Podcast appearances and mentions of chris don

In this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, I sit down with Jacob Robinson, the founder of Dig World, a construction-themed amusement park. Jacob's journey from owning a commercial cleaning business to launching a theme park was inspired by his son Pierce's courage in overcoming a severe illness. Jacob shares how this personal experience drove him to create a space where families can make lasting memories by operating real construction equipment. We also explore Jacob's unexpected invitation to appear on Shark Tank, which initially seemed too good to be true. Jacob describes the rigorous preparation process for the show and how securing a deal with Robert Herjavec provided significant exposure and credibility for Dig World. This experience sparked interest in franchise opportunities nationwide, propelling the business forward. However, Jacob's path has not been without challenges. He reflects on the operational setbacks faced during Dig World's grand opening and the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship. Jacob emphasizes learning from these failures and the need to be patient and ready for success. Throughout the episode, Jacob discusses his leadership evolution, focusing on servant leadership and building a passionate, customer-focused team. He highlights the importance of creating a culture of trust and creativity to ensure a safe and memorable experience for all visitors. Jacob remains committed to expanding DigWorld while offering an affordable alternative to traditional family outings. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I discussed Jacob Robinson's inspiring journey from running a commercial cleaning company to founding Dig World, a construction-themed amusement park inspired by his son Pierce's battle with a severe illness. Jacob shared the story of how an unexpected email invitation led to his appearance on Shark Tank, which resulted in a significant deal with Robert Herjavec and propelled Dig World into the national spotlight. We explored the challenges faced during Dig World's opening day, highlighting the operational setbacks that resulted in temporary closure and how these experiences taught valuable lessons about patience and readiness. Jacob explained the development of custom technology to enhance safety and functionality in the park's machinery, ensuring a secure and manageable experience for visitors operating real construction equipment. We discussed the importance of building a passionate and customer-focused team, emphasizing a culture of creativity and care that enhances the visitor experience and supports the company's mission. Jacob described his evolution from a fear-driven leadership style to one centered on servant leadership, focusing on resilience and motivating his team positively through setbacks. As Dig World plans for expansion, Jacob remains committed to offering an affordable, enriching alternative to traditional family outings, while also contemplating new mascots and improvements to machinery safety. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Dig World GUESTS Jacob RobinsonAbout Jacob TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: Jacob, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking time to come on the podcast. Jacob: No, thank you. I'm so honored to be here. Chris: So we can see from behind you. You know Dig World's your company. Take a minute to tell the listeners what Dig World is. What do you do? What are you known for? Jacob: Yeah, great question. So we are a construction theme park where we allow kids and adults to operate real construction equipment. So we let them drive real skid steers, real excavators, real UTVs would take you up and boom lifts, the whole deal. And the only thing is you need to be three years old or older. And so we truly are a fun family theme park, but we allow you to operate real construction equipment. Chris: Wow, I mean, that's amazing Real construction equipment. I can't wait to get into more of the details behind that, but first I have to ask you what was the inspiration to start a company like this? Jacob: Yeah, it's crazy. You don't wake up with a dream every day to start a construction theme park. Chris: Yeah, maybe a construction theme park, but not one where a three-year-old can operate. That's right. Jacob: That's fair? That's fair? Well, no. So we, my wife and I, were blessed. We have three amazing kids. We have nine-year-old, a five-year-old and almost a two-year-old, and so life is good and hectic right now. But my nine-year-old son, pierce, was born in 2015, a happy, healthy baby boy, and life progressed just normally and just fine. And then, in 2017, one morning on a Saturday morning, my wife found him in his crib unconscious and after rushing him to the hospital, we learned that he had contracted bacterial meningitis. We weren't sure if he was going to make it through the weekend, but the Lord had different plans. He was in a coma 12 days and we were in the hospital 75 days. And when we left the hospital, pierce left with a whole host of issues he's nonverbal, he's epileptic, he's deaf in both ears, you know, wheelchair and mental capacity of call it maybe a one-year-old, but but he is a happy little boy and, as I was telling somebody else, you know Pierce sees the world the way that we should all see the world. He doesn't see your skin color. He doesn't see your income. He doesn't see what car you drive. As long as you hang out with them, you've, we could bring people together. You know, you conceptually always understand that life is short, but when you're faced with something like that, you really understand that life is short and precious and so you want to bring people together and create memories and have good times and not just look up and say, man, all I did was work for 40, 50 years. And here I am, and so we had this idea. You know, as I told somebody, we're pretty good arrogant Texans. We thought we could build a theme park. It couldn't be that hard, right. And man, we were wrong and we'll get into that, I'm sure, at some point in the show. But Pierce's always loved construction equipment garbage trucks, dump trucks, really thinking that whole, everything in that category. And so we said, hey, we really think we could build a theme park where kids could actually come and operate real construction equipment. And for the listeners out there, some of you may be thinking, oh, this must be some toned down version. No, these are real. These are 3027s, these are 305s, these are 243 skid steers, and so these are the real deal that we have re-engineered to where it's safe, but these are the real deal that you get to operate the park. So that's how we got started. Pierce is the inspiration behind the park, the inspiration behind really a lot of things that I do in life, and bringing people together to create memories that last a lifetime. Chris: My gosh, I mean what? I mean? That's a mic drop story, jacob. I mean, you know, blessings to you and Pierce and your whole family. I hope to get the chance to meet him one day. Yes, he's the coolest member of our family. So, yes, that is amazing. So, wow. I love the inspiration and the story and this whole idea of bringing people and families together for those memories. So were you in the construction business when you started this, or what? Jacob: were you doing? I would say yes and no. I had a commercial cleaning company. I started in 2015. That was my job. We just recently sold that business and where we started that business was in the construction cleaning space. So anytime a general contractor would go and build a big building or a hotel or an office building, we would come in, we would work for the general contractor and we would do the final clean on that building. So I was kind of in the construction space. We, you know we answered to GCs all day, but I am not a construction guy by trade. I was an ag major at Texas A&M, so I was a janitor turned theme park guy. So it's been a very interesting career, as you can ask my CPA wife from all the meandering roads that we've taken. Chris: Yeah, so you know we're on inspiration. So then let's yeah, let's kind of dig into what a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners you know face is that first step right Of actually getting the courage to, to chase that dream. So let's take us back to that. What was that like? You know what were, you know what were the first steps like, what were the feelings? Like? How'd you convince that CPA wife that you know CPA wife that this wasn't quite as crazy as it sounded? Jacob: Yes, I'm not sure, when we crossed that line that the craziness went out the window. We may have been there for a couple of years, but I would say to those entrepreneurs out there it's easy to say and it's cliche to say, but everybody sees the end of the story, everybody sees Dig World. Now We've been open, we're on Shark Tank, we're franchising. You know everybody's going ah, great idea. Listen, that was not the case when we first started. We went back and counted. I had roughly 248 pitch meetings where they told me no, that I was crazy, it was never going to work. Nobody's ever going to come to this, nobody's. You know, it's not safe All these kinds of things. And so 248, it's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of no's. It's a lot of no's. To keep coming home and go, no, it was a good meeting. It was a good meeting. What did they give you? Money? Not at all, quite the opposite, but it was a good meeting, right? And so to those entrepreneurs out there that you, you, if you're pounding your head against the pavement and going, man, if one more person tells me no, hey, I've been there with you, I know what that's like. Keep pressing on, keep going. If you have the vision and you have the conviction behind it, I promise you, at some point you are going to find somebody that believes in your vision for no other reason than you've just been at it for so long and you've got conviction behind it that somebody will take a flyer on you. But it was difficult. It was difficult. We started in 2019, and then COVID hit right, and so we told people not only were we the crazy theme park people running around asking people to invest, but then we were the crazy people saying hey, listen, not only are we going to build it, we're going to get a whole bunch of people together. And that messaging wasn't going over very well during COVID, and so you know, we had all of these factors that were not going in our favor. And then, finally, in 21, in 2021, we had a first couple of people start to say yes, and then Domino's started to fall, and then we opened in March of 2022. And, frankly, that was an epic failure, too, that we can talk about as well, but it was a long journey. It was a long journey, and so my encouragement to those that are out there, either on that journey or those that are at the beginning of that journey is take a step, just take a step. Right, do something. Just call somebody and say your dream out loud, right? Call somebody and say hey, listen, I'm going to let a three-year-old drive a skid steer. Right, and the more you start to say it out loud, the better that muscle is going to become being flexed. And then, all of a sudden, you're going to be the confident person that walks in the room and goes no, yeah, of course we're going to put a three-year-old on skid steer. We're going to let them drive an excavator. We're going to have birthday parties here, and then, hey, guess what they? But that theme of just take the step, just do it just go for it. Chris: No one's ever going to believe it as much as you do, so you got to have that passion and belief and eventually you will find someone to get behind you, and then it's on you to deliver. Right, that's right, that's right, that's exactly right. So I do want to get to the story on the opening, but I have to ask you mentioned it earlier, so how did the Shark Tank thing come about? How did you, how'd you wind up on Shark Tank? Let's talk a little bit about that experience and what that was like. Jacob: Yeah, an amazing experience, you know, it just was fantastic all around. An exhausting experience nonetheless, but it was a fantastic experience. You know, we were very blessed. One day I was sitting at my computer and we got an email to our info account and said hey, would you consider being on season 16 of Shark Tank? And clearly we thought it was a joke, right, and clearly thought something was going to be hacked if I responded to it. Chris: Don't click the attachment right, that's right, that's right. Jacob: All of a sudden our bank account gets hacked. But it was actually one of the producers. She had seen us on Instagram and said, hey, listen, would you be interested? Let's learn more about your business, see if it checks a lot of these boxes. And then that started the whole process. And the process is rigorous and it's long, and your fate hangs in the hands of people that you never get to see or talk to. And you know it goes from one lawyer to another lawyer. None of those lawyers have talked to each other, and so the whole process is very interesting. And then you know the show is true. It's true to form. The only thing scripted about the show is the very beginning pitch that you give, and other than that, it's a free for all. The Sharks don't know about your business, they don't have a flyer on your business, they haven't been given any information. It's truly a live pitch pitching again when I'm like, hey, no, hold on, we got the park open, I don't need to pitch anybody again. Plenty of people have told me no, I don't need, you know, five people on national television to blast me and tell me no. But so when we got there, we did the pitch and we were very blessed it went well. We secured a deal from Robert Herjavec, the tech entrepreneur on the show. He's one of the staple sharks and it's just been a great experience and once there's one of those things that you look up and you really have to sit in the fact that it's one of those once in a lifetime crazy things. And even yesterday I was driving to the grocery store and I sat there and I was like man, this really happened. That's crazy and just trying to enjoy those moments. Chris: Well, and it has to be. I mean, it's great that it worked out and you got, you know, some additional investment from a very seasoned person, but just the notoriety of being on right Open, you know, a lot of eyes to you and had to, you know, you know, increase traction and interest in what you were doing. Jacob: Totally. I think, from even, just you know, foot traffic to the park here in Katy. That that's been tremendous. But then even, obviously, you know we went on the show to sell franchises. That that's our next big hurdle is selling franchises across the country and we have been flooded with requests of franchises to bring people, you know, bring a park to their location, their city. Talking to potential franchisees, it really just just totally gasoline on the fire. Chris: Yeah. So let's go back to the opening. You said March 2022. One of the things I like to talk to people about is let's talk about a failure that you've encountered and most people will tell you can do a whole show on them, right. Literally, I was going to say you don't have enough time on this, but you know you shared that. I guess the opening didn't go so well or something around that. So let's talk about what were some of the failures around that. What did you learn that made you better going forward? Jacob: That's right. You know, I tell people one day when I'm, when I give it, when I give a speech one day at a theme park conference, I'm going to be able to tell people I'm one of the very few theme park operators in the world that has opened a theme park and closed it the same day because it went so poorly. And so you know, I do have that badge of honor with me. So we opened the park too soon and that was a hundred percent my fault, right you too soon, and that was 100% my fault, right? You're trying to you build in these parameters in your head. We got to open this date. We got to do this. You know people are waiting and I really wanted it to be open that Thursday of spring break back in 2022. Could I have waited 48 hours more and would that have fixed our problems? Yes, did I? No, and I think a lot of it was. You know, we had been at this for four years. At this point, we were exhausted and here was the finish line. The finish line was on Thursday and we could do this and everybody's gonna love it. Tickets were sold out there. There was plenty of buzz. You know we were being interviewed from broadcaster. You know I was on NPR and we're doing this interview in this country and all over the US, and there was so much media attention. We had helicopters circling over the park doing filming, getting ready for the opening, and when we opened, man, it was an epic disaster, and the reason it was is I pushed the grand opening. All of our machines were not ready. We had not put on our technology of all the machines, not that we were letting people operate those machines, but we did not have enough time built in to put a computer on this machine, and then this machine, and then this machine. And so what happened is we opened the park to hundreds and hundreds of people and we didn't have that many machines going, and so those hundreds and hundreds of people waited in line for hours and it was just disastrous. And people were angry at me, rightfully so. People wanted to tell me what they thought about me, and rightfully so. The amount of refunds that we issued that day were it was probably dollar for dollar, we probably made $0 that day or just lost money, and so we had to shut the park down. So so I go on, and we, you know we were open. We were going to be open that Thursday, friday, saturday, sunday, and I just canceled everything and said hey, I'm so sorry, we're not going to be open, we'll refund you your tickets or you can come back whenever you want. And, man, people were so mad at us. They were so mad at us. The news was doing coverage about how Dig World closed in less than 24 hours and it was a disaster, an epic failure. And so you know you go home that night and something you had been working for four years, there was no, nothing good about it. There wasn't even. There was no silver lining, like you could be, like well, but no, it was terrible and kids left crying. I mean, just like I said, just terrible. And my wife will tell you that, looking back on that night, she goes hey, I thought I lost you mentally that night, like I thought you were so down in the dumps that night that I didn't know where we were going to go from here. And yeah, I remember the next day waking up, I was trying to, I was going to take my son on a walk and I remember getting halfway out of the neighborhood and having to turn around, got to go back into the office. We've got to go on the offensive here and really try to say hey, listen, we're sorry, let's own the mistake right. Hey, we opened too soon, please come back. And so I think you look at it right and it just was one of those epic failures, and we've had many more along the way, right? 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. Jacob: I was thinking of just trying to figure out how to run a theme park, and we've never run a theme park, but that was one. That's an easy recall when somebody asked me to talk about failure. Chris: Right, like you almost were there right Reliving it that day. Jacob: Oh man yes. Chris: Well, the lesson, though, in that you found the positive and I think it's true in so many different circumstances. We're all going to make mistakes, right, we've made them in the past. One thing certain we're going to make them again in the future, it's owning it right, be this, taking ownership of it, and then kind of committing to do better. I think when you do that, you know what, more times than not, what comes from that is grace. You know people grace to you, and I think that's what it seems like what you've experienced. Right, you owned it, so we're going to do better. The community gave you grace, and when you open back up, they came. Jacob: I think don't pass the blame, Even honestly, even if it's not really your blame, right? People want somebody to stand up and say, hey, it's on me, and I think we don't see that a lot of times in leadership throughout you know, whatever. But people willing to say, hey, that was on me, I'm gonna raise my hand, that was on me. And then the key is forgetting quickly and moving on right and not dwelling which, whatever you do, operate out of imagination, not memory. Right, Don't go back there, sit in those failures operate out of imagination, not memory. Chris: That's a good one. I haven't heard that one before I'm writing it down. Jacob: I would like to take credit for it, but somebody much smarter than me said it, so yeah, right. Chris: So I want to talk a little bit about technology and innovation because, I mean, I know these are, you know, big machinery used out in the construction. There's nothing really innovative about them, but it seems to me that using them in your theme park has to have some innovation and technology to make them safe, as you've described them. So you know, tell us about that. How did you come up with it or did you, or where did you find it? Jacob: it? Yeah, great question. So, yes, yes, all of the above. I know I did not come up with it, I'm not smart enough to write code, but we partnered with an engineer and we said hey, listen, this is what we want to do. We believe this can happen. And what we did, in simplistic terms, we built our own computer to put onto the back of the machine. That goes into its wiring to override a lot of the functionality of it. And so when we call it dig world mode, when the computer's in dig world mode, it is safe. The excavators are stationary, they can't go forward and backwards, they only go certain degrees to the right and left and up and down. Our skid steers are heavily governed, the hydraulics and a lot of functionalities are disengaged. We have kill switches and then we can flip the computer back to normal mode and it's a normal functioning machine. And so really, coming alongside a bright engineering team and building this technology that's our technology and putting it on these machines is really outside the box kind of stuff. And finding somebody that wanted to dream alongside with us was the key to success there. And he's still dreaming alongside with us. I mean he had made a technology upgrade this past week. That's one of those things you look at and you go why didn't we do that three years ago? That makes things a lot, you know not safer, they were very safe it makes it simpler for our team to utilize, and so we're always improving. I think that's the other thing. You know you hear it all the time as an entrepreneur, but as a business owner, one of the things that's very easy to do is get stuck in a rut and go well, we've always done it that way, right? I had a call with my business partner this morning and he's newer to the team and he said well, why are we doing that? And I was like well, honestly, I don't know if we've ever asked that question. I think we've just done it and let's try something new here. And knowing that you don't always have the right answers, and your teammate you may have a high school kid that works for you, like I do that comes to you and goes hey, why, why aren't we doing it like this? Could we do it like this? And you go it's a genius idea, let's do it that way. Yeah, and being okay and putting your pride aside and saying let's change and adapt. Chris: Right. So you're clearly kind of in the entertainment business. Let's talk about building a team right, because I think I mean clearly you've got an internal team there, I guess in the office that's got to run the company, some creativity around it, but then you have another team, that's, you know, customer facing. How have you gone about building kind of each of those teams to try to maximize the company's success? Jacob: Yeah, it's a great question, Thank you. I would say, yeah, our two teams I'd almost kind of say like our corporate team. Right, our corporate team is the X's and O's business focus. How do we grow the franchises? How do we optimize the P&L? And really the key to success there is not to overstate cliches, but like go hire somebody smarter than you and go hire somebody that is great at your weaknesses and then give them the reins to run it. I don't go in your lane, you know how to run it. I trust you explicitly. I've given you the keys of the kingdom because if not, if I'm just going to micromanage you, then why would I even have you on my team? That's demeaning to you. I'm going to end up doing the work anyways because I'm a control freak. So I'm going to go hire somebody that really knows what they're doing and say go, do it right. Or my business partner he oversees a lot of different things, but one of them is the marketing, and today he said hey, listen, do we want to spend here? Do you want to spend here? I think the answer is here. Yep, let's go there right, if you think that's interview going. Hey, this is what we sleep and breathe here. We love the customer, we love that people are here. We're going to love on them and we're going to make memories. Can you do that? And that's what I'm going to hire and fire against. If I see you out there and you're not loving on customers and you're not creating memories that last a lifetime, we're going to ask you to leave. But that's what you know from the beginning. We're going to hire and fire against. Do we love people and are we serving them well? And if we do those things, we're going to build a culture that people start to talk about. And every team meeting that we have, I kick off of hey, today we're going to love people and today we're going to think outside the box, and I know you had, you know, a long week at school. I'm asking you from nine to five today to dig deep and love on people because and when you really frame it up, we get to be a part of something so special and so unique. We get to really be a part of this kid or this family's memory bank, and hopefully in a good way. Right, there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of kids for the rest of their lives that are able to say man, when I was five I had my birthday party at this place called Dig World and I got to drive a real excavator. They're gonna tell that story for their whole life. We get to be a part of that. How humbling is that. And so when you really can set the picture for these kids, what we're doing here is not just a job. We're not here today to collect tickets and put you on a machine and say thank you for coming. We are ingraining ourselves into your memory bank, and when we can take that on in the privilege of that, then, man, we can really sky's the limit. Chris: Yeah, well, I could see if you get that light bulb to go off and kind of in any employee, right, it changes the whole dynamic, the mindset and luckily those high school kids I got to believe they're learning great life skills to have to deal with people on the fly. And that's what we do every day. Right, we're dealing with people as we as they come to us, and so that's exactly right. Jacob: And get to teaching that, hey, the customer's not always right Sometimes. You know we can stand our ground every now and then too, and so really, yeah, how do we handle conflict with each other? How do we handle conflict with a customer? You know those are skills that are in an online day and age are becoming less and less, so how do we actually stand in front of another human being and say, hey, listen, I know you're frustrated, let's figure out how we can work through this kind of deal. So hopefully we're teaching them things that can go far beyond Dig World. Chris: Yes, for sure. So we're here in Texas. You started this business here. Tell me some of the things that you found, or have found, to be advantageous about being a Texas-based business. Jacob: Oh man, so many, one. Obviously. Just the people right, the people buy in and they love it. They love supporting the business, they love supporting what we're trying to do here. And so, culturally, it's amazing to be here in Texas. We were fortunate when we started we had a partnership with Texas A&M, my alma mater and so I'm a little biased there but really getting their buy-in, and a university that saw what we were trying to do and said, hey, listen, let's go capture the next generation of construction workers and teach them about Texas A&M. Yes, but let's also teach them about this great industry of construction. And then really, just the flexibility of Texas. You know there's not many states you can just go out and, for the first and foremost, be like, hey, listen, we're going to start a theme park and it's going to let kids operate construction equipment, right, the flexibility and you know we went through the whole rigmarole and everything with insurance and the filings, but really the adaptability of the state and going, yeah, that sounds great, let's do that. And then everybody behind it. It's just, it's been amazing. Chris: That's great. So I'd like to talk about leadership, and you know you're clearly, as a founder and CEO, leader, but how do you think those leadership qualities have developed over time and how would you describe your leadership style? Jacob: Yeah, I tell people a lot of times I think there's two versions of Jacob as the leader. There is pre-Pierce getting sick and then there's post-Pierce getting sick. Not that the goals have changed. The goals are still. Listen, you're running a business. You got to make money and you got to keep the doors open right At the end of the day. That's the name of the game. But mindset around those have changed. The intensity around that has changed and the bigger picture around that has changed. So, for example, pre Pierce getting sick and our cleaning business, we lose a contract. I'm pretty frustrated. I'm probably a little panicky. We're getting a little desperate on how do we replace that contract. I'm driving the team harder. What are we selling? I'm micromanaging more because I'm feeling nervous and anxious. Right, post Pierce getting sick, the intensity is not gone, but the priorities are going hey, we lost the contract, okay, let's go home, let's reset. Tomorrow, we'll find another one. There's another one out there, let's go find another one. Right, and motivating the team that way, instead of fear-based whether it be my fear or the fear I'm instilling rather than going hey, we'll be fine, we're gonna keep doing what we're doing. We're gonna keep doing the X's and O's of the business and it will be there. And so I think, when failure of a grand opening and a grand closing comes, you go. Okay, listen, today was not a good day, today was a terrible day. However, I'm still here, my family's still here, and tomorrow we're going to figure out how we survive this and we're going to pick up and we're going to go to work tomorrow and we're going to figure it out, and then I think, at the end of the day, I'm a servant leader. I hope our high school kids see me doing things that I asked them to do. I hope they see me cleaning the bathrooms. I hope they see me doing this, not to manipulate them to saying, hey, you know, oh, jacob's doing it, I should go do it. No, I want you to see that we're all in this together, right, and I believe in it this much that I'm going to get in here with you and I'm not going do at that point is they go? Yeah, I'll go clean the bathrooms, right, and hey, jacob asked me to do it, I'll go do it because I know he would do it right, rather than the dictator style leadership or the authoritarian style leadership. So I think for me it's coming alongside them, servant leadership, getting in the trenches, dealing with the disgruntled customers and not just making them deal with it, all of those kinds of things, I think. Build in the goodwill with the team and they see somebody that wants to link arms with you, and then what it allows me to do is come alongside them on those times where I either have to discipline or I have to recorrect or reposition, and they go. Ok, I know. But I know at the end of the day, he loves me. I know at the end of the day, it's the best, even if he's firing me. You know at the end that you, moving on, I'm still going to be in your corner, and so I think I view my leadership in those two ways. Chris: I like that. I can identify with it as well, feel the same way. To me the servant leadership is so valuable, right? Your employees have to believe not only they've seen you do it, not that you will do it, they've seen you do it right, and that when you ask them to do it it's important and so that's great. You know, just thinking about the obviously a lot of stuff going on in our world and in any kind of different ways. But you know economically, you know legislatively, what are some of the headwinds, given all that that you kind of see facing dig world as you're kind of looking out over the next 30, 60, 90, 120 days, year, kind of yeah, yeah. Jacob: It's a great question. I would answer it two ways. One you know, as we look at the economics of our park and people coming to our park, you know what we feel like is we sit in that middle or probably lower to middle ground of your discretionary spending as a family, meaning. Meaning, as I compare it to a Disney right, and when the economy goes down a little bit or people are a little worried or nervous, the Disney vacation may go on the back burner. Right, because that's a significant financial investment into that. It's a great experience, but it's significant. Where we fall is on the lower end of that category, hopefully delivering the same memories and experiences and fun and joy, but the price point is significantly cheaper than that. So we feel in good times and in rougher times we hope to be a resource that allows those families to still create memories in that regard. Externally, as we look to grow franchises, the ups and downs of the economy can sway different investors. They can sway how they want to hold their money, what they want to do with their money, what they don't want to do with their money. Now my sales pitch to those individuals are hey, you could take your money and put it over here, or you could take your money and put it over here and you could kind of be in control of it, but you also can create something that's bigger than you for your community, for your family, things like that. So it it will be interesting to see what the next probably call it 120 days have in store for us as far as how we're received on the investment side. But right now, our focus on this phase one is how do we get five franchises across the finish line, and right now, praise the Lord, we're very close to hitting that number. And then we got to get them open and we have to produce right. Chris: At the end of the day, you have to produce and I understand you have two open now or the second one's about to open. Dallas will be open by the end of this year. That's correct. Okay, that's great. So I gotta ask. I mean, you're talking about disney, made me think. Do you have some kind of mascot or anybody like in a big suit when you show up at dig world? You know? Jacob: so. But he said I literally got off a phone call earlier we are, we've honed it into kind of two mascots that we want, and so that will be released soon once the debate can be decided within our team of which way we're going. Chris: Okay very good. So let's just kind of turn to a little more casual side. Yeah, you said you and Katie went to A&M. I'm taking those two data points and making an assumption you're a born and raised Texan, it's a great question. Jacob: It's a great assumption, but no, I am a son of a healthcare executive, and so I was born in Alabama, raised all over Texas, graduated high school in South Carolina, then came to A&M, met my wife, who is a Houstonian, who's a Katie girl and much smarter than I am, and so she had a real job after college, and so I followed her here and I've been here ever since. Chris: Okay, Great story. So just talking about Texas, you know you all have a favorite spot. You like to go within the state to get away, maybe vacation time. Jacob: Yeah, you know it's funny whenever, within the state, melissa and I we love to head over to San Antonio. We love the Hill Country side. We like a couple of the resorts there. That's our, our getaway. And then I think you know when we're getting away. Now we've got young kids. Grandparents and cousins and nephews live in waco and so we head over to waco. We spend a lot of time there. But if melissa and I are just getting away and staying in the state, we're gonna head probably over to san antonio very good. Chris: That leads me to the next question then do you prefer tex-mex or barbecue? Jacob: oh man, that's. Oh man, see that one. That's a tricky question because we'd have to be like specific in the subcategory right. Like'd have, we'd have to like pit two against each other. Chris: I hear you. Everyone says that that's the hardest question saved for last. Jacob: Oh, my goodness, I'm going to have to go barbecue. I'm going to have to go barbecue. Chris: All right, all right. I love how you're going to break it down, though, cause I'm the same way. You know. It's like. Well, I don't know, it depends, I mean it depends it just. Jacob: You know, on Friday night this weekend I had Tex-Mex. On Saturday I had barbecue. So you know like it literally is, but I'd have to go barbecue. Chris: All right, very good. Well, jacob, thank you again for taking time to come on the podcast. I mean your story, obviously from the start of it with Pierce, was amazing, but just such a creative, unique thing that you've created. And you know, just wish you the best of success, thank you. Thank you, honored to be here today. Thank you for taking time Special Guest: Jacob Robinson.

