paper, no computers. That’s why I made this comment. But in my mind, this is long gone. It’s multiple trends of really pointing to the same direction. First of all, people are educated by Apple that you can in fact have a product that’s pleasant to use. Some young people in their 20s and 30s, most of what they’ve seen is really a lot better that what you and I have seen, being slightly older than that. Expectation is to have good products. They’ve seen that hardware and software and combination of those things can be done well. That’s one. The second is that the technology is evolving, especially in my space, there’s been virtualization, then there’s cloud, then there’s containerization, and so many big waves that are changing everything, that you constantly have to refresh your software and the ability. The users inside the enterprises are now replacing stuff much faster. They’re replacing the infrastructure much faster, and then with that, they replace software and adopted much faster. The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary. It’s one of the things people care about. They don’t care about the user experience specifically. They care about being able to complete their tasks. They don’t care how that happen. If it was easier to achieve what they need and it left them with a good feeling, it’s a better tool. That derives better usability. Everything is pointing to the same direction because you have to refresh as a vendor. You have to create software faster to adjust to the new waves of technology that’s coming in because that’s part of being competitive. While you’re at it, you have to take care of creating really strong usability because then you will have another advantage in the marketplace. I think those trends are only enforcing the same direction. You have to have great usability. By the way, usability is not limited to user interface. It’s everything. User interface is just a part of it. Brian: I didn’t want to bias my question to you, but I would wholeheartedly agree that the tolerance levels for really difficult software or software that doesn’t really provide the value clearly or quickly, the tolerances for that have gone down quite a bit and I think you’re totally spot on that consumer products have created an expectation that it doesn’t need to be that complicated. A lot of times, there’s a service to language like, “Oh, it’s ugly,” or customers will comment sometimes on the paint and the surface interface because they don’t necessarily have the language to explain why. It actually may be a utility problem or just a value problem. I think the importance here is, as you said, usability is important, but it’s not just about that. Ultimately, it’s about whether value is created. So, if you write a decision support tool, like a declarative decision support tool in your case, it’s probably often about minimal time spent using the tool, maximum signal when I do have to use the tool, and the best case scenario is probably never needing to go into the tool to begin with. That’s actually the highest business value. You can focus all day on UI, maybe it’s a one-sentence text message is really the only interface that’s required and you might deliver a ton of value with just that. Gadi: To add on what you have said, I totally agree. I actually see in the marketplace LogicMonitor is winning deals that are based on ultimately better usability. I can give you an example. A lot of customers that we see, companies are growing and they start monitoring using a few open source tools—there are so many of them—and when you’re small, like, “This is awesome. I’m going to use this open source tool and I have the problem solved.” The company grows and at some point, the open source tool, you realize that you spent so much time maintaining it and so much time on making sure that the tool keeps on working when you add another resource to the network, I think the old expression was, ‘Tool Time versus Value Time,’ or something like that. Brian: Tool Time versus Goal Time. Gadi: Goal Time, exactly. This is much bigger than user interface. This is about the whole experience, which means that in those open source tools, you need to have a team of five people that are chasing all the changes that happen in the organization and you’re never there. You never actually up-to-date with what’s going on. From a very high-level perspective, this thing just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because of usability. So, we come in and as I’ve stated what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do something that just works, what’s well and quickly, and you’re able to deploy quickly, automatically discover the changes, and follows what’s going on. People are amazed by that and it’s part of the rationale, depending on the problems that they have. But in many cases, it’s part of what makes them buy our product. At the same time, part of our product had older user interface. I think that the comment that you said before, where you said, “Oh, it’s an ugly UI,” or something, I think there are situations where products that are a bit older might have pieces of user interface that are not as great, but their overall experience is so good that it carries the product forward. I think in organizations that have a choice, they might actually opt for a product that, on a first glance, might look not as great from a UI perspective but overall their experience is good. I’m not saying that this is the situation with LogicMonitor because we actually have pretty good UI as well, but I think that our UI reached a point where it needs to be improved and that’s what we’re doing now. Brian: May I ask a question on that just as we get towards the end here. If you’re able to share, what are the outcomes that you want to get from the new UI? There’s some business or customer impact you’re probably looking for, right? A business justification. Gadi: There is. It’s fairly complicated because it’s also a very expensive process. There are very qualitative things that you start hearing like, “Oh, your user interface looks old,” or people tell you things like, “Your customer X is much easier to do a certain task.” I like that better because it’s a lot more specific and they can explain why and all that. But in many cases, you just get like, “Oh, this other company has a new UI and it’s so much more pretty and cool.” That’s very hard to measure and very hard to act on. We have some of that but more specifically, I think, LogicMonitor’s also moving from the mid markets to more and more enterprise. As that happens, certain things that used to be okay are no longer okay. The amount of data that we’re dealing with on the screen, how we process and present it, when you have a couple of hundreds of items, you can think about a tree or a table. When you have hundreds of thousands, then the entire thinking process is different and you need a complete different method. Doesn’t mean all those changes like trends we’re moving upmarket in terms of size, we expect a lot more data in the user interface. People are telling us that the UI looks a little bit old. We want to refresh also the technology. We can do other things. If you’re doing things that are mostly server-based, then UI tends to be more static. It doesn’t have to be that way but it’s an engineering challenge. But if you’re moving to the more new frameworks like React, Redux or things like that, you can do a lot more dynamic. Every component can take care of itself, its data, its model, and update asynchronously. It opens up the product to do things that are a lot more responsive, like a one-page application, for example. A large part of the light business logic is actually done on the client side rather than on the server side, so it makes a much better user experience. All those multiple causes, multiple trends that lead us to the conclusion that we need to refresh. Brian: Was there a particular business outcome, though? For example, are you having some attrition and you’re looking to stop that? Or do you think this is the way to start facilitating sales, to close more easily with a better UI or anything like that? Or is it mostly qualitative? Gadi: No. Obviously, we try and quantitatively justify stuff, so we look at all the requests from the last two years and how many of them are related to UI and certain things in the UI that are very hard to do today. Yes, we do think that this will encourage sales for certain reasons that we will improve in the UI. I think that over the years, because there are so many people changing things in the product, I think that some of the consistency have dissolved along the way. In most cases, you do things the same way but in other cases, you do it a little bit differently. That is both in concept and the UI. That’s confusing for new users. Old users don’t care. They’ve got used to it but I think there’s some issues of consistency. Back to your question, we do expect that to increase sales. We expect that to increase customer satisfaction. We’re actually improving a lot of the flows that we went through and we realized that simple things are missing in the UI. Those are the gold nuggets that you find on the way. Really simple things that you could add or modify in certain places that would make flows a lot better. And I mean reducing 5–10 clicks in a certain flow. My favorite one is I look at a user, he ends up working on a product, and they have six or seven open tabs. I was like, “Why do you have so many tabs?” and he explains, “It makes total sense.” It shows that you’re missing something in the product. There’s a couple of things that are easy telltales if multiple tabs are open, or you have a sticky note on the side with text, or you have Excel on the side where people copy-paste. All those things are signs to problems with the product. We have a few of those and our product is going to come up the other side much more pleasant for the users and help them achieve things faster. Brian: Great. I wish you good fortune and good luck with that redesign that you guys are going through at LogicMonitor. On that note, where can people find LogicMonitor and where can they find you if they wanted to follow you? Gadi: You can find me on Twitter. The handle is @gadioren. I have a LinkedIn page. You can look me up and find me there. You can get to our website, it’s www.logicmonitor.com and that will get you started in you’re interested with that. Brian: Awesome. Thanks, Gadi. This has been really fun to talk to you and hear about your experience here. Thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Gadi: Thank you very much for having me.

My guest today is Carl Hoffman, the CEO of Basis Technology, and a specialist in text analytics. Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995, and in 1999, the company shipped its first products for website internationalization, enabling Lycos and Google to become the first search engines capable of cataloging the web in both Asian and European languages. In 2003, the company shipped its first Arabic analyzer and began development of a comprehensive text analytics platform. Today, Basis Technology is recognized as the leading provider of components for information retrieval, entity extraction, and entity resolution in many languages. Carl has been directly involved with the company’s activities in support of U.S. national security missions and works closely with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Many of you work all day in the world of analytics: numbers, charts, metrics, data visualization, etc. But, today we’re going to talk about one of the other ingredients in designing good data products: text! As an amateur polyglot myself (I speak decent Portuguese, Spanish, and am attempting to learn Polish), I really enjoyed this discussion with Carl. If you are interested in languages, text analytics, search interfaces, entity resolution, and are curious to learn what any of this has to do with offline events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, you’re going to enjoy my chat with Carl. We covered: How text analytics software is used by Border patrol agencies and its limitations. The role of humans in the loop, even with good text analytics in play What actually happened in the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing? Carl’s article“Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. The 2 lessons Carl has learned regarding working with native tongue source material. Why Carl encourages Unicode Compliance when working with text, why having a global perspective is important, and how Carl actually implements this at his company Carl’s parting words on why hybrid architectures are a core foundation to building better data products involving text analytics Resources and Links: Basis Technology Carl’s article: “Exact Match” isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. Carl Hoffman on LinkedIn Quotes from Today’s Episode “One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know. You know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they do…” — Brian O’Neill “Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you [Brian] point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language…” — Carl Hoffman “What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication…Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics.” — Carl Hoffman “It’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down [the right] people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling [entity resolution] wrong. It’s shocking in a way.” — Brian O’Neill “We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting as close to yes or no as we can.”– Carl Hoffman Episode Transcript Brian: Hey everyone, it’s Brian here and we have a special edition of Experiencing Data today. Today, we are going to be talking to Carl Hoffman who’s the CEO of Basis Technology. Carl is not necessarily a traditional what I would call Data Product Manager or someone working in the field of creating custom decision support tools. He is an expert in text analytics and specifically Basis Technology focuses on entity resolution and resolving entities across different languages. If your product, or service, or your software tool that you’re using is going to be dealing with inputs and outputs or search with multiple languages, I think your going to find my chat with Carl really informative. Without further ado here’s my chat Mr. Carl Hoffman. All right. Welcome back to Experiencing Data. Today, I’m happy to have Carl Hoffman on the line, the CEO of Basis Technology, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. How’s it going, Carl? Carl: Great. Good to talk to you, Brian. Brian: Yeah, me too. I’m excited. This episode’s a little but different. Basis Tech primarily focuses on providing text analytics more as a service as opposed to a data product. There are obviously some user experience ramifications on the downstream side of companies, software, and services that are leveraging some of your technology. Can you tell people a little bit about the technology of Basis and what you guys do? Carl: There are many companies who are in the business of extracting actionable information from large amounts of dirty, unstructured data and we are one of them. But what makes us unique is our ability to extract what we believe is one of the most difficult forms of big data, which is text in many different languages from a wide range of sources. You mentioned text analytics as a service, which is a big part of our business, but we actually provide text analytics in almost every conceivable form. As a service, as an on-prem cloud offering, as a conventional enterprise software, and also as the data fuel to power your in-house text analytics. There’s another half of our business as well which is focused specifically on one of the most important sources of data, which is what we call digital forensics or cyber forensics. That’s the challenge of getting data off of digital media that maybe either still in use or dead. Brian: Talk to me about dead. Can you go unpack that a little bit? Carl: Yes. Dead basically means powered off or disabled. The primary application there is for corporate investigators or for law enforcement who are investigating captured devices or digital media. Brian: Got it. Just to help people understand some of the use cases that someone would be leveraging some of the capabilities of your platforms, especially the stuff around entity resolution, can you talk a little bit about like my understanding, for example, one use case for your software is obviously border crossings, where your information, your name is going to be looked up to make sure that you should be crossing whatever particular border that you’re at. Can you talk to us a little bit about what’s happening there and what’s going on behind the scenes with your software? Like what is that agent doing and what’s happening behind the scenes? What kind of value are you providing to the government at that instance? Carl: Border crossings or the software used by border control authorities is a very important application of our software. From a data representational challenge, it’s actually not that difficult because for the most part, border authorities work with linear databases of known individuals or partially known individuals and queries. Queries may be the form manually typed by an officer or maybe scan of a passport. The complexity comes in when a match must be scored, where a decision must be rendered as to whether a particular query or a particular passport scan matches any of the names present on a watch list. Those watch list can be in many different formats. They can come from many different sources. Our software excels at performing that match at very high accuracy, regardless of the nature of the query and regardless of the source of the underlying watch list. Brian: I assume those watch lists may vary in the level of detail around for example, aliases, spelling, which alphabet they were being printed in. Part of the value of what your services is doing is helping to say, “At the end of the day, entity number seven on the list is one human being who may have many ways of being represented with words on a page or a screen,” so the goal obviously is to make sure that you have the full story of that one individual. Am I correct that you may get that in various formats and different levels of detail? And part of what your system is doing is actually trying to match up that person or give it what you say a non-binary response but a match score or something that’s more of a gray response that says, “This person may also be this person.” Can you compact that a little bit for us? Carl: Your remarks are exactly correct. First, what you said about gray is very important. These decisions are rarely 100% yes or no. We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting us close to yes or no as we can. But the quality of the data in watch lists can vary pretty wildly, based on the prominence and the number of sources. The US border authorities must compile information from many different sources, from UN, from Treasury Department, from National Counterterrorism Center, from various states, and so on. The amount of detail and the degree of our certainty regarding that data can vary from name to name. Brian: We talked about this when we first were chatting about this episode. Am I correct when I think about one of the overall values you’re doing is obviously we’re offloading some of the labor of doing this kind of entity resolution or analysis onto software and then picking up the last mile with human, to say, “Hey, are these recommendations correct? Maybe I’ll go in and do some manual labor.” Is that how you see it, that we do some of the initial grunt work and you present an almost finished story, and then the human comes in and needs to really provide that final decision at the endpoint? Are we doing enough of the help with the software? At what point should we say, “That’s no longer a software job to give you a better score about this person. We think that really requires a human analysis at this point.” Is there a way to evaluate or is that what you think about like, “Hey, we don’t want to go past up that point. We want to stop here because the technology is not good enough or the data coming in will never be accurate enough and we don’t want to go past that point.” I don’t know if that makes sense. Carl: It does makes sense. I can’t speak for all countries but I can say that in the US, the decision to deny an individual entry or certainly the decision to apprehend an individual is always made by a human. We designed our software to assume a human in the loop for the most critical decisions. Our software is designed to maximize the value of the information that is presented to the human so that nothing is overlooked. Really, the two biggest threats to our national security are one, having very valuable information overlooked, which is exactly what happened in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. We had a great deal of information about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, yet that information was overlooked because the search engines failed to surface it in response to queries by a number of officials. And secondly, detaining or apprehending innocent individuals, which hurts our security as much as allowing dangerous individuals to pass. Brian: This has been in the news somewhat but talk about the “glitch” and what happened in that Boston Marathon bombing in terms of maybe some of these tools and what might have happened or not what might have happened, but what you understand was going on there such that there was a gap in this information. Carl: I am always very suspicious when anyone uses the word ‘glitch’ with regard to any type of digital equipment because if that equipment is executing its algorithm as it has been programmed to do, then you will get identical results for identical inputs. In this case, the software that was in use at the time by US Customs and Border Protection was executing a very naive name-matching algorithm, which failed to match two different variant spellings of the name Tsarnaev. If you look at the two variations for any human, it would seem almost obvious that the two variations are related and are in fact connected to the same name that’s natively written in Cyrillic. What really happened was a failure on the part of the architects of that name mentioning system to innovate by employing the latest technology in name-matching, which is what my company provides. In the aftermath of that disaster, our software was integrated into the border control workflow, first with the goal of redacting false-positives, and then later with the secondary goal of identifying false negatives. We’ve been very successful on both of those challenges. Brian: What were the two variants? Are you talking about the fact that one was spelled in Cyrillic and one was spelled in a Latin alphabet? They didn’t bring back data point A and B because they look like separate individuals? What was it, a transliteration? Carl: They were two different transliterations of the name Tsarnaev. In one instance, the final letters in the names are spelled -naev and the second instance it’s spelled -nayev. The presence or absence of that letter y was the only difference between the two. That’s a relatively simple case but there are many similar stories for more complex names. For instance, the 2009 Christmas bomber who successfully boarded a Northwest Delta flight with a bomb in his underwear, again because of a failure to match two different transliterations of his name. But in his case, his name is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. There was much more opportunity for divergent transliterations. Brian: On this kind of topic, you wrote an interesting article called “Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. You’ve talked a little bit about this particular example with the Boston Marathon bombing. You mentioned that they’re thinking globally about building a product out. Can you talk to us a little about what it means to think globally? Carl: Sure. Thinking globally is really a mindset and an architectural philosophy in which systems are built to accommodate multiple languages and cultures. This is an issue not just with the spelling of names but with support for multiple writing systems, different ways of rendering and formatting personal names, different ways of rendering, formatting, and parsing postal