Hey there Cubies! We are diving into a new game that was just announced by Compulsion Games, South Of Midnight. A game set in the south showcases the rich lore and culture of the area. This tittle appears to be doing some amazing things when it comes to the story telling, art and music. But why is already being looked at under a microscope and being judged so harshly. Well there is something that plagues not just gaming culture, but all media and that is those that make rash judgments without knowing or understanding the intent, or speaking their mind when they do not really need to. We want to celebrate this game while bringing attention to the hurdles that it is having to jump through. ---------------- Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! So, it is finally official, after all the rumors and the leaks the trailer for the Switch 2 has dropped and we could not be more excited. As well as curious about the whole joycon mouse rumor. Nintendo is known for taking weird gambles on their hardware, but this time around it feels a bit more conservative. Regardless it is an exciting time to be a Nintendo fan! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! We have some surprising games for you all this week. We have been tackling our back logs and have been rather pleased with what we have been playing. Games this episode - Batman: Arkham Asylum, Star Wars: Outlaws, Last Of Us 1 & 2, Heavy Rain. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! It's time to finish out our list of top games for 2024. We started this endeavor last week and put a capstone on it here. It really feels like 2024 will be a year to remember for gaming. Bloomtown: A Different Story, Anthology Of A Killer, Unicorn Overlord, Mouthwashing, Balatro, Metaphor: Refantazio, 1000 X Resist & Dragon Age: The Veilguard. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! We have a long list of games to get through and we have been able to boil down our lists to our top 10 games for 2024. This week we are diving into 5 games each that really meant a lot to us in 2024. Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, Minishoot Adventures, Eiyuden Chronicles, Indika, Persona 3 Reload, Astro Bot, Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Animal Well & Kuniitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! We are closing out 2024 with some great games. Some from the back log and some to prepare for our final game of the year episode. Games like Atlyss, Jak & Daxter, Call Of Duty Black Ops and the surprisingly good Dragon Age: The Veilguard. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Happy Holidays Cubies! We are back at it again with one of our favorites pass times here on GlitchCube. This week we are doing another we make a game episode. Where we find a game idea generator and expand on what is given to us to brain storm a game. How it would play, what the goals are and just how to make it fun. But this time we are throwing in an extra twist. To celebrate the holidays everything needs to have a Christmas theme to it. From Rudolph Battle Royals, to shopping strategy RPGs you never know what will happen here! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Its that time of year once again! We have the game awards and with that we have a whole set of new games announced to look forward to. From a new Elden Ring experience, to classics being brought to the modern era with Onimusha and Okami. There are a lot of great looking games coming soon. We just hope that we wont have to wait too long to get our hands on these. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there Cubies! This week we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Playstation! It is hard to believe that it has been 30 years already. From day 1 the Playstation has changed gaming and continues to do so today. We grew up with these consoles, running out day 1 to get them. They even made us fall in love with particular genres like RPGs. There have been amazing franchises that started close to 30 years ago that still inspire gamers and designers to this day. We share our fond memories of the Playstation. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hello Cubies! This week we are sharing an episode that really means a lot to us. It was one of the episodes that gave us fuel to our flame and really made us feel that we now know what we want to do and how we are going to do it. This cute, sad story of the Tamagotchi, a small pocket pet that was all the rage for many years. It was your very own digital pet you could carry on your belt loop or hang from your backpack. But did you know there is an actual story behind it? ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

The nominees are out and its time to start looking back at all the amazing games we have played this year. The list for GOTY is very interesting this year. With games like Balatro breaking through the ranks and Elden Ring DLC making the list there is a lot to discuss here. What really is a GOTY, what makes them a contender. Also, for something cozy at the end so chatting about an RPG classic, Grandia! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Once again 2024 hits hard with more RPGs than the normal person can keep up with. Nintendo has given us Dragon Quest 3 finally and Chris is on cloud 9. For those that listen to the show you know that this series holds a special place in his heart. So, when this was announced we knew this was a "have to play" game. And it has not disappointed. The cozy-ness of a classic RPG just hits different with these classics. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

It's should be no surprise to our listeners that RPGs are our thing. But Metaphor has completely blown us away on all levels. From the rich story to the deep mechanics and job like system it has captured our attention. Instead of flooding our feed with more Metaphor we decided to do a full spoiler free episode for you all. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

The evolution of free to play games has changed drastically over the years. From gotcha games, to live service there are different styles out there that try to tap into our lizard brain and keep us playing or buying any random cosmetic that gets dropped. But there are some titles out there that tend to rub the fan base the wrong way, like server wipes every season with Once Human. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Happy Halloween! It's the spooky season and we have some great games for you. The genre of horror is so vast and really has something for everyone. With so many remakes out there it just makes sense that a classic like Silent Hill 2 sees a new audience. Or dive into delivery madness with Mouthwashing. Or are you looking for a real vibe? Why not try out the atmospheric horror of Stories Untold. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Chris chats about a new city builder with Manor Lords. Ever wanted to start your medieval city? Well now you can with this one. Flowstone Saga shows a new mash up to make some very interesting combat systems using tetris to fight in this new rpg. And Metaphor feels like a game we will be talking about for quite some time because there is just so much to love about this one. To tie it all up we have some movie for the spooky season to recommend to you too! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hello Cubies! This is a blast from our past here with an episode to do spooky month proud. Way back in 2022 we released an episode of our favorite horror games and what made them special to us. So, with Christian out of the country we figured what better time then now to revisit this idea and what better time then a few weeks before Halloween!  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Feels like a broken record at this point but this has been a great year for games. And Atlus did something amazing, they released another demo (like Unicorn Overlord) that allows you to play a good chunk of the game. Just have to say that the demo does not disappoint, but rather really drives the point home that we will be diving head first into this one. Christian also has played a lot more of Bloomtown and for a game that has such a cozy exterior the content and story are so rich and will tug at all of your emotions.  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Some big hitters this week! We are digging through the back log a little bit here with Christian playing through the Mass Effect series for the first time ever. Exploring the vast worlds and rich story with fresh eyes is really fascinating.  Then we travel back to current times with the Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom. Finally we are able to play as Zelda with a very interesting mechanic to explore.  Then we chat about a new cozy, nostalgia heavy, murder mystery, persona like game that is Bloomtown: A Different Story. So muuch to talk about and so many great mechanics too dive into.  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Chris beat Astro Bot and we speculate on whats next for that franchise. Maybe a Kingdom Hearts inspired Sony-verse? And Dungeons Of Hinterburg asks the question of what wouldn't you do on a vacation. Magical portals open so why not plan a trip to fight monsters to decompress from your day to day life. But what beaches in games would you actually want to visit for a weekend getaway? ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hello all! Before we get into Astro Bot Christian has a little chip on his shoulder that needed discussion. It is becoming much more common in games and media now but too many titles have little to no pay off at the end. You finish a story and instead of enjoying a twist, or witnessing a huge epic event, or just a good payoff the ending is spoiled half way through and nothing exciting happens. Its especially annoying with games you spend 40+ hours in. But anyway...Astro Bot is amazing and it is just further proof that we NEED a new Ape Escape game! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey there! Throughout media certain jobs have been made to look more appealing then they actually are. There is more drama and gun fights thrown in to add to the mystery of what the job actually entails. Whether is Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge, or fighting a giant Trex in a cave like Tomb Raider the job has a lot of added flourish. But is this a bad thing? Is this just escapism at its finest. And how many people have been introduced to these jobs through media and have made it their life's passion to go into the field. Let's talk about that! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

We open hot this episode with some super great tech issues with Game Pass.  But dive head first into the world of simulation games with inZOI. If you have not seen this game it looks insane! The character creator alone is so realistic its slightly uncomfortable. While Christian was never one to get into these types of games, Chris helps him better understand the appeal of these fictional worlds.  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Coop is coming back in a hard way for us here at GlitchCube. Chris who is not a Avatar fan boy has been playing the game with a buddy, and only playing it coop and enjoying the game itself. With that there is also Remnant 2 to explore. While Christian continues down his path of long RPGs with Tales Of Arise next. So much to play and so little time.  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hello again! We took a week off last week for good reason! Our Glitch family has grown. We welcome Chris's new babies into the world! With such a large life event we somehow managed to still find time for games. Christian finished Eiyuden Chronicles, a fun game but slightly lacking in something. And Chris finished up Pikmin 4, a solid gaming experience. Fun puzzles and great visuals. So sit back, relax and enjoy some thoughts on these games, plus some shows too! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

From the IBS Podcast! We have a series of fun episodes planned out for you all. We are going to be playing the Quiet Year. It's a table top world making game. Perfect for world building and we allow our imagination to run wild here. Typically you start with a blank slate and build out the world from there. But we decided to build a world in the land of Candy Land! Think epic Game Of Thrones meets cotton candy woods and chocolate swamps. ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Hey everyone! We are back with a little update episode here. We have been combing through our backlog of retro games all the while trying to keep up with the newer titles as well. We dive deep into Eiyuden Chronicles, a great love letter to the Suikoden games. But is it sticking too close to the source material? Is it missing some of the quality of life tropes that we have come to expect from modern RPGs. Also, Pikimin is back in a big way! The perfect pick up and play game for everyone! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

With the flood of great games released so far this year and looking at the list of whats to come we thought it would be a good idea to look at the game of the year contenders so far. So, at least we forget about all of them.  Even though we have split the year the list is as strong and as long as previous years already. And there is truly something for everyone. Games like Balatro, Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, Unicorn Overlord, 1000xResist, Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth and so much more! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

This week we dive back into memory lane and do a little draft pick of our top 4 N64 games. And some of these picks will definitely surprise you. Looking back at this console it really was made to be enjoyed with others. So many of their biggest games were not single player experiences. Instead they brought families together while simultaneously ripping them apart. Whether its arguing over the rumble pack or getting mad at the rng of Mario Party it was a crazy fun time! ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

Atlus games has continued to surprise us. We have been on an Atlus kick lately and each one of their games is so different from the last but there are a couple things that persist through out all of them.And that is that they are innovative with captivating stories that have memorable characters with true life issues that are very relatable for the player. And we really dive into the time traveling, Game Of Thrones styled world of Radiant Historia. We both agree that this is the best version of time travel in anny game we have played. And oh man that combat system is so unique mixing turn based, grid based tactics and strategic turn order to make a very interesting experience.  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

We have a special episode here for you all. This week we are going to going over the large library of the PS1 and picking our top four games. But instead of just picking them together we wanted to try something different and do a draft style pick of our top games. The way this is going too work is we each take turns picking a game and we cannot pick games that each other have picked. So that way we will have 8 unique picks. The picks will really surprise you these are definitely not the top rated games on the PS1! Spoiler one is Yugioh!  ------------------ Hosts: Christian & Chris Don't forget to leave us a cheeky review and we will read them on the show. Tell your friends that they need some GlitchCube in their life.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I welcomed Jen Sudduth, CEO of Sudduth Search, for an insightful discussion on her journey in the executive search industry. Jen shared her story of transitioning from Taylor Winfield to launching her boutique firm focused on transformative growth companies. I learned how Sudduth Search crafts a supportive work culture that prioritizes both productivity and well-being. Our dialogue also uncovered nuances around balancing work responsibilities with life's pleasures. As we wrapped up, Jen reflected on life lessons from mentorship to her commitment to the Special Olympics community SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jen Sudduth shares her transition from Taylor Winfield to founding Sudduth Search, focusing on middle market private equity and emphasizing the need for leaders who can drive change. We explore the importance of having a business and marketing strategy before starting a venture, as well as considering when to hire based on company growth and values alignment. Strategies for maintaining work-life balance in recruitment are discussed, including setting boundaries and fostering a culture that supports employee well-being alongside business success. The episode delves into the comprehensive selection process for executive search, particularly for pivotal roles such as CFOs, and the role of retained search firms in this process. Jen reflects on the role of empathy in leadership and the importance of mentorship, drawing from her own experiences and her involvement with the Special Olympics. Personal joys, such as a preference for Tex-Mex cuisine and planning for sabbatical destinations like Maine and Santa Fe, are shared as part of achieving a joyful living. The conversation covers the initial opportunistic hiring during COVID and the shift towards a more strategic hiring approach to raise the team's overall expertise. Chris and Jen discuss the benefits of leaving a company the right way, honoring agreements, and how transparency can lead to unexpected opportunities. Jen advises on the importance of planning for success, not just the startup phase, by having operational projections and growth strategies in place. The episode also touches on Jen's past experience as Director of Talent at a consultancy, highlighting how internal hiring insights can improve external recruitment advice. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Sudduth search GUESTS Jen SudduthAbout Jen TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode, you will meet Jen Sudduth, co-founder and CEO of Sudduth Search, a boutique executive search firm. Jen's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to be intentional and purposeful in your business planning, and don't forget to plan for success. Okay, jen, first off, welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for being here. Jen: Thank you. Chris: So I'm excited to have this conversation with you today. I want to start by just allowing you to introduce yourself and tell us what your company, Sudduth Search, is known for. Jen: Sure. So we are a seven-person boutique executive search firm, but I think what we do is a little bit unique. We work with the middle market private equity. Probably 75% of our clients are private equity backed. The other are public, private you name it individually owned, it doesn't matter. I think the common denominator with all of them is that all of the companies are going through some sort of transformation, and most of the time that's growth. It could have been that they raised capital. That's a trigger to bring us in and go and replace some of your leadership team. Could be some of our bigger companies going through some sort of culture change. We did 10 positions for a Blackstone-backed company and basically they wanted to pull from outside of their industry and they didn't know how to do that, and so we helped them come up with a concept of how to do that completely, you know, changed their recruiting processes from how they were doing them before, and then they brought in a whole new culture and that's what they wanted. They wanted a different culture than they had before. So it's just, it doesn't matter what the trigger is, but it's usually some sort of change, transformation. You need a leader that can drive that change right. You need someone that is fearless. A lot of times that can come in, and they're you. You know they can make things happen. Right and that's where we play most of the time. Chris: Well, what I find interesting about that is how laser focused it is what inspired you to kind of start a search firm that was so focused on that kind of niche industry. Jen: So I've actually done it for over 20 years and the firm I was with before was called Taylor Winfield. I only bring that up because a lot of people know Taylor Winfield. I started with Taylor Winfield and kind of worked my way up and that's what they focused on. They were more. You know that was 2000, so there was a lot of venture money out there, there was Silicon Valley and they worked a lot in California we did. I was just a lowly junior recruiter back then and that's where I learned the business and that's where I kind of learned that world. And it's not for everyone, both as a candidate and as a recruiter, because sometimes candidates will go well, what are they going to sell? Am I going to still have a job? I'm like, well, you're really not, you're not right for this, because that's not the mentality that we look for in a candidate. But so that's how I got my start and that's how I learned it. And then when I started this up my practice five years ago, I kind of I don't do a whole lot of venture. I have a few here and there. Usually they're a little bit more mature as a company. I think. As I've aged I'm not as patient with the venture. I think they've got a great thing going. But it's just a different world and I think sometimes those, the people that are willing to go and do something really earlier stage, are not the same people that I'm looking for the middle market series, b series, c type folks. So so that's how I had got into. It was really that's kind of what I've done my whole career. Chris: Gotcha. Well, I know that you started this company Suddeth Search around five years ago. Jen: Exactly. Chris: So you had to make some decision to leave and just start fresh on your own. Let's talk about that a little bit. What drove that decision? Jen: So the company that I worked for was actually owned by and I don't usually say this, so you're getting new information here by my stepmother, connie Adair, and I bring that up because she's fully retired now. She's been retired for about two years. But she brought me into the business, not as a multi-generational business. I had to earn my keep, earn my way Right, just like everyone else. She was very big on treating me like everyone else. Chris: The benefit for you that she did that. Jen: Absolutely and I learned from the best. She was really known as one of the best in the industry so I kind of got to see that world and that process. But she sold to private equity and it was a private equity roll up. Like some of them, it didn't go really well. The integration piece was a little rough. Chris: Not unique in that regard, right and I got no benefit from it. Jen: To be quite honest. I stuck around to try to support her and she did well. And then she got another bite of the apple and I tried for two years. I wasn't a big company person and I realized if I can make this kind of money for someone else, I should be doing it for myself. And so I kind of did it because I could, and she fully supported me. She knew that retirement was on the horizon and so when I told her she said you know, I think you should go for it. So that's what I did. Chris: That's great. Well, I mean good to have that encouragement for someone that you were close with but considered to be a trusted mentor Absolutely. So got to be a little bit trepidatious to just start out on your own, even though you know what you're doing and you, I think you can't do that unless you have confidence that it's going to work and confidence that it will work isn't a guarantee that it will Absolutely. But you know what were some of the things you did to kind of set yourself up in those early days of starting your own company, to try to pave the path towards success. Jen: So I will start with the fact that I had a very strict non-compete. I did not get any clients from the company or from her, and I am a devout follower of non-competes. Chris: Well, it's funny, you say that you bring that, yeah, you know, now we devise people, I mean literally every day, on both sides of those, and right because because they exist and obviously you know there's a lot of buzz recently because the ftc came out with the rule to ban them, uh, which is, you know, probably not going to take effect because lawsuits have already been filed to challenge it. Jen: But it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out yeah in the next, over the next few years, I think yeah, and not to say I don't think some non-competes go overboard. I have heard some ludicrous non-competes as I'm interviewing, so sure, I do think a lot of them go overboard. I think the fdc is in the is moving in the right direction with some of them, because I think they're a little too restrictive. Chris: But that's not your question yeah, and even as the rule's written, it doesn't apply to executives, so it wouldn't change your world. Jen: It wouldn't, and I'd been there a long time. Everything I got was under their umbrella. So what I did do was I planned for a long time. I've owned businesses before and so I had a business plan, I had a marketing plan, I had a strategy. The other advantage I had was that I had been I've been asked to be on the board of ACG and so that was a. I knew that was going to be great PR. It's gonna be great relationships there. That's how I met Steve Kasten here at the Boyer Miller and a few others, and so I knew that was coming. But it was pretty far out. You know my tenure had just started. Didn't know I was gonna be president, but I knew that was gonna be on the. I'd have a lot of visibility. So that helped quite a bit. I think that was one factor. Fun story unrelated to your question the day before I quit, the day before my last day, I gave like four months notice and they knew I was leaving. I was unwinding. I had some really big searches, so I was unwinding those and finishing those up for clients, kind of on the bench, but just doing that. So the day of the last day of employment I get a call from that client that I just mentioned wanted to change their culture Blackstone Back Company. He said I got 10 searches for you, jim. I said, well, I can't do them, I'm leaving, today is my last day. And he's well, I'm not doing it without you. And so I called the company and I said here's what's happening. Would you, would we, can we do a fee split? Didn't know that was coming, but that was really great cash flow. And they said yes, and so we worked out a fee split. I continued I worked with that client and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And then I developed brand new clients from that point on. But I knew the industry. I think the industry knew me. Chris: So even if it wasn't somebody, I'd worked before, I had a plan and I went after those people. That's a really cool story to hear and there's a lesson. There's probably many lessons, but one that just struck me right between the eyes is the lesson in leaving the right way, when you leave a company versus leaving the wrong way and you just laid out a roadmap for the listeners. If you're thinking about leaving, you left the right way, honoring your agreements, and then, with the transparency to get the slug of business for your new business, for your new company, because you went to them and said here's the deal, because you've done everything else right. It's good to hear that. I guess they could have not honored that, but they did the right thing in my mind too, yeah, by saying yeah, it'd be fair to share this and, by the way, we should. Customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. Jen: So customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. So, yeah, and I completely agree and I try to tell people and I know there's exceptions, I know there's bosses that are just difficult and if they know you're even looking there, you're gone. I know that happens, but I think majority of the time people are reasonable and if you come to them and sometimes I'll have friends come to me and say I'm thinking about making a change- Grass is greener Right and I'm like I know they're in a great situation. I'm like have you had a really difficult conversation with your boss before you leave, before you start thinking about? Have you told them that you're unhappy You've been there? Chris: 14 years or you've been there seven years. Jen: Have you talked about it? And usually the answer is no, and so I try to encourage them to say go talk to them first and then if it's still you know, in a month you still feel like it's just not fulfilling then talk about leaving. Yeah, but you need to give them a chance. Chris: It's great advice. People unfortunately right. It's kind of human nature to avoid the difficult, uncomfortable conversation, or at least I'll say this, the ones we perceive have it that they're going to be difficult or uncomfortable. And to your point, I think, a lot of times if you actually have the courage to go have it, they usually aren't as difficult or uncomfortable as you work them up in your mind to be. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: And you know I can speak. You know as well as you can. If you give your employer, where you've been otherwise happy for a while, the chance to have that conversation most people if there's a tweak or two that would keep you there, it's probably going to save the company a ton of money. To consider that. Jen: And it might benefit the company. Talk to them about. You know I'd really like to do more sales. You know I'd really like to take on bigger projects. You know what We've been looking for someone that wants to take on bigger projects. You just never know what the company needs. Chris: So we can go back. You mentioned, and just for the listeners ACG Association of Corporate Growth. Jen: Yes. Chris: Indice Group industry in the kind of M&A, a lot of private equity. So sounds like part of that marketing plan was to plug yourself in to the right kind of networking system where you would meet people and build relationships. Jen: That's correct. Yeah, yeah, and I eventually was asked to be president I don't know if you know that and so it was a lot of it was a lot of visibility as well. That's half the battle. Chris: Yes. Jen: Because there's a lot of top of mind search firms out there. Yeah, getting top of mind and helping them see that. I understand private equity, I understand what their challenges are. I understand what they're trying to achieve. I understand how capital's raised. You know I've got the knowledge base to be able to convey that to candidates and to help find the right one that's going to fit that. So I think that helped a lot and it's it was educational for me. You know, going to conferences, hearing panels speak. I know a lot about a lot or a little about a lot. Chris: Let me rephrase that I shouldn't admit that, but it's true, but it does. Jen: It's real educational to hear those conversations and to hear what's happening in the market. You know from your peers that are in the organization. Chris: A couple other takeaways from what you said. That I hope people listening caught is that you had a plan before you did this right, absolutely. You sat down and put it to paper a business plan, a marketing plan, a strategy. Look, I think those are so important and can be overlooked. When people say, look, I'm just going to go chase this dream, that's great because you need the inspiration, but you also need some substance behind it, because if you eventually do go to and most will go to a bank or an investor or something, they're going to be asking about that. So you better be prepared. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: So one of the things and you and I were talking about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know, you now have seven employees. Let's talk a little bit about you know. I think there's a few conversations. One is what was it that triggered you each time to make the decision Now it's time to take on an employee or another employee, because those are big investments and then how did you go about making sure they were the right fit? Jen: Yeah. So it was growth that predicated the need. That was the part I didn't plan was when am I going to hire what? You know what? At what point do we need to bring on another person? At what point do we need to bring on a junior person, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't plan that piece of it and I probably should have, but it was really just my bandwidth and being able to do what I needed to do. You know, we were super busy during COVID, which sounds really strange, but I had some. I had that one big client that was still going. I had just so, if you think about I had been in business for about a year and so that year I had been really busy doing marketing and business development and getting out there and making relationships, and so it just it paid off and I think a lot of those people one of my biggest clients I don't know if you know Dave Marchese, he'd be a good guest. Let's do it. He called me out of the blue in the middle of COVID and we had met like five years prior, but he had seen my posts and my marketing and my emails and so he said I can't go out. I'm not going to go out and interview five interview candidates, but we're in the or excuse me search firms because we're in the middle of COVID. So what you got Jen, and so I took it on, and we've probably done 15 different positions over three or four years. Wow, so he's one of our biggest clients. So there that, I think the prior relationships definitely helped us make it. You asked about employees, though. Chris: Yes, well, before we go there. Yeah, one of the things you so interesting. You said I didn't plan for growth. Yeah, probably should have. Jen: Yeah. Chris: So, looking back, what do you think you could have done in that regard that you might offer as advice to someone that you know is maybe about to do something similar that you did five years ago? You know, what have you learned? Looking back, to say I would have, if I was going to do it again, I would plan for growth in this way. Jen: Plan for success. I think I was so focused on how am I going to get there that I didn't say if, when I get there, if when I get there, how am I going to get to the next level? I never did that. I never said, okay, I can handle 12 searches, or whatever it is, at different in different phases. So if I get 14, what do I do? At what point do I, you know? Do I need to start hiring when I get to 9 searches, whatever it? So maybe it was a revenue. I think I should have projected and said, because I've been in the business a while, I know how many searches I can do by myself or with a team, and so I think that would have been very helpful to do kind of like an FB&A analysis, but on the operational side. Chris: Right, Very helpful, that's very helpful. Okay, so now let's go back to kind of set a search. You starting to decide I've hit the point, I can't do this all, I've got to bring someone on. Yeah, you know how did you go about sourcing. I know obviously you've probably had a lot of contacts, but you know just the whole process of how you interviewed to make sure they were going to be a good fit for your company. Jen: So my first hire, I got really lucky because she was a neighbor, a friend who got laid off during COVID and so we brought her on just to do some of this data pushing type stuff. She made phone calls, cold calls, she's fearless, and then she grew into being a really good recruiter. After that first hire it was, oh my God, I can't handle this. I just need a body that can help do, a professional person that can do all this. After that hire I was much more purposeful. After that it was we want experience. We want, you know, degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand you know degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand, you know. I think every time I made another hire I kind of elevated my expectations. Chris: Right. Jen: And not to say the first hire was. She was a phenomenal employee, but I think every time after that I was much more purposeful about how I, who I wanted to hire and what my expectations of them were. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense to me and you're right, it's not a condemnation of the earlier hires. It's if you're doing things right, I believe you're always learning and your processes can always get better, and it doesn't mean you didn't make bad hires before, but you can get more intentionality around the decisions you're making and I think that's part of growth and when you're a one person show or two because my husband did join me about six months in it's harder to attract talent you know, Now we're about to make an offer to a pretty senior person and we had a really good slate of people that were interested, that were like, yeah, I want to join a boutique firm, I want to do what you're doing. Jen: So it changes too. 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. Well, that's validating. So you've gone through this process of sourcing people for your company, right, and what have you? What has that process and the learning? Jen: through that done to help you better advise your clients or vet candidates for them. What else about that I'm actually gonna go back to. So I took about five years. I left the executive search world and went to a consultancy and they I was director of talent. We tripled in size in about five years time and then they sold to Accenture about two years after I left. When I left, I think oil and gas was zero. The barrel, the barrel. Chris: I remember that yeah. Jen: So they made a strong comeback and then eventually sold. But being on the inside like that was the best education I could get, because it was. This is what happens when you make a really bad hire. This is what happens to the entire company when you make a really good hire. And we weren't huge I think we ended up being about a hundred but but it was really helpful to me to see. I also learned you know really short tenures on people's resume. There's a reason you know, I know there's reasons that people have to leave jobs absolutely there's good reasons, but when it's over and over and over, and then you hire that person because you're desperate for a data manager or whatever it is. You're desperate for that skill. You're going to find out why they can't stay in a job longer. I learned a lot being on the inside, you know, and I think that job is really what taught me kind of the hard knocks of making a mishire. Chris: Right. Well, I think you're to your point, right, it's if you look there are red flags, pay attention to them, and I know from our we're not perfect either in this business that I have, and you know sometimes you can convince yourself to overlook a red flag here or there, and more times than not you shouldn't. Right, there's exceptions to every rule, but we don't want to run a business based on exceptions necessarily You've got to be purposeful about those hires is really what it taught me. Jen: You know very purposeful. Chris: So just to kind of come back to Sutter's search a little bit so you have seven, about to have eight, and you talked about doing a search for a client where it was a culture change. Let's talk about culture at Sutter Search. What are you, as the kind of co-founder and CEO, doing to try to cultivate a culture? How would you describe it? And what are you doing to kind of, you know, foster it and breathe life into it? Jen: Yeah, it's hard with seven people, eight people, you know, to kind of create that, because you're like oh, we're just eight people, but they need it. Employees need training, they need to be developed, they need to evolve, they need to expand and grow, and so we actually started EOS at the beginning of this year. Are you familiar with entrepreneurial operating system? Chris: Yes. Jen: I think I don't know if Allie was the one that told me about it, but you know I've heard a lot of business owners that have done it, and so we actually started it and I think it's been evolutionary and I'm not selling it, I don't sell anything they do but it has really helped us be very purposeful about what we're doing for our employees, and so my one of our other managing directors is. She's in charge of kind of the HR and training, and so we have a weekly training every single week and it's sometimes it's heavier than others, but we have a weekly training every week and one of the employees actually gives it, so they have to go out and learn themselves and then they come and teach the rest of us. I try to. I'm a big advocate in the old school headhunting world is just dog eat, dog work, and so when I started my firm I was like I don't want to be that way. We're not working 12-hour days, we're not working both coasts, we're going to have a great and I hate to use the words work-life balance because I know it's overused. Chris: That's right. Jen: But we are, we're going to edit that part out. I'm kidding it is overused, but I think in some aspects it's important because you're a better employee if you take your vacation, if you didn't have to work until 9 pm the night before, if your managing director isn't calling you at 6 in the morning because she happens to be on the East Coast that is not the culture that we have. I'm always telling them you're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your calls? Did you put your out of? We require out of office messages to be turned on and I'm just, I'm always preaching that. I really think it's important to separate yourself and give your brain a break, because what we do is very, it's very repetitive, it's very. You know you may, if you have ten searches, that you have four candidates at least on what we usually have a hundred, but you have four finalists going through to offer yeah you think about the ups and downs every single day. Chris: It's a lot well, I mean, to your point, what you're doing, I mean, has to be stressful because you're affecting people's lives. Absolutely right, you got four candidates and or maybe see this as a great opportunity and are very hopeful, and you got a, a client, that needs to fill a hole and every day they don't have that whole field, they're losing money. So I can get that yeah to your point, the work-life balance and we could do a whole podcast on that. But I think what my experience has shown, or at least what I feel like I've learned through that, is our work-life balance is different at different times of our career. So it's hard to institutionalize that when everyone's at different stages. We try to use the term more like professional development. Developing our people to be great professionals means you tend to your business, but you tend to you have a life as well and you got to figure out how to manage both in a healthy way, knowing that the way it works for me now is totally different than it was 15 years ago right and that's okay because everything changes and we have new employees here that are going through totally different life stuff than I go through now. but how do we help give them the tools, the training to manage that and still be successful both in the office and in their personal life? Jen: Yeah, and we do we have different? Everybody kind of has a different work methodology. I shouldn't say hours, it's more like hours, you know a 20-something. They like to kind of work late in the day and have their workouts in the morning or whatever. Like everybody's kind of different. And then Hazel and I are about the same age and we like to not be disturbed until 8.30 or something. You know, like we like to go do our thing in the morning and work out and whatever. Read the paper and everybody's a little different, but we are very understanding of each other's different lifestyles. Right To your point. Chris: The key there comes to communication right. Yeah absolutely Absolutely, and so do you have. What is it that you're using as such to make sure those conversations are happening? Yeah, so that people understand how each other works differently, but together you can work for success. Jen: Yeah, we talk about it when they're hired. I say I'm not going to track your hours unless your productivity is not working Right, and then we're going to talk about it. Do you have too of a workload? Or, let's be honest, are you not working enough? You know, because last week you didn't have very many searches. This week you've got a lot. So if I need you to work till six, you gotta admit that last week you didn't have to. And they're very honest with me. A lot of times they'll say, hey, not going to be online until 10 or so, but I'm going to be working late or whatever. Or I stayed up for four hours last night sourcing. So you know I'll be available on phone but I'm not online. Perfectly okay, and we're very flexible that way. It's a little hard sometimes. You know, I'm always like are you working? I'm on the back of my brain and then I have to call myself and go. Of course they are, it's not producing. Chris: So that comes down to two fundamentals no matter what industry, communication, yeah, and what you're willing to do is have what some people might feel like is the harder conversation or uncomfortable conversation, but you approach it with kind of support and transparency. Jen: Yeah. Chris: The other thing. It comes down to productivity. Jen: Yeah, right. Chris: Absolutely. If we're running a business, we're running a for-profit business. We have to be productive to make the business go. So you can't lose sight of that. Some people, I fear at times the extracurriculars overweigh what we do to make our money and what is our. You go into the. This is what fuels our economic engine. We can't lose sight of that. It won't matter how many out-of policies or things we do, we won't have a business to support it. Jen: So it's finding a balance there, right? Yeah, I'd say the common denominator with all my employees is they thrive on success. They thrive on accomplishing things. They're not going to just shut things off if they're not done and they haven't accomplished what they set out to accomplish. They're very driven that way. That's a common denominator. Chris: Very good. So a little bit about your business. So you were saying you know, middle market focused, we're kind of approaching mid-year 2024, which is like just blows my mind that we're, you know, that far into the year already. But you know there are businesses out there that either use services like yourself or maybe contemplating that, and I know, at least in your world there's at least two different ways to go about it Retain, searches or kind of the contingency model. Can you just share maybe a little bit about what each is, the differences, pros and cons, and maybe flow into what a company should consider going one versus the other? Jen: Yeah. So I want to make it clear that I am not pro or con. Either way, I think there's a contingency, there's absolutely a place for it. I have several friends that are in the contingency recruiting world and they say I will never be in the retained world. So there is a place for it and I think if you have a large number of hires, you have a position or a company that is attractive to candidates and you want to get all the resumes you can get and then choose because they want to come to you, that's great. You can use contingency. What we do is a consultancy. So if you're a middle market working with a middle market firm right now, it's a downhole tool. Cfo position this position is critical that they get it right because they have big plans. I'm not going to tell you what those big plans are. They're private equity backed and they have big plans and it's going to happen, but if they don't have a financial expert that can devote time and devote, then it's not going to happen. And so it's critical, and in that situation you absolutely need to find the best person that you can find, and you need to interview a lot of people to make sure that you are choosing the right person, and so that's what we're doing. That's where we come in, and it doesn't have to be a CFO role. We can do. We do VPs and we do directors sure directors but we're going to look at 150 people that we know could do this job, and then we're going to reach out to every one of them and then we're going to interview 20 or 30. I'm going to interview half of those and then I'm going to present and rank the top. So it's not like we're going out and finding five people that are qualified and handing them to you. We're going out and finding 10 times that many maybe not 10 times, but a lot more than that and then finding you the best and ranking those for you to interview. So if it's a critical hire for your company to succeed, I would absolutely recommend retained, because they should be a retained firm, should be a consultancy, they should help you find that person. Chris: So that's really helpful, and hearing you describe it makes the difference very clear for me. I hope for the listeners and what I hear is you're doing a lot more upfront work on the retained side and I guess, as a consumer of these services, you should expect that your retained firm will do a lot more upfront work and vetting the best clients to bring to you. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I think that's important for my clients to know is our database is completely open. Our kimono is open. Is that a bad thing to say? Chris: No, we don't have video, so we're good. Jen: They can see everything we're doing, when we're doing, how we're doing. It's not a we'll talk to you in a month or two and we'll give you three great people. There's no magic thing that happens like that. It's a database they can go in. They can be like ooh, I know that guy and not going to work. Chris: Right, whatever reason, work right, whatever reason. So through, I guess, an online portal that you give them access to. Jen: okay and so it's a process to get to the fine. We meet once a week and I say here's why we chose, here's why we interview these people. What do you think? And a lot of times I'll say you know what? That company doesn't hire well, or they might be an acquisition on the horizon with that company. We can't talk to their people, so we have weekly conversations that get us closer and closer to the best person. And so it's a process, it's a very thorough process that gets us there. But that's 15, 30 minutes a week from our client, that's it. Chris: Okay, Well, they have to be invested, especially in these that are so critical. The positions to fill the client has to be invested. That's right and I like the somewhat. Maybe it's not. It sounds innovative to me that you are creating that opportunity for them to vet and see what's going on whenever they want. Right, but have those weekly check-ins. You know, it sounds like a kind of a white glove service, if you will. Jen: Yeah, and I think a lot of times people are scared, overtained. They're like what if it doesn't? What if you don't find someone? I'm like never happened in the history of 23 years, because we're talking to you and if we're not finding the right people, we're going to pivot, we're going to merge, we're going to figure out why is that happening. Is it the company reputation? Is it our pitch? Is it the way we're describing it? I mean, we're going after the wrong people. We will figure it out. We always fill the positions. Chris: Right Always, because you're invested in it. Right, right, it's not which. Jen: Because it's and it's not a. Here's three resumes, let me know. Chris: Right. Jen: That's not how it works. I got it. Chris: That makes sense. So a little bit, I just want to ask you're obviously, you know, leading this company. What, what would you or how would you describe your leadership style and how would you say that maybe has evolved over time based on your experience? Jen: So I would describe my leadership style as real. It's too real. I like to be pretty open with my employees and I have weekly calls with almost all of them I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly calls with almost all of them, I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly call with her. But the others, who I may not speak with, I have weekly calls. We talk about what's happening, what's going well, what is their workload like? I ask them what was the most challenging? Because we all work remote, so that's the other thing. We don't see each other every day right and I'll say what was the most challenging thing and what are you most proud of. And sometimes I had no idea. They're like oh well, I met that candidate at that event. I went to one of my. One of my employees told me that I'm like, I had no idea. Like you went to this networking event and happened to meet the right guy. So you know, just things like that. I try to have the communication very open yeah and they can tell me listen, I'm just not feeling well today or I'm mentally having some issues with home. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I just need to sit back and I'm like, take the time, whatever you need to do. So I like to think I'm a pretty real manager. Chris: Yeah Well, it sounds like there's a lot of empathy that comes across in those calls, so they feel safe. Yeah, empathy, that comes across in those calls so they feel safe, and I think that's an important thing for a leader to be able to show empathy so that people will be more open and responsive, at whatever level your leadership is in the organization, is an important quality. It's interesting too, I think, that you asked about challenges, because I find it to be helpful to if you're kind of forced to reflect on what was really good about the last week and maybe what was a challenge, because we learn from both. Right, well, that's really good. Anything that you mentioned your stepmother earlier as a mentor, any learning from her that you kind of feel like you're implementing today and kind of carrying on some of the things you learned along the way from her Well, she is my free consultant, so you know, so I call her all the time. Jen: I'm like, okay, more free. Chris: Don't let her listen, she might start charging. Jen: She's fully retired, so she's like no problem. No, I think, being a peer to your clients and telling them no, sometimes you know she's not a yes man and I think I learned that, that you know you've got to push back. When you know, because of your 20 years experience, that something's wrong, you have to call the elephant in the room yeah and you have to say you, you may not skip this recruiting. You know, a lot of times my clients will get very excited about a candidate and they're like, well, can you just come see me tomorrow? And I'm like, no, he cannot because that's too fast for the candidate. They need time to process. You look too eager. I had one client that said it. He said I'm not coming to the first date with a diamond ring. You cannot come to the first date with a diamond ring, you have to let the process happen. But she was always very good about not being a yes man and I've learned that works and it pays off to help your clients be successful. Chris: It's funny that works and it pays off for to help your clients be successful. It's funny that reminds me there's an analogy that applies in all kinds of situations. But it's the cake right. So, just like you were saying, don't be too fast. Yeah, you can have all the right ingredients, mix it up, put it in the oven. If you pull it out too quick, it's going to flop yeah right. So you got to let the process, trust the process, let the process play out, and that applies in so many different aspects of business yeah, and these are humans that we're dealing with. Jen: These are people and they weren't thinking about a job change most likely. Chris: So you've got to let that change management process happen in their head, you know, let them go through that as well so good point to make and we'll repeat it that for what you're doing with these targeted executive searches, most likely the right person was not looking. The ones that are looking there could be one of those red flags there, Not always right, not always, but yeah. So, jen, this has been a fun conversation. Congratulations on your success, thank you. I want to ask you just a few things to wrap up. Yep, so obviously you've been in the search world, or executive search world, for you said 20 plus years. What was your first job? Jen: I remember you asked somebody else this, so I actually worked at a daycare for intellectually disabled kids and adults. Not that fun story that you wanted to hear, but it was fun. I absolutely loved it. I worked every summer. 0:36:20 - Chris: There had to be a lot of life lessons learned in that. Jen: Very challenging. These were kids that were not accepted at other daycares, even for special needs kids. And so I made $4.25 an hour. I was just telling this story because now I'm the chairman of the board for Special Olympics. Chris: Are you really? Jen: I am, and so they asked me my why, and I was like well, I did this for about five years, six years, all through college. I did summer camps and stuff, and so that population has a very soft spot in my heart. Chris: I love how that's come full circle in your life to be able to be doing what you're doing with Special Olympics. As an aside and maybe a plug, isn't Houston hosting the Special Olympics? Jen: next year, next year, I did not tell you that you didn't, but I just know we are right at rice, and is it 2025? Yeah, so that's a big deal, so huge those. Chris: Any listeners in houston, be on the lookout to go support that, what a great cause thank you, appreciate that all right. So my favorite question tex-mex or barbecue? Jen: tex-mex. I'm not a barbecue fan. My husband loves it, but I don't. Chris: Well, you know, you had no problem answering that question. Jen: Some people struggle so I love that In Texas only probably Right. Chris: So another question I get travel ideas from. So if you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Jen: Maine. Chris: Maine. Jen: We. If you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Maine, maine. We went to Maine last year. Oh my God, it's beautiful. We're empty nesters and so we're doing two-week working vacations. We just got back from Santa Fe and then we're hoping the next spring we're going to do Maine. Chris: Good for you. Yeah, I like that, kenny. Jen: Bunk or somewhere around there. Chris: Okay Well, you didn't let me finish a sentence, oh sorry, no, so I know you meant it right. Some people have to think about it. Jen: Oh, I knew. Yeah. Well, we're thinking about where we want to go now, so we've got a whole list. Chris: That's a fun process to go through. Yeah, it is so well, jen. Thanks again for coming. Special Guest: Jen Sudduth.