addresses, telephone numbers, dates, times, and so on. The format of a questionnaire in Japanese is quite different from the format of a questionnaire in English. If you will get any complex global software product, there’s a great deal of work that must be done to accommodate the needs of a worldwide user base. Brian: Sure and you’re a big fan of Unicode-compliant software, am I correct? Carl: Yes. Building Unicode compliance is equivalent to building a solid stable foundation for an office tower. It only gets you to the ground floor, but without it, the rest of the tower starts to lean like the one that’s happening in San Francisco right now. Brian: I haven’t heard about that. Carl: There’s a whole tower that’s tipping over. You should read it. It’s a great story. Brian: Foundation’s not so solid. Carl: Big lawsuit’s going on right now. Brian: Not the place you want to have a sagging tower either. Carl: Not the place but frankly, it’s really quite comparable because I’ve seen some large systems that will go unnamed, where there’s legacy technology and people are unaware perhaps why it’s so important to move from Python version 2 to Python version 3. One of the key differences is Unicode compliance. So if I hear about a large-scale enterprise system that’s based on Python version 2, I’m immediately suspicious that it’s going to be suitable for a global audience. Brian: I think about, from an experience standpoint, inputs, when you’re providing inputs into forms and understanding what people are typing in. If it’s a query form, obviously giving people back what they wanted and not necessarily what they typed in. We all take for granted things like this spelling correction, and not just the spelling correction, but in Google when you type in something, it sometimes give you something that’s beyond a spelling thing, “Did you mean X, Y, and Z?” I would think that being in the form about what people are typing into your form fields and mining your query logs, this is something I do sometimes with clients when they’re trying to learn something. I actually just read an article today about dell.com and the top query term on dell.com is ‘Google,’ which is a very interesting thing. I would be curious to know why people are typing that in. Is it really like people are actually trying to access Google or are they trying to get some information? But the point is to understand the input side and to try to return some kind of logical output. Whether it’s text analytics that’s providing that or it’s name-matching, it’s being aware of that and it’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down these people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling wrong. It’s shocking in a way. I guess for those who are working in tech, we can understand how it might happen, but it’s scary that that’s still going on today. You’ve probably seen many other. Are you able to talk about it? Obviously, you have some in the intelligence field and probably government where you can’t talk about some of your clients, but are there other examples of learning that’s happened that, even if it’s not necessarily entity resolution where you’ve put dots together with some of your platform? Carl: I’ll say the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from nearly two decades of working on government applications involving multi-lingual data is the importance of retaining as much of the information in its native form as possible. For example, there is a very large division of the CIA which is focused on collecting open source intelligence in the form of newspapers, magazines, the digital equivalent of those, radio broadcast, TV broadcasts and so one. It’s a unit which used to be known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, going back to Word War II time, and today it’s called the Open Source Enterprise. They have a very large collection apparatus and they produce some extremely high quality products which are summaries and translations from sources in other languages. In their workflow, previously they would collect information, say in Chinese or in Russian, and then do a translation or summary into English, but then would discard the original or the original would be hidden from their enterprise architecture for query purposes. I believe that is no longer the case, but retaining the pre-translation original, whether it’s open source, closed source, commercial, enterprise information, government-related information, is really very important. That’s one lesson. The other lesson is appreciating the limits of machine translation. We’re increasingly seeing machine translation integrated into all kinds of information systems, but there needs to be a very sober appreciation of what is and what is not achievable and scalable by employing machine translation in your architecture. Brian: Can you talk at all about the translation? We have so much power now with NLP and what’s possible with the technology today. As I understand it, when we talk about translation, we’re talking about documents and things that are in written word that are being translated from one language to another. But in terms of spoken word, and we’re communicating right now, I’m going to ask you two questions. What do you know about NLP and what do you know about NLP? The first one I had a little bit of attitude which assumes that you don’t know too much about it, and the second one, I was treating you as an expert. When this gets translated into text, it loses that context. Where are we with that ability to look at the context, the tone, the sentiment that’s behind that? I would imagine that’s partly why you’re talking about saving the original source. It might provide some context like, “What are the headlines were in the paper?” and, “Which paper wrote it?” and, “Is there a bias with that paper?” whatever, having some context of the full article that that report came from can provide additional context. Humans are probably better at doing some of that initial eyeball analysis or having some idea of historically where this article’s coming from such that they can put it in some context as opposed to just seeing the words in a native language on a computer screen. Can you talk a little bit about that or where we are with that? And am I incorrect that we’re not able to look at that sentiment? I don’t even know how that would translate necessarily unless you had a playing back of a recording of someone saying the words. You have translation on top of the sentiment. Now you’ve got two factors of difficulty right there and getting it accurate. Carl: My knowledge of voice and speech analysis is very naive. I do know there’s an area of huge investment and the technology is progressing very rapidly. I suspect that voice models are already being built that can distinguish between the two different intonations you used in asking that question and are able to match those against knowledge bases separately. What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication. My knowledge is stronger when it comes to its written form. Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics. That’s why, say, when we’re analyzing a document, we’re looking not only the individual word but the sentence, the paragraph, where does the text appear? Is it in the body? Is it in a heading? Is it in a caption? Is it in a footnote? Or if we’re looking at, say, human-typed input—I think this is where your audience would care if you’re designing forms or search boxes—there’s a lot that can be determined in terms of how the input is typed. Again, especially when you’re thinking globally. We’re familiar with typing English and typing queries or completing forms with the letters A through Z and the numbers 0 through 9, but the fastest-growing new orthography today is emoticons and emoji offer a lot of very valuable information about the mindset of the author. Say that we look at Chinese or Japanese, which are basically written with thousand-year-old emoji, where an individual must type a sequence of keys in order to create each of the Kanji or Hanzu that appears. There’s a great deal of information we can capture. For instance, if I’m typing a form in Japanese, saying I’m filling out my last name, and then my last name is Tanaka. Well, I’m going to type phonetically some characters that represent Tanaka, either in Latin letters or one of the Japanese phonetic writing systems, then I’m going to pick from a menu or the system is going to automatically pick for me the Japanese characters that represent Tanaka. But any really capable input system is going to keep both whatever I typed phonetically and the Kanji that I selected because both of those have value and the association between the two is not always obvious. There are similar ways of capturing context and meaning in other writing systems. For instance, let’s say I’m typing Arabic not in Arabic script but I’m typing with Roman letters. How I translate from those Roman letters into the Arabic alphabet may vary, depending upon if I’m using Gulf Arabic, or Levantine Arabic, or Cairene Arabic, and say the IP address of the person doing the typing may factor into how I do that transformation and how I interpret those letters. There’s examples for many other writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Brian: I meant to ask you. Do you speak any other languages or do you study any other languages? Carl: I studied Japanese for a few years in high school. That’s really what got me into using computers to facilitate language understanding. I just never had the ability to really quickly memorize all of the Japanese characters, the radical components, and the variant pronunciations. After spending countless hours combing through paper dictionaries, I got very interested in building electronic dictionaries. My interest in electronic dictionaries eventually led to search engines and to lexicons, algorithms powered by lexicons, and then ultimately to machine learning and deep learning. Brian: I’m curious. I assume you need to employ either a linguist or at least people that speak multiple languages. One concern with advanced analytics right now and especially anything with prediction, is bias. I speak a couple of different languages and I think one of the coolest things about learning another language is seeing the world through another context. Right now, I’m learning Polish and there’s the concept of case and it doesn’t just come down to learning the prefixes and suffixes that are added to words. Effectively, that’s what the output is but it’s even understanding the nuance of when you would use that and what you’re trying to convey, and then when you relay it back to your own language, we don’t even have an equivalent between this. We would never divide this verb into two different sentiments. So you start to learn what you don’t even know to think about. I guess what I’m asking here is how do you capture those things? Say, in our case where I assume you’re an American and I am to, so we have our English that we grew up with and our context for that. How do you avoid bias? Do you think about bias? How do you build these systems in terms of approaching it from a single language? Ultimately, this code is probably written in English, I assume. Not to say that the code would be written in a different language but just the approach when you’re thinking about all these systems that have to do with language, where does that come in having integrating other people that speaks other languages? Can you talk about that a little bit? Carl: Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language. Yes, this is something that we think about. I disagree with your remark about code being written in English. The most important pieces of code today are the frameworks for implementing various machine learning and deep learning architectures. These architectures for the most part are language or domain-agnostic. The language bias tends to creep in as an artifact of the data that we collect. If I were to, say, harvest a million pages randomly on the internet, a very large percentage of those pages would be in English, out of proportion to the proportion of the population of the planet who speaks English, just because English is common language for commerce, science, and so on. The bias comes in from the data or it comes in from the mindset of the architect, who may do something as simple-minded as allocating only eight bits per character or deciding that Python version 2 is an acceptable development platform. Brian: Sure. I should say, I wasn’t so much speaking about the script, the code, as much as I was thinking more about the humans behind it, their background, and their language that they speak, or these kinds of choices that you’re talking about because they’re informed by that person’s perspective. But thank you for clarifying. Carl: I agree with that observation as well. You’re certainly right. Brian: Do you have a way? You’re experts in this area and you’re obviously heavily invested in this area. Are there things that you have to do to prevent that bias, in terms of like, “We know what we don’t know about it, or we know enough about it but we don’t know if about, so we have a checklist or we have something that we go through to make sure that we’re checking ourselves to avoid these things”? Or is it more in the data collection phase that you’re worried about more so than the code or whatever that’s actually going to be taking the data and generating the software value at the other end? Is it more on the collection side that you’re thinking about? How do you prevent it? How do you check yourself or tell a client or customer, “Here’s how we’ve tried to make sure that the quality of what we’re giving you is good. We did A, B, C, and D.” Maybe I’m making a bigger issue out of this than it is. I’m not sure. Carl: No, it is a big issue. The best way to minimize that cultural bias is by building global teams. That’s something that we’ve done from the very beginning days of our company. We have a company in which collectively the team speaks over 20 languages, originate from many different countries around the world, and we do business in native countries around the world. That’s just been an absolute necessity because we produce products that are proficient in 40 different human languages. If you’re a large enterprise, more than 500 people, and you’re targeting markets globally, then you need to build a global team. That applies to all the different parts of the organization, including the executive team. It’s rare that you will see individuals who are, say, American culture with no meaningful international experience being successful in any kind of global expansion. Brian: That’s pretty awesome that you have that many languages going in the staff that you have working at the company. That’s cool and I think it does provide a different perspective on it. We talk about it even in the design firm. Sometimes, early managers in the design will want to go hire a lot of people that look like they do. Not necessarily physically but in terms of skill set. One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know, you know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they are, and you don’t necessarily know what the output is, but you can learn that there’s other perspectives to have, so too many like-minded individuals doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. I think that’s cool. Can you talk to me a little bit about one of the fun little nuggets that stuck in my head and I think you’ve attributed to somebody else, but was the word about getting insights from medium data. Can you talk to us about that? Carl: Sure. I should first start by crediting the individual who planted that idea in my head, which is Dr. Catherine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, who’s also a cofounder of a company called Luminoso, which is a partner of ours. They do common sense understanding. The challenge with building truly capable text analytics from large amounts of unstructured text is obtaining sufficient volume. If you are a company on the scale of Facebook or Google, you have access to truly enormous amount of text. I can’t quantify it in petabytes or exabytes, but it is a scale that is much greater than the typical global enterprise or Fortune 2000 company, who themselves may have very massive data lakes. But still, those data lakes are probably three to five orders of magnitudes smaller than what Google or Facebook may have under their control. That intermediate-sized data, which is sloppily referred to as big data, we think of it as medium data. We think about the challenge of allowing companies with medium data assets to obtain big data quality results, or business intelligence that’s comparable to something that Google or Facebook might be able to obtain. We do that by building models that are hybrid, that combine knowledge graphs or semantic graphs, derived from very large open sources with the information that they can extract from their proprietary data lakes, and using the open sources and the models that we build as amplifiers for their own data. Brian: I believe when we were talking, you have mentioned a couple of companies that are building products on top of you. Difio, I think, was one, and Tamr, and Luminoso. So is that related to what these companies are doing? Carl: Yes, it absolutely is related. Luminoso, in particular, is using this process of synthesizing results from their customers, proprietary data with their own models. The Luminoso team grew out of the team at MIT that built something called Constant Net, which is a very large net of graph in multiple languages. But actually, Difio as well is also using this approach of federating both open and closed source repositories by integrating a large number of connectors into their architecture. They have access to web content. They have access to various social media fire hoses. They have access to proprietary data feeds from financial news providers. But then, they fuse that with internal sources of information that may come from sources like SharePoint, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive, your local file servers, and then give you a single view into all of this data. Brian: Awesome. I don’t want to keep you too long. This has been super informational for me, learning about your space that you’re in. Can you tell us any closing thoughts, advice for product managers, analytics practitioners? We talked a little about obviously thinking globally and some of those areas. Any other closing thoughts about delivering good experiences, leveraging text analytics, other things to watch out for? Any general thoughts? Carl: Sure. I’ll close with a few thoughts. One is repeating what I’ve said before about Unicode compliance. The fact that I again have to state that is somewhat depressing yet it’s still isn’t taken as an absolute requirement, which is today, and yet continues to be overlooked. Secondly, just thinking globally, anything that you’re building, you got to think about a global audience. I’ll share with you an anecdote. My company gives a lot of business to Eventbrite, who I would expect by now would have a fully globalized platform, but it turns out their utility for sending an email to everybody who signed-up for an event doesn’t work in Japanese. I found that out the hard way when I needed to send an email to everybody that was signed up for our conference in Tokyo. That was very disturbing and I’m not afraid to say that live on a podcast. They need to fix it. You really don’t want customers finding out about that during a time of high stress and high pressure, and there’s just no excuse for that. Then my third point with regard to natural language understanding. This is a really incredibly exciting time to be involved with natural language, with human language because the technology is changing so rapidly and the space of what is achievable is expanding so rapidly. My final point of advice is that hybrid architectures have been the best and continue to be the best. There’s a real temptation to say, “Just grow all of my text into a deep neural net and magic is going to happen.” That can be true if you have sufficiently large amounts of data, but most people don’t. Therefore, you’re going to get better results by using hybrids of algorithmic simpler machine learning architectures together with deep neural nets. Brian: That last tip, can you take that down one more notch? I assume you’re talking about a level of quality on the tail-end of the technology implementation, there’s going to be some higher quality output. Can you translate what a hybrid architecture means in terms of a better product at the other end? What would be an example of that? Carl: Sure. It’s hard to do without getting too technical, but I’ll try and I’ll try to use some examples in English. I think the traditional way of approaching deep nets has very much been take a very simple, potentially deep and recursive neural network architecture and just throw data at it, especially images or audio waveforms. I throw my images in and I want to classify which ones were taken outdoors and which ones were taken indoors with no traditional signal processing or image processing added before or after. In the image domain, my understanding is that, that kind of purist approach is delivered the best results and that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t have first-hand information about that. However, when it comes to human language in its written form, there’s a great deal of traditional processing of that text that boosts the effectiveness of the deep learning. That falls into a number of layers that I won’t go into, but to just give you one example, let’s talk about what we called Orthography. The English language is relatively simple and that the orthography is generally quite simple. We’ve got the letters A through Z, an uppercase and lowercase, and that’s about it. But if you look inside, say a PDF of English text, you’ll sometimes encounter things like ligatures, like a lowercase F followed by a lowercase I, or two lowercase Fs together, will be replaced with single glyph to make it look good in that particular typeface. If I think those glyphs and I just throw them in with all the rest of my text, that actually complicates the job of the deep learning. If I take that FI ligature and convert it back to separate F followed by I, or the FF ligature and convert it back to FF, my deep learning doesn’t have to figure out what those ligatures are about. Now that seems pretty obscure in English but in other writing systems, especially Arabic, for instance, in which there’s an enormous number of ligatures, or Korean or languages that have diacritical marks, processing those diacritical marks, those ligatures, those orthographic variations using conventional means will make your deep learning run much faster and give you better results with less data. That’s just one example but there’s a whole range or other text-processing steps using algorithms that have been developed over many years, that simply makes the deep learning work better and that results in what we call a hybrid architecture. Brian: So it sounds like taking, as opposed to throw it all in a pot and stir, there’s the, “Well, maybe I’m going to cut the carrots neatly into the right size and then throw them in the soup.” Carl: Exactly. Brian: You’re kind of helping the system do a better job at its work. Carl: That’s right and it’s really about thinking about your data and understanding something about it before you throw it into the big brain. Brian: Exactly. Cool. Where can people follow you? I’ll put a link up to the Basis in the show notes but are you on Twitter or LinkedIn somewhere? Where can people find you? Carl: LinkedIn tends to be my preferred social network. I just was never really good at summarizing complex thoughts into 140 characters, so that’s the best place to connect with me. Basically, we’ll tell you all about Basis Technology and rosette.com is our text analytics platform, which is free for anybody to explore, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the most capable text analytics platform with the largest number of languages that you will find anywhere on the public internet. Brian: All right, I will definitely put those up in the show notes. This has been fantastic, I’ve learned a ton, and thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Carl: Great talking with you, Brian. Brian: All right. Cheers. Carl: Cheers.