If you missed the other episodes with thoughtbot Incubator Program partcipants and founders Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito of Goodz, you can listen to the first episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e2incubatorgoodz) and the second episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e4incubatorgoodz), and the third episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e6incubatorgoodz) to catch up! Lindsey Christensen and Jordyn Bonds catch up with the co-founders of Goodz, Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal, where they share insights from their journey during the Incubator program, including the usefulness of the application process in aligning their vision and the challenges and benefits of user interviews and the importance of not overreacting to single user feedback and finding a balance in responding to diverse opinions. They reveal the varied reactions of users to Goodz's product, highlighting the different market segments interested in it. As the Incubator program nears its end for Goodz, Chris and Mike reflect on their achievements and future plans. They've made significant progress, such as setting up an e-commerce site and conducting successful user interviews. The co-founders discuss their excitement about the potential of their product and the validation they received from users. Mike mentions the importance of focusing on B2B sales and the possibility of upcoming events like South by Southwest and Record Store Day. Transcript: LINDSEY: Thanks for being here. My name's Lindsey. I head up marketing at thoughtbot. If you haven't joined one of these before, we are checking in with two of the founders who are going through the thoughtbot Startup Incubator to learn how it's going, what's new, what challenges they're hitting, and what they're learning along the way. If you're not familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy, and we hope your team and your product become a success. And one way we do that is through our startup incubator. So, today, we are joined by our co-founders, Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, Co-Founders of the startup Goodz. And we also have another special guest today, Danny Kim, from the thoughtbot side, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. So, I think, to start off, we'll head over to the new face, the new voice that we've got with us today. Danny, tell us a little bit about your role at thoughtbot and, specifically, the incubator. DANNY: Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks for having me on, and thanks for letting me join in on all the fun. I'm one of the product managers at thoughtbot. I typically work for the Lift-Off team. We usually work with companies that are looking to, like, go into market with their first version MVP. They might have a product that exists and that they're already kind of doing well with, and they kind of want to jump into a new segment. We'll typically work with companies like that to kind of get them kicked off the ground. But it's been really awesome being part of the incubator program. It's my first time in helping with the market validation side. Definitely also, like, learning a lot from this experience [laughs] for myself. Coming at it specifically from a PM perspective, there's, like, so much variation usually in product management across the industry, depending on, like, what stage of the product that you're working in. And so, I'm definitely feeling my fair share of impostor syndrome here. But it's been really fun to stretch my brand and, like, approach problems from, like, a completely different perspective and also using different tools. But, you know, working with Mike and Chris makes it so much easier because they really make it feel like you're part of their team, and so that definitely goes a long way. LINDSEY: It just goes to show everyone gets impostor syndrome sometimes [laughter], even senior product managers at thoughtbot [laughter]. Thanks for that intro. It's, you know, the thoughtbot team learns along the way, too, you know, especially if usually you're focused on a different stage of product development. Mike, it's been only three weeks or a very long three weeks since last we checked in with you, kind of forever in startup time. So, I think the last time, we were just getting to know you two. And you were walking us through the concept, this merging of the digital and physical world of music, and how we interact with music keepsakes or merchandise. How's my pitch? MIKE: Good. Great. You're killing it. [laughter] LINDSEY: And has anything major changed to that concept in the last three weeks? MIKE: No. I mean, I can't believe it's only been three weeks. It feels like it's been a long time since we last talked. It's been an intense three weeks, for sure. No, it's been going really well. I mean, we launched all sorts of stuff. I'm trying to think of anything that's sort of fundamentally changed in terms of the plan itself or kind of our, yeah, what we've been working on. And I think we've pretty much stayed the course to sort of get to where we are now. But it's been really intensive. I think also having sort of Thanksgiving in there, and we were kind of pushing to get something live right before the Thanksgiving break. And so, that week just felt, I mean, I was just dead by, you know, like, Thursday of Thanksgiving. I think we all were. So, it's been intense, I would say, is the short answer. And I'm happy, yeah, to get into kind of where things are at. But big picture, it's been an intense three weeks. LINDSEY: That's cool. And when we talked, you were, you know, definitely getting into research and user interviews. Have those influenced any, you know, changes along the way in the plan? MIKE: Yeah. They've been really helpful. You know, we'd never really done that before in any of the sort of past projects that we've worked on together. And so, I think just being able to, you know, read through some of those scripts and then sit through some of the interviews and just kind of hearing people's honest assessment of some things has been really interesting. I'm trying to think if it's materially affected anything. I guess, you know, at first, we were, like, we kind of had some assumptions around, okay, let's try to find, like...adult gift-givers sounds like the wrong thing, adults who give gifts as, like, a persona. The idea that, like, you know, maybe you gift your siblings gifts, and then maybe this could be a good gift idea. And I think, you know, we had a hard time kind of finding people to talk in an interesting way about that. And I think we've kind of realized it's kind of a hard persona to kind of chop up and talk about, right, Chris? I don't know [crosstalk 04:55] CHRIS: Well, it also seemed to, from my understanding of it, it seemed to, like, genuinely stress out the people who were being interviewed... MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: Because it's kind of about a stressful topic [inaudible 05:03], you know, and, like, especially -- LINDSEY: Why? [laughs] CHRIS: Well, I think, I don't know, now I'm making assumptions. Maybe because we're close to the holiday season, and that's a topic in the back of everybody's mind. But yeah, Danny, would you disagree with that? Those folks, from what we heard, seemed like they were the most difficult to kind of extract answers from. But then, if the subject changed and we treated them as a different persona, several of those interviews proved to be quite fruitful. So, it's just really interesting. DANNY: Yeah. It really started, like, you kind of try to get some answers out of people, and there's, like, some level of people trying to please you to some extent. That's just, like, naturally, how it starts. And you just, like, keep trying to drill into the answers. And you just keep asking people like, "So, what kind of gifts do you give?" And they're just like, "Oh my goodness, like, I haven't thought about buying gifts for my sister in [laughs], like, you know, in forever. And now, like [laughs], I don't know where to go." And they get, like, pretty stressed out about it. But then we just kind of started shifting into like, "All right, cool, never mind about that. Like, do you like listening to music?" And they're like, "Yes." And then it just kind of explodes from there. And they're like, "This last concert that I went to..." and all of this stuff. And it was much more fruitful kind of leaning more towards that, actually, yeah. LINDSEY: That's fascinating. I guess that speaks to, especially at this stage and the speed and the amount of interviews you're doing, the need for being, like, really agile in those interviews, and then, like, really quickly applying what you're learning to making the next one even more valuable. MIKE: Yeah. And I think, you know, like, we launched just a little sort of website experiment or, like, an e-commerce experiment right before Thanksgiving. And I think now, you know, we're able to sort of take some of those learnings from those interviews and apply them to both sort of our ad copy itself but also just different landing pages in different language on the different kind of versions of the site and see if we can find some resonance with some of these audience groups. So, it's been interesting. LINDSEY: Are you still trying to figure out who that early adopter audience is, who that niche persona is? MIKE: I think we -- CHRIS: Yes, we are. I think we have a good idea of who it is. And I think right now we're just trying to figure out really how to reach those people. That, I think, is the biggest challenge right now for us. MIKE: Yeah. With the e-commerce experiment it was sort of a very specific niche thing that is a little bit adjacent to what I think we want to be doing longer term with Goodz. And so, it's weird. It's like, we're in a place we're like, oh, we really want to find the people that want this thing. But also, this thing isn't necessarily the thing that we think we're going to make longer term, so let's not worry too hard about finding them. You know what I mean? It's been an interesting sort of back and forth with that. CHRIS: From the interviews that we conducted, you know, we identified three key personas. Most of them have come up, but I'll just relist them. There's the sibling gift giver. There was the merch buyers; these are people who go to concerts and buy merchandise, you know, T-shirts, albums, records, things along those lines to support the artists that they love. And then the final one that was identified we gave the title of the 'Proud Playlister'. And these are people who are really into their digital media platforms, love making playlists, and love sharing those playlists with their friends. And that, I would say, the proud playlister is really the one that we have focused on in terms of the storefront that we launched, like, the product is pretty much specifically for them. But the lessons that we're learning while making this product and trying to get this into the hands of the proud playlisters will feed into kind of the merch buyers. MIKE: Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's funny, like, this week is kind of a poignant week for this, right? Because it's the week that Spotify Wrapped launched, right? So, it's like, in the course of any given year, it's probably, like, the one week of the year that lots and lots and lots of people are thinking about playlists all of a sudden, so trying a little bit to see if we can ride that wave or just kind of dovetail with that a bit, too. LINDSEY: Absolutely. And do you want to give just, like, the really quick reminder of what the product experience is like? MIKE: Oh yeah [laughs], good call. CHRIS: This is a prototype of it. It's called the Goodz Mixtape. Basically, the idea is that you purchase one of these from us. You give us a playlist URL. We program that URL onto the NFC chip that's embedded in the Good itself. And then when you scan this Good, that playlist will come up. So, it's a really great way of you make a playlist for somebody, and you want to gift it to them; this is a great way to do that. You have a special playlist, maybe between you and a friend or you and a partner. This is a good way to commemorate that playlist, turn it into a physical thing, give that digital file value and presence in the physical world. LINDSEY: Great. Okay, so you casually mentioned this launch of an e-commerce store that happened last week. MIKE: It didn't feel casual. LINDSEY: Yeah. Why [laughter]...[inaudible 09:45] real casual. Why did you launch it? How's it going? MIKE: I don't know. Why did we launch it? I mean, well, we wanted to be able to test some assumptions. I think, you know, we wanted to get the brand out there a little bit, get our website out there, kind of introduce the concept. You know, this is a very...not that we've invented this product category, but it is a pretty obscure product category, right? And so, there's a lot of sort of consumer education that I think that has to go on for people to wrap their heads around this and why they'd want this. So, I think we wanted to start that process a little bit correctly, sort of in advance of a larger launch next year, and see if we could find some early community around this. You know, if we can find those core people who just absolutely love this, and connect with it, and go wild around it, then those are the people that we're going to be able to get a ton of information from and build for that persona, right? It's like, cool, these are the people who love this. Let's build more for them and go find other people like this. So, I think, for us, it was that. And then, honestly, it was also just, you know, let's test our manufacturing and fulfillment and logistics capabilities, right? I mean, this is...as much as we are a B2B, you know, SaaS platform or that's what we envision the future of Goodz being, there is a physical component of this. And, you know, we do have that part basically done at this point. But we just, you know, what is it like to order 1,000 of these? What is it like to put these in the mail to people and, you know, actually take orders? And just some of that processing because we do envision a more wholesale future where we're doing, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of this at a time. And so, I think we just want to button up and do some dry runs before we get to those kinds of numbers. CHRIS: I think it also it's important to remember that we are talking in startup time. And while this last week seems like an eternity, it's been a week [laughs] that we've had this in place. So, we're just starting to learn these things, and we plan on continuing to do so. MIKE: Yeah. But I think we thought that getting a website up would be a good way to just start kind of testing everything more. LINDSEY: Great. Danny, what went into deciding what would be in this first version of the site and the e-commerce offering? DANNY: I mean, a lot of it was kind of mostly driven by Chris and Mike. They kind of had a vision and an idea of what they wanted to sell. Obviously, from the user interviews, we were starting to hone in a little bit more and, like, we had some assumptions going into it. I think we ultimately did kind of feel like, yeah, I think, like, the playlisters seem to be, like, the target market. But just hearing it more and hearing more excitement from them was definitely just kind of like, yeah, I think we can double down on this piece. But, ultimately, like, in terms of launching the e-commerce platform, and the storefront, and the website, like, just literally looking at the user journey and being like, how does a user get from getting onto a site, like, as soon as they land there to, like, finishing a purchase? And what points do they need? What are the key things that they need to think through and typically will run into? And a lot of it is just kind of reflecting on our own personal buyer behavior. And, also, as we were getting closer to the launch, starting to work through some of those assumptions about buyer behavior. As we got there, we obviously had some prototypes. We had some screenshots that we were already working with. Like, the design team was already starting to build out some of the site. And so, we would just kind of show it to them, show it to our users, and just be like, hey, like, how do you expect to purchase this? Like, what's the next step that you expect to take? And we'd just kind of, like, continue to iterate on that piece. And so... LINDSEY: Okay. So you were, before launching, even showing some of those mockups and starting to incorporate them in the user interviews. DANNY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we tried to get it in there in front of them as early as possible, partially because, like, at some point in the user interviews, like, you're mostly just trying to first understand, like, who are our target customers? Who are these people? And we have an assumption of or an idea of who we think they are. But really, like, once you start talking to people, you kind of are, like, okay, like, this thing that I thought maybe it wasn't so accurate, or, like, the way that they're kind of talking about these products doesn't 100% match what I originally walked into this, you know, experiment with. And so, we, like, start to hone in on that. But after a certain point, you kind of get that idea and now you're just like, okay, you seem to be, like, the right person to talk to. And so, if I were to show you this thing, do you get it, right? Like, do you understand what's happening? Like, how to use this thing, what this product even does. And then also, like, does the checkout experience feel intuitive for you? Is it as simple as, like, I just want to buy a T-shirt? So, like, I'm just going to go by the T-shirt, pick a size, and, you know, move on with my life. Can we make it as seamless as that? LINDSEY: And so, you mentioned it's only been a week since it's been live. Have you been able to learn anything from it yet? And how are you trying to drive people to it today? MIKE: Yeah, I think we learned that sales is hard [laughs] and slow, and it takes some time. But it's good, and we're learning a lot. I mean, it's been a while since I've really dug deep in, like, the analytics and marketing kind of metrics. And so, we've got all the Google Tag Manager stuff, you know, hooked up and just, you know, connecting with just exploring, honestly, like the TikTok advertising platform, and the YouTube Pre-Rolls, and Shorts. And, like, a lot of stuff that I actually, since the last time I was heavily involved in this stuff, is just totally new and different. And so, it's been super interesting to see the funnel and sort of see where people are getting in the site, where people are dropping off. You know, we had an interesting conversation in our thoughtbot sync yesterday or the day before, where we were seeing how, you know, we're getting lots of people to the front page and, actually, a good number of people to the product page, and, actually, like, you know, not the worst number of people to the cart. But then you were seeing really high cart abandonment rates. And then, you know, when you start Googling, and you're like, oh, actually, everybody sees very high cart abandonment rates; that's just a thing. But we were seeing, like, the people were viewing their cart seven or eight times, and they were on there sort of five times as long as they were on any other page. And it's this problem that I think Danny is talking about where, you know, we need to actually get a playlist URL. This gets into the minutiae of what we're building, but basically like, we need to get them to give us a playlist URL in order to check out, right? And so, you sort of have to, like, put yourself back in the mind of someone who's scrolling on Instagram, and they see this as an ad, and they click it, and they're like, oh, that thing was cool. Sure, I will buy one of those. And then it's like, no, actually, you need to, you know, leave this, go into a different app, find a play...like, it suddenly just puts a lot of the mental strain. But it's a lot. It's a cognitive load, greater than, as you said, just buying a T-shirt and telling what size you want. So, thinking through ways to really trim that down, shore up the amount of time people are spending on a cart. All that stuff has been fascinating. And then just, like, the different demographic kind of work that we're using, all the social ads platforms to kind of identify has been really interesting. It's still early. But, actually, like, Chris and I were just noticing...we were just talking right before this call. Like, we're actually starting to get, just in the last 12 hours, a bunch more, a bunch, but more people signing up to our email newsletter, probably in the last 12 hours that we have in the whole of last week. Yeah, I don't know, just even that sort of learning, it's like, oh, do people just need time with a thing, or they come back and they think about it? CHRIS: Yeah. Could these people be working on their playlists? That's a question that I have. MIKE: [chuckles] Yeah, me too. CHRIS: It's like, you know, I'm making a playlist to drop into this product. It's really interesting. And I think it gives insight to kind of, you know, how personal this product could be, that this is something that takes effort on the part of the consumer because they're making something to give or to keep for themselves, which is, I think, really interesting but definitely hard, too. DANNY: Yeah. And I also want to also clarify, like, Chris just kind of said it, like, especially for viewers and listeners, like, that's something that we've been hearing a lot from user interviews, too, right? Like, the language that they're using is, like, this is a thing that I care about. Like it's a representation of who I am. It's a representation of, like, the relationship that I have with this person that I'm going to be giving, you know, this gift to or this playlist to, specifically, like, people who feel, like, really passionate about these things. And, I mean, like, I did, too. Like, when I was first trying to, like, date, my wife, like, I spent, like, hours, hours trying to pick the coolest songs that I thought, you know, were like, oh, like, she's going to think I'm so cool because, like, I listen to these, like, super low-key indie rock bands, and, like, you know, so many more hours than she probably spent listening to it. But that's [laughs] kind of, like, honestly, what we heard a lot in a lot of these interviews, so... LINDSEY: Yeah, same. No, totally resonates. And I also went to the site this week, and I was like, oh damn, this is cool. Like, and immediately it was like, oh, you know, I've got these three, you know, music friends that we go to shows together. I'm like, oh, this would be so cool to get them, you know, playlists of, like, music we've seen together. So, you might see me in the cart. I won't abandon it. MIKE: Please. I would love that. CHRIS: Don't think about it too long if you could -- [laughter]. LINDSEY: I won't. I won't. CHRIS: I mean, I would say I'm really excited about having the site not only as a vehicle for selling some of these things but also as a vehicle for just honing our message. It's like another tool that we have in our arsenal. During the user interviews themselves, we were talking in abstract terms, and now we have something concrete that we can bounce off people, which is, I think, going to be a huge boon to our toolset as we continue to refine and define this product. MIKE: Yeah, that's a good point. LINDSEY: Yeah. You mentioned that they're signing up for, like, email updates. Do you have something you're sending out? Or are you kind of just creating a list? Totally fine, just building a list. MIKE: [laughs] No. CHRIS: It's a picture of Mike and I giving a big thumbs up. That's, yeah. [laughter] MIKE: No. But maybe...that was the thing; I was like, oh great, they're signing up. And I was like, gosh, they're signing up. Okay [laughter], now we got to write something. But we will. LINDSEY: Tips to making your playlist [crosstalk 19:11] playing your playlist -- MIKE: Yeah [crosstalk 19:13]. CHRIS: Right. And then also...tips to making your playlists. Also, we're advancing on the collectible side of things, too. We are, hopefully, going to have two pilot programs in place, one with a major label and one with a major artist. And we're really excited about that. LINDSEY: Okay. That's cool. I assume you can't tell us very much. What can you tell us? MIKE: Yeah. We won't mention names [chuckles] in case it just goes away, as these things sometimes do. But yeah, there's a great band who's super excited about these, been around for a long time, some good name recognition, and a very loyal fan base. They want to do sort of a collection of these. I think maybe we showed the little...I can't remember if we showed the little crates that we make or not, but basically, [inaudible 19:52] LINDSEY: The last time, yeah. MIKE: So, they want to sell online a package that's, you know, five or six Goodz in a crate, which I think will be cool and a great sort of sales experiment. And then there's a couple of artists that we're going to do an experiment with that's through their label that's more about tour...basically, giving things away on tour. So, they're going to do some giveaway fan club street team-style experiments with some of these on the road. So, first, it's ideal, provided both those things happen, because we definitely want to be exploring on the road and online stuff. And so, this kind of lets us do both at once and get some real learnings as to kind of how people...because we still don't know. We haven't really put these in people's hands yet. And it's just, like, are people scanning these a lot? Are they not? Is this sort of an object that's sitting on their shelf? Is it...yeah, it's just, like, there's so much we're going to learn once we get these into people's hands. LINDSEY: Do you have the infrastructure to sort of see how many times the cards are scanned? CHRIS: Mm-hmm. Yep, we do. MIKE: Yeah. So, we can see how many times each one is scanned, where they're scanned, that sort of thing. CHRIS: Kind of our next step, and something we were just talking about today with the thoughtbot team, is building out kind of what the backend will be for this, both for users and also for labels and artists. That it will allow them to go in and post updates to the Goodz, to allow them to use these for promotion as people, you know, scan into them to give them links to other sites related to the artists that they might be interested in before they move on to the actual musical playlist. So, that's kind of the next step for us. And knowing how users use these collectibles, both the kind of consumer Good and the artist collectibles that we were just talking about, will help inform how we build that platform. LINDSEY: Very cool. And right now, the online store itself that's built in Shopify? MIKE: Yeah. The homepage is Webflow that Kevin from the thoughtbot team really spearheaded in building for us. And then, yeah, the e-commerce is Shopify. LINDSEY: Y'all have been busy. MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: Is there anything else maybe that I haven't asked about yet that we should touch on in terms of updates or things going on with the product? MIKE: I don't know. I don't think so. I think, like Chris said, I mean, we're just...like, now that the site has kind of stood up and we're really switched over to kind of marketing and advertising on that, definitely digging into the backend of this kind of SaaS platform that's going to probably be a big focus for the rest of the, you know, the program, to be honest. Yeah, just some other things we can do on the next front that could eventually build into the backend that I think can be interesting. No, I guess [laughs] the short answer is no, nothing, like, substantial. Those are the big [crosstalk 22:26] LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, that was my next question, too, which is kind of like, what's next, or what's the next chunk of work? So, it's obviously lots more optimization and learning on the e-commerce platform, and then this other mega area, which is, you know, what does this look like as a SaaS solution? What's the vision? But also, where do we start? Which I'm sure, Danny, is a lot of work that you specialize in as far as, like, scoping how to approach these kinds of projects. DANNY: Yeah. And it's interesting because, I mean, we were just talking about this today. Like, part of it is, like, we can, like, really dig into, like, the e-commerce site and, like, really nailing it down to get it to the place where it's like, we're driving tons more traffic and also getting as low of a, like, cart abandonment rate as possible, right? But also, considering the fact that this is in the future, like, large-scale vision. And there's, like, also, like, we're starting to, I think, now iron out a lot of those, like, milestones where we're kind of like, okay, like, we got, like, a short-term vision, which is, like, the e-commerce site. We got a mid-term vision and a potential long-term vision. How do we validate this long-term vision while also still like, keeping this short-term vision moving forward? And, like, this mid-term vision is also going to, like, help potentially, either, like, steer us towards that long-term or maybe even, like, pivot us, like, into a completely different direction. So, like, where do you put your card, right? Like, how much energy and time do we put into, like, each of these areas? And that's kind of, like, the interesting part of this is starting to talk through that, starting to kind of prioritize, like, how we can maximize on our effort, like, our development and design effort so that things just kind of line up more naturally and organically for our future visioning, so... MIKE: Yeah. A lot of different things to juggle. I saw there was a question. Somebody asked what the URL is, but I don't seem to be able to [crosstalk 24:10]. LINDSEY: The same question as me. We got to drop the link for this thing. MIKE: Yeah, getthegoodz.com. CHRIS: That's G-O-O-D-Z. LINDSEY: Get in there, folks MIKE: Yeah, get [crosstalk 24:23]. LINDSEY: And let us know how it goes. MIKE: Yeah, please [laughs]. Any bugs? Let us know. Yeah. I think that those...yeah, I mean, it's a good point, Danny, in terms of juggling kind of the near-term and longer-term stuff. You know, it's a good kind of reminder our big focus, you know, in the new year is going to be fundraising, right? We're already talking to some investors and things like that. So, it's like, okay, yes, as you said, we could tweak the cart. We could tweak the e-commerce. Or, like, can we paint the big picture of what the longer-term version of this company is going to be in a way that makes it compelling for investment to come in so that there can be a long-term version of this company? And then we can build those things. So yeah, it's definitely a balance between the two. LINDSEY: Oh, also, just casual fundraising as well. [crosstalk 25:06] MIKE: Yeah, yeah. LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: But it's hard. It's like, you wake up in the morning. It's like, do I want to, like, write cold emails to investors? Or do I want to, like, look at Google Analytics and, like, tweak ad copy? That's actually more fun. So, yes. LINDSEY: Yeah, life of the founder, for sure. All right. So, that's getthegoodz (Goodz with a z) .com. Check it out. We'll tune in and see what happens with the e-commerce site, what happens with the SaaS planning the next time that we check in. But Chris, Mike, Danny, thank you so much for joining today and sharing what's been going on over the last few weeks: the good, the bad, the challenge, the cart abandonment. And, you know, best of luck to you over the next few weeks, and we'll be sure to check in and see how it's going. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Transcript:  LINDSEY: Thank you to our viewers and listeners. We are catching up once again with one of the startups going through the thoughtbot Incubator. My name is Lindsey Christensen. I'm joined today by Jordyn Bonds, who heads up the thoughtbot incubator, as well as our Co-Founders of Goodz, Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal. Welcome, everybody. MIKE: Thanks, Lindsey. LINDSEY: Before we get started, before we put Chris and Mike back in the hot seat, at the top here, Jordyn, we have a special announcement for our viewers and listeners. JORDYN: Application window is open for session 1 of 2024, folks. You can go to thoughtbot.com/incubator and apply. And Chris and Mike can tell you how easy or hard applying was. MIKE: It was easy. It was totally easy. It's a very straightforward process. CHRIS: Yeah, it was way more straightforward than a lot of applications that we've dealt with in the past, for sure. JORDYN: Ha-ha. And if you've got a business idea that involves software but you haven't gotten anything out there yet, come talk to us. We will help you make sure that it's a good idea and that there are people who might buy it, and maybe get you even a little further than that. MIKE: We actually have a friend who's considering applying. I'll tell him applications are open. He's worried his idea is not big enough to actually be a business idea, so we'll see. CHRIS: Even the process of doing the application was really helpful for us because it helped us get aligned on exactly what we were doing, yeah. JORDYN: I love that. And I found that to be true when I was a founder applying to some of these things, in particular, applying for an SBIR grant was one of the most challenging things that we did, but it was so productive. I was so annoyed by it at the time, and then I cribbed from that thing. It actually sort of forced us to make a business plan [laughs], and then, basically, we ran it, and it was great [laughs]. CHRIS: Yeah. I think that was, for us, that was our point where we were like, "Is this idea fleshed out enough to move forward?" And we were like, "Yes, it is. Let's go. Let's do this." JORDYN: So, use the application as a forcing function, everybody. It will help you clarify your thinking. LINDSEY: Yeah. Jordyn, what would you say to Mike's friend who's questioning if their idea is big enough? How do you respond to that sentiment? JORDYN: That is a fascinating sentiment because I feel like so much more often, I am trying to help founders with the opposite problem where they think this thing is so big that they are not thinking about what step 1 is going to look like. They're just, like, in 10 years, we're going to be the next Amazon, and I'm like, "Maybe [laughter]. Let me help you figure out how to get to that giant vision." So, I don't come across the "Is this big enough to be a business?" question as often. And, I don't know, what would I say? I guess I need the details. LINDSEY: It could be a perfect fit MIKE: It could be. JORDYN: It could be a perfect fit. LINDSEY: In a way, that's what you're answering, right? MIKE: Right. LINDSEY: In some of this work. MIKE: That is true. So, yeah, you guys would certainly...just thinking through the process we've gone through the last two months, it would definitely help them flesh that out. LINDSEY: Which is a great segue. MIKE: Great segue. LINDSEY: Chris and Mike, we're actually coming up to the end of your incubator time. CHRIS: It's so sad. LINDSEY: Can you believe it? MIKE: It's gone by really fast. I mean, eight weeks is not a long time, but it has gone by very, very fast. CHRIS: It felt like a very long time in the middle of it. MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: But now that it's over, it feels like a blink that it's coming to a close. MIKE: I don't know. It's funny. I think we had some note in our retro today that was like, maybe the very end of the year is not the best time to do an accelerator just because you have, like, the holidays kind of jumping in here in the end. So, that might have helped make it feel like a... I feel like the end of the year always feels like a rush anyway. So, I think just life gets a little bit busier this time of year, too, but yeah. CHRIS: Yeah, my gingerbread man decorating game is, like, really down this season because we've been so busy. Tragic. LINDSEY: Chris, can you remind our viewers and listeners who might not be familiar what was the idea that you and Mike have been exploring with the incubator or, like, what did you come in with? CHRIS: So, with Goodz, what we're trying to do is make little, physical collectibles objects that connect back to the digital content that a user loves. The idea being that today, we are awash in these digital files, links, so many things on our desktops, on our phones, on our devices, and it's really hard to tell which part of those are really, really important to us. So, by giving them a presence in the physical world, that denotes that's something that's really important, worth keeping, worth sharing, and showing off to your friends and family. And to start this off, mostly because Mike and I are both kind of music nerds, we're starting off with a music focus, but at some point, we're hoping to move into other realms, too. LINDSEY: And a lot of the incubator, as repeat listeners will know, is focused on really kind of evolving user interviews all the way through and narrowing in on, you know, a core audience, a core market. Mike, how has that evolution been? I think the last time we chatted was around three weeks ago. What has the latest iteration of user interviews looked like in terms of the people you're talking to and even what you're asking them? MIKE: It's been a really fascinating process. I mean, I'm trying to think of where we were exactly the last time we talked to you, but I think we'd probably just launched the e-commerce site that we had been experimenting with putting up. LINDSEY: Yeah, exactly. MIKE: And so, and we really then started cranking on user interviews kind of once that was live. And so, moving away from the conceptual and more into like, "Okay, share your screen. Here's the link. Like, tell me what you think is going on here," and really sort of getting users who had never, you know, never heard our pitch, never been involved with us to sort of try to wrap their heads around what we are and what we're doing just based on that website and trying to sort of make iterative changes based on that. You know, for me, because I had not done user interviews very much in the past, like, it's very tempting, like, you get sort of 1 note from 1 person in 1 interview, and you're like, oh, we need to change this word. That word didn't make any sense to them, or this thing needs to be blue instead of pink. I think, for me, it was like, all right, how do we kind of synthesize this data in a responsible way? And it emerged naturally, which, I mean, Jordyn and all thoughtbot folks said that it would, but you sort of started hearing the same things again and again. And we never really got to a place where, like, you heard the exact same things from everyone. But there were enough buckets, I feel like, where we're like, okay, like, this part really isn't making that much sense to people, or, like, we do really need to, you know, structure this differently to convey. So, it was a bunch of that kind of work over the last three weeks or so and sort of just getting a sense of like, are we conveying our message? It's hard. I mean, it's a new, like, we're not the only people making physical products with NFC chips in them, but it is not the most common, like, product. Like, it is kind of a new category out there. And so, really trying to understand just right off the bat, do people get it? And you get wildly different answers [laughs] as to whether they get it or they don't, which has been fascinating, too. JORDYN: Yeah. [crosstalk 7:12] LINDSEY: Chris or Jordyn, anything to add there? JORDYN: Yeah. You get the best, like, bootcamp in the don't overreact to a single user interview experience in some ways because we [laughs]...it would literally be like, interview in the morning someone says this thing. Interview in the afternoon, someone says the exact opposite thing [laughter]. And you're like, okay [laughs], like, which one of these things are we going to respond to, if either of them? CHRIS: Yeah. It's hard. As somebody with, like, a strong desire to please, it's hard to reign yourself in and want to change things immediately, but it definitely makes sense to do so in the long run. MIKE: But yeah, but, I mean, like I said, I do feel like it kind of came down to buckets. It's like, okay, you're that. I can, like, categorize you with all those other people and you with all those other people. And yeah, I hear you. I'm like, yeah, it's tempting to want to please them all. But I think with this one, we're fighting hard to be like...or we sort of have a philosophy that this product is emphatically not for everyone because, at the end of the day, you get a lot of people who are like, "Wait, you're just putting a link to a streaming playlist on a physical object? Why don't I just text someone the link?" And sometimes that breaks down by age group, like, 18-year-olds being like, "What are you talking about, old man? LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: Like, why the hell would I do that? It makes no sense." But it sort of skews all over the age ranges. But then there'll be other people who are 18 or 20 years old who are like, "Wow, I never had cassettes when I was growing up," or "I never got to make, you know, mixtapes or CD-Rs for people." And like, you know, so it's, yeah, it's about finding the people who are the early adopters. As Jordyn has said a lot, it's like, we need to find those early adopters and, like, make them love us, and then other people will come later. CHRIS: I mean, some of the most gratifying moments, I think, are there's been some interviews where people have been so excited that after the interview, they've gone and purchased our products, which is just, like, the coolest feeling ever. LINDSEY: Wow. MIKE: Yeah, it's pretty cool. LINDSEY: Are you open to sharing a little bit more about what those buckets or what those segments look like? CHRIS: I mean, I think there's folks who outright just get it almost immediately, and I think those people tend to be hardcore music collectors, hardcore music fans, Jordyn and Mike, please feel free to jump in if you disagree with any of this. They just get it right off the bat. Then I think there's, in my experience, there's another bucket of people who are a little more hesitant, and maybe they wouldn't buy it, but they seemed really excited about the idea of getting one as a gift, which is really interesting. They're like, "I don't know if I'd buy this, but I'd really like to have one." And then there is another segment, like, which Mike just mentioned, of folks who just don't see the value in this whatsoever, which is totally fair. MIKE: Yeah, totally. I think it's also...I see it almost as, like, a matrix. There's, like, desirability, and, like, technical understanding because people were like, "I technically understand what this is, and I do not want it in my life." Or like, "I get what this is and, oh my God, I have to have that," or like, "I don't really understand what you're talking about, but, man, I love physical stuff. Like, sure I want..." you know, it's like, it goes across those two planes, I think. JORDYN: I will say that it, I think you alluded to this before, Mike, but, like, we're going to run a whole analysis of...because we did a ton of interviews, and we haven't actually done that, like, sort of data-driven thing of like, are there trends in the demographics somewhere that we're not getting? Because the pattern has not been there. Like, someone will talk to an 18-year-old, you know, at 1:00 p.m. who is just, like, "Why on earth would I ever want this?" And then I, like, you know, will talk to a 21-year-old who is like, "I love this." And it's like, why? Like, this is the answer. The thing we're trying to get out now is, like, what is the difference between those two people? It's not a demographic thing that we can see from the outside, so what is it instead? But with consumer stuff like this, often, you don't necessarily...you don't need that in such great detail when you're starting. You just kind of, like, throw it out there and see who grabs it, and then you start to build sort of cohorts around that. And that is kind of what these interviews have shown us is that there are people who will grab it, and that was part of what we were trying to validate. Are there people who Mike and Chris do not know personally who will, like, get this and be psyched about it immediately? And that is, you know, check unequivocally true. Like Chris said, there are people that we were, you know, that we had recruited on this user interviews platform [chuckles] who then just turned around and bought the product because they were so psyched about it. One of the guys I interviewed was like, "Can I invest in your company right now?" Like, during the interview, and I was like, "Maybe?" [laughs] CHRIS: There was, like, another person who wanted to work for us immediately... JORDYN: Yes, great. CHRIS: Which was really interesting and kind of awesome. JORDYN: Yeah, they're like, "Are you hiring?" You're just like, okay. So, it's validating that there are people all over that spectrum. Like, where those trends lie, though, which is, I think, what you were asking, Lindsey, not as straightforward and in a fascinating way. So, we still have a little more, like, number crunching to do on that, and we may have an answer for you later. LINDSEY: That's exciting. Exactly. I'm curious: what are the connecting dots between the folks who are really into it, and how might that impact how you approach the business? MIKE: Yeah, it's hard. It's definitely going to be a niche to start. And so, we got to figure out kind of got to crack the code on how we find those people. LINDSEY: And, Mike, I think you had also mentioned last time that, you know, you or both of you have a network kind of in the music industry, and you've been floating the idea past some people there. Have you been having more of those conversations over the last few weeks, too? MIKE: We have, yeah. Well, so yeah, we've had a couple more just kind of straight-up pitch calls versus like, "Hey, there's this cool thing we're doing," and having those people be like, "Cool. Let's do a pilot." And so, they're ordering, you know, 500 or 1,000 units at a time, which is rad. LINDSEY: Whoa. MIKE: For the first...yeah. LINDSEY: Okay, very cool. MIKE: Yeah. The first two or three of those should happen in January or maybe early February, but yeah, those are done and in production and arriving soon. So, that's really exciting with some cool bands. We won't say the names in case it doesn't [laughs] work out, but it does look like it's going to work out. LINDSEY: And so, it's specific bands that are creating merch for their fans. MIKE: Yeah, yeah. So, we're working with one artist manager on a band that he manages, and then we're working with a record label. And they're going to try with a couple of smaller artists. And so, yeah, it's actually really good for us. One is going to be straight-up sales, most likely, and it's, like, selling these things. And the other ones will be given away as kind of promo items on tour artists, which is also a really interesting use case for us, too, that we're excited about and using them as a way to sort of get email addresses and, like, fans engaged and stuff, so... And then yeah, then I had another conversation, and they want to talk about doing some pilots. So far, like, that side of things is going great. We're sort of 3 for 4 in terms of initial calls leading to pilots right off the bat, which is kind of unheard of from [laughs] my experience. LINDSEY: Yeah, I'd say so. No, a lot of very good signals. MIKE: Really good signals. But then we were able to turn some of those into user interview conversations, actually, as well over the course of the last couple of weeks, which has been really helpful, like, talking to manager and label-type people about what they might want out of a software product that is associated with this because we're not just thinking about making physical products but sort of coupling that with an online toolset. And that part, we haven't gotten as far along as we did with the direct-to-consumer e-commerce, but it's been fascinating. LINDSEY: So, what has been happening with the online shop? As you noted the last time we talked, it was just a baby less than a week-old Shopify site getting, you know, some first hits of people going around maybe putting things in their basket. I'm sure a lot has happened over the last few weeks. What kind of work, what kind of insights have you seen around the site? CHRIS: We've been, I mean, we've been selling stuff at a slow but steady pace. It's been great because it's enough to, you know, because our product really straddles the line between physical and digital; there's a lot of physical aspects to this that we need to figure out and kind of the level of orders that we've been getting have been really...it's, like, the perfect number to think about fulfillment issues, things like what kind of package does this go in? How do we mail this out? Things along those lines, just very basic, practical questions that needed to be answered. But yeah, it's been great. We actually, I mean, we hit our goal for the amount of these that we wanted to get in people's hands before Christmas, which is pretty awesome. And we continue now with the lessons learned. I think our plan is to try and make a push for Valentine's Day because these seem like they would be a great Valentine's Day present: make a playlist; share it with your loved one; share it with a friend; share it with somebody you don't like at all. Who knows? LINDSEY: [laughs] CHRIS: But yeah, that's kind of our next sales push, we think. LINDSEY: The hate playlist. CHRIS: [inaudible 15:40] hate playlist. MIKE: Yeah, perfect. Real passive-aggressive. CHRIS: Just Blue Monday, like, by New Order, like, 14 times. LINDSEY: [laughs] Yeah, every song is just like a sub-tweet... MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: About something they've done and [inaudible 15:53] Have you updated the site? Like, how do you decide what gets updated on the site? [laughter] Everyone laughed. MIKE: It was a little haphazard, I would say, there for a minute. But -- CHRIS: We got the site up very, very quickly. And from my perspective, I've been dealing a lot with the physical side of things, just getting great product photos up there, which is, like, something that thoughtbot has actually been super helpful with. You know, everybody on the team is starting to submit photos of their Goodz in the real world and using their Goodz, which is great. And we continued to update the site with that but also making sure our text made sense, refining copy in response to things that people said during user interviews. The checkout process, the process of adding the URL that we point the Good to that, we did a bunch of experimentation there based on what people were saying during user interviews. So, it has been a little haphazard, but we have made a bunch of changes. LINDSEY: Jordyn, has there been any experiment, like, structured experimentation around the site or how you're getting people to the site? JORDYN: Mike actually did a little bit of ad funnel work that I don't think we've, like, even remotely scratched the surface of. So, I wish I could say that was conclusive, but I think we've found a little bit more...here are plenty of sales that are from people that nobody here knows. MIKE: True. JORDYN: So, people are finding out about this somehow [laughs]. But I think it's a little bit, like, word-of-mouth sort of chain of events is our sense so far. I wanted to say, though, about the site, we did get what Chris was saying about, like, this experiment was, in part, about fulfillment and figuring out how fulfillment would work and packaging, and not just messaging and not just closing the sale with consumers, but also, just, like, how do you fulfill these? But one of the really fun things we've managed to do in the last, since we talked last time, which I can't even believe...I feel like this wasn't even a gleam in our eyes for this project, but we managed to get out, like, stood up and out the door, and working in production in the last few weeks is a way for folks to actually assign the URL to their mixtape themselves. Previously, the plan had just been for Chris and Mike to do that, which is fine but a little bit unscalable, right? CHRIS: That was a huge dream or, like, that was high on our wish list. And we didn't think we'd get to it. And it's been pretty amazing that we have, yeah. JORDYN: Yeah, so that was one thing that is an update to the site. So, then we had to do a little bit of, like, micro iterating, on, like, the messaging around that. Like, how do you communicate to people? This is, like, a little bit of an abstract challenge, right? Like, here's this object. It's going to point to a digital thing. How do you tell the physical object which digital thing it's pointing to [laughs]? So, a lot of our recent interviewing has been to sort of get inside the mind of the consumer about how they're thinking about that and how we can best communicate that to them. So that's been a lot of the, like, recent iteration is getting that mechanism stood up and then the messaging around it. CHRIS: It's also really cool because it adds to the utility of the object itself in the sense that now our Goodz, when a user gets one, they can add a URL to their Good themselves, but they can also change that URL. So, it's much more malleable. JORDYN: Which is something that in one of our early user interviews was, like, a hot request [laughs], and we were like, "Someday, someday." And it's, you know, I should actually go back to her and be like, "Someday is today." [laughter] MIKE: Well, yeah, and just as Chris was saying, it just makes it so much easier to ship these out without having to manually load them, and you could sell them, and yeah, retail outlets, like, it just opens up a lot of opportunities for us for them. LINDSEY: And Mike mentioned that some of the, like, kind of future looking aspirations for the solution are, you know, how might you figure out the B2B, like, SaaS aspect of it? Jordyn, is that something that's been explored at all at this point, or is it early? JORDYN: That experiment I just described is actually sort of the link between the two projects. It sort of proves the concept and proves the value in some ways, and it has given us a little bit more visibility into sort of how we're going to execute some of this technical stuff. Like, how easy, how difficult is it going to be? These little experiments all build your confidence around your ability to do those things and what it's going to look like. And so, this experiment absolutely feeds into that question. But I would say it was really this week where we got to have a really fun brainstorming sort of blue sky conversation about that that I don't think would have been nearly as both creative and blue sky or rooted in reality as it was if we hadn't done these experiments and hadn't talked to so many...we had so much work...we could participate in a conversation like that so much more confidently and creatively because all of us had a lot more shared context. So, we really got to dream big, like, what is a SaaS platform built around these physical objects? And I don't want to, you know, I'm not going to give it away at this moment because we had a lot of, like, really cool ideas. It's one part talking to the B2B customer, which, you know, you mentioned earlier, getting what their pain points are, and what they're looking for, what they need, but then also dreaming big about now we understand the technology a little bit more and how it feels to use it. What does that unlock in our brains? The analogy I used in that conversation and that I use all the time is like, the users of Twitter invented hashtags, right? Twitter did not invent hashtags. And so, hey, everybody out there, newsflash: users invented hashtags, not Twitter or something else, if you didn't realize that Twitter was where those things kind of emerged. But there was just a user behavior that was happening in the wild, and Twitter was just very good at making that easier for them, looking at that and being like, "Oh, hey, is this a thing you all want to do? Here, we'll make that even more useful for you." And it was part of Twitter's early success that they were able to do that. And so, that was the kind of thinking we were trying to employ here is, like, now that we have these objects and we understand a little bit more how it feels to use them, you get these second order effects. What does that then make us think of? What is then possible to us that we wouldn't have been able to dream of previously because we didn't quite get it? So, that was really happening this week. LINDSEY: So, as the incubator time wraps up, what are the kind of final activities or deliverables, one, that Goodz wants and you know that they're going to get? What are the parting gifts as we send you out into the next phase? MIKE: Yeah, well, loads of stuff. I mean, we're getting all that code that [SP] Guillermo and the guys worked on to let people set their own playlist settings. And we've got that up in a GitHub repository now. And we've got a bunch of great design work that's all being handed over, like Chris was saying, product shots that a bunch of the team members were taking, synthesizing all the user interviews. We're actually sort of making some kind of final reports on those, so it's kind of more usable, actionable data for us. The whole website, you know, that didn't exist before. And that will sort of continue to grow as the entire website for Goodz moving forward. I don't know. That's a lot. What else was there, Chris? CHRIS: As a result of all that, I mean, one of the things I'm most excited about is now we have a small user base who actually has the physical products that, hopefully, we can get them to answer questions. That's huge for what's coming next. Starting the path towards the SaaS platform, too, it's really helped narrow our scope and think about, you know, how to make that successful or if it will be successful. LINDSEY: Yeah, that sounded like a big discussion this week that I know has been on your minds from the beginning. Wait, the last time, also, you said you were starting to get emails, too. Have you emailed anyone yet, or are you still holding on to them? MIKE: Oh. No, I still haven't sent a newsletter out [laughs], actually, but we have Mailchimp set up. Yeah, no, we've got a good kind of core of our, yeah, early folks on there. We'll start getting a newsletter out with some sort of regularity. We're building up the socials very slowly just focusing on Instagram mostly right now and trying to get back into that game. It's been a long time since I've had to do kind of social marketing stuff. And so, it's a lot of work, as it turns out, but we'll get all that cooking. I think this was just such a sprint, working with the thoughtbot folks and trying to get all this stuff done. Before the end of the year, now we can sort of take a breath and start engaging folks in the new year. LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, so, do you know what you want to do next or what the next phase looks like? Are you going to do fundraising? MIKE: We're certainly going to continue to have some fundraising conversations. We've had some conversations emerge over the last, you know, since we've been in thoughtbot, again, not the greatest time of year to try to be raising a round. But we're also not, like, desperately, urgently needing to do that right this second. I think, you know, part of it is the fundraising landscape, you know, doesn't look amazing. And we're still sort of building out a lot of traction, and sort of every week, there's some new, exciting thing, or we've got some new, big artists who wants to do something. So, I think, in some ways, to the extent that we can bootstrap for a little while, I think we will, yeah. So, we will focus on...I'd like to get back to focusing on, like, B2B sales. I'd like to hit the ground in January and just start talking to a bunch of music industry folks. And thinking ahead a little bit, sort of Q1 and Q2, like, what are the big tentpole events? You know, you got South by Southwest coming up in March. You got Record Store Day in April, or whenever it is. But, you know, there's, like, a bunch of those sorts of things that it's like, oh, let's not let those things suddenly be tomorrow. Like, right now, they're all still two or three/four months out. Like, let's make sure we're queued up for those things and see what happens. And Jordyn has been giving really good advice on the fundraising side where it's just like, just keep getting cool stuff like that and just do almost like little drip campaigns with funders who aren't maybe giving you the time of day or think it's too early, and just kind of keep going back to them. Like, the best excuse to go back to funders is like, "Hey, we just closed this new thing. We just launched this new thing. We just got this thing working. Hey, we're launching with this major band," Like, enough of those happen, and I think the fundraising will happen more organically. It's a strategy. CHRIS: I think we're really lucky in the fact that, you know, now, at this point, we're not talking about vapourware, you know, like, these are actual things that actually exist that, like, anybody could go onto our site right now and buy, which is awesome. And because of that, the product's going to continue to evolve, and, hopefully, our sales record will continue to evolve, too. LINDSEY: Amazing. Well, that feels like a good place to wrap up, maybe. Are you going to hang around in our incubator Slack, the thoughtbot incubator Slack for all our past founders? MIKE: Yes. Emphatically, yes. LINDSEY: Okay. We're holding you to it then [laughs]. CHRIS: I'm excited about that. We met with the other founders yesterday for the first time, and it was a really great and interesting conversation. It was cool seeing how diverse all these projects are and how folks are working on things that we had no idea about and how we're working on stuff that they have no idea about, and it was really great. It felt like a good cross-pollination. MIKE: Agreed. LINDSEY: That's awesome to hear. Jordyn, any final thoughts? JORDYN: [inaudible 26:58] out there listening and watching and want to join this community of founders [laughs], don't you want to have office hours with Chris and Mike? LINDSEY: All right, thoughtbot.com/incubator. You can apply for session 1 of the 2024 incubator program. And yeah, you two, if you have more recommendations, referrals, definitely send them our way. Chris, Mike, Jordyn, thank you so much once again for joining and catching us up on all the exciting developments for Goodz. MIKE: Thank you. LINDSEY: A lot of really cool milestones. JORDYN: I got to say, so much good stuff. And like, you know, just wrapping it all up almost diminishes the impact of any single one of those things that we just talked about, but it's, like, pretty amazing. People out there, apply to the incubator but also go buy yourself a Goodz mixtape. It's cool with playlists on it. MIKE: It's a good point. JORDYN: Give it to your BFF. Come on. LINDSEY: Getthegoodz.com. MIKE: Getthegoodz.com. Awesome. LINDSEY: All right. Thanks, Chris and Mike. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Chris Cerrito, Jordyn Bonds, and Mike Rosenthal.