Nancy Hensley is the Chief Digital Officer for IBM Analytics, a multi-billion dollar IBM software business focused on helping customers transform their companies with data science and analytics. Nancy has over 20 years of experience working in the data business in many facets from development, product management, sales, and marketing. Today’s episode is probably going to appeal to those of you in product management or working on SAAS/cloud analytics tools. It is a bit different than our previous episodes in that we focused a lot on what “big blue” is doing to simplify its analytics suite as well as facilitating access to those tools. IBM has many different analytics-related products and they rely on good design to make sure that there is a consistent feel and experience across the suite, whether it’s Watson, statistics, or modeling tools. She also talked about how central user experience is to making IBM’s tools more cloud-like (try/buy online) vs. forcing customers to go through a traditional enterprise salesperson. If you’ve got a “dated” analytics product or service that is hard to use or feels very “enterprisey” (in that not-so-good way), then I think you’ll enjoy the “modernization” theme of this episode. We covered: How Nancy is taking a 50-year old product such as SPSS and making it relevant and accessible for an audience that is 60% under 25 years of age The two components Nancy’s team looks at when designing an analytics product What “Metrics Monday” is all about at IBM Analytics How IBM follows-up with customers, communicates with legacy users, and how the digital market has changed consumption models Nancy’s thoughts on growth hacking and the role of simplification Why you should always consider product-market fit first and Nancy’s ideas on MVPs The role design plays in successful onboarding customers into IBM Analytics’ tools and what Brian refers to as the “honeymoon” experience Resources and Links: Nancy Hensley on Twitter Nancy Hensley on LinkedIn Quotes: “It’s really never about whether it’s a great product. It’s about whether the client thinks it’s great when they start using it.” –Nancy “Every time we add to the tool, we’re effectively reducing the simplicity of everything else around it.”–Brian “The design part of it for us is so eye-opening, because again, we’ve built a lot of best in class enterprise products for years and as we shift into this digital go-to-market, it is all about the experience…”–Nancy “Filling in that “why” piece is really important if you’re going to start changing design because you may not really understand the reasons someone’s abandoning.”–Brian “Because a lot of our products weren’t born in the cloud originally, they weren’t born to be digitally originally, doesn’t mean they can’t be digitally consumed. We just have to really focus on the experience and one of those things is onboarding.” –Nancy “If they [users] can’t figure out how to jump in and use the product, we’re not nailing it. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, if they can’t figure out how to effectively interact with it. –Nancy Episode Transcript Brian: Today on Experiencing Data, I [talked] to Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of IBM Analytics. Nancy brings a lot of experience and has a lot to say about how user experience and design have become very integral to IBM’s success especially as they move their applications into the cloud space. They really try to bring the price point down and make their services and applications much more low touch in order to access a new base of subscribers and users. I really enjoyed this talk with her about what the designers and people focused on the product experience have been doing at IBM to keep their company relevant and keep them pushing forward in terms of delivering really good experiences to their customers. I hope you enjoy this episode with Nancy Hensley. Hello everybody. I’m super stoked to have Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of IBM Analytics. How’s it going, Nancy? Nancy: Good. I’m happy to be here. Happy Friday. Brian: Yeah. It’s getting cold here in Cambridge, Mass ; [ you’re] in Chicago area, if I remember correctly. Nancy: Yeah, it’s a little bit chilly here as well. Brian: Nice. So it begins. You’ve done quite a bit of stuff at IBM when we had our little pre-planning call. You talked a lot about growth that’s been happening over at IBM. I wanted to talk to you specifically about the role that design and experience has played, how you guys have changed some of your products, and how you’re talking to new customers and that type of thing. Can you tell people, first of all, just a little bit about your background, what you’re currently doing, and then we could maybe […] some of those things. Nancy: Sure, happy to. Thank you for having me again. I think I’m one of those people that doesn’t fit nicely into a box of, “Are you product? Are you marketing?” I am a little bit of both. Most of my IBM career, I have moved in between product marketing and product management. That’s why I love digital so much because it really is a nice mixture. And in particular, growth hacking because it combines all the things I love, including data as a part of what we do. What I’m doing right now as a Chief Digital Officer in the Analytics Division and Hypercloud is how do we transform our products to make them more consumable, more accessible? We have best in class products in data science, in unified governments and integration, in hyper data management products, but our products and our business is built on a traditional face-to-face model. There is even a perception that we’re not as accessible to them and that’s what we’re looking to change. Creating those lower entry points, making it easier for people who didn’t have access to us before, to start small and grow through a digital channel, through a lower entry point product, and then scale up from there. That’s really what we’re trying to do and as part of a bigger mission to really democratize data science—I kind of cringe when I say that word—I think it’s really important for more clients to be able to be more data-driven, have tools that are easy to use, and leverage data science to optimize their business. Part of the way we’re doing that is to develop a digital route to market. We’re pretty excited about it. Brian: I think a lot of our listeners probably come from internal roles of companies. They might be someone that’s purchasing vendor software as opposed to a SaaS company where they may have a closer role to marketing and all that. Can you tell me what you guys are doing there? Part of the thing with my experience is that some of the legacy companies, the older companies that are out there tend to get associated with big giant enterprise installations, really crappy user experience. It’s just so powerful, you have to put up with all these stuff. People’s tendency these days to accept that poor experience as just status quo is changing. What have you guys done? Not that you’re to blame but I’m sure that opinion exist. How do you guys adapt to that and wonder if upstart analytics companies coming out with other things, what do you guys to to address the experience? Nancy: There’s certainly a perception that IBM is that big, complicated, enterprise-focused product out there. We see the data. There’s a lot of articles, there’s a lot of feedback, there’s endless report that all validate that clients are trading off complexity or features and functions for consumability, because they got to get things done, they have less people to do it. We fully recognize that. Where we started to look for that was how we first started to make things much more accessible, not just our cloud products because that’s pretty easy if you have stuff in the cloud—it’s pretty accessible—but our on-prime products as well. So, for clients that are running analysis behind the private cloud, whether it’s a statistical product, or a predictive analytics product, or data science project, or even what they’re doing on their data catalog, all of that was not something people would go to the cog to look for it. There are some things they need especially financial and health care, and there’s large and small companies on both sides. One of the things we set out to do is how do we create that cloud-like experience for clients that are running things behind their firewall. We started a project about a year ago to look at some of our on-prime products and create that experience where literally you could, within a couple of clicks, download, try, and be using a product within 15 minutes. That was our goal. As opposed to before where you would have to contact and IBM salesperson, get them to come out and meet with you, and then set-up a trial. That’s what we started to change was that at least make it accessible. As we progressed that capability, we started changing our pricing and packaging to be appropriate, to create that entry-level point, to create a shift to subscription. You want to buy everything on subscription these days, I think. The last part of that shift for us has been to really focus on the experience because a lot of these products were not born digital. We really need to make sure that when clients were coming through that channel, that it was a great experience. That’s really where design experience came into play for us. Brian: How did you know of what’s wrong beyond broad surveys or just that general feeling that like, “Oh, it’s the big giant bloated software…” the stereotype, right? How do you guys get into the meat and potatoes of like you said, sounds like there’s a benchmark there, 15 minutes on that first onboarding experience, but can you tell us a little bit of maybe if you have a specific example about how you figured it out? What do we need to change about this software application to make it easier to get value out of the analytics of the data that’s there? Nancy: I’ve got lots of examples. We’ll opt with one that clients actually are very familiar with, which is SPSS Statistics that a lot of us used back in college. That was a product that actually turns 50 years old this year. It’s been out a while, a lot of people still using it a lot, and most of our base of users for statistics, I think if you look at the demographics of it, over 60% are under the age of 25. So, their buying preferences were very different than they were when they started out in 1968. We look at the verbatims from our NPS feedback and it was clear that clients really wanted a much more simplified and flexible experience than buying SPSS Statistics and having access to it. A lot of times, students have to get it really quickly for a project because they’ve might have waited until the last minute and they wanted a much more flexible subscription-based program. They might only use it for a few months and then come back to it. That was one of the first things that we implemented was to change the buying experience for the consumption model. We didn’t actually change the product at that point. We just changed the consumption model to see if in fact that actually will help us have some growth on that product, and it absolutely did. Since then, we’ve actually gone back and change the product as well. It’s got a whole new UI for its 50th anniversary. Joke around that it’s got a face lift for it’s 50th anniversary. Brian: Does it have a green screen mode? Nancy: It is a completely different experience, not just from a buying perspective, but also from a UI perspective as well. We have other products, too, that have been around maybe not 50 years but have been very popular products like our DB2 Warehouse on Cloud and our DB2 database that clients have been buying for years to run their enterprises. We wanted to make that again, as we created a SaaS alternative of these products that it was extremely consumable. So, we’ve been looking specifically, is it easy to figure out which version to buy? How much to buy? What it’s going to do for you? Like I said, which version? How do I calculate things? We’ve been really looking at the experience of that is, if there was no salesperson at all, how do we help clients through that buying experience? Brian: I’m curious. When you decided to helping them through the buying experience, does any of that thinking or that strategy around hand-holding someone through that experience happen in the product itself? I’m guessing you’re downloading a package at some point, you’re running an installer, and at that point, did you continue that hand-holding process to get them out of the weeds of the installation and onboarding again to the actual, “Is this tool right for what I needed to do?” Everything else being friction up until that point where you’re actually working with your data, did you guys carry that through? Can you talk about that? Nancy: You’re hitting one of my favorite topics which is onboarding. Because a lot of our products weren’t born in the cloud originally, they weren’t born to be digital originally, doesn’t mean they can’t be digitally consumed. We just have to really focus on the experience and one of those things in onboarding. Let’s say, DB2 in particular, which won the process of creating onboarding experience for DB Warehouse on Cloud. For anybody who’s used DB2, we do have an updated UI for that. They can jump in and start using it. But that’s not everyone, the people that haven’t used it before. So, we just started working with a couple of different onboarding tools to create these experiences. Our goal was to be able—at least I’m offering management side alongside our partners but design—to create these experiences in a very agile way and make them measurable—my second favorite topic, which is instrumentation—but not have a burden on development, because the fact is, in almost any organization, development wants to build features and functions. Whenever we talk about this, they were prioritized lower because they want to build new capabilities. They’re less enthusiastic about building in things like onboarding experiences. With some of the tools like [.DB2..] give us, is a way to make it codeless to us. We can create these experiences, then pass the code snippet, and then measure whether those are effective or not because we actually see those flowing through segment into our amplitude as a part of the shuttle. We’ve got some great feedback as to whether they’re working or where they’re falling down. We can create checklists of things that we want the clients to do that we know makes the product sticky, and see if they actually complete that checklist. It’s giving us so much better view because before, what we would see with a client is register for trial, they downloaded the trial, they’ve created their instance, and then boom they fall off the cliff. What happened? Now we’re getting a much better view to what’s actually going on for the products that have been instrumented as well as the view we’re getting in from the onboarding experiences. Brian: For every one of these applications that you’re trying to move into a cloud model or simplify whether it’s cloud, to me the deployment model doesn’t matter. It’s really about removing the friction points whether it’s on-premise software or not. I think we all tend to use the word ‘cloud’ to kind of feel like, “Oh, is this browser-based thing? There’s no hard clients? There’s no running scripts at the terminal and all that kind of stuff?” Do you guys have a set of benchmarks or something that you establish for every one of these products that are going to go through a redesign? Nancy: We do. We’ve got a set of criteria, it’s really broken down into two pieces. Whether it’s going to be a cloud product or an on-premise product—I actually have a mix of both—there is what we call the MVP side, which might be something that’s not born in the cloud, it’s not a new product, and we’re looking to create a lower entry point, a really good trial experience, a very optimized journey. We’re even doing things like taking some of the capabilities that we used to have from a technical perspective and making those more digitally available. Online proof of concepts, hands-on labs that you do online instead of waiting for a technical salesperson to come out to see you. Tap us that can answer your questions faster even before you talk to a sales rep. All of that is included in the what we call the MVP portion of the criteria that we look at. Pricing and packaging’s got to be right for the product, for the marketplace. Got to have that right product market fit that you’ve got a good valuable product but a low-enough entry point where somebody can start small and scale up. The second part of the criteria is where the growth magic happens, where we’re dumbing down a lot more on the experimentation, where we’re making sure that we’ve got onboarding, instrumentation we want done, and the MVP phase, we don’t always get it, but our development partners really understand the value of that now, which is great. Though more often, we’re getting into the second phase of where we’re more doing the transformation. Through that, then we’re getting a lot more feedback, where we can create the onboarding experience. We can do even more on the optimized journey. We’re doing a lot of growth hacking that’s based on terms of optimizing. Things like how clear is information on the pricing page? Is it easy for the customer to figure out what they need to buy? What the pricing is for that? Can they get their questions answered quickly? Can we create a deeper technical experience for them, even outside of the trial itself? Like I mentioned, things we’re doing with our digital technical engagement, thinking that what used to be our tech sales modeling and making it more digital. Brian: That’s cool. When you guys go through this process of testing, are you primarily looking at quantitative metrics then that are coming back from the software that you guys are building, or you’re doing any type of qualitative research to go validate like, “Hey, is the onboarding working well?” Obviously, the quantitative can tell you what. It doesn’t tell you why someone might have abandoned at this point. You guys do any research there? Nancy: We do. It happens in a couple of places. We run squads that are cross-functional across marketing, product, development, and design, each product. Then every Monday we have this thing called Metrics Monday where we get the cross-functional routines together, we share the insights around the metrics. If we had a big spike or we had a big decrease, or if we had a change in engagement, or if we did some experimentation that came out with a very interesting result, we actually share that across teams. We really focus on why did things happen. We have a dashboard. Everybody is religious in using on a daily basis that tracks all of our key metrics, whether it’s visits, engage visits, trials, trial-to-win conversions, number of orders, things like that, but we also want to dive deeper into the ebbs and flows of the business itself, why things are happening, and if the experimentation we’re doing is helping or not helping. We’ve got a lot of focus on that on a daily and a weekly basis. Brian: Do you have any way to access the trial users and do one-on-one usability study or a follow-up with them that’s not so much quantitative? Nancy: Our research team and design will do that and they’ll take a very thorough approach to both recording users using the product, getting their feedback. It’s pretty thorough and also gives us some feedback. We usually don’t do that until the product’s been in the market for a little bit longer. We’ve got some hypothesis of how we think it’s doing, and then the research team will spend a couple of weeks diving a lot deeper into it. We get some great feedback from that. Honestly, as a product person, as much as I’d to think I’m focused on a beautiful experience, my lens versus our designers’ lens is completely different and they just see things we don’t. Brian: Yeah, the friction points and filling in the why’s, it takes time to go and do that, but it can tell you things, it helps you qualify the data, and makes sense especially when you’re collecting. I’m sure at the level that you guys are collecting that, you have a lot of inbound analytics coming back on what’s happening. But it’s really filling in that “why” piece that is really important if you’re going to start changing design because you may not really understand the reasons someone’s abandoning. Maybe it’s like, “I couldn’t find the installer. I don’t know where the URL is. I ended up locking the server on my thing and I don’t know how to localhost, but I forgot the port number,” and the whole product is not getting accessed because they don’t know the port number for the server they installed or whatever the heck it is, and it’s like, “Oh, they dropped off. They couldn’t figure it out how to turn it on, like load the browser…” Nancy: Right, and even behavioral things that we don’t always think of, like putting a really cool graphic in the lead space that actually takes the attention away from the callback-ends. We’re all proud of, “Hey look at this cool graphic we built.” One of our designers uses a tool that tracks eye movements and [wait a second] “We’re losing the focus here.” But again, you don’t always see from that lens. The design part of it, for us has been so eye-opening because again, we’ve built a lot of best in class enterprise products for years. As we shift into this digital go-to market, it is all about the experience. It’s