If you missed the first and second episodes with thoughtbot Incubator Program partcipants and founders Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito of Goodz, you can listen to the first episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e2incubatorgoodz) and the second episode (https://podcast.thoughtbot.com/s3e4incubatorgoodz) to catch up! Lindsey Christensen, head of marketing at thoughtbot is joined by Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, co-founders of the startup Goodz, and Danny Kim, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. Mike and Chris discuss the progress of Goodz, focusing on the recent intense weeks they've had. Goodz, a startup merging the digital and physical worlds of music, has stayed on course with its initial concept. Mike details their approach to Thanksgiving and the launch of their e-commerce experiment. He shares insights from recent user interviews, which have influenced their approach and understanding of their target audience. When the discussion turns to the challenges of launching and maintaining their e-commerce platform, Mike and Chris talk about learning from analytics, marketing strategies, and the importance of understanding consumer behavior. They discuss the challenges in balancing short-term and long-term goals, and the upcoming fundraising efforts. Transcript: LINDSEY: Thanks for being here. My name's Lindsey. I head up marketing at thoughtbot. If you haven't joined one of these before, we are checking in with two of the founders who are going through the thoughtbot Startup Incubator to learn how it's going, what's new, what challenges they're hitting, and what they're learning along the way. If you're not familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy, and we hope your team and your product become a success. And one way we do that is through our startup incubator. So, today, we are joined by our co-founders, Mike Rosenthal and Chris Cerrito, Co-Founders of the startup Goodz. And we also have another special guest today, Danny Kim, from the thoughtbot side, Senior Product Manager at thoughtbot. So, I think, to start off, we'll head over to the new face, the new voice that we've got with us today. Danny, tell us a little bit about your role at thoughtbot and, specifically, the incubator. DANNY: Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks for having me on, and thanks for letting me join in on all the fun. I'm one of the product managers at thoughtbot. I typically work for the Lift-Off team. We usually work with companies that are looking to, like, go into market with their first version MVP. They might have a product that exists and that they're already kind of doing well with, and they kind of want to jump into a new segment. We'll typically work with companies like that to kind of get them kicked off the ground. But it's been really awesome being part of the incubator program. It's my first time in helping with the market validation side. Definitely also, like, learning a lot from this experience [laughs] for myself. Coming at it specifically from a PM perspective, there's, like, so much variation usually in product management across the industry, depending on, like, what stage of the product that you're working in. And so, I'm definitely feeling my fair share of impostor syndrome here. But it's been really fun to stretch my brand and, like, approach problems from, like, a completely different perspective and also using different tools. But, you know, working with Mike and Chris makes it so much easier because they really make it feel like you're part of their team, and so that definitely goes a long way. LINDSEY: It just goes to show everyone gets impostor syndrome sometimes [laughter], even senior product managers at thoughtbot [laughter]. Thanks for that intro. It's, you know, the thoughtbot team learns along the way, too, you know, especially if usually you're focused on a different stage of product development. Mike, it's been only three weeks or a very long three weeks since last we checked in with you, kind of forever in startup time. So, I think the last time, we were just getting to know you two. And you were walking us through the concept, this merging of the digital and physical world of music, and how we interact with music keepsakes or merchandise. How's my pitch? MIKE: Good. Great. You're killing it. [laughter] LINDSEY: And has anything major changed to that concept in the last three weeks? MIKE: No. I mean, I can't believe it's only been three weeks. It feels like it's been a long time since we last talked. It's been an intense three weeks, for sure. No, it's been going really well. I mean, we launched all sorts of stuff. I'm trying to think of anything that's sort of fundamentally changed in terms of the plan itself or kind of our, yeah, what we've been working on. And I think we've pretty much stayed the course to sort of get to where we are now. But it's been really intensive. I think also having sort of Thanksgiving in there, and we were kind of pushing to get something live right before the Thanksgiving break. And so, that week just felt, I mean, I was just dead by, you know, like, Thursday of Thanksgiving. I think we all were. So, it's been intense, I would say, is the short answer. And I'm happy, yeah, to get into kind of where things are at. But big picture, it's been an intense three weeks. LINDSEY: That's cool. And when we talked, you were, you know, definitely getting into research and user interviews. Have those influenced any, you know, changes along the way in the plan? MIKE: Yeah. They've been really helpful. You know, we'd never really done that before in any of the sort of past projects that we've worked on together. And so, I think just being able to, you know, read through some of those scripts and then sit through some of the interviews and just kind of hearing people's honest assessment of some things has been really interesting. I'm trying to think if it's materially affected anything. I guess, you know, at first, we were, like, we kind of had some assumptions around, okay, let's try to find, like...adult gift-givers sounds like the wrong thing, adults who give gifts as, like, a persona. The idea that, like, you know, maybe you gift your siblings gifts, and then maybe this could be a good gift idea. And I think, you know, we had a hard time kind of finding people to talk in an interesting way about that. And I think we've kind of realized it's kind of a hard persona to kind of chop up and talk about, right, Chris? I don't know [crosstalk 04:55] CHRIS: Well, it also seemed to, from my understanding of it, it seemed to, like, genuinely stress out the people who were being interviewed... MIKE: [laughs] CHRIS: Because it's kind of about a stressful topic [inaudible 05:03], you know, and, like, especially -- LINDSEY: Why? [laughs] CHRIS: Well, I think, I don't know, now I'm making assumptions. Maybe because we're close to the holiday season, and that's a topic in the back of everybody's mind. But yeah, Danny, would you disagree with that? Those folks, from what we heard, seemed like they were the most difficult to kind of extract answers from. But then, if the subject changed and we treated them as a different persona, several of those interviews proved to be quite fruitful. So, it's just really interesting. DANNY: Yeah. It really started, like, you kind of try to get some answers out of people, and there's, like, some level of people trying to please you to some extent. That's just, like, naturally, how it starts. And you just, like, keep trying to drill into the answers. And you just keep asking people like, "So, what kind of gifts do you give?" And they're just like, "Oh my goodness, like, I haven't thought about buying gifts for my sister in [laughs], like, you know, in forever. And now, like [laughs], I don't know where to go." And they get, like, pretty stressed out about it. But then we just kind of started shifting into like, "All right, cool, never mind about that. Like, do you like listening to music?" And they're like, "Yes." And then it just kind of explodes from there. And they're like, "This last concert that I went to..." and all of this stuff. And it was much more fruitful kind of leaning more towards that, actually, yeah. LINDSEY: That's fascinating. I guess that speaks to, especially at this stage and the speed and the amount of interviews you're doing, the need for being, like, really agile in those interviews, and then, like, really quickly applying what you're learning to making the next one even more valuable. MIKE: Yeah. And I think, you know, like, we launched just a little sort of website experiment or, like, an e-commerce experiment right before Thanksgiving. And I think now, you know, we're able to sort of take some of those learnings from those interviews and apply them to both sort of our ad copy itself but also just different landing pages in different language on the different kind of versions of the site and see if we can find some resonance with some of these audience groups. So, it's been interesting. LINDSEY: Are you still trying to figure out who that early adopter audience is, who that niche persona is? MIKE: I think we -- CHRIS: Yes, we are. I think we have a good idea of who it is. And I think right now we're just trying to figure out really how to reach those people. That, I think, is the biggest challenge right now for us. MIKE: Yeah. With the e-commerce experiment it was sort of a very specific niche thing that is a little bit adjacent to what I think we want to be doing longer term with Goodz. And so, it's weird. It's like, we're in a place we're like, oh, we really want to find the people that want this thing. But also, this thing isn't necessarily the thing that we think we're going to make longer term, so let's not worry too hard about finding them. You know what I mean? It's been an interesting sort of back and forth with that. CHRIS: From the interviews that we conducted, you know, we identified three key personas. Most of them have come up, but I'll just relist them. There's the sibling gift giver. There was the merch buyers; these are people who go to concerts and buy merchandise, you know, T-shirts, albums, records, things along those lines to support the artists that they love. And then the final one that was identified we gave the title of the 'Proud Playlister'. And these are people who are really into their digital media platforms, love making playlists, and love sharing those playlists with their friends. And that, I would say, the proud playlister is really the one that we have focused on in terms of the storefront that we launched, like, the product is pretty much specifically for them. But the lessons that we're learning while making this product and trying to get this into the hands of the proud playlisters will feed into kind of the merch buyers. MIKE: Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's funny, like, this week is kind of a poignant week for this, right? Because it's the week that Spotify Wrapped launched, right? So, it's like, in the course of any given year, it's probably, like, the one week of the year that lots and lots and lots of people are thinking about playlists all of a sudden, so trying a little bit to see if we can ride that wave or just kind of dovetail with that a bit, too. LINDSEY: Absolutely. And do you want to give just, like, the really quick reminder of what the product experience is like? MIKE: Oh yeah [laughs], good call. CHRIS: This is a prototype of it. It's called the Goodz Mixtape. Basically, the idea is that you purchase one of these from us. You give us a playlist URL. We program that URL onto the NFC chip that's embedded in the Good itself. And then when you scan this Good, that playlist will come up. So, it's a really great way of you make a playlist for somebody, and you want to gift it to them; this is a great way to do that. You have a special playlist, maybe between you and a friend or you and a partner. This is a good way to commemorate that playlist, turn it into a physical thing, give that digital file value and presence in the physical world. LINDSEY: Great. Okay, so you casually mentioned this launch of an e-commerce store that happened last week. MIKE: It didn't feel casual. LINDSEY: Yeah. Why [laughter]...[inaudible 09:45] real casual. Why did you launch it? How's it going? MIKE: I don't know. Why did we launch it? I mean, well, we wanted to be able to test some assumptions. I think, you know, we wanted to get the brand out there a little bit, get our website out there, kind of introduce the concept. You know, this is a very...not that we've invented this product category, but it is a pretty obscure product category, right? And so, there's a lot of sort of consumer education that I think that has to go on for people to wrap their heads around this and why they'd want this. So, I think we wanted to start that process a little bit correctly, sort of in advance of a larger launch next year, and see if we could find some early community around this. You know, if we can find those core people who just absolutely love this, and connect with it, and go wild around it, then those are the people that we're going to be able to get a ton of information from and build for that persona, right? It's like, cool, these are the people who love this. Let's build more for them and go find other people like this. So, I think, for us, it was that. And then, honestly, it was also just, you know, let's test our manufacturing and fulfillment and logistics capabilities, right? I mean, this is...as much as we are a B2B, you know, SaaS platform or that's what we envision the future of Goodz being, there is a physical component of this. And, you know, we do have that part basically done at this point. But we just, you know, what is it like to order 1,000 of these? What is it like to put these in the mail to people and, you know, actually take orders? And just some of that processing because we do envision a more wholesale future where we're doing, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of this at a time. And so, I think we just want to button up and do some dry runs before we get to those kinds of numbers. CHRIS: I think it also it's important to remember that we are talking in startup time. And while this last week seems like an eternity, it's been a week [laughs] that we've had this in place. So, we're just starting to learn these things, and we plan on continuing to do so. MIKE: Yeah. But I think we thought that getting a website up would be a good way to just start kind of testing everything more. LINDSEY: Great. Danny, what went into deciding what would be in this first version of the site and the e-commerce offering? DANNY: I mean, a lot of it was kind of mostly driven by Chris and Mike. They kind of had a vision and an idea of what they wanted to sell. Obviously, from the user interviews, we were starting to hone in a little bit more and, like, we had some assumptions going into it. I think we ultimately did kind of feel like, yeah, I think, like, the playlisters seem to be, like, the target market. But just hearing it more and hearing more excitement from them was definitely just kind of like, yeah, I think we can double down on this piece. But, ultimately, like, in terms of launching the e-commerce platform, and the storefront, and the website, like, just literally looking at the user journey and being like, how does a user get from getting onto a site, like, as soon as they land there to, like, finishing a purchase? And what points do they need? What are the key things that they need to think through and typically will run into? And a lot of it is just kind of reflecting on our own personal buyer behavior. And, also, as we were getting closer to the launch, starting to work through some of those assumptions about buyer behavior. As we got there, we obviously had some prototypes. We had some screenshots that we were already working with. Like, the design team was already starting to build out some of the site. And so, we would just kind of show it to them, show it to our users, and just be like, hey, like, how do you expect to purchase this? Like, what's the next step that you expect to take? And we'd just kind of, like, continue to iterate on that piece. And so... LINDSEY: Okay. So you were, before launching, even showing some of those mockups and starting to incorporate them in the user interviews. DANNY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we tried to get it in there in front of them as early as possible, partially because, like, at some point in the user interviews, like, you're mostly just trying to first understand, like, who are our target customers? Who are these people? And we have an assumption of or an idea of who we think they are. But really, like, once you start talking to people, you kind of are, like, okay, like, this thing that I thought maybe it wasn't so accurate, or, like, the way that they're kind of talking about these products doesn't 100% match what I originally walked into this, you know, experiment with. And so, we, like, start to hone in on that. But after a certain point, you kind of get that idea and now you're just like, okay, you seem to be, like, the right person to talk to. And so, if I were to show you this thing, do you get it, right? Like, do you understand what's happening? Like, how to use this thing, what this product even does. And then also, like, does the checkout experience feel intuitive for you? Is it as simple as, like, I just want to buy a T-shirt? So, like, I'm just going to go by the T-shirt, pick a size, and, you know, move on with my life. Can we make it as seamless as that? LINDSEY: And so, you mentioned it's only been a week since it's been live. Have you been able to learn anything from it yet? And how are you trying to drive people to it today? MIKE: Yeah, I think we learned that sales is hard [laughs] and slow, and it takes some time. But it's good, and we're learning a lot. I mean, it's been a while since I've really dug deep in, like, the analytics and marketing kind of metrics. And so, we've got all the Google Tag Manager stuff, you know, hooked up and just, you know, connecting with just exploring, honestly, like the TikTok advertising platform, and the YouTube Pre-Rolls, and Shorts. And, like, a lot of stuff that I actually, since the last time I was heavily involved in this stuff, is just totally new and different. And so, it's been super interesting to see the funnel and sort of see where people are getting in the site, where people are dropping off. You know, we had an interesting conversation in our thoughtbot sync yesterday or the day before, where we were seeing how, you know, we're getting lots of people to the front page and, actually, a good number of people to the product page, and, actually, like, you know, not the worst number of people to the cart. But then you were seeing really high cart abandonment rates. And then, you know, when you start Googling, and you're like, oh, actually, everybody sees very high cart abandonment rates; that's just a thing. But we were seeing, like, the people were viewing their cart seven or eight times, and they were on there sort of five times as long as they were on any other page. And it's this problem that I think Danny is talking about where, you know, we need to actually get a playlist URL. This gets into the minutiae of what we're building, but basically like, we need to get them to give us a playlist URL in order to check out, right? And so, you sort of have to, like, put yourself back in the mind of someone who's scrolling on Instagram, and they see this as an ad, and they click it, and they're like, oh, that thing was cool. Sure, I will buy one of those. And then it's like, no, actually, you need to, you know, leave this, go into a different app, find a play...like, it suddenly just puts a lot of the mental strain. But it's a lot. It's a cognitive load, greater than, as you said, just buying a T-shirt and telling what size you want. So, thinking through ways to really trim that down, shore up the amount of time people are spending on a cart. All that stuff has been fascinating. And then just, like, the different demographic kind of work that we're using, all the social ads platforms to kind of identify has been really interesting. It's still early. But, actually, like, Chris and I were just noticing...we were just talking right before this call. Like, we're actually starting to get, just in the last 12 hours, a bunch more, a bunch, but more people signing up to our email newsletter, probably in the last 12 hours that we have in the whole of last week. Yeah, I don't know, just even that sort of learning, it's like, oh, do people just need time with a thing, or they come back and they think about it? CHRIS: Yeah. Could these people be working on their playlists? That's a question that I have. MIKE: [chuckles] Yeah, me too. CHRIS: It's like, you know, I'm making a playlist to drop into this product. It's really interesting. And I think it gives insight to kind of, you know, how personal this product could be, that this is something that takes effort on the part of the consumer because they're making something to give or to keep for themselves, which is, I think, really interesting but definitely hard, too. DANNY: Yeah. And I also want to also clarify, like, Chris just kind of said it, like, especially for viewers and listeners, like, that's something that we've been hearing a lot from user interviews, too, right? Like, the language that they're using is, like, this is a thing that I care about. Like it's a representation of who I am. It's a representation of, like, the relationship that I have with this person that I'm going to be giving, you know, this gift to or this playlist to, specifically, like, people who feel, like, really passionate about these things. And, I mean, like, I did, too. Like, when I was first trying to, like, date, my wife, like, I spent, like, hours, hours trying to pick the coolest songs that I thought, you know, were like, oh, like, she's going to think I'm so cool because, like, I listen to these, like, super low-key indie rock bands, and, like, you know, so many more hours than she probably spent listening to it. But that's [laughs] kind of, like, honestly, what we heard a lot in a lot of these interviews, so... LINDSEY: Yeah, same. No, totally resonates. And I also went to the site this week, and I was like, oh damn, this is cool. Like, and immediately it was like, oh, you know, I've got these three, you know, music friends that we go to shows together. I'm like, oh, this would be so cool to get them, you know, playlists of, like, music we've seen together. So, you might see me in the cart. I won't abandon it. MIKE: Please. I would love that. CHRIS: Don't think about it too long if you could -- [laughter]. LINDSEY: I won't. I won't. CHRIS: I mean, I would say I'm really excited about having the site not only as a vehicle for selling some of these things but also as a vehicle for just honing our message. It's like another tool that we have in our arsenal. During the user interviews themselves, we were talking in abstract terms, and now we have something concrete that we can bounce off people, which is, I think, going to be a huge boon to our toolset as we continue to refine and define this product. MIKE: Yeah, that's a good point. LINDSEY: Yeah. You mentioned that they're signing up for, like, email updates. Do you have something you're sending out? Or are you kind of just creating a list? Totally fine, just building a list. MIKE: [laughs] No. CHRIS: It's a picture of Mike and I giving a big thumbs up. That's, yeah. [laughter] MIKE: No. But maybe...that was the thing; I was like, oh great, they're signing up. And I was like, gosh, they're signing up. Okay [laughter], now we got to write something. But we will. LINDSEY: Tips to making your playlist [crosstalk 19:11] playing your playlist -- MIKE: Yeah [crosstalk 19:13]. CHRIS: Right. And then also...tips to making your playlists. Also, we're advancing on the collectible side of things, too. We are, hopefully, going to have two pilot programs in place, one with a major label and one with a major artist. And we're really excited about that. LINDSEY: Okay. That's cool. I assume you can't tell us very much. What can you tell us? MIKE: Yeah. We won't mention names [chuckles] in case it just goes away, as these things sometimes do. But yeah, there's a great band who's super excited about these, been around for a long time, some good name recognition, and a very loyal fan base. They want to do sort of a collection of these. I think maybe we showed the little...I can't remember if we showed the little crates that we make or not, but basically, [inaudible 19:52] LINDSEY: The last time, yeah. MIKE: So, they want to sell online a package that's, you know, five or six Goodz in a crate, which I think will be cool and a great sort of sales experiment. And then there's a couple of artists that we're going to do an experiment with that's through their label that's more about tour...basically, giving things away on tour. So, they're going to do some giveaway fan club street team-style experiments with some of these on the road. So, first, it's ideal, provided both those things happen, because we definitely want to be exploring on the road and online stuff. And so, this kind of lets us do both at once and get some real learnings as to kind of how people...because we still don't know. We haven't really put these in people's hands yet. And it's just, like, are people scanning these a lot? Are they not? Is this sort of an object that's sitting on their shelf? Is it...yeah, it's just, like, there's so much we're going to learn once we get these into people's hands. LINDSEY: Do you have the infrastructure to sort of see how many times the cards are scanned? CHRIS: Mm-hmm. Yep, we do. MIKE: Yeah. So, we can see how many times each one is scanned, where they're scanned, that sort of thing. CHRIS: Kind of our next step, and something we were just talking about today with the thoughtbot team, is building out kind of what the backend will be for this, both for users and also for labels and artists. That it will allow them to go in and post updates to the Goodz, to allow them to use these for promotion as people, you know, scan into them to give them links to other sites related to the artists that they might be interested in before they move on to the actual musical playlist. So, that's kind of the next step for us. And knowing how users use these collectibles, both the kind of consumer Good and the artist collectibles that we were just talking about, will help inform how we build that platform. LINDSEY: Very cool. And right now, the online store itself that's built in Shopify? MIKE: Yeah. The homepage is Webflow that Kevin from the thoughtbot team really spearheaded in building for us. And then, yeah, the e-commerce is Shopify. LINDSEY: Y'all have been busy. MIKE: [laughs] LINDSEY: Is there anything else maybe that I haven't asked about yet that we should touch on in terms of updates or things going on with the product? MIKE: I don't know. I don't think so. I think, like Chris said, I mean, we're just...like, now that the site has kind of stood up and we're really switched over to kind of marketing and advertising on that, definitely digging into the backend of this kind of SaaS platform that's going to probably be a big focus for the rest of the, you know, the program, to be honest. Yeah, just some other things we can do on the next front that could eventually build into the backend that I think can be interesting. No, I guess [laughs] the short answer is no, nothing, like, substantial. Those are the big [crosstalk 22:26] LINDSEY: Yeah. Well, that was my next question, too, which is kind of like, what's next, or what's the next chunk of work? So, it's obviously lots more optimization and learning on the e-commerce platform, and then this other mega area, which is, you know, what does this look like as a SaaS solution? What's the vision? But also, where do we start? Which I'm sure, Danny, is a lot of work that you specialize in as far as, like, scoping how to approach these kinds of projects. DANNY: Yeah. And it's interesting because, I mean, we were just talking about this today. Like, part of it is, like, we can, like, really dig into, like, the e-commerce site and, like, really nailing it down to get it to the place where it's like, we're driving tons more traffic and also getting as low of a, like, cart abandonment rate as possible, right? But also, considering the fact that this is in the future, like, large-scale vision. And there's, like, also, like, we're starting to, I think, now iron out a lot of those, like, milestones where we're kind of like, okay, like, we got, like, a short-term vision, which is, like, the e-commerce site. We got a mid-term vision and a potential long-term vision. How do we validate this long-term vision while also still like, keeping this short-term vision moving forward? And, like, this mid-term vision is also going to, like, help potentially, either, like, steer us towards that long-term or maybe even, like, pivot us, like, into a completely different direction. So, like, where do you put your card, right? Like, how much energy and time do we put into, like, each of these areas? And that's kind of, like, the interesting part of this is starting to talk through that, starting to kind of prioritize, like, how we can maximize on our effort, like, our development and design effort so that things just kind of line up more naturally and organically for our future visioning, so... MIKE: Yeah. A lot of different things to juggle. I saw there was a question. Somebody asked what the URL is, but I don't seem to be able to [crosstalk 24:10]. LINDSEY: The same question as me. We got to drop the link for this thing. MIKE: Yeah, getthegoodz.com. CHRIS: That's G-O-O-D-Z. LINDSEY: Get in there, folks MIKE: Yeah, get [crosstalk 24:23]. LINDSEY: And let us know how it goes. MIKE: Yeah, please [laughs]. Any bugs? Let us know. Yeah. I think that those...yeah, I mean, it's a good point, Danny, in terms of juggling kind of the near-term and longer-term stuff. You know, it's a good kind of reminder our big focus, you know, in the new year is going to be fundraising, right? We're already talking to some investors and things like that. So, it's like, okay, yes, as you said, we could tweak the cart. We could tweak the e-commerce. Or, like, can we paint the big picture of what the longer-term version of this company is going to be in a way that makes it compelling for investment to come in so that there can be a long-term version of this company? And then we can build those things. So yeah, it's definitely a balance between the two. LINDSEY: Oh, also, just casual fundraising as well. [crosstalk 25:06] MIKE: Yeah, yeah. LINDSEY: [laughs] MIKE: But it's hard. It's like, you wake up in the morning. It's like, do I want to, like, write cold emails to investors? Or do I want to, like, look at Google Analytics and, like, tweak ad copy? That's actually more fun. So, yes. LINDSEY: Yeah, life of the founder, for sure. All right. So, that's getthegoodz (Goodz with a z) .com. Check it out. We'll tune in and see what happens with the e-commerce site, what happens with the SaaS planning the next time that we check in. But Chris, Mike, Danny, thank you so much for joining today and sharing what's been going on over the last few weeks: the good, the bad, the challenge, the cart abandonment. And, you know, best of luck to you over the next few weeks, and we'll be sure to check in and see how it's going. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Chris Cerrito and Mike Rosenthal.

Cheltenham is back for Christmas and so are Dec & Andy. They join Chris & Don as they look ahead to Cheltenham's 2 day Christmas meeting

We had to deliver a two-guest episode for such a big weekend at App State. First, the guys preview the Sun Belt football championship game and sit down with safety Jordan Favors to discuss the journey he and the team have traveled during the regular season. Then, the men's basketball team is riding a four-game winning streak into the Sunday afternoon showdown with Auburn at the Holmes Center. We discuss the opportunity ahead, and nerd-out on shooting, with Chris (Don't Miss) Mantis. #DSOTDPSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Do you know your four key quadrants and how to bring them into balance? On this episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times, Host Chris Schembra welcomes back best-selling author Robert Glazer, who is taking us inside his Elevate framework. As the founder of Acceleration Partners, he and his team provide clients a unique framework through which to optimize the core capacities foundational for healthy, thriving enterprises. You'll come away from this lively give-and-take with concrete steps for restoring life elements that are “out of whack” and in need of more attention. “It requires deep self-awareness and real authenticity to be the type of leader you actually are,” says our guest. “If I don't understand my values and why they are my values, I'm showing up as a completely different type of leader.” Don't miss pivotal insights from Robert's most recent book, "Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders," and frontlines perspectives on the leadership challenges we're facing daily, both personally and organizationally. Is it time you got your spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical capacities into alignment? Sign up for Robert's on-demand course (use code GRATITUDE to receive $20 off). And once you've done your core work, let us know about the values that define you!You can hear lots more about how to push your personal limits by listening in to Robert Glazer's The Elevate Podcast. Or purchase his latest book, "Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders."Want to stay in touch with what Robert's up to? You can receive his weekly Friday Forward newsletter, click here.If you'd like to learn more about Chris and his 7:47 Virtual Gratitude Experience or subscribe to our newsletter, please visit this link.Click hereto hear more fascinating conversations with Fortune 500 CEOs, professional athletes and entertainerswho have shared their human stories on Gratitude Through Hard Times. KEY TOPICS:Because he's a repeat guest. Chris slightly tweaks the pod's signature gratitude question to ask: How has gratitude been foundational to Robert's “other-ish” orientation in life.From the Jump: Acknowledging the value and benefits we receive from the people who come into our lives and the relational elements that cement true success in life.About Robert's Writing Method: Interweaving the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical elements that are the framework for his myriad best-selling books.State of Mind: If you're constantly coming into conflict or dealing with negativity, it's probably time to ask: Are you bringing the best version of yourself?Rejection as a Catalyst: How the “Valley of Death” shapes ultimate business outcomes – if we adopt the tools necessary to adapt to and navigate the terrain.Reframing Growth: Why it's important for leaders today to figure out how to bring their entire team along through waves of expansion that are humane and sustainable.Robert's Four Core Competencies to Elevate Organizational Cultures:Spiritual Capacity: Understanding bedrock strengths and values.Intellectual Capacity: Improving your ability to think, learn, plan and execute on goals. It's your personal operating system!Physical Capacity: Tending to personal performance and optimized well-being.Emotional Capacity: Cultivating strong relationships and how you react to outside individuals and circumstances.Finding Your Values: About Robert's online course and how it expands our spiritual vocabulary and capacity.Examining the role of trust.Bringing awareness to core narratives that drive leadership styles.Finding solutions that reinforce psychological safety in the workplace.Take the free Four Capacities Quiz or use cod GRATITUDE to get $20 off the his on-demand core values course.The Role of Vulnerability: How sharing personal stories and normalizing our common humanity empowers teams to look inward, get honest and make necessary adjustments.The Growth Mindset: When we explore, attune to and build our core capacities our leadership abilities expand in ways that enable us to be agile and flexible.Shifting the Story: How developing the capacity (and helping our teams) to process negative autobiographical experiences turns those negatives into powerful positives.Parting Thoughts:Remember to model the importance in today's hybrid world of being intentional about creating breaks and separation between work and home.A vacation is allowed to be a vacation. Take a real break!Consider using delayed delivery to manage the flow of email – for your benefit and that of others up and down the organization.Don't forget that setting boundaries empowers everyone!Maintain not just a work-life balance but a life in balance – spiritually, emotionally, intellectually and physically.  QUOTABLE“I think gratitude is an orientation … It's outside of ourselves, thinking about what we can do for others.” (Robert)“If you're focusing (only) on internal, self-reflective things, you're forgetting about the most important part of humanity, which is to be in relation and connection with and acknowledge the benefits of others.” (Chris)"When we show up as an exhausted, diminished version of ourselves, we're not really helping anyone else.” (Robert)“If you're meeting a**holes every hour of the day, you're probably an a**hole. It's your state of mind. How we feel changes our perceptions in all those interactions with others.” (Robert)“The whole aspect of capacity-building within an organization is learning, evolving and future-oriented.” (Robert)“Leaders are having to wake up and say, ‘You know what? We can't do the growth-at-all-costs model anymore because we forgot about our people.' ” (Chris)“A big piece of organizational emotional capacity is psychological safety.” (Robert)“It requires deep self-awareness and real authenticity to be the type of leader you actually are … If I don't understand my values and why they are my values, I'm showing up as a completely different type of leader.” (Robert)“We make mistakes. We review them. We don't make them again. We focus on the things we control, not the things we don't control.” (Robert)“What's cool is that emotional capacity is how you react to challenging situations. It's your emotional mindset. It comes as resilience, hope, pride, self-confidence, optimism in the face of really difficult circumstances.” (Chris)“When you can assign a list of positive benefits to a negative autobiographical experience and give gratitude to it and make it part of your story, it becomes the best thing that ever happened to you.” (Chris)“Don't allow a focus on external variables … If a sales team lost a deal, it should not be about the competitor's price. It should be about how we showed up, were we prepared, what was the feedback? Things that you can control.” (Robert) “It takes a great level of discernment to look within and acknowledge the things that you can actually control and should change. That takes wisdom.” (Chris) LINKS/FURTHER RESOURCES:Find all of Robert's books at this link.Learn more about the Anatomy of Peace at The Arbinger Institute.Discover Robert's course on expanding core capacities here.Find out more about Alcoholics Anonymous's Serenity Prayer.About "Grateful Processing," a concept developed by Prof. Phillip Watkins of Eastern Washington University. ABOUT OUR GUEST:Robert Glazer is a serial entrepreneur, award-winning executive, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. Founder and Board Chairman of global partnership marketing agency Acceleration Partners, he has significant experience in digital monetization, affiliate & partner marketing, customer acquisition, e-commerce, and direct-to-consumer marketing. He has served as a board member and advisor to many high-growth companies in the e-commerce and marketing verticals. Bob shares his ideas and insights via Friday Forward, a popular weekly inspirational newsletter that reaches more than 300,000 individuals and business leaders across 60+ countries. He is a #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestselling author of five books: Elevate, Friday Forward, Performance Partnerships, Moving to Outomes, and How to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. He has also been columnist for Inc., Forbes, and Harvard Business Review, and hosts the Elevate Podcast, a top podcast for entrepreneurship in more than 20 countries. FOLLOW ROBERT:WEBSITE | LINKEDIN | INSTAGRAM| PODCAST ABOUT OUR HOST:Chris Schembra is a philosopher, question asker and facilitator. He's a columnist at Rolling Stone magazine, USA Today calls him their "Gratitude Guru" and he's spent the last six years traveling around the world helping people connect in meaningful ways. As the offshoot of his #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling book, "Gratitude Through Hard Times: Finding Positive Benefits Through Our Darkest Hours,"he uses this podcast to blend ancient stoic philosophy and modern-day science to teach how the principles of gratitude can be used to help people get through their hard times. FOLLOW CHRIS:WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | LINKEDIN | BOOKS

About Chris Chris Farris has been in the IT field since 1994 primarily focused on Linux, networking, and security. For the last 8 years, he has focused on public-cloud and public-cloud security. He has built and evolved multiple cloud security programs for major media companies, focusing on enabling the broader security team's objectives of secure design, incident response and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he's architected and implemented multiple serverless and traditional cloud applications focused on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.Chris now does cloud security research for Turbot and evangelizes for the open source tool Steampipe. He is one if the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference (https://fwdcloudsec.org) and has given multiple presentations at AWS conferences and BSides events.When not building things with AWS's building blocks, he enjoys building Legos with his kid and figuring out what interesting part of the globe to travel to next. He opines on security and technology on Twitter and his website https://www.chrisfarris.comLinks Referenced: Turbot: https://turbot.com/ fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/ Steampipe: https://steampipe.io/ Steampipe block: https://steampipe.io/blog 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: Tailscale SSH is a new, and arguably better way to SSH. Once you've enabled Tailscale SSH on your server and user devices, Tailscale takes care of the rest. So you don't need to manage, rotate, or distribute new SSH keys every time someone on your team leaves. Pretty cool, right? Tailscale gives each device in your network a node key to connect to your VPN, and uses that same key for SSH authorization and encryption. So basically you're SSHing the same way that you're already managing your network.So what's the benefit? Well, built-in key rotation, the ability to manage permissions as code, connectivity between any two devices, and reduced latency. You can even ask users to re-authenticate SSH connections for that extra bit of security to keep the compliance folks happy. Try Tailscale now - it's free forever for personal use.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Logicworks. Getting to the cloud is challenging enough for many places, especially maintaining security, resiliency, cost control, agility, etc, etc, etc. Things break, configurations drift, technology advances, and organizations, frankly, need to evolve. How can you get to the cloud faster and ensure you have the right team in place to maintain success over time? Day 2 matters. Work with a partner who gets it - Logicworks combines the cloud expertise and platform automation to customize solutions to meet your unique requirements. Get started by chatting with a cloud specialist today at snark.cloud/logicworks. That's snark.cloud/logicworksCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone that I have been meaning to invite slash drag onto this show for a number of years. We first met at re:Inforce the first year that they had such a thing, Amazon's security conference for cloud, as is Amazon's tradition, named after an email subject line. Chris Farris is a cloud security nerd at Turbot. He's also one of the organizers for fwd:cloudsec, another security conference named after an email subject line with a lot more self-awareness than any of Amazon's stuff. Chris, thank you for joining me.Chris: Oh, thank you for dragging me on. You can let go of my hair now.Corey: Wonderful, wonderful. That's why we're all having the thinning hair going on. People just use it to drag us to and fro, it seems. So, you've been doing something that I'm only going to describe as weird lately because your background—not that dissimilar from mine—is as a practitioner. You've been heavily involved in the security space for a while and lately, I keep seeing an awful lot of things with your name on them getting sucked up by the giant app surveillance apparatus deployed to the internet, looking for basically any mention of AWS that I wind up using to write my newsletter and feed the content grist mill every year. What are you doing and how'd you get there?Chris: So, what am I doing right now is, I'm in marketing. It's kind of a, you know, “Oops, I'm sorry I did that.”Corey: Oh, the running gag is, you work in DevRel; that means, “Oh, you're in marketing, but they're scared to tell you that.” You're self-aware.Chris: Yeah.Corey: Good for you.Chris: I'm willing to address that I'm in marketing now. And I've been a cloud practitioner since probably 2014, cloud security since about 2017. And then just decided, the problem that we have in the cloud security community is a lot of us are just kind of sitting in a corner in our companies and solving problems for our companies, but we're not solving the problems at scale. So, I wanted a job that would allow me to reach a broader audience and help a broader audience. Where I see cloud security having—you know, or cloud in general falling down is Amazon makes it really hard for you to do your side of shared responsibility, and so we need to be out there helping customers understand what they need to be doing. So, I am now at a company called Turbot and we're really trying to promote cloud security.Corey: One of the first promoted guest episodes of this show was David Boeke, your CTO, and one of the things that I regret is that I've sort of lost track of Turbot over the past few years because, yeah, one or two things might have been going on during that timeline as I look back at having kids in the middle of a pandemic and the deadly plague o'er land. And suddenly, every conversation takes place over Zoom, which is like, “Oh, good, it's like a happy hour only instead, now it's just like a conference call for work.” It's like, ‘Conference Calls: The Drinking Game' is never the great direction to go in. But it seems the world is recovering. We're going to be able to spend some time together at re:Invent by all accounts that I'm actively looking forward to.As of this recording, you're relatively new to Turbot, and I figured out that you were going there because, once again, content hits my filters. You wrote a fascinating blog post that hits on an interest of mine that I don't usually talk about much because it's off-putting to some folk, and these days, I don't want to get yelled at and more than I have to about the experience of traveling, I believe it was to an all-hands on the other side of the world.Chris: Yep. So, my first day on the job at Turbot, I was landing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, having left the United States 24 hours—or was it 48? It's hard to tell when you go to the other side of the planet and the time zones have also shifted—and then having left my prior company day before that. But yeah, so Turbot about traditionally has an annual event where we all get together in person. We're a completely remote company, but once a year, we all get together in person in our integrate event.And so, that was my first day on the job. And then you know, it was basically two weeks of reasonably intense hackathons, building out a lot of stuff that hopefully will show up open-source shortly. And then yeah, meeting all of my coworkers. And that was nice.Corey: You've always had a focus through all the time that I've known you and all the public content that you've put out there that has come across my desk that seems to center around security. It's sort of an area that I give a nod to more often than I would like, on some level, but that tends to be your bread and butter. Your focus seems to be almost overwhelmingly on I would call it AWS security. Is that fair to say or is that a mischaracterization of how you view it slash what you actually do? Because, again, we have these parasocial relationships with voices on the internet. And it's like, “Oh, yeah, I know all about that person.” Yeah, you've met them once and all you know other than that is what they put on Twitter.Chris: You follow me on Twitter. Yeah, I would argue that yes, a lot of what I do is AWS-related security because in the past, a lot of what I've been responsible for is cloud security in AWS. But I've always worked for companies that were multi-cloud; it's just that 90% of everything was Amazon and so therefore 90% of my time, 90% of my problems, 90% of my risk was all in AWS. I've been trying to break out of that. I've been trying to understand the other clouds.One of the nice aspects of this role and working on Steampipe is I am now experimenting with other clouds. The whole goal here is to be able to scale our ability as an industry and as security practitioners to support multiple clouds. Because whether we want to or not, we've got it. And so, even though 90% of my spend, 90% of my resources, 90% of my applications may be in AWS, that 10% that I'm ignoring is probably more than 10% of my risk, and we really do need to understand and support major clouds equally.Corey: One post you had recently that I find myself in wholehearted agreement with is on the adoption of Tailscale in the enterprise. I use it for all of my personal nonsense and it is transformative. I like the idea of what that portends for a multi-cloud, or poly-cloud, or whatever the hell we're calling it this week, sort of architectures were historically one of the biggest problems in getting to clouds two speak to one another and manage them in an intelligent way is the security models are different, the user identity stuff is different as well, and the network stuff has always been nightmarish. Well, with Tailscale, you don't have to worry about that in the same way at all. You can, more or less, ignore it, turn on host-based firewalls for everything and just allow Tailscale. And suddenly, okay, I don't really have to think about this in the same way.Chris: Yeah. And you get the micro-segmentation out of it, too, which is really nice. I will agree that I had not looked at Tailscale until I was asked to look at Tailscale, and then it was just like, “Oh, I am completely redoing my home network on that.” But looking at it, it's going to scare some old-school network engineers, it's going to impact their livelihoods and that is going to make them very defensive. And so, what I wanted to do in that post was kind of address, as a practitioner, if I was looking at this with an enterprise lens, what are the concerns you would have on deploying Tailscale in your environment?A lot of those were, you know, around user management. I think the big one that is—it's a new thing in enterprise security, but kind of this host profiling, which is hey, before I let your laptop on the network, I'm going to go make sure that you have antivirus and some kind of EDR, XDR, blah-DR agents so that you know we have a reasonable thing that you're not going to just go and drop [unintelligible 00:09:01] on the network and next thing you know, we're Maersk. Tailscale, that's going to be their biggest thing that they are going to have to figure out is how do they work with some of these enterprise concerns and things along those lines. But I think it's an excellent technology, it was super easy to set up. And the ability to fine-tune and microsegment is great.Corey: Wildly so. They occasionally sponsor my nonsense. I have no earthly idea whether this episode is one of them because we have an editorial firewall—they're not paying me to set any of this stuff, like, “And this is brought to you by whatever.” Yeah, that's the sponsored ad part. This is just, I'm in love with the product.One of the most annoying things about it to me is that I haven't found a reason to give them money yet because the free tier for my personal stuff is very comfortably sized and I don't have a traditional enterprise network or anything like that people would benefit from over here. For one area in cloud security that I think I have potentially been misunderstood around, so I want to take at least this opportunity to clear the air on it a little bit has been that, by all accounts, I've spent the last, mmm, few months or so just absolutely beating the crap out of Azure. Before I wind up adding a little nuance and context to that, I'd love to get your take on what, by all accounts, has been a pretty disastrous year-and-a-half for Azure security.Chris: I think it's been a disastrous year-and-a-half for Azure security. Um—[laugh].Corey: [laugh]. That was something of a leading question, wasn't it?Chris: Yeah, no, I mean, it is. And if you think, though, back, Microsoft's repeatedly had these the ebb and flow of security disasters. You know, Code Red back in whatever the 2000s, NT 4.0 patching back in the '90s. So, I think we're just hitting one of those peaks again, or hopefully, we're hitting the peak and not [laugh] just starting the uptick. A lot of what Azure has built is stuff that they already had, commercial off-the-shelf software, they wrapped multi-tenancy around it, gave it a new SKU under the Azure name, and called is cloud. So, am I super-surprised that somebody figured out how to leverage a Jupyter notebook to find the back-end credentials to drop the firewall tables to go find the next guy over's Cosmos DB? No, I'm not.Corey: I find their failures to be less egregious on a technical basis because let's face it, let's be very clear here, this stuff is hard. I am not pretending for even a slight second that I'm a better security engineer than the very capable, very competent people who work there. This stuff is incredibly hard. And I'm not—Chris: And very well-funded people.Corey: Oh, absolutely, yeah. They make more than I do, presumably. But it's one of those areas where I'm not sitting here trying to dunk on them, their work, their efforts, et cetera, and I don't do a good enough job of clarifying that. My problem is the complete radio silence coming out of Microsoft on this. If AWS had a series of issues like this, I'm hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where they would not have much more transparent communications, they might very well trot out a number of their execs to go on a tour to wind up talking about these things and what they're doing systemically to change it.Because six of these in, it's like, okay, this is now a cultural problem. It's not one rando engineer wandering around the company screwing things up on a rotational basis. It's, what are you going to do? It's unlikely that firing Steven is going to be your fix for these things. So, that is part of it.And then most recently, they wound up having a blog post on the MSRC, the Microsoft Security Resource Center is I believe that acronym? The [mrsth], whatever; and it sounds like a virus you pick up in a hospital—but the problem that I have with it is that they spent most of that being overly defensive and dunking on SOCRadar, the vulnerability researcher who found this and reported it to them. And they had all kinds of quibbles with how it was done, what they did with it, et cetera, et cetera. It's, “Excuse me, you're the ones that left customer data sitting out there in the Azure equivalent of an S3 bucket and you're calling other people out for basically doing your job for you? Excuse me?”Chris: But it wasn't sensitive customer data. It was only the contract information, so therefore it was okay.Corey: Yeah, if I put my contract information out there and try and claim it's not sensitive information, my clients will laugh and laugh as they sue me into the Stone Age.Chris: Yeah well, clearly, you don't have the same level of clickthrough terms that Microsoft is able to negotiate because, you know, [laugh].Corey: It's awful as well, it doesn't even work because, “Oh, it's okay, I lost some of your data, but that's okay because it wasn't particularly sensitive.” Isn't that kind of up to you?Chris: Yes. And if A, I'm actually, you know, a big AWS shop and then I'm looking at Azure and I've got my negotiations in there and Amazon gets wind that I'm negotiating with Azure, that's not going to do well for me and my business. So no, this kind of material is incredibly sensitive. And that was an incredibly tone-deaf response on their part. But you know, to some extent, it was more of a response than we've seen from some of the other Azure multi-tenancy breakdowns.Corey: Yeah, at least they actually said something. I mean, there is that. It's just—it's wild to me. And again, I say this as an Azure customer myself. Their computer vision API is basically just this side of magic, as best I can tell, and none of the other providers have anything like it.That's what I want. But, you know, it almost feels like that service is under NDA because no one talks about it when they're using this service. I did a whole blog post singing its praises and no one from that team reached out to me to say, “Hey, glad you liked it.” Not that they owe me anything, but at the same time it's incredible. Why am I getting shut out? It's like, does this company just have an entire policy of not saying anything ever to anyone at any time? It seems it.Chris: So, a long time ago, I came to this realization that even if you just look at the terminology of the three providers, Amazon has accounts. Why does Amazon have Amazon—or AWS accounts? Because they're a retail company and that's what you signed up with to buy your underwear. Google has projects because they were, I guess, a developer-first thing and that was how they thought about it is, “Oh, you're going to go build something. Here's your project.”What does Microsoft have? Microsoft Azure Subscriptions. Because they are still about the corporate enterprise IT model of it's really about how much we're charging you, not really about what you're getting. So, given that you're not a big enterprise IT customer, you don't—I presume—do lots and lots of golfing at expensive golf resorts, you're probably not fitting their demographic.Corey: You're absolutely not. And that's wild to me. And yet, here we are.Chris: Now, what's scary is they are doing so many interesting things with artificial intelligence… that if… their multi-tenancy boundaries are as bad as we're starting to see, then what else is out there? And more and more, we is carbon-based life forms are relying on Microsoft and other cloud providers to build AI, that's kind of a scary thing. Go watch Satya's keynote at Microsoft Ignite and he's showing you all sorts of ways that AI is going to start replacing the gig economy. You know, it's not just Tesla and self-driving cars at this point. Dali is going to replace the independent graphics designer.They've got things coming out in their office suite that are going to replace the mom-and-pop marketing shops that are generating menus and doing marketing plans for your local restaurants or whatever. There's a whole slew of things where they're really trying to replace people.Corey: That is a wild thing to me. And part of the problem I have in covering AWS is that I have to differentiate in a bunch of different ways between AWS and its Amazon corporate parent. And they have that problem, too, internally. Part of the challenge they have, in many cases, is that perks you give to employees have to scale to one-and-a-half million people, many of them in fulfillment center warehouse things. And that is a different type of problem that a company, like for example, Google, where most of their employees tend to be in office job-style environments.That's a weird thing and I don't know how to even start conceptualizing things operating at that scale. Everything that they do is definitionally a very hard problem when you have to make it scale to that point. What all of the hyperscale cloud providers do is, from where I sit, complete freaking magic. The fact that it works as well as it does is nothing short of a modern-day miracle.Chris: Yeah, and it is more than just throwing hardware at the problem, which was my on-prem solution to most of the things. “Oh, hey. We need higher availability? Okay, we're going to buy two of everything.” We called it the Noah's Ark model, and we have an A side and a B side.And, “Oh, you know what? Just in case we're going to buy some extra capacity and put it in a different city so that, you know, we can just fail from our primary city to our secondary city.” That doesn't work at the cloud provider scale. And really, we haven't seen a major cloud outage—I mean, like, a bad one—in quite a while.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: The outages are always fascinating, just from the way that they are reported in the mainstream media. And again, this is hard, I get it. I am not here to crap on journalists. They, for some ungodly, unknowable reason, have decided not to spend their entire career focusing on the nuances of one very specific, very deep industry. I don't know why.But as [laugh] a result, they wind up getting a lot of their baseline facts wrong about these things. And that's fair. I'm not here to necessarily act as an Amazon spokesperson when these things happen. They have an awful lot of very well-paid people who can do that. But it is interesting just watching the blowback and the reaction of whatever there's an outage, the conversation is never “Does Amazon or Azure or Google suck?” It's, “Does cloud suck as a whole?”That's part of the reason I care so much about Azure getting their act together. If it were just torpedoing Microsoft's reputation, then well, that's sad, but okay. But it extends far beyond that to a point where it's almost where the enterprise groundhog sees the shadow of a data breach and then we get six more years of data center build-outs instead of moving things to a cloud. I spent too many years working in data centers and I have the scars from the cage nuts and crimping patch cables frantically in the middle of the night to prove it. I am thrilled at the fact that I don't believe I will ever again have to frantically drive across town in the middle of the night to replace a hard drive before the rest of the array degrades. Cloud has solved those problems beautifully. I don't want to go back to the Dark Ages.Chris: Yeah, and I think that there's a general potential that we could start seeing this big push towards going back on-prem for effectively sovereign data reasons, whether it's this country has said, “You cannot store your data about our citizens outside of our borders,” and either they're doing that because they do not trust the US Silicon Valley privacy or whatever, or because if it's outside of our borders, then our secret police agents can come knocking on the door at two in the morning to go find out what some dissidents' viewings habits might have been, I see sovereign cloud as this thing that may be a back step from this ubiquitous thing that we have right now in Amazon, Azure, and Google. And so, as we start getting to the point in the history books where we start seeing maps with lots of flags, I think we're going to start seeing a bifurcation of cloud as just a whole thing. We see it already right now. The AWS China partition is not owned by Amazon, it is not run by Amazon, it is not controlled by Amazon. It is controlled by the communist government of China. And nobody is doing business in Russia right now, but if they had not done what they had done earlier this year, we might very well see somebody spinning up a cloud provider that is completely controlled by and in the Russian government.Corey: Well, yes or no, but I want to challenge that assessment for a second because I've had conversations with a number of folks about this where people say, “Okay, great. Like, is the alt-right, for example, going to have better options now that there might be a cloud provider spinning up there?” Or, “Well, okay, what about a new cloud provider to challenge the dominance of the big three?” And there are all these edge cases, either geopolitically or politically based upo—or folks wanting to wind up approaching it from a particular angle, but if we were hired to build out an MVP of a hyperscale cloud provider, like, the budget for that MVP would look like one 100 billion at this point to get started and just get up to a point of critical mass before you could actually see if this thing has legs. And we'd probably burn through almost all of that before doing a single dime in revenue.Chris: Right. And then you're doing that in small markets. Outside of the China partition, these are not massively large markets. I think Oracle is going down an interesting path with its idea of Dedicated Cloud and Oracle Alloy [unintelligible 00:22:52].Corey: I like a lot of what Oracle's doing, and if younger me heard me say that, I don't know how hard I'd hit myself, but here we are. Their free tier for Oracle Cloud is amazing, their data transfer prices are great, and their entire approach of, “We'll build an entire feature complete region in your facility and charge you what, from what I can tell, is a very reasonable amount of money,” works. And it is feature complete, not, “Well, here are the three services that we're going to put in here and everything else is well… it's just sort of a toehold there so you can start migrating it into our big cloud.” No. They're doing it right from that perspective.The biggest problem they've got is the word Oracle at the front end and their, I would say borderline addiction to big-E enterprise markets. I think the future of cloud looks a lot more like cloud-native companies being founded because those big enterprises are starting to describe themselves in similar terminology. And as we've seen in the developer ecosystem, as go startups, so do big companies a few years later. Walk around any big company that's undergoing a digital transformation, you'll see a lot more Macs on desktops, for example. You'll see CI/CD processes in place as opposed to, “Well, oh, you want something new, it's going to be eight weeks to get a server rack downstairs and accounting is going to have 18 pages of forms for you to fill out.” No, it's “click the button,” or—Chris: Don't forget the six months of just getting the financial CapEx approvals.Corey: Exactly.Chris: You have to go through the finance thing before you even get to start talking to techies about when you get your server. I think Oracle is in an interesting place though because it is embracing the fact that it is number four, and so therefore, it's like we are going to work with AWS, we are going to work with Azure, our database can run in AWS or it can run in our cloud, we can interconnect directly, natively, seamlessly with Azure. If I were building a consumer-based thing and I was moving into one of these markets where one of these governments was demanding something like a sovereign cloud, Oracle is a great place to go and throw—okay, all of our front-end consumer whatever is all going to sit in AWS because that's what we do for all other countries. For this one country, we're just going to go and build this thing in Oracle and we're going to leverage Oracle Alloy or whatever, and now suddenly, okay, their data is in their country and it's subject to their laws but I don't have to re-architect to go into one of these, you know, little countries with tin horn dictators.Corey: It's the way to do multi-cloud right, from my perspective. I'll use a component service in a different cloud, I'm under no illusions, though, in doing that I'm increasing my resiliency. I'm not removing single points of failure; I'm adding them. And I make that trade-off on a case-by-case basis, knowingly. But there is a case for some workloads—probably not yours if you're listening to this; assume not, but when you have more context, maybe so—where, okay, we need to be across multiple providers for a variety of strategic or contextual reasons for this workload.That does not mean everything you build needs to be able to do that. It means you're going to make trade-offs for that workload, and understanding the boundaries of where that starts and where that stops is going to be important. That is not the worst idea in the world for a given appropriate workload, that you can optimize stuff into a container and then can run, more or less, anywhere that can take a container. But that is also not the majority of most people's workloads.Chris: Yeah. And I think what that comes back to from the security practitioner standpoint is you have to support not just your primary cloud, your favorite cloud, the one you know, you have to support any cloud. And whether that's, you know, hey, congratulations. Your developers want to use Tailscale because it bypasses a ton of complexity in getting these remote island VPCs from this recent acquisition integrated into your network or because you're going into a new market and you have to support Oracle Cloud in Saudi Arabia, then you as a practitioner have to kind of support any cloud.And so, one of the reasons that I've joined and I'm working on, and so excited about Steampipe is it kind of does give you that. It is a uniform interface to not just AWS, Azure, and Google, but all sorts of clouds, whether it's GitHub or Oracle, or Tailscale. So, that's kind of the message I have for security practitioners at this point is, I tried, I fought, I screamed and yelled and ranted on Twitter, against, you know, doing multi-cloud, but at the end of the day, we were still multi-cloud.Corey: When I see these things evolving, is that, yeah, as a practitioner, we're increasingly having to work across multiple providers, but not to a stupendous depth that's the intimidating thing that scares the hell out of people. I still remember my first time with the AWS console, being so overwhelmed with a number of services, and there were 12. Now, there are hundreds, and I still feel that same sense of being overwhelmed, but I also have the context now to realize that over half of all customer spend globally is on EC2. That's one service. Yes, you need, like, five more to get it to work, but okay.And once you go through learning that to get started, and there's a lot of moving parts around it, like, “Oh, God, I have to do this for every service?” No, take Route 53—my favorite database, but most people use it as a DNS service—you can go start to finish on basically everything that service does that a human being is going to use in less than four hours, and then you're more or less ready to go. Everything is not the hairy beast that is EC2. And most of those services are not for you, whoever you are, whatever you do, most AWS services are not for you. Full stop.Chris: Yes and no. I mean, as a security practitioner, you need to know what your developers are doing, and I've worked in large organizations with lots of things and I would joke that, oh, yeah, I'm sure we're using every service but the IoT, and then I go and I look at our bill, and I was like, “Oh, why are we dropping that much on IoT?” Oh, because they wanted to use the Managed MQTT service.Corey: Ah, I start with the bill because the bill is the source of truth.Chris: Yes, they wanted to use the Managed MQTT service. Okay, great. So, we're now in IoT. But how many of those things have resource policies, how many of those things can be made public, and how many of those things are your CSPM actually checking for and telling you that, hey, a developer has gone out somewhere and made this SageMaker notebook public, or this MQTT topic public. And so, that's where you know, you need to have that level of depth and then you've got to have that level of depth in each cloud. To some extent, if the cloud is just the core basic VMs, object storage, maybe some networking, and a managed relational database, super simple to understand what all you need to do to build a baseline to secure that. As soon as you start adding in on all of the fancy services that AWS has. I re—Corey: Yeah, migrating your Step Functions workflow to other cloud is going to be a living goddamn nightmare. Migrating something that you stuffed into a container and run on EC2 or Fargate is probably going to be a lot simpler. But there are always nuances.Chris: Yep. But the security profile of a Step Function is significantly different. So, you know, there's not much you can do there wrong, yet.Corey: You say that now, but wait for their next security breach, and then we start calling them Stumble Functions instead.Chris: Yeah. I say that. And the next thing, you know, we're going to have something like Lambda [unintelligible 00:30:31] show up and I'm just going to be able to put my Step Function on the internet unauthenticated. Because, you know, that's what Amazon does: they innovate, but they don't necessarily warn security practitioners ahead of their innovation that, hey, you're we're about to release this thing. You might want to prepare for it and adjust your baselines, or talk to your developers, or here's a service control policy that you can drop in place to, you know, like, suppress it for a little bit. No, it's like, “Hey, these things are there,” and by the time you see the tweets or read the documentation, you've got some developer who's put it in production somewhere. And then it becomes a lot more difficult for you as a security practitioner to put the brakes on it.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me. If people want to learn more and follow your exploits—as they should—where can they find you?Chris: They can find me at steampipe.io/blog. That is where all of my latest rants, raves, research, and how-tos show up.Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:37]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Chris: Perfect, thank you. You have a good one.Corey: Chris Farris, cloud security nerd at Turbot. 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 angry insulting comment, and be sure to mention exactly which Azure communications team you work on.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.