all about how good the experience is, how easy the experience is, how frictionless it is, and it’s also about how consumable and accessible the product is in the marketplace. Brian: You mentioned earlier, it sounded like engineering doesn’t want to go back and necessarily add onboarding on all of this. This gets into the company culture of who’s running the ship, so to speak. Is it engineering-driven in your area? How do you guys get aligned around those objectives? I’ve seen this before with larger enterprise clients where engineering is the most dominant force and sprints are often set up around developing a feature and all the plumbing and functionality required to get that feature done, but there’s not necessarily a collective understanding of, “Hey, if someone can’t get from step A to step G, horizontally across time, then all that stuff’s a failure. Step F which you guys went in deep on is great, but no one can get from E to F, so definitely they can’t get to G.” So, that’s you’re qualifier of success. How do you guys balance that? Who’s running the ship? Does your product management oversee the engineering? Can you talk a little bit about that structure? Nancy: We call operating management aside from product management for a reason, because we really do want the operating managers to feel like they’re the CEO of their business and run the ship. Of course, development has a big say at the table, but they have a natural tendency to want to build capabilities. It’s never going to go away. It’s been that way for ages. We just don’t want to fight that tendency. We want them to focus on building, not take six months to build an onboarding experience when they could build in really valuable functionality in that six months instead. So, we really run it as a squad, just like many other companies. Operating management does leave a lot of the strategy with our products and development, but I would say that design is also a really, really chief at the table, for sure, absolutely. Brian: Tell us a little bit about your squads and is this primarily a designer or a UX professional up in your offering manager? Are they a team and then you pull in the engineering representatives as you strategize? Nancy: My team is a digital offering management. We’re a subset of offering management better known as product management. We will run the squads and the squads will be a cross-function of our product marketing team, our performance marketing team, which is demand to and type marketing. They run the campaigns, design, developments, the core product managers because we’re the digital product managers and such, and then there’s the core product managers. They have all routes to market. We’re just focused on the digital ones. With that is the cross-functional squad that gets together on a weekly basis and they run as a team. From a digital perspective, it’s led by the Digital OM for our route to market there. Brian: That’s interesting. How do you ensure that there are some kind of IBMness to all these offerings? Your UX practice and offering managers sound like they are part of one organization, but I imagine some of these tools, you might be crossing boundaries as you go from tool X to tool Y. Maybe you need to send data over like, “Oh, I have this package of stuff and I need to deploy this model,” then we have a different tool for putting the model into production and there’s some cross user experience there. Can you talk about that? Nancy: That’s really why design’s been key because their job is to keep us onus making sure that the experience is somewhat consistent across the tools so they seem familiar to us, especially within a segment data science. Some of these are using our Watson Studio tool and then moves to our statistics for our modeler tool. There should be a very familiar experience across those. That’s why design is really the lead in the experience part of it. From pricing and packaging, we try to maintain a consistency as much as possible across all the products again. Whatever level of familiarity you have and how we price and package things should be consistent across the entire segment. So we strive for that as well. On the digital side, in terms of the experience on the actual web, we partner with a team called the Digital Business Group. They are basically the host of our digital platform and they maintain a level of consistency worldwide across all the products in terms of the digital journey itself with us. Brian: That’s cool that you guys are keeping these checkpoints, so to speak, as stuff goes out the door. You’ve got the front lenses on it looking at it from different quality perspectives, I guess you could say. Earlier, you mentioned democratizing data science and we hear this a lot. Are we talking about democratizing the results of the data science, so at some point there’s maybe decision support tool or there’s some kind of outcome coming from the data science? Is that what you’re talking about democratizing? Or are you saying for a data scientist of all levels of ability, it’s more for the toolers as opposed to the [consumers..]? Nancy: It’s about the capability. The ability to put more of these products or these products in people’s hands that bought, that they might have been out of their reach, or that they were too enterprisey, or that they are for big companies. That’s one of the key things that we want to do. When you look at some of our products, they start really, really low. Cognizant Analytics is another great example where people might have had a perception that it’s really expensive but we just introduced a new version of it, and it’s less than $100 a month. You can get these powerful tools for analysis for a lot less than you think. Statistics in $99 a month, one of our pay products are significantly less, and it allows these companies that might not have considered doing business with us, to smart small and build up. That’s one of the key things we noticed as we shifted to a subscription model. With that, we started to see double digit increases in the number of clients that were new on products. Just because opened up this new route to market, doesn’t mean that we still didn’t maintain our enterprise face-to-face relationships because, of course, we did, but this allowed us to open up relationships with clients might have not gotten to before. Brian: How are the changes affecting the legacy users that you have? I imagine you probably do have some people that are used to, “Don’t change my toolset,” like, “I’ve been using DB2 for 25 years.” How are they reacting to some of the changes? I imagine at some point maybe you have some fat clients that turn to browser-based interfaces. They undergo some redesign at that point. Do you have a friction between the legacy experience and maybe do you employ the slow change mentality? Or do you say, “Nope, we’re going to cut it here. We’re jumping to the new one and we’re not going to let the legacy drag us back”? You talk about how you guys make those changes? Nancy: We’re shifting towards the subscription model. Our clients are, too. We have clients that are demanding that this is the only way that they actually want to buy software is through a subscription model. So it’s changing for them as well. I think in many ways, it’s a welcome change across the board. I can’t think of any negativity that we’ve had in both the change for the consumption models on a subscription side, as well as the new UI changes and things that we’re doing to the product that really update them and give them a modern feel. I know a lot of the onboarding is a welcome change, even for clients that are familiar with us. It helps them because they have to do less training internally to help people use the tool because now we’re building it into the product. Brian: How do you measure that they’re accepting that? Do you wait for that inbound feedback? Do you see if there’s attrition and then go talk to them? I imagine there’s some attrition that happens when you make a large tooling change. Is there a way to validate that or why that happened? Was it a result of changing too quickly? Any comment on that? Nancy: I think it’s a couple of things. We’re constantly monitoring the flow of MRR and the contraction of revenue where the attrition that we get through some of our subscription, to see if there is any anomalies there. But also we’re always were very in-tune with NPS. A lot of our product managers live and die in the verbatims and with the integration of FLAX, they get a lot of it. They’re coming right at them constantly, that they respond to. We are very, very in-tune with NPS and the feedback we’re getting there. We’re also getting a lot of reviews now on our software using tools like G2 Crowd where we keep an eye on that. I think the feedback doesn’t just come from one place. We’ll look at things like the flow through Amplitude. Our clients, when they’re coming in and during the trial, are they getting stuck someplace? Are they falling off someplace? Are they falling off either at a specific page like the pricing page? Or are they falling off as soon as they get the trial because they don’t know what to do with it? We look at things like that. We look at NPS in particular after we’ve introduced new capabilities. Did our NPS go up? What’s the feedback? Are our clients truly embracing this? I think it’s a combination of things. There is a lot of information, a lot of data that we just need to stay in-tune with. We’ve got a couple of dashboards that I know my team wakes up with everyday and takes a look at, and the product team. The core product manager stayed very focused on NPS. Brian: Do you have a way of collecting end-user feedback directly? I would imagine maybe in your newer tools, it’s easier to tool some of that in, but is there any way to provide customer feedback or something to chat or any type of interactivity that’s directly in the tools that you’re creating these days? Nancy: Sure. We are rolling out more end-product nurture capability than we ever had before. That gives them the ability to chat directly within the product, as well as schedule a time with an expert. We’re working in making that even easier through a chat bot. So if you do get stuck and you’re chatting with that bot, you can schedule the appointment with an expert right there. I think there’s lots of ways to do that. I think sometimes I worry that there’s too much data coming at us but we [didn’t have enough..] before, so I’m not going to do that. Brian: Right. It’s not about data, right? It’s, do we have information? Nancy: Do we have information? Exactly. I would say my team spends a lot of time going through that, looking at Amplitude, analyzing the flows, looking in the patterns, in the orders, in the data, and the revenue. With the NPS feedback, it’s a combination of all of that stuff that really gives us a good view. As well as looking at the chat data, and analyzing some of the keywords that’s coming across on the chat, the Watson robots are constantly learning, which is great. We’re using machine learning to get smarter about what do people ask about, and that’s giving us also some good insight into the questions they ask, the patterns of information they’re searching for by product. Brian: In terms of the net promoter score that you talked about, tell me about the fact that how do you interpret that information when not everybody is going to provide a net promoter score? You have nulls, right? Nancy: Right. Brian: How do you factor that in? That’s the argument against NPS as the leading indicator. Sometimes, it’s not having any information. So you may not be collecting positive or potentially negative stuff because people don’t even want to take the time to respond. Do you have comments on how you guys interpret that? Nancy: I think you also have to look at the NPS is going to go up and down. If you have a client who has particularly a bad experience, it’s the week of thanksgiving, there was only X amount of surveys, and one of them had a bad experience that could make your NPS score looks like it drops like a rock. [right] you’ve got to look at it like the stock market. It’s more of the patterns over the long haul, what’s coming across within those patterns of information and feedback the clients are giving you. We react but you have to look at the data set, you have to look at the environmental things that are happening, and take that all into consideration from an NPS perspective. We’re very driven by that and that comes down from our CEO. She’s very cognizant, making sure that the product teams and the development teams are getting that feedback directly from the clients. As an organization—we’re a few years old—the way we used to do that is we would have these client advisory boards. It was a small number of clients that would give us feedback on our products, roadmap, and usability of that. The reality is just that then you end up building the product for 10% of your clients. Now it’s been eye-opening for us as we really open that up. Obviously, we’re still getting feedback from a larger community and client advisory board still, but NPS comments and feedback has really widen the aperture of the feedback we’ve gotten from a broader scope of clients. Brian: You brought up a good point. I had a client who luckily was cognizant of this and they did the same things where they fly their clients, they do two-day workshops, and they gather feedback from them. I was doing some consulting there and he said, “Brian, I’d like you to just go walk around, drop in some of the conversations and just listen, but take it with a grain of salt because I hate these freaking things. All we do is invite people that are willing to come for 2–3 days and tell us how much they love our stuff, it’s a free trip, we’re not getting to the people that don’t like our stuff…” Nancy: Or don’t use it. Brian: Or don’t use it at all. I love the concept of design partners, which is new, where you might have a stable of customers who are highly engaged, but that the good ones are the ones that are engaged who will pummel you when you’re stuff is not happening. They will come down on you and they will let you know. So it’s really about finding highly communicative and people who are willing to tell it like it is. It’s not, we’ll go out and find people that rah-rah, cheerleading crowd for you. Did that inspire the changes? Nancy: Even in the client advisory councils that we had—I ran a couple of them for products like Netezza for a while—we started to change the way we even ran those. I remember the biggest aha moment was, we had a client advisory board for Netezza one year and not too long ago. We decided to run a design thinking camp as part of the agenda, so that they would actually drive what they wanted from our requirements prospectus, going through the design thinking process through that. What came out of it was truly eye-opening. You know how a design thinking process progresses. I think even they were surprised at what they ended up prioritizing across the group of requirement. I think we’re really starting using differently about that feedback from clients. I do remember that day when we were looking at those things and that was not where we thought we would end up. Brian: Do you have a specific memory about something that was surprising to the group that really stuck? Something you guys learned in particular that stuck with you? Nancy: I think we focused a lot more at that point. At the time there was a lot of issues around security and what was one of our leading things going into the next version. What clients actually were not necessarily as verbal about was that, as they were using these appliances and they were becoming more mission-critical, they were doing more mixed workloads. Yes, security was still incredibly important, but what was emerging beyond that for them was workload management because they had this mixed workload that was emerging. So many different groups were jumping in with different types of workload. They have not anticipated on their [day route?] appliance, so it was something that I think came out of the next in the design thinking process that was important to them that they actually hadn’t been able to verbalize to us. Outside of that process, which was really, really interesting to us, we were on track with the requirements that we have but beyond that, the requirements that we just hadn’t thought of and quite honestly they hadn’t verbalized. Brian: You make a good point there. Part of the job of design is to get really good clarity on what the problems are and they’re not always going to be voiced to you in words or in direct statements. It’s your job to uncover the latent problems that are already there, crystalize them, so ideally whoever your project manager in the organization and your leadership, can understand and make them concrete because then you can go and solve them. When they’re not concrete and vague, like, “We need better security.” But what does that mean specifically? If you start there and really the problem had to do with the mixed workloads and managing all that, it’s like you can go down a completely different path. You can still write a lot of code, you can build a lot of stuff, and you can do a lot of releases, but if you don’t really know what that problem is that you’re solving, then you’re just going through activity and you’re actually building debt. You’re building more technical debt, you’re wasting money and time for everybody, and you’re not really driving the experience better for the customer. I think you made a good point about the design thinking helps uncover the reality of what’s there, when it’s not being explicitly stated, support requests are not going to get that type of information. They tend to be much more tactical. You’re not going to get a, “Hey, strategically I think the project needs to go this direction.” Nancy: Right and if you would have asked of us an open-ended question, you would have gotten and answer that could have been interpreted slightly differently. I think this was when I became the biggest fan of design is that, there was this magical person who was running this design camp for me that got information that I didn’t think I could get to. I mean, I knew nothing about the product. It was pretty amazing. Brian: That can happen when you also get that fresh lens on things even when they may not be a domain expert. You get used to seeing the friction points that people have and you can ask questions in a way to extract information that’s not biased. You’re not biased by the legacy that might be coming along with that product or even that domain space. It’s sometimes having jthat almost like first grade, “Tell it to me like I’m your grandfather,” or, “Explain that to me this way,” and then you can start to see where some of those friction points are and make them real. I always enjoyed that process of when you’re really fresh. Maybe this happens for other people but especially as a designer and consultant, coming into a product and a new domain, and just having that first-grader lens on it like, “Hey, could you unpack that for me?” “What is the workload in there like?” looking at you like, “What?” and you make them unpack that but you give that full honesty there to really get them to extract out of their head into words that you [and.] everyone can understand. That’s where some of those magical things happen like, “Oh my gosh. We had no idea that this was a problem,” because he or she thought it was so obvious like, “Of course, they know this,” and it’s like, “No. No one’s ever said that.” Nancy: Right. We’re experiencing that now. We have an embedded designer into our team that’s focused on our growth products. Again, she’s coming in with a complete fresh set of eyes and her perspective that she brings on the experience is just so completely different, not completely different but there are things that she flushes out we would have never see. It’s really helping because a lot of times, too, when you’re focused on the experience as opposed to the features and functions analysis, and you come down to looking at it from that perspective. I don’t want to go to development and tell them this because it’s like calling their baby ugly. But at the end of the day, the client needs to have a great experience. They need to see the value. When they’re even just trying the product out, they don’t get to that aha experience like, “I know how this will help me within 15 minutes.” We’re just not nailing it. If they can’t figure out how to jump in and use the product, we’re not nailing it. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, if they can’t figure out how to effectively interact with it. Brian: Effectively, none of the stuff really exist in their world. It just doesn’t exist because they can’t get to it. So, effectively it’s totally worthless. Whatever that island you have on the island, if there’s no bridge to get there, it doesn’t matter because its just totally inaccessible. Nancy: Right and it’s harder sometimes for even the product managers to see it. When I was sitting down in a demo of a product that we are going to be releasing, dude was cruising through the demo, my eyes were like glazed over, I just look and I was like, “Boy, we’re going to need some onboarding with that.” Great product, amazing capabilities, very complex and dense in its capability. It’s never really about whether it’s a great product. It’s about whether the client understands that’s great, when they start using it. Brian: Yeah and I think especially for analytics tools, highly technical tools used by engineers and other people that have better working in this kind of domain. Sometimes we gloss over stuff that seems like it would be totally easy or just not important. I have this specific example I was working on a storage application. It was a tool I think for migrating storage between an old appliance and a new appliance. At some point during that workload migration, something as simple as like, “Oh, I need a list of these host names and these IP addresses,” some other information that’s just basically setup-related stuff, and all the tool needed to do was have a CSV download of a bunch of numbers to be piped into another thing so that they could talk to each other. It’s not sexy. It’s literally a CSV. It was the only technical lift required, but it was not seen as engineering. It’s not part of the product. That has to do with some other product but you have to go type it into. It’s like yes, but that bridge is never going to happen. It takes them 10 years to go figure out where all these IP addresses are listed, domain names, and all these kind of stuff. It’s not sexy but if you look at the big picture, the full end-to-end arc, and if we’re all lying around, what is that A to G workflow, there’s six steps that have to happen there. This is not sexy, it’s not a new feature but this is the blocker from getting from B to E. They’re never get to A, which is where the product begins. Nancy: We definitely had those discussions in the early days about making it more consumable instead of giving it more features and functions, and can’t we really hack growth that way? That is a mind shift that if you are a design-led organization, you get it, and we believed in every part of our being that we are. Sometimes we still have that natural resistance that we really need to add more features and functions to make this product grow, but I think we’ve really turned the corner on that. Digital really has been the task for us to do that because we build the experience in the products as if there was no IBM sales team that’s going to surround you to help make you a success. That’s a very different way that we’ve done things for so many years, and the only way you can do that is by focusing on experience. Brian: You bring up a good point and I think that it’s worth reiterating to listeners. You can add these features but they do come at a cost. The cognitive load goes up. Every time we add to the tool, we’re effectively reducing the simplicity of everything else around it. Typically as a general rule, removing choice simplifies because you’re just removing the number of things that someone has to think about. So those features don’t really come for free. It’s almost like you have a debt as soon as you add the feature and then you hope you recoup it by, “Oh there’s high engagement. People are really using that,” so that was a win. If there’s low engagement with it, you just add it. It’s like Microsoft Word 10 years ago. You just added another menu bar and another thing that no one’s gonna use, and now it’s even worse. The pile continues to grow and it’s so hard to take stuff out of software once it’s in there, because you’re going to find, “You know what? But IBM’s our client, and they’re using it. IBM makes $3 million a year. We’re not taking that button out of the tool. End of story,” and now you have that short-term like, “We can’t take that out because Nancy’s group uses this.” Nancy: That’s right and we can’t point out exactly. I think my favorite story when it comes to that is the Instagram story that people talk about, where it was launched as a tool, a product called Bourbon. It had all of these great capabilities and it was going nowhere. So they dug into the usability side of things and said, “Well, what are people actually using?” which is what we do as well from an instrumentation perspective, and found that they were really only using a couple of things. They wanted to post a picture, they wanted to comment on the picture, they want to add some sort of emojis or in like system the picture and they are like, “Let’s [do.]. Let’s just do three or four things, do them really great, and relaunch the product,” and then of course the rest is history. I think that that’s a great illustration of more features and functions. If they’re not important, relevant, and consumable, all three of those things, are not going to give you growth. It comes down to, is it easy to use? Can I get value out of it? Do I immediately see that I can get value out of it? That’s all product market fit. That’s where we shifted our focus and digital’s helped us, too. That’s why my job is so cool. Brian: Cool. This has been super fun. Can you leave us with maybe an anecdote? Do you have a big lesson learned or something you might recommend to people that are either building internal tools, internal enterprise software or even SaaS products, something like, “Hey, if I was starting fresh today, I might do this instead of doing that.” Anything from your experience you could share? Nancy: For me, the biggest thing is just really focusing on product market fit because we build something sometimes to be competitively great, but not necessarily competitively great and competitively different, or that. So to understand that you not only have something that solves somebody’s problem but does it in a way that’s unique, and that’s so valuable that they’ll pay the price that’s appropriate for whatever they’ll pay for it. You’ve got to start thinking about that upfront because oftentimes, we’ll build something we’ll see a market opportunity for, but we may not truly understand product market fit whereas we know who the target is, we know what they’ll pay for this, we know what the value is, we know how to get to them, and I think you’ve got to start with that upfront, like you really got to understand product market fit or you’re never be able to grow the product. I’ve got a lot of religion around that and we really try very, very hard to create pricing and packaging around making sure we hit that, but the product has to have that value. It can’t be too overwhelming, it can’t be too underwhelming, it’s got to hit that great value spot. Brian: Fully agree on getting that fit upfront. You save a lot of time, you could solve a lot of technical debt instead of jumping in with the projects that you going to have to change immediately because you find out after the fact and now you’re starting it like… Nancy: See you in Instagram not a Bourbon, right? Brian: Exactly. Tell us where can people find you on the interwebs out there? Nancy: I probably spend a lot of time on Twitter. Maybe not so much lately. It’s been a little bit crazy but you can find me on Twitter @nancykoppdw […] or you can find me on LinkedIn. I am going to try and do better. I am on Medium. I haven’t done as good about blogging but that’s one of my goals for trying to get back on blogging. I’m usually out there on Medium or Twitter talking about growth hacking and digital transformation. I do podcast as well. Brian: Cool. I will put those links up on the show notes for anyone. Thanks for coming to talk with us, Nancy. It’s been fun. This has been Nancy Hensley from IBM Analytics, the Chief Digital Officer. Thanks again for coming on the show and hope we get the chance to catch up again. Nancy: Thank you.

If you own a tablet or iPad, you've probably shopped for a case for it. And if you bought a case for it, did you ever run across beautiful leather cases that looked like books? If so, you and I have the same taste. Pad & Quill makes those luxurious cases. Our guest today is Brian Holmes, President, and owner of Pad & Quill. He started the business in 2010 with his wife, Kari. It was a desire to create exceptionally crafted luxury accessories (rather than profits) that motivated Holmes when he chose to start the business with a budget of just over $1,000. Pad and Quill is the tale of a shop formed with bookbinders, carpenters, a painter and a working mom coming together to create beautiful handmade iPad/iPhone cases, leather bags, and other dry goods. In this episode, we dive into his seven-year journey in ecommerce and discover what he's learned along the way. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: How Pad & Quill got started Their direct approach to launching the brand Why you should embrace your passion The advantage of lifetime warranties How to Brian pitches the press The golden rule that governs Brian's marketing Why he moved from Magento to Shopify Plus And his advice for entrepreneurs Links Mentioned: PadAndQuill - Use coupon code BHAPPY10 to get 10% off any product Shopify Plus Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: Hello, and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, recording from Ethercycle headquarters; about 10 minutes from O'Hare Airport, if you're familiar. And today I'm talking to a wonderful, seven year-old eCommerce store owner. Well, the store is seven years old. The owner is not seven years old, I should say, I should be specific. But we've got this app called Crowdfunder, and it's not the easiest thing to install if you're not familiar with HTML. So people ask me, "Hey Kurt, can you install this thing for me?" And I say, "Yes, of course." And in doing that, I always get to check out some interesting stores. And in this case, I said, gee this seems ... I was looking at a store, it was called Pad & Quill, and I thought, this seems awfully familiar. So I went and I searched through my email, and sure enough, I had bought an iPad case from Pad & Quill in 2011. So I reached out, and I acted like, this seemed familiar because it is familiar; I used to have your case on my first gen iPad, and I would love to hear your story. This looks like a fascinating brand, they were in the process of moving to Shopify Plus. So I wanted to hear that story. So joining me today, is Brian Holmes, who is the President/Owner of Pad & Quill. He started in 2010 with his wife, Kari. Prior to running Pad & Quill, he's a Tradesman for over 16 years; we'll find out in what. He and Kari have been married for almost 27 years. Congratulations! It is so much easier to do this with a supportive family, and doing it with family helps. But Brian, thank you for joining us. Brian: Kurt, thank you for having us on. I appreciate it, having me on. My only question is, you've only boughten one case since 2011, Kurt. What's goin on? Kurt: (laughs) Let's see, I had- Brian: (laughs) Kurt: So for the longest time I just had the standard iPad case on there. And then one of my kids dropped it on the kitchen tile floor like two or three years ago, and we have not had an iPad since. Someday. Brian: Ah. Kurt: Someday I'll get around to buying another iPad. Brian: Yes. Well, you're right I'm not seven years old, I'm almost 50, but I've been doing this for seven years. That is correct. Kurt: Very good. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: For our listeners, what is Pad & Quill? Brian: So, Pad & Quill is a, we are a luxury accessory maker. So we design and craft luxury goods for tech and play. That's kinda what we like to say. They're durable goods. They're artisan made. Those four words are very important to us. We don't wanna make anything that is going to fade away within a year and breakdown, et cetera. So all of our products come with longer warranties, and we want them to be very well made, as far as what we call good art. So when we make a product, to us, it should be both beautiful and functional. Cause you can have a lot of products out there that are really nice to look at, but they don't last, or they're really, really functional, but they're just ugly. So what we're trying to do is create these kind of beautiful leather bags, iPad cases, MacBook cases, things like that, that are unique, but also provide a function, provide a utility and are durable. They last a long time. So that's kinda been our focus. We're a typical company, that when we started, we started one place, and ended up somewhere else. That's very common in startup stories, that the products you started with aren't always the products you end up making five years later. Kurt: So somewhere along your line you had to pivot. Going back to the beginning, how did you start Pad & Quill? Brian: Yeah. Kurt: And what was your first product? Brian: Yeah. So we started with $1,200, and I- Kurt: Very good. Brian: I painted my web designer's deck. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: She painted it ... She still works with us, she's still a consultant, Kathy. She made our website. She coded it on ... I can't even remember where it was coded, what platform; think it was WordPress. And we started an original ... She built it all, all I knew is that I had seen a product out in San Francisco by a company called DODOcase. Kurt: DODOcase, another Shopify store. Brian: Yeah, they made a wood and book case, and I saw what they were doing. And I thought, my word, we could do this, but we could more than what they're doing. We could do, like, MacBook cases, and iPhone cases, and all kinds of stuff. So that kinda was the inspiration. So we took the $1,200, I paid a photographer far less than he deserved; he still works with me today. Now he's making money, but he knew we didn't have a lot so he gave me a deal. We built four prototypes, and we put up the site, it was in late June of 2010, and just started reaching out to the press saying, "Hey, we've got these products. They're on pre-order, they'll deliver in six weeks." You know, basically, help us fund this, in many ways. Reached out to everyone you could think of. Some Wired, I was talking to Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal, who turned me down, of course. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: But what happened was, we got picked up by a couple people. So Gadget Lab picked us up at Wired, and then someone at Gizmodo wrote about us; and it started to pick up. Sales started coming in, and what had happened is, it was really born of not an idea that I had been thinking about. It was born out of a passion of a product I already saw, that I liked, which was the iPad and then the book bindery style case. And it just, kinda like, came together one evening. I was just like, "Wait a minute, we could do this. And we could do this better." You know, cause typical entrepreneurs think they can always do it better. So I was thinking, we can do this better, or different. Kurt: So when you saw that original DODOcase- Brian: Yeah. Kurt: You saw an iPad, [inaudible 00:05:50] and you saw ... And at that time, that was very early; I don't know if that was the first gen or second gen iPad at that point. Brian: First gen, first gen. Kurt: First gen, okay. So very early on. When you first held an iPad, it did have kind of a magical quality to it, where it's like, it's just this big, solid glass display that I can poke at. Brian: Right. Kurt: And at that time, apps had really ... Like, a lot of them had these very novel interfaces; it was pretty exciting. Brian: It was. Kurt: Back six years ago, it seems like forever ago, and now we don't think twice about it. But it was exciting. And then you had seen, you're right, DODOcase in San Francisco who was using traditional book ... Really, I mean, they were making cases using just traditional book binding- Brian: Techniques, yeah. Kurt: Techniques. Brian: Yep. Kurt: And you're right, in the typical, the entrepreneurial mindset, you said, "I love both of these. Why can't I do this? Why not me?" Brian: Yeah. Kurt: That's often how businesses start. Why not me? Brian: Yeah, and it didn't have, necessarily, a logic behind it. It had an opportunity, is what was seen. But here's the interesting thing, what happened was, is that as Kari and I started working on these products, all of a sudden there was something that connected for both of us; which was, these devices by Apple are beautifully designed, made of aluminum and glass, steel, gorgeous, gorgeous finishes, but they lacked warmth. Kurt: Yeah, they're ultra modern, which- Brian: Yeah, they're ultra modern Kurt: Can often make them feel cold. Brian: Which is fine, but we love, and that's a huge passion of ours, is that we love traditional materials. So it wasn't just book bindery, and that's why after the first two years of selling I ... I mean, we shipped about 3,000 iPad cases out of my basement window- Kurt: Hmm Brian: In the first nine months of the business. So what we were doing is we were having a bindery in Minneapolis make the books. And we were having a CNC Maker make the wood, and they were putting it together for us. And then we would take it to our basement and do some finishing touches, and ship them. So, we continued our press push. We constantly were reaching out to the press, coming out with new products. So we were in a never-ending cycle of creating new things. So we created a book-style case for a MacBook Air, which was very unique to the market, and that got us a lot of pickup. We just kept working through all these different products. We did stuff for the Kindle, at that time. This again, back in 2010 when the Kindle was pretty popular. Yeah, and then after about 3,000 or 4,000 products, my wife was like, "I want the basement back." Kurt: (laughs) Brian: So that's pretty much what happened. So we found a spot in Northeast Minneapolis, which is kind of an arts community area of Minneapolis, in downtown. We found a little spot there, and that's where we've been since. So, we've been there since I think May of 2011. Kurt: Did you, at all, have a background in business, entrepreneurship, manufacturing? Did you have any unfair advantage or skills that you think played a part in the success? Or at least, did you just have so much hubris you said, "You know, I think I could do this and then figure it out." Brian: Yeah, it's interesting you said unfair, cause that's an interesting term; that it's unfair. I mean, I know what you mean, like did I have something that I could leverage, that other people wouldn't typically have. Here's the thing, I had been a painting contractor. So I had done wall painting, like, house painting. I'd done that for 16 years. We had four kids. I didn't wanna be a painter for the rest of my life. And then the last five years of my trades work, and this was my own company, and I had a couple guys working for me, we were pretty small. In the last five years, I got into more artistic designs. So I was doing a lot of artisan finishes on walls and design work. Kurt: Like French plaster, and that kinda thing. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: Okay. Brian: Exactly. Kurt: Cool. Brian: And Venetian plasters, all that stuff. And what was interesting was, I really enjoyed that part of it. I, then, got my four year degree. In those last five years, I got my four year degree at night, in Psychology, ironically. I had never finished my four year. I went and got it, never used it. Think I decided at the end of my Psychology degree that I couldn't listen to people that long. Kurt: (laughs) Brian: So I ended up not doing anything with that, but I took a job with a small tech startup; cause I wanted to get out of painting. I didn't feel like I was using my skills the way I wanted to. So I took a risk and jumped into a small startup, which failed. It failed in about 18 months. It was a tech startup with a guy here locally, he was an inventor. It went poorly. What happened was, is that, the idea for Pad & Quill, the idea for me ... Like, I didn't have any manufacturing background. But my time, those 18 months in that startup, taught me almost a Master's level about here's how you'd operationalize a product; here's all the things you would need to make a product happen. And so, I think Pad & Quill was kinda like, a culmination of multiple life experience; running a painting company, being part of a small startup. It just kinda all came together, and I thought I could do this, and here's how I'd do it. And as I've moved further away, I'm realizing I love design. You know, I have no background in actual design. I have no background in product design. It was very much self-taught, but it's following ... I'm good at reading what people want to see in the markets, and then kind of taking it and putting my own flavor to it. Kurt: Okay. So early on you started with, it starts with your passion, and it sounds like you have a passion for product design, which is great. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: It's so much easier to run a business when it's exciting to you, versus I'm just going to do this because it will sell. That's such a struggle; and some people have the discipline to do it. I think it just makes life harder. Brian: It does. Kurt: Certainly easier if you enjoy the product. So you created this ... How many products did you launch with, like, within the first 12 months? Brian: Two. Oh, in 12 months, probably- Kurt: So you started with two. Brian: Started with two, and then we added some Kindle, and then some MacBook products. So they- Kurt: And they're all variations on ... They're essentially the same product in different form factors. Brian: Exactly. It was the same product on the same theme. So then, in 2011, the iPad 2 came out, so that was a big lift for us; and we became a competitor to DODOcase. And there was another company, I believe called Portenzo, out there at the time; and Treegloo. There was a few other competitors doing what we were doing. But here's what happened, and this was a huge shift for us, in 2012, so I'm a good two years in, I was noticing that these books were falling apart. So what was happening is, these books were made in traditional book bindery techniques, using really good book material; but they were falling apart. And I was like, they look beautiful, but they don't last. And I was realizing this is a ... You know, people love our product, they love our design, but I don't love that they don't last. And if you're cynical you could say, well that just means people will come back and buy another one. And my comment to that is, no, it means people will be disaffected by your brand. Kurt: I agree. Brian: They'll say your stuff isn't gonna last. Kurt: The brands I've seen where the product is incredibly durable, where they're comfortable in giving, like, really outlandish warranties on it because it's so durable; those are the brands where people, they don't have to worry about it falling apart and someone buying another one because people like it so much, they recommend it and they often will buy multiples. Brian: Right. Kurt: A good example would be, oh there's a Reddit group, I think, called Buy It For Life, where people just recommend products that they think will last a lifetime. Brian: Oh, funny. Kurt: Yeah. Off the top of my head ... And some are leather goods. But often times we see Saddleback Leather's bags mentioned, Beltman leather gun belts, which a gun belt- Brian: Okay. Kurt: Just turns out, it's a very stiff belt. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I'm wearing one right now; it's a client. Brian: (laughs) Kurt: Yeah, those are great. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: What's the other one? Another good example. Oh, we use Everest bands as an example; they make watch straps for Rolex, but out of this unreal durable rubber. We had a review where someone said that they run it through an autoclave on a weekly basis, and the thing's fine. Brian: Yeah, yeah. Kurt: And it doesn't hurt their sales, people buy multiple products. So, no, I'm with you. Brian: And so what happened is, in 2011, I said that's it. It was late 2011, I said we have gotta shift to leather. We've just gotta shift, cause this is not a sustainable ... We're doing the eCommerce thing well. You know, by the way, we're not buying any ads from Google for the first three years. We are existing purely on reaching out to the press with new products. Any press that'll listen to us, and you know, if you have something kind of sexy, they'll write about it. Kurt: So that's a- Brian: And that would bring in sales. Kurt: Alright, that is an excellent point. But it's so difficult. Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Kurt: Early on, the only marketing you were doing were two things, PR and these continuous launch cycles. Brian: Yep. Kurt: So you're coming out. You end up, kinda trapped in a thing where you're always launching new products; and that could be good, or it can be a struggle. Brian: Yeah, it's a little of both. Kurt: It's a little of both. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: But it gives you a reason to keep reaching out to the press. And once, I think, you've gotten over that initial hurdle where they're interested in you, and you start developing relationships, it helps. Brian: Right. Kurt: But what do you think goes into, like, what makes a good press pitch? Cause this is so difficult. Brian: Yeah. This is a good question. This is a good question. Two things, be real. You know, don't sit there and try to ... Don't talk to a press person like you're not pitching them; you are pitching them. But, with that said, be brief. Okay. Brevity is the soul of wit, is a famous saying. I love that saying; it's very true. Be very brief in your communication. Send a big fat image to the press. Make sure you're taking some photography of your product that looks nice. Pay a photographer friend, if you're just starting out, to maybe give you a hand. Because good imagery goes a long ways in a writer's mind, because in the end, what they're looking for is, are you offering me something my readers would care about? Is this interesting to my readers? Cause if it's interesting, yeah I'll write about it. I'll mention it. I'll tweet about it. So, be brief, be very real, just be open. Say, "Hey we're just starting out. We're a family business." That's what we used to say. Our pitch was, "Hey this is Brian from Pad & Quill. We're a small family business here, in Minneapolis. We've got these beautiful new iPad cases we're just releasing. Here's some images. Thanks for any considerations, if you'd cover us." I still say that same email, what I just said to you just now, today. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: I still email that exact same way, today, when I'm emailing Wired. Kurt: I'm sure it works. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I am on the receiving end of so many awful pitch emails, and outreach emails. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: That when one comes through where it's like, alright, it's not a giant wall of text. It's concise, it's to the point, it tells me what the advantage to me and my audience is, and it's not trying to trick me, or in any way mislead me. It's saying, hey, this is who I am, this is what I can offer you or your audience, and if you wanna know more information, here's next ups. Brian: Right. Kurt: And it's genuine and real. Brian: It is, and I think that, that has a huge benefit. Again, it's that whole idea of, are you serving people? So I come from the place of serving my customers. I serve my customers, then I'll be able to create an income for myself and my family. If I serve my vendors by creating a customer base, then my vendors will be loyal to me, and continue to make products on time; because they know that I have a loyal customer base. If I'm going to the press, am I operating from a place of service? How am I serving the press person? Not using, serving. There's a huge difference between those two. Because in serving someone, you're saying, how can I help your column to be more interesting? Would this be a way to do it? And the press person may say, "No, this is not of interest to me right now," and that's fine. But it's better to come from that perspective, more of humility, than to come from, "You know, you should cover this. We have a lot of customers. You should cover our products, they last forever." Kurt: (laughs) Brian: That doesn't go very far with the press. It's funny, I wanna finish that pivot because you brought up a company I wanna kinda tie you into. So, in 2012, we wanted to move to leather goods. I wanted to get into more leather cases. I wanted to make an iPhone case. We were making them, at the time, out of traditional book bindery material. They'd last, honestly, about nine months. We were charging, like, $50, and I'm thinking, that's too much money for somethin that falls apart. You know? How do we do this? So I started reaching out to leather manufacturing companies, and I came across a company called Saddleback Leather Company. Kurt: Very good. Brian: And I hit up their PR guy, and I said, "Hey, I wanna do manufacturing." And they said no. And on the third time, I kept coming back, they gave in. So, all of our, the majority, I shouldn't say all, but the majority of our leather goods are made by Saddleback's manufacturing. So, Dave Munson's a good friend of mine, that developed over the last four years from all this. So it's funny you brought up Saddleback, cause I was like, "Yep, that's our people." Kurt: Right. Brian: And that's the thing is that, what I knew I needed, I don't wanna make just a beautiful item, I have to make something that lasts and is durable. And we have been so thrilled to be working with Saddleback's team. They have a plant in Mexico that we use, and it's just phenomenal, they treat their people really well. I've been there, I've seen what they do. It's just a fantastic company to work with. Yeah, so that's who we use for all our leather. So that happened in 2012, and we launched this little leather wallet case with them; and it was partly made here, actually. Some of it was made here, some of it was made in Mexico. It was all brought to St. Paul and assembled, and that took off in 2012. We had a huge, huge sales cycle, our biggest year ever in 2012; at that time. Kurt: This is just a leather wallet? This was your- Brian: Yeah, it was basically, like, a leather wallet case with our wood frame. We had our unique wood frame attached to all leather, so it was really durable. And that started in 2012, it was featured in the New York Times in 2013. We had a big year in 2013 and 14 because of it. Yeah, iPhone cases were real good to us in the first three years. And then, in 2013, 14 is when we started developing our lifestyle line. That's when we started bringing in bags, we started creating ... Our first bag launch was in late 2013. Kurt: I'm admiring your Classic Journeyman leather wallet on your website. I gotta- Brian: Oh yeah. Kurt: Pick up one of these. Oh, and it even comes in different colors. Brian: Oh yeah. Kurt: Oh that chest- Brian: Yeah, if that Chestnut looks familiar, you've seen it at Saddleback Leather. And I have no problem promoting Saddleback, cause honestly, it's a great company. Dave and I are different designer styles, definitely, but he makes great bags. He makes great bags. Kurt: Yeah, I see right on here. It says, "30 day, money back promise, and 10 year leather guarantee." Brian: Yeah. Kurt: So tell me, was it scary to offer this kind of warranty? Brian: Yeah. Yeah, it always is. It was funny cause I had a guy from inc.com, I was doing an interview two years ago, and he asked me, "Why not lifetime warranty? Why 25?" And I thought, it was a good question, and I thought, because lifetime is so cliched; everyone says lifetime. But by putting 25 years, what I'm trying to say is, it's gonna last two and half decades. You're gonna get a lot of use out of it. And by the time they last two and half decades, you're probably gonna want another one anyhow. You know, we'll have new stuff by then. Kurt: Right. Brian: I think we put a year around it because it gives it a definitive, like, wow this is built to really last. Yes, it's built to last. Is it scary? Yeah, it is, because you do have things break. Hardware breaks, stitching fails; it happens from time to time. We repair it and take care of it, but yeah. Put it this way, I don't feel nervous about the quality we're putting out, though. Does that make sense? We got a lot of confidence behind what we're doing. Kurt: Right, if you're confident in it, it shouldn't be scary. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: If you believe in your product, you shouldn't be afraid of it. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: I mean, really, your only fear is will people abuse it? And you're always gonna get someone who does. Brian: Yeah. I mean, we started coming out with ... We found a book bindery material that lasts more than six months. We found one that lasts for years. Now, we put a one year warranty on it, but it'll last. We tell customers, it's a one year warranty, but you'll have it for years. Because we found this really tough buckram, that's really beautiful; it's used in the library of Congress. That's what we wrap our iPad cases in. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: So for us, it's all about the materials. Will they last? So I guess I'm ... No, to answer the question, I'm not too worried because we're trying to use the materials that will last. Kurt: Right. Brian: Yeah. Kurt: So you've got, you're in the process ... Well, probably by the time this airs, maybe, your Shopify store will have launched. Brian: Hard to say. Kurt: Hard to say. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. Brian: We actually see a delay coming because of, and you can edit this out if you want, or keep it in, I don't care. We may be unable to switch for at least a month or two because of a new iPad coming out in a few weeks. Kurt: (laughs) Cool. Brian: Because of that, we're gonna have so much lift on the site, we are very hesitant to shift platforms until the sales calm down. Kurt: So what platform are you on now? Brian: Magento. Kurt: And you're switching to Shopify Plus. Tell me- Brian: Thank God. Kurt: (laughs) Alright, so what happened? Why are you doing that? Brian: We were told early on, I had talked to a consulting group, and they said, "Oh, you should be on Magento, it's scalable, you can customize." All true, all true. I call Magento, kinda like, the PC, and Shopify is kinda like a Mac. Kurt: Hmm. Brian: That's how I see the two. I mean, you can do a lot of customization on Shopify, but it's very plug and play friendly. And for the entrepreneur who wants to start a company, the last thing you want, is to be figuring out how many hours you can pay a $150 an hour developer. Because if you have a Magento site, that's what you're doing all the time. You're paying a developer, constantly, for the smallest changes. Kurt: Right. Brian: Whereas, on Shopify, you have app store, you have plugins. We're, of course, with what we're doing, we're paying developers to help us with small projects here and there. But for the most part, it's really a lot easier to assemble a Shopify site. Magento is definitely customizable, but boy, you better have Magento Pro engineers, who are doing all your coding. They have to do all your maintenance, manage all your plugins. If you have conflicts with your plugins, that's up to you to figure it out. Shopify does all that for you. They do that thinking for you. Kurt: Right. Brian: That's something that is a huge benefit to us. We were debating Magento 2.0, last year, or Shopify, and came down on Shopify. Kurt: What was the straw that broke the camel's back, where you said, alright it's time to make the switch? Cause it is not an easy task to change platforms when you've got an existing, running business. Brian: It's not. I think, a couple things. One, we designed this site about three to four years ago, it was starting to feel three to four years old. The current site at padandquill.com if you go there right now, it's three to four years old design. And we're kinda, you know what, we need to make this a little cleaner. We've moved more into a luxury lifestyle brand. We wanna even display more large imagery about our lifestyle and what we do, and what we love. So, that was kinda the impetus to go, okay, what platform do we want it? We were thinking, originally, Magento 2.0, and then we started considering just how much technical work was required; and that's when we reached out to Shopify, and it was a pretty easy sale. Cause we were like, "Sounds good!" I mean, we'd pay a certain fee. We're on Shopify, what's it called? Shopify Plus? Kurt: Shopify Plus. Brian: Yeah, so we're paying a fee, but that's like, I already pay that fee with a developer right now to guarantee 99.9% uptime. Kurt: Right, yeah. Brian: I have to pay someone that right now. Kurt: Yeah. The thing you're trading ... It's interesting to sell, trying to explain the benefits and the value proposition of Shopify Plus to an existing Shopify store owner. They're like, "Alright." You have to figure out, like, what's the problem you're facing, and the Shopify Plus will solve it. Versus when someone is on Magento and they're looking at switching and you go, well you don't worry about, you know, for one flat fee, someone else is gonna manage and you never worry about hosting uptime, updates, security, all of that goes away, and support. Brian: Right. Kurt: And it just becomes a no brainer. Brian: And we've had security issues, just being open with you. We've had some security issues pop up because of outdated plugins. Kurt: Right, and those- Brian: And all kinds of stuff. And it was, like, an outdated plugin in a blog. Kurt: Yeah. Brian: On our Magento site. And someone had gotten in through the back door, and we caught it, fixed it. But it was one of these things where we're like, okay Shopify does all that for us. Kurt: Yeah. I have, literally, never seen a security vulnerability like that happen on Shopify. Whereas, previously we did a lot of WordPress development work, and that was like a constant, constant battle trying to keep those things locked down. Brian: Right. That's the last thing you need to be worrying about. Right? Kurt: Yeah, that's just such an unnecessary- Brian: I mean, that's the last thing. When you're designing products, you're trying to ... Cause what am I? I'm a designer. I'm a salesman. I'm a community developer. Like, we have a family of customers, that's where our focus needs to be. You know? Not on security issues on the site. Cause 98% of our revenue comes from eCommerce, our store. Kurt: Hmm. That's excellent. Brian: Yeah, we are not in wholesale. We're very much like Saddleback; we're eCommerce only. Kurt: So, we're coming to the end of our time together. You have had a long, successful, and wonderful journey over the last seven years. What are some of the things you've learned, that you would go back tell yourself when you were starting out? Brian: Oh, that's a great question. Did I tell you to ask me that question? That's a good one. Kurt: (laughs) No, no. You said what three things have you learned building a brand? Brian: Yeah. I would say this, if you have a product you're making that's starting to sell, and it's selling pretty well and you love making that product, and other products like it ... Whatever the field is, whatever you do, be very careful to not listen to consultants too much. There is wisdom in a host of counselors, there really is. But in the end, your passion has to be from you about what you wanna sell and bring to your customers. So be careful how much you listen to consult ... I did a lot of consultant listening early on, that I wouldn't do now. I would just be who I am. And the more that Kari and I have just been who we are as a couple in this business, the more success we've seen. The more we have followed what other people have told us, "Well, you're getting big now. You really need to think about strategic changes." Those are big disasters. Not disasters, that's a heavy word. Those have not been fruitful. So, be who you are. To the degree that you can do something you love, is a huge blessing, it really is. Not everyone gets that opportunity. Like I said, I was painting for 17 years. I was thankful I was able to bring in an income, but I didn't really enjoy painting. So, where you can match a passion or a desire to income, it's awesome. But it's not ... I don't think it's something you can always do. Does that make sense? Kurt: No, absolutely. Brian: I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here, because it's pretty hard to do that. Kurt: I think it comes down to having an authentic voice, being true to yourself, being true to your brand. Brian: Yep. Kurt: The hard part is figuring out what that voice and brand are, and then letting that show through. Every time I've been scared to include more of my personality in my marketing and my work, it has always paid off. You know, people like having that authentic voice; and that's what part of the podcast is. Brian: Right. Kurt: I'm myself on the show, and then by the time someone says, "Hey Kurt, could we work together on this?" And we get on the phone, they go, "I feel like I already know you." Yeah, because the whole time, I've been myself, and that's so important. Brian: Right. That is so important. It is so important. Plus, you'll just be happier with yourself, at the end of the day. Cause you've been true to yourself, even if the business doesn't work out. You just don't guarantee that any of these businesses will succeed, right? Kurt: No, absolutely not. It's always a risk. Brian: But in the end of day, if they fail, were you yourself? Were you trying to be yourself? Yeah. Kurt: So, Brian- Brian: A good entrepreneur gets back up and says, "Okay, what can I do next?" Kurt: Yeah, you learn from it, you move on. Brian: Yep. Kurt: And try the next thing. Brian: Yep. Kurt: So Brian, where can people go to learn more about you? Brian: Yeah, so, the best place to learn about us is at www.padandquill.com. So that's our website, click on About Us if you wanna see our story in more detail; that's at the bottom of the page, About Us. You'll see a picture of Kari and I, and there's kind of our story, and kinda what drives us, our passion is very interesting as well. Also, coupon code. We have a coupon code for your listeners. Kurt: Wonderful. Brian: So bhappy. So the letter B, and then happy, H-A-P-P-Y, number 10, just one zero. That's 10% off anything, any product, including bags, leather bags as well. Kurt: And they are beautiful bags. 10%. Brian: Thank you! Thank you. Kurt: Alright, I wrote that down, I will include it in the show notes for folks. Brian: Cool. Kurt: Brian, thank you for everything. I appreciate it. Brian: Yeah, Kurt, thanks so much for having us on, and wish you best with your success on your podcast. Kurt: Thank you. That's all for us today at The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. So please, join our Facebook group, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders, and let me know. Or sign up for my newsletter, kurtelster.com, shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified whenever a new episode goes live. And of course, if you'd like to work with me on your next Shopify project, you can apply at Ethercycle. Com. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.

Everyone has a story, but few people take the time to tell it. My guest today started a podcast to tell his story, despite having little experience with podcasting. As a result, he’s growing an audience, making new friends, and learning a lot along the way.Brian Sanders is a project manager and app designer who formed a startup to build a new podcast app and platform called Nexcast. He’s joining me today to share what he’s learned in his startup and podcasting journey so far, and how podcasting is helping him learn more about his target audience and his product.Key Takeaways:People will reach out to you if you take the time to share your story.People relate to struggles. Don’t be afraid to share yours.It’s important to go make things happen—don’t wait for good things to happen to you.If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.Podcasting, videos, and blogging all come back to opening up, sharing your experiences, and telling your story—that’s how you build community.You don’t always have to have the best equipment—use what you have and start telling your story today.Aaron: Joining us today is Brian Sanders from Nexcast. Brian, you’re trying to build a podcast app and maybe a platform. What’s your backstory?Brian: I grew up in Hawaii and I got into UCLA for mechanical engineering, so I came to LA and I’ve been here ever since. I started in the engineering world where I actually got to design some rides for Universal Studios and Disneyland. So I was doing engineering, but I didn’t like it that much. The company I was working for went out of business during the recession and I went to another similar company.That’s actually when I found podcasts, when I was sitting at a computer working on 3D models all day. It was kind of boring, so I was listening to podcasts eight hours a day. I would be laughing in my cubical and none of my coworkers even knew what podcasts were. I realized I wanted to be more entrepreneurial—I liked to design and be creative—so I started doing that on the side.I started doing design for other people and getting paid for it. I joined up with a developer and we started building whole products for people in LA, New York, and Chicago for a couple of years. It took a while to figure it out because I was learning on my own, but eventually I got a job. One of my clients hired me on and we started working at a tech company in Santa Monica where I got to learn a lot more about the processes of building technology and managing an engineering team.I still had projects on the side. I had an app that was like Instagram for writing, where you could post a photo with stories and you add chapters. People could comment and follow you. I decided to sell it to a private company, quit my job, and started working on a podcast app idea that had been in the back of my mind for awhile.Overlapping & Taking Your Side Project Full TimeAaron: So you worked your day job for a few years and saved up money and stripped back your expenses so that when you quit, you could support yourself doing your own thing.Brian: Exactly. The biggest thing is to start pretending you’re not making a lot of money (even if you’re working a good job), and save as much money as you can.Aaron: That’s very long-term focused. I think a lot of people struggle with that.Brian: It takes a lot of discipline. I pretended like I was making minimum wage, but I was really happy. I had a couple of roommates from Hawaii that I grew up with and we still had a great time. You can get a lot out of life even if you aren’t spending much money.Aaron: If you’re trying to go freelance or do anything that doesn’t guarantee you a steady paycheck, it’s important to practice for that while you’re working a day job. I know that’s not related to podcasting, but it’s important. Living cheaply is why I’m able to do what I do—podcast editing and helping people make podcasts. I learned in my twenties to save money and to really think about what was important for me to spend money on.There are a lot of things that you can spend money on, but sometimes it’s better to not spend money so that later you can pursue your dreams. For example, you quit your job and you had this idea to work on a podcast app, maybe even a platform. Was that your plan when you quit your job, or was that a more recent development?Brian: I didn’t pursue it fully until I put that platform bigger picture together. I wondered if we could listen to podcasts in a more interactive way or have more features. Why isn’t anyone building a better podcast app? The problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to make it a business and it seems like not many other people have either. The podcast industry is weird, but it’s growing. It’s hard to put together the business model. The day I figured out the business model, I started focusing on it for real and I put everything else to the side.Your Life is a Story – Document ItAaron: When did you start your own podcast to tell the story of what you’re doing?Brian: It started about five months after I got the idea for the app. Now that it’s happening, it’s like, “Of course we should be doing a podcast. We have to tell our story and get people involved.”Aaron: There are so many people who have stories, but they don’t document or share them. If you’re not writing, publishing blog posts, or even journaling, you’re going to regret that in the future. Brian, you’re going through a period in your life where you’re trying to start a company and you’re documenting the process so anyone who’s interested can hear it.12:43 Aaron: You’re seven episodes into your podcast so far. Do you have a background in working with audio?Brian: No, but in high school I worked a little bit with video. That really helped. I haven’t done anything with video since then, but I always think I can teach myself anything, and anyone can learn. It’s easy these days with all the tools and resources online. You just have to start.Getting a Team TogetherAaron: You’re trying to build a team to help you create this podcast app. How’s that going so far? I know you’ve been struggling to find a new CTO.Brian: We had an interesting process of getting a team together. As a non-developer, it’s always really hard to get developers on your team. It’s the #1 goal of your life. You don’t want to hire people from other countries because that never really works out well, and great developers always have jobs and are very expensive. Sometimes it seems like there are no options.Aaron: Do you have funding or enough money to pay a full-time developer’s salary?Brian: Well, Troy has a good job, so he’s busy all day and he has some money, but we’re not paying anyone. We have to find people who are in it for equity. Our next episode is about this crazy battle with some teens in the Philipines that have my Twitter handle (we’ve been in this crazy journey for nine months trying to get it back from them). After that, there’s going to be an episode about getting our new CTO.Aaron: I usually want to be paid for work I do, but at the same time, when I started editing podcasts, I was working for free. I started a podcast with some people I knew online and they needed someone to edit the show, and because I was interested in becoming a podcaster and podcast editor, I was willing to do the editing without getting paid. I’m glad you found someone though, because that can be really hard. Did he listen to your podcast?Brian: He didn’t initially, but the fact that we had a podcast helped. I could point him to it so he could see we were legit. But other people who listen have been getting in touch. There’s another developer who wants to join who happens to be in LA who found us by listening. That guy just wants to be part of the journey. It’s huge, having a podcast has been great.Share Your MistakesAaron: It’s one thing to be a stranger randomly emailing people on the internet saying, “Hey, help me with my project.” It’s a whole different thing if you open up and you share your journey, what you’re struggling with, who you are, and where you’re planning to go—sharing your story rallies people around you. This is not just for startups or businesses. You will make connections and people will find you. You’ll build a community.People will reach out to you if you take the time to share your story.Brian: Looking back, I can’t imagine not doing a podcast. There were different routes to go down and it was important to us to share the shortcomings and the mistakes. We didn’t want to be startup bros saying, “We’re killing it! This is going awesome! Everything we’re doing is cool!” I edited the first episode and people don’t realize I left all the bad parts of the pitch. I made it sound worse than it probably was.Aaron: So you went to pitch an investor. You recorded the conversation and included it in the first episode of your podcast. You left the rough parts in because people relate to struggles—winning all the time isn’t interesting to most people. The first episode really grabbed me and I’m pretty picky about podcasts. I’m choosy about what I listen to and I really enjoyed your show.Brian: I’ve only had one bad podcasting experience. All the other podcasters I’ve talked to have been amazing. This one guy thought I was the worst sales guy ever because he listened to that first episode and he heard me stumbling my way through that pitch. When I was interviewed on show, he said, “So, you’re the worst salesman ever. What do you do? You don’t build the technology and you couldn’t even get through a simple sales pitch.” I guess he didn’t realize that I edited that episode and chose to put that stuff in.Aaron: Did you find it hard to put out those imperfections and mistakes?Brian: Yeah, I regret it sometimes. I worry that it makes us look like idiots. There could be VC’s listening and they might be discounting us now. It might make a better story, but I might be losing my chances at investment. Sometimes I wonder if I can pull the episode, re-edit it, and put it back.Get UncomfortableAaron: You told me on the phone the other day that you’re trying to get on Planet of the Apps. Can you explain why and give a brief overview of what that is?Brian: Apple hasn’t released all the details yet, but they’re producing a show with some big names like Will.i.am, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gary Vaynerchuck. They haven’t told us the exact format of the show, but it sounds a little bit like Shark Tank, or a reality show about app developers. The developers who are accepted to the show get access to mentoring, funding, and marketing and promotions.Aaron: It sounds like a great opportunity for you. So you drove across town to audition?Brian: Yeah, there was an event. Will.i.am was there and he talked about what he wanted to see. There were a bunch of casting agents there. There was this one casting area that no one was paying attention to. Everyone was wanting to talk to Will.i.am or nervously milling around, and I told my partner we needed to just charge these casting guys. We needed to sound like we had something really cool, and eventually we did that.We found the lead casting agent and got him to sit down with us. We said, “We’re building something cool. Podcasts are awesome.” He didn’t listen to podcasts, so we had to make sure he knew how big podcasts are. We told him, “They change peoples’ lives, and we’re going up against Apple, who has their own podcast app already. This is good tv! We’re taking on Apple and we’re already doing a podcast about us building this app.”He said, “I’m going to skip you ahead of the casting process. Make me a 10-minute video.” So we made the video and they emailed us the next day and wanted headshots. They wanted to see the app, but I had to tell them it wasn’t ready yet. We’re hoping to hear back from them soon.Aaron: The takeaway here is that you could have just said, “Our app isn’t ready yet. We’re probably not going to win this,” and you could have stayed home, but you drove across town and you showed up. You tried to talk to people and make stuff happen. I just wanted to highlight that.It’s important to go make things happen. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you.Brian: There was as a specific moment where we were nervous and it could have gone either way. We had a choice; either just turn in our 1-minute audition video like everyone else and hope we’d get noticed, or go talk to the casting guy and try to make something happen. I’m happy we chose the latter.Aaron: It’s scary, but if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.What’s Next for You?Aaron: What do you see in the future for yourself and your startup?Brian: We had a few hiccups, but now we’re finally moving and things are back on track. Our overarching goal is to make podcasting better for everyone. We’re working on an app that brings the content right into the app. For example, you’ve got show notes and you send people to your site, but not everyone is going to do that, so we want to put that stuff right in the app.It will show the visual content, photos of guests, promotions, links to your products, etc. It’s all right in the app. We’re also working on discussions and comment threads.There are different comment areas on the internet that aren’t so great, but podcasts audiences are passionate and enthusiastic. It seems to me like the best place to have discussions.Aaron: Having the ability to have a discussion about a podcast episode and go back and forth with other people inside the app would be really interesting. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, though.Brian: It’s just the beginning, but I think we’re positioned in a good way. All of my team members have their own jobs, which could be seen as a down side, like they’re not focused or it’s not a career, but that’s what’s going to help us last a long time without investment. We’re going to see what happens and get advice from the community we’re in to see what features they want. It could take years, but I’m ready for that.Aaron: It make take even longer than that, but you’re learning in the process. You’ll make some mistakes but you’ll document them for others to learn from, which is great.Q&A:Alex Castro asks: “Should I document the development of my brand, maybe on YouTube or a blog instead of podcasting? Sharing the journey as I go seems super scary.”Brian: It is scary. YouTube might fit better if you’re doing a lot of visual things or if you’re already good at doing video. Why not? It will be scary, but you’ll realize that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had 99.9% positive feedback, except for one weird guy on a podcast. He was just a hater who hasn’t really built anything of his own.Aaron: Alex is a phenomenal visual designer, and I think sharing your story in a video format or blogging with pictures is fine. The lines between blogging, podcasting, and video are all starting to blur for me.I’m starting to think of these just as sharing a message or telling a story, instead of separate things. They are separate things, but if you start off by writing a blog post, you’ve got words that can be recorded and that’s a podcast. Or you could record a video of yourself saying those words. There’s different formatting and editing you can do, but it’s really all the same thing.Podcasting, producing video, and blogging all come back to opening up, sharing your experiences, and telling your story.That’s how you build community. That’s how you attract like-minded people and make friends. Opportunities will come from it. Even if you don’t think you have an interesting story yet, start telling it. You’ll find your story if you dig.Brian: Just start doing it. It took us a few months to put everything together before we even went live with it. You figure it out as you go and you write ahead. No one has ever regretted putting their story out there.Links:Podcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcastingYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowdBlog: https://www.aarondowd.comRecommended Gear: https://kit.co/podcastingwithaaron

ternet commentator has suggested setting a 7-year validity period of marriage certificate on his weibo account, which he believes can solve a lot of social problems. His words have sparked several severe criticism online. Could marriage certificate have a validity certificate like other certificates? 近日，某网络评论员在微博上提出一种大胆而令人惊叹的声音：结婚证应设置一个7年有效期，到期自动离婚，这样一来，许多社会问题就会迎刃而解。这一言论引起了网友大肆的口诛笔伐。结婚证是否应该像其他证件一样设定有效期呢？ Laiming: So who is this guy? What he’s proposing? Brian: Well, his name is Lu Guoping (鲁国平) and he is a column writer and internet commentator lives in Shanghai. He has done lots of essays on various newspapers, journals, and what-not. For quite a while, he does ads, news interviewing, editing, all kinds of different stuff there. So he gets this idea perhaps in lowering the divorce rate which has been increasing in recent years and says “Well, how about when you get married, instead of just a lifetime sort of thing is kind of the intent you think, let’s just kept it seven years so that you kind have to either you renew it or it’s up and thanks for the good time.” Laiming: What's the point behind this? What are the grounds that he uses to support his idea? What good could come of the marriage that comes with the 7-year warranty? Brian: Well, again, if were concerned about divorce rates, and if you have a contract that just expires, and that doesn’t count as a divorce. If people are doing this, then that would lead to fewer divorces. Whether or not that actually matters or is it a good thing in anyway, it’s a separate question. But that is one part of it. The other point he makes is that a lot of marriages don’t work well. And rather than having to kind of torment people by forcing them to just continue that throughout their whole lives, it kind of gives them a way out and stops the suffering itself. Laiming: Isn’t that the purpose of divorce? Brian: But divorce is often a messy sort of a complicated process. If you do like this, it’s like OK, we don’t have to go through any actual things, we just have to wait out the time. Laiming: So we don’t have to fight for our kids, we don’t have to fight for the properties. Brain: Exactly. Perfect, isn’t it? Luo Yu: I think, you know, even for those people who want to get divorce, 7 years might be too long for them to terminate their contract. Laiming: Why wait for 7 years then they can get a divorce? Luo Yu: I think this gentleman, Mr. Lu Guoping, is trying to make some media hype there. And all of his arguments don’t hold water. For example, he said this probably will lower the divorce rate. But if the couples end up in divorcing, this is divorce anyway. What’s the meaning of lowering the so-called divorce rate? Laiming: Well, I guess his point is instead of having couples fight and decide to have a divorce, we’re going to separate them before they have the chance to fight for a divorce. Brian: Exactly, because again, if it happens, let’s say, most couples who are gonna to have a divorce, they divorce after 8 years, whatever reasons. Then this actually might be a beneficial thing if there were tons of people who were following that pattern. There’s no real reason, I think, to suggest that. I’m wondering because there’s a famous phrase which I think came from the movie called The 7-Year Itch, I’m wondering if this is where he got his idea, because as you just mentioned when we talked earlier, why would people go to 7 years? There’re a lot of people who get divorce even don’t make it to five years, or even three years. Laiming: Yeah, what a torment for them to wait for two more years! Shame. Luo Yu: And consider about the wedding vow, it will be very ridiculous if we implement this 7-year contract. Because in the wedding vow, it says for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Laiming: In a 7-year do we part. Luo Yu: In the future, until 7 years, the certificate expires, do we part. It will be very ridiculous. Brian: It would be. Luo Yu: And some people even said this will promote economic growth. Come on, how can you… Brian: Well, I think the argument there was, OK, weddings, these big ceremonies, maybe you have divorce ceremonies as well, and those cost money. So if you have a new wedding, every, let’s say, ten years, then you’re spending more money, right? Luo Yu: And probably, Brian, you have to buy a new apartment, then a new car. Brian: I see there you go. In that Chinese situation, it’s even better. Because, you know, if you have one from your first marriage, that’s not good enough. This would stimulate consumption so much. It’ll be perfect. Luoyu: But what if you’ve already generated or produced so many babies, and you have a bunch of mother-in-laws and father-in-laws together with you.Brian: Well, again, you need to spend more money to keep them happy thus increase consumption. Clearly this is economic goal here.Laiming: One more strong argument coming from this Lu Guoping is that he believes the kids will enjoy more care and love because there will be more step mothers and step fathers.Brian: That is an interesting idea. I would say it would be better to have a lot of parents than to have just one, regardless who they are exactly.Laiming: Then we should go back to the prehistoryBrian: There is that idea. I think there probably is a study showing kids who have to travel back and forth between various household, especially when it is not just two, but maybe more than that…Laiming: What a wonderful opportunity to see the world!Brian: Yeah, see the world, see dysfunction experience, instability, as a kid when you are supposed to have a good upbringing. It’s not ideal.Laiming: What doesn’t kill you make you stronger.Brian: Maybe not for kids.Luoyu: I think now in China getting married or getting divorced have become so much easier than before. You just go to the civil office there, you have a stamp on your certificate and you both get married or you both get divorced. I think when it comes to marriage, the couple should have thought about it very prudently and thoughtfully, otherwise you guys shouldn’t have got married in the first place. As we have made this procedure so much easier, I mean, the husband doesn’t have any financial burden. Like in other countries like Holland, after divorce, if one side lacks sufficient basic living resources, the other side will have the duty to pay alimony.Brian: Alimony, yes, that’s a common thing in the U.S.. Oftentimes, if you get divorced, the man has to pay the woman a good bit of money, especially if there is a kid there. But it is easy to get divorced in the U.S.. But it is easier to live together beforehand also which is kind of like this trial marriage, which is somewhat going on here. Even if we agree with some of these goals here, I’m not sure that has any practical effect.Laiming: You two gentlemen have marvelously given some very diplomatic comments on this new story. I want to make it personal. You guys haven’t got married yet. How do you feel about having this choice?Brian: Well personally, I don’t feel any interest. I think people should be allowed in general to do what they want. I think as some of us have said here, if you are not ready to go the full distance, if you only want to do seven years, why are you getting married.Laiming: Luoyu, I have to question you.Luoyu: My perspective is quite simple. I take marriage very very seriously.Laiming: Which is why you are not married yet.Luoyu: Yes.Brian: That’s a good thing. You need to be serious. You need to make sure you have the right person beforehand. Don’t rush into it.

Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to Roundtable’s Word of the Week. This week we are giving out the secret of saying no.Brian: Yes. That’s right because as much as we want to be nice to everybody all the time, sometimes whether we have a good reason or a bad reason, we don’t really want to do things that people ask us to do.Xiaohua: Exactly. 所以我们今天就来聊一聊如何礼貌的拒绝别人，say no.Brian: Exactly, and there’re quite a few ways here. So first of all, we have things like “I can’t commit to this right now as I have other priorities at the moment.” This would be the case that if you might actually want to do this but you have other things going on. There’re more important things to you so it just doesn’t work right now. Maybe later though.Xiaohua: 我真的很想帮你做这件事情，但是现在还有一件更紧急的事情等着我去做。Now this basically says that you’re occupied somewhere else but you don’t need to say specifically what the thing that you’re doing at the moment is.Brian: Exactly, exactly. It’s like do I’ve got some stuff going on and that’s actually kind of similar to our second one here. You can say things like “Now’s not a good time. I’m in the middle of something. Ca we come back to this another time, or at whatever time?” And that again, very useful if you have something right now but you’d like to help later.Xiaohua: now’s not a good time. “现在这个时间非常不凑巧，我正忙着呢。” 也是一个非常简单的say no的办法. But what if that person comes back another time and asks is this a good time? Brian: Well, hopefully it is, and then if it’s not, and you have a good excuse to that, then you tell them and be very apologetic and say “I’m really sorry. This still isn’t a good time. How about this?” And then if the third time you still can’t do it, you probably should just do it otherwise it’s going to be bad.Xiaohua: Or thee other person should realize that you really do not want to do it.Brian: That’s an East-West cultural difference there perhaps. In China, it might be the case. In the West, may be, maybe not. Xiaohua: I see.Brian: And then another we have here is “I’d love to help you” or “I’d love to do this, but…” and then you give some kind of explanation there. That’s when maybe you want to do this but you have something else that prevents you from doing it, but “I can’t do this because of this and that” or you’re just kind of finding excuse there. “I’d love to, but” whatever excuse. Xiaohua: 这个 “I’d love to，but…” 句型真的是拒绝别人的时候一个非常常用的句型。Usually when somebody says “I’d really love to do it”, there’s a “but” following that.Brian: Yes. You can tell when a “but” is coming for a lot of things. Another one we have here is “Let me think about that and I’ll get back to you.” That’s kind of like a “maybe”, and again, maybe a good reason for that, maybe you actually don’t want to do that at all, but it gives you some time. You don’t have to commit to a “yes” or “no” right now. Xiaohua: “让我先想一想待会儿再回复你。”这听上去好像是拖延战术。It sounds like you don’t want to give a “no” now, but you might give out one later.Brian: Yes, or maybe later you might just say “Hey, I do want to do this.” Who knows? Next up, we have “This doesn’t meet my needs right now” or “This isn’t what I’m looking for right now, but I’ll be sure to keep you in mind.” This is kind of like if someone comes up to you and they are trying to sell something to you or give you some kind of opportunity and you’re not very interested and maybe you just want to politely turn them down, or maybe you just think “You know what? Hey, this isn’t what I’m looking for right now but in the future, that could be a good thing.”Xiaohua: 这一句话“This doesn’t meet my needs” 是比较适用于有人给你一个机会或者是让你做一件事情，但是你又不想做的时候用的。I think this is really effective because you don’t stall the person. You just tell them that it’s not okay but you keep them in mind and you appreciate their offer. Brian: Exactly. Polite and direct. And another one we have here: “You know, I’m not the best person to help on this. Why don’t you try so and so?” It’s because sometimes that really is the case. They come for you to help on this topic and you are really bad at it. Then you’re not going to be able to help them, so you suggest someone else. Of course, if you don’t want to do this, and you just want to push it off on someone else, you can also use it for that.Xiaohua: 当有的人要来问你一些根本不属于你专长的事情的时候，你就可以用这句话来搪塞啦。“这块儿我不是很熟耶，你要不要去问问那个人？”It’s just like when someone asks me a Spanish word pronunciation, I’m going to say this. Brian: Indeed, indeed. And lastly, there’s just this simple “No” or “No. I can’t.” or “Sorry. Doesn’t work for me.” That’s just when you don’t have anything else and you just got to say no.Xiaohua: 当你实在是不知道该怎样拒绝别人的时候，直接说“No”可能是最好的办法啦。And that’s all we have for Roundtable’s Word of the Week. I hope you have learnt these by heart.

Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to RoundTable’s Word of the Week. Now today Brian and I are going to talk about something food-related.Brian: That’s right. We’re talking about all the different ways to describe how good your food tastes because in Chinese you often say it’s literally “good eat” or “good taste” or whatever. For a lot of people, they’ll check the dictionary and say, “Oh, it’s delicious.” That’s a very common phrase and it’s not incorrect but the most common one, you just say, “Oh wow, that was good” or “Man, that food tastes so good.” It’s just kind of like Chinese there and it is actually a little more common than saying delicious.Xiaohua: 我们中国人在说什么东西好吃的时候，基本就说”好吃”、”真好吃。”但是呢，其实在英语里面 “Delicious”这个词并不是我们想象中的那么常用，而用最简单的 “good,” “That’s good food,” or “That tastes so good,” 倒反而是一种更加常用的用法。Brian: Exactly. And then we also get “appetizing” there. For this, you don’t actually have to use that much after you’ve tasted the food. It’s more like you walk into a room, especially if you have appetizers, but even with dinner or whatever you see on the table especially, you get the sights, and you get the smells there, and you’re like, “Man, that food looks so appetizing. I just want to get a piece of that. Can I start eating now?” Xiaohua: “Appetizing” 直接的翻译是说 “开胃的” 、”促进食欲的”。但是这个词经常使用在当我们看到卖相很好的食物的时候说的，而不是在吃进食物之后表达它有多么好吃的时候说的。We don’t want to make the mistake of gobbling something up and then say “appetizing”.Brian: That would come often as a little weird, and then another one that I personally like quite a bit is “scrumptious”, “simply scrumptious.” I feel like maybe this you might have seen this in one of those Willy Wonka movies over there, but it’s a little bit funny ‘cause it’s kind of formal but if you use it in kind of a humorous or light-hearted situation, such as “Ah! Simply scrumptious! I must have some more of that.” or you’re kind of being mock-formal and that kind of thing. But it’s definitely a compliment to whoever’s made that food for you. Xiaohua: “Scrumptious” 虽然也是在书面场合用到的词，但是当你对朋友的厨艺赞赏到 “scrumptious” 的时候，他可是会非常高兴的啊。Brian: Yes, and of course, even besides these different words here, there’re a lot of different phrases we use in English where we use these different flavors to describe something that isn’t food. For example, “a sweet tooth.” Lots of people, especially Americans, have “a sweet tooth.” That means you really like foods that are sweet, and often have a lot of sugars. Xiaohua: That’s right. 下面来讲一下跟酸甜苦辣各种味道相关的一些英文中的习语。 “A sweet tooth,” 那就是非常喜欢吃甜食。Brian: Also, we’ve got another one – “short and sweet”, or often “keep it short and sweet”, that you want to keep it nice and not too long.Xiaohua: “Short and sweet” 其实就是简明扼要的意思。I wish all the speeches in these Chinese meetings can be short and sweet.Brian: Ah, that would be nice there, but meetings are sometimes important. Also, we’ve got “sweet talk.” A lot of people have probably been “sweet-talked” at some point. They want a favor and they come up and like, “Oh, I love your outfit there. That’s just so good, and you’re looking so good today. By the way, I have this little thing, and I think it would be really good for you.” If someone’s going like that, they’re sweet-talking you.Xiaohua: “Sweet talk’”是甜言蜜语， 而且不是平常所说的恭维大家。经常在 “sweet talk’”后面还有一些等着你要干的活，或者等着你要帮的忙。Brian: Exactly, exactly. Then, we have some other flavors here, of course, like “sour,” “sour grapes,” which I think in my personal experience, it’s been more like you say “Oh, don’t be a bag of sour grapes” or whatever. You’re just kind of criticizing things and being negative without much of a use or reason.Xiaohua: “Sour grapes.” “酸葡萄。”这个字好像中文和英文的意思差不多。就是说，自己得不到什么样的东西，但是你也别老去抱怨别人。Brian: And then even besides “sour,” of course we also have “bitter.” And “bitter” is actually an interesting thing because it’s an important flavor in Chinese cuisine, but in Western, and certainly in American cuisine, it almost never comes up. So it’s a cultural difference. But we have things like “to the bitter end,” “to the very end,” all the way through whether it’s good or bad.” And often if it is “bitter,” it’s grueling, it’s long, and it’s hard work. You just have to go through all the way with it to the very end. Xiaohua: “To the bitter end” 这个词是说坚持到最后，一直到最后的意思。Brian: Yes, and besides that, we also have “spicy,” which is again, also something that’s a little more common in Chinese food than in certainly American food there, but it does come up, and it does come up in language quite a lot too. For example, “to spice things up,” to make it more interesting, or we often have to go for “sexy” as a common popular word for that. So instead of keeping things boring, doing the same thing everyday, you change something, add a little spice, and then spice things up there. Xiaohua: “Spice things up”基本上就是说让生活变得更有意思一些，或者是让这个party变得更热辣一些。Brian: And lastly, we have “the spice of life” or “variety is the spice of life,” meaning that you don’t want to do the same thing everyday so you add variety, and that is the spice of life. Xiaohua: “Spice of life” 也有点像是生活的调味剂的意思。 And that wraps up this edition of RoundTable’s Word of the Week.