The boys are back! After a longer than expected hiatus, the boys are back recapping where they've been all this time, some movie and TV recommendations, and all the drama surrounding our childhood ice cream treats and favorite streaming services. We cover a new rooftop bar in Culver City, an object lesson in respecting each other's identities starring Chris (Don't call him Chris) Pratt, and some recommendations for the terrible people in your lives. Let's get back to it! Got a comment or question? Send it to: toliveandtryinlapodcast@gmail.com Follow us on: Instagram: @toliveandtryinlapodcast Twitter: @toliveandtrypod

Longtime listener and friend of the show, Gio Lodi, released a book y'all should check out and Chris and Steph ruminate on a listener question about tension around marketing in open-source. Say No To More Process, Say Yes To Trust by German Velasco (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/say-no-to-more-process-say-yes-to-trust) Test-Driven Development in Swift with SwiftUI and Combine by Gio Lodi (https://tddinswift.com/) Transcript: CHRIS: Our golden roads. STEPH: All right. I am also golden. CHRIS: [vocalization] STEPH: Oh, I haven't listened to that episode where I just broke out in song in the middle. Oh, you're about to add the [vocalization] [chuckles]. CHRIS: I don't know why, though. Oh, golden roads, Golden Arches. STEPH: Golden Arches, yeah. CHRIS: Man, I did not know that my brain was doing that, but my brain definitely connected those without telling me about it. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: It's weird. People talk often about the theory that phones are listening, and then you get targeted ads based on what you said. But I'm almost certain it's actually the algorithms have figured out how to do the same intuitive leaps that your brain does. And so you'll smell something and not make the nine steps in between, but your brain will start singing a song from your childhood. And you're like, what is going on? Oh, right, because when I was watching Jurassic Park that one time, we were eating this type of chicken, and therefore when I smell paprika, Jurassic Park theme song. I got it, of course. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And I think that's actually what's happening with the phones. That's my guess is that you went to a site, and the phones are like, cool, I got it, adjacent to that is this other thing, totally. Because I don't think the phones are listening. Occasionally, I think the phones are listening, but mostly, I don't think the phones are listening. STEPH: I definitely think the phones are listening. CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey. So we have a bit of exciting news where we received an email from Gio Lodi, who is a listener of The Bike Shed. And Gio sent an email sharing with us some really exciting news that they have published a book on Test-Driven Development in Swift. And they acknowledge us in the acknowledgments of the book. Specifically, the acknowledgment says, "I also want to thank Chris Toomey and Steph Viccari, who keep sharing ideas on testing week after week on The Bike Shed Podcast." And that's just incredible. I'm so blown away, and I feel officially very famous. CHRIS: This is how you know you're famous when you're in the acknowledgments of a book. But yeah, Gio is a longtime listener and friend of the show. He's written in many times and given us great tips, and pointers, and questions, and things. And I've so appreciated Gio's voice in the community. And it's so wonderful, frankly, to hear that he has gotten value out of the show and us talking about testing. Because I always feel like I'm just regurgitating things that I've heard other people saying about testing and maybe one or two hard-learned truths that I've found. But it's really wonderful. And thank you so much, Gio. And best of luck for anyone out there who is doing Swift development and cares about testing or test-driven development, which I really think everybody should. Go check out that book. STEPH: I must admit my Swift skills are incredibly rusty, really non-existent at this point. It's been so long since I've been in that world. But I went ahead and purchased a copy just because I think it's really cool. And I suspect there are a lot of testing conversations that, regardless of the specific code examples, still translate. At least, that's the goal that you and I have when we're having these testing conversations. Even if they're not specific to a language, we can still talk about testing paradigms and strategies. So I purchased a copy. I'm really looking forward to reading it. And just to change things up a bit, we're going to start off with a listener question today. So this listener question comes from someone very close to the show. It comes from Thom Obarski. Hi, Thom. And Thom wrote in, "So I heard on a recent podcast I was editing some tension around marketing and open source. Specifically, a little perturbed at ReactJS that not only were people still dependent on a handful of big companies for their frameworks, but they also seem to be implying that the cachet of Facebook and having developer mindshare was not allowing smaller but potentially better solutions to shine through. In your opinion, how much does marketing play in the success of an open-source project framework rather than actually being the best tool for the job?" So a really thoughtful question. Thanks, Thom. Chris, I'm going to kick it over to you. What are your thoughts about this question? CHRIS: Yeah, this is a super interesting one. And thank you so much, Thom, although I'm not sure that you're listening at this point. But we'll send you a note that we are replying to your question. And when I saw this one come through, it was interesting. I really love the kernel of the discussion here, but it is, again, very difficult to tease apart the bits. I think that the way the question was framed is like, oh, there's this bad thing that it's this big company that has this big name, and they're getting by on that. But really, there are these other great frameworks that exist, and they should get more of the mindshare. And honestly, I'm not sure. I think marketing is a critically important aspect of the work that we do both in open source and, frankly, everywhere. And I'm going to clarify what I mean by that because I think it can take different shapes. But in terms of open-source, Facebook has poured a ton of energy and effort and, frankly, work into React as a framework. And they're also battle testing it on facebook.com, a giant website that gets tons of traffic, that sees various use cases, that has all permissions in there. They're really putting it through the wringer in that way. And so there is a ton of value just in terms of this large organization working on and using this framework in the same way that GitHub and using Rails is a thing that is deeply valuable to us as a community. So I think having a large organization associated with something can actually be deeply valuable in terms of what it produces as an outcome for us as consumers of that open-source framework. I think the other idea of sort of the meritocracy of the better framework should win out is, I don't know, it's like a Field of Dreams. Like, if you build it, they will come. It turns out I don't believe that that's actually true. And I think selling is a critical part of everything. And so if I think back to DHH's original video from so many years ago of like, I'm going to make a blog in 15 minutes; look at how much I'm not doing. That was a fantastic sales pitch for this new framework. And he was able to gain a ton of attention by virtue of making this really great sales pitch that sold on the merits of it. But that was marketing. He did the work of marketing there. And I actually think about it in terms of a pull request. So I'm in a small organization. We're in a private repo. There's still marketing. There's still sales to be done there. I have to communicate to someone else the changes that I'm making, why it's valuable to the system, why they should support this change, this code coming into the codebase. And so I think that sort of communication is as critical to the whole conversation. And so the same thing happens at the level of open source. I would love for the best framework to always win, but we also need large communities with Stack Overflow answers and community-supported plugins and things like that. And so it's a really difficult thing to treat marketing as just other, this different, separate thing when, in fact, I think they're all intertwined. And marketing is critically important, and having a giant organization behind something can actually have negative aspects. But I think overall; it really is useful in a lot of cases. Those are some initial thoughts. What do you think, Steph? STEPH: Yeah, those are some great initial thoughts. I really agree with what you said. And I also like how you brought in the comparison of pull requests and how sales is still part of our job as developers, maybe not in the more traditional sense but in the way that we are marketing and communicating with the team. And circling back to what you were saying earlier about a bit how this is phrased, I think I typically agree that there's nothing nefarious that's afoot in regards to just because a larger company is sponsoring an open-source project or they are the ones responsible for it, I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about that. And I agree with the other points that you made where it is helpful that these teams have essentially cultivated a framework or a project that is working for their team, that is helping their company, and then they have decided to open source it. And then, they have the time and energy that they can continue to invest in that project. And it is battle-tested because they are using it for their own projects as well. So it seems pretty natural that a lot of us then would gravitate towards these larger, more heavily supported projects and frameworks. Because then that's going to make our job easier and also give us more trust that we can turn to them when we do need help or have issues. Or, like you mentioned, when we need to look up documentation, we know that that's going to be there versus some of the other smaller projects. They may also be wonderful projects. But if they are someone that's doing this in their spare time just on the weekends and yet I'm looking for something that I need to be incredibly reliable, then it probably makes sense for me to go with something that is supported by a team that's getting essentially paid to work on that project, at least that they're backed by a larger company. Versus if I'm going with a smaller project where someone is doing some wonderful work, but realistically, they're also doing it more on the weekends or in their spare time. So boiling it down, it's similar to what you just said where marketing plays a very big part in open source, and the projects and frameworks that we adopt, and the things that we use. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. CHRIS: Yeah. I think, if anything, it's possibly a double-edged sword. Part of the question was around does React get to benefit just by the cachet of Facebook? But Facebook, as a larger organization sometimes that's a positive thing. Sometimes there's ire that is directed at Facebook as an organization. And as a similar example, my experience with Google and Microsoft as large organizations, particularly backing open-source efforts, has almost sort of swapped over time, where originally, Microsoft there was almost nothing of Microsoft's open-source efforts that I was using. And I saw them as this very different shape of a company that I probably wouldn't be that interested in. And then they have deeply invested in things like GitHub, and VS Code, and TypeScript, and tons of projects that suddenly I'm like, oh, actually, a lot of what I use in the world is coming from Microsoft. That's really interesting. And at the same time, Google has kind of gone in the opposite direction for me. And I've seen some of their movements switch from like, oh Google the underdog to now they're such a large company. And so the idea that the cachet, as the question phrase, of a company is just this uniformly positive thing and that it's perhaps an unfair benefit I don't see that as actually true. But actually, as a more pointed example of this, I recently chose Svelte over React, and that was a conscious choice. And I went back and forth on it a few times, if we're being honest, because Svelte is a much smaller community. It does not have the large organizational backing that React or other frameworks do. And there was a certain marketing effort that was necessary to raise it into my visibility and then for me to be convinced that there is enough there, that there is a team that will maintain it, and that there are reasons to choose that and continue with it. And I've been very happy with it as a choice. But I was very conscious in that choice that I'm choosing something that doesn't have that large organizational backing. Because there's a nicety there of like, I trust that Facebook will probably keep investing in React because it is the fundamental technology of the front end of their platform. So yeah, it's not going to go anywhere. But I made the choice of going with Svelte. So it's an example of where the large organization didn't win out in my particular case. So I think marketing is a part of the work, a part of the conversation. It's part of communication. And so I am less negative on it, I think, than the question perhaps was framed, but as always, it depends. STEPH: Yeah, I'm trying to think of a scenario where I would be concerned about the fact that I'm using open source that's backed by a specific large company or corporation. And the main scenario I can think of is what happens when you conflict or if you have values that conflict with a company that is sponsoring that project? So if you are using an open-source project, but then the main community or the company that then works on that project does something that you really disagree with, then what do you do? How do you feel about that situation? Do you continue to use that open-source project? Do you try to use a different open-source project? And I had that conversation frankly with myself recently, thinking through what to do in that situation and how to view it. And I realize this may not be how everybody views it, and it's not appropriate for all situations. But I do typically look at open-source projects as more than who they are backed by, but the community that's actively working on that project and who it benefits. So even if there is one particular group that is doing something that I don't agree with, that doesn't necessarily mean that wholesale I no longer want to be a part of this community. It just means that I still want to be a part, but I still want to share my concerns that I think a part of our community is going in a direction that I don't agree with or I don't think is a good direction. That's, I guess, how I reason with myself; even if an open-source project is backed by someone that I don't agree with, either one, you can walk away. That seems very complicated, depending on your dependencies. Or two, you find ways to then push back on those values if you feel that the community is headed in a direction that you don't agree with. And that all depends on how comfortable you are and how much power you feel like you have in that situation to express your opinion. So it's a complicated space. CHRIS: Yeah, that is a super subtle edge case of all of this. And I think I aligned with what you said of trying to view an open-source project as more generally the community that's behind it as opposed to even if there's a strong, singular organization behind it. But that said, that's definitely a part of it. And again, it's a double-edged sword. It's not just, oh, giant company; this is great. That giant company now has to consider this. And I think in the case of Facebook and React, that is a wonderful hiring channel for them. Now all the people that use React anywhere are like, "Oh man, I could go work at Facebook on React? That's exciting." That's a thing that's a marketing tool from a hiring perspective for them. But it cuts both ways because suddenly, if the mindshare moves in a different direction, or if Facebook as an organization does something complicated, then React as a community can start to shift away. Maybe you don't move the current project off of it, but perhaps you don't start the next one with it. And so, there are trade-offs and considerations in all directions. And again, it depends. STEPH: Yeah. I think overall, the thing that doesn't depend is marketing matters. It is a real part of the ecosystem, and it will influence our decisions. And so, just circling back to Thom's question, I think it does play a vital role in the choices that we make. CHRIS: Way to stick the landing. STEPH: Thanks. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. STEPH: Changing topics just a bit, what's new in your world? CHRIS: Well, we had what I would call a mini perfect storm this week. We broke the build but in a pretty solid way. And it was a little bit difficult to get it back under control. And it has pushed me ever so slightly forward in my desire to have a fully optimized CI and deploy pipeline. Mostly, I mean that in terms of ratcheting. I'm not actually going to do anything beyond a very small set of configurations. But to describe the context, we use pull requests because that's the way that we communicate. We do code reviews, all that fun stuff. And so there was a particular branch that had a good amount of changes, and then something got merged. And this other pull request was approved. And that person then clicked the rebase and merge button, which I have configured the repository, so that merge commits are not allowed because I'm not interested in that malarkey in our history. But merge commits or rebase and merge. I like that that makes sense. In this particular case, we ran into the very small, subtle edge case of if you click the rebase and merge button, GitHub is now producing a new commit that did not exist before, a new version of the code. So they're taking your changes, and they are rebasing them onto the current main branch. And then they're attempting to merge that in. And A, that was allowed. B, the CI configuration did not require that to be in a passing state. And so basically, in doing that rebase and merge, it produced an artifact in the build that made it fail. And then attempting to unwind that was very complicated. So basically, the rebase produced...there were duplicate changes within a given file. So Git didn't see it as a conflict because the change was made in two different parts of the file, but those were conflicting changes. So Git was like, this seems like it's fine. I can merge this, no problem. But it turns out from a functional perspective; it did not work. The build failed. And so now our main branch was failing and then trying to unwind that it just was surprisingly difficult to unwind that. And it really highlighted the importance of keeping the main branch green, keeping the build always passing. And so, I configured a few things in response to this. There is a branch protection rule that you can enable. And let me actually pull up the specific configuration that I set up. So I now have enabled require status checks to pass before merging, which, if we're being honest, I thought that was the default. It turns out it was not the default. So we are now requiring status checks to pass before merging. I'm fully aware of the awkward, painful like, oh no, the build is failing but also, we have a bug. We need to deploy this. We must get something merged in. So hopefully, if and when that situation presents itself, I will turn this off or somehow otherwise work around it. But for now, I would prefer to have this as a yeah; this is definitely a configuration we want. So require status checks to pass before merging and then require branches to be up to date before merging. So the button that does the rebase and merge, I don't want that to actually do a rebase on GitHub. I want the branch to already be up to date. Basically, I only ever want fast-forward merges on our main branch. So all code should be ahead of main, and we are simply updating what main points at. We are not creating new code. That code has run on CI, that version of the code specifically. We are fully rebased and up to date on top of main, and that's how we're going. STEPH: All of that is super interesting. I have a question about the workflow. I want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So let's say that I have issued a PR, and then someone else has merged into the main branch. So now my PR is behind me, and I don't have that latest commit. With the new configuration, can I still use the rebase and merge, or will I need to rebase locally and then push up my branch before I can merge into main but at least using the GitHub UI? CHRIS: I believe that you would be forced to rebase locally, force push, and then CI would rebuild, and that's what it is. So I think that's what require branches to be up to date before merging means. So that's my hope. That is the intention here. I do realize that's complicated. So this requirement, which I like, because again, I really want the idea that no, no, no, we, the developers, are in charge of that final state. That final state should always run as part of a build of CI on our pull request/branch before going into main. So no code should be new. There should be no new commits that have never been tested before going into main. That's my strong belief. I want that world. I realize that's...I don't know. Maybe I'm getting pedantic, or I'm a micromanager of the Git history or whatever. I'm fine with any of those insults that people want to lob at me. That's fine. But that's what I feel. That said, this is a nuisance. I'm fully aware of that. And so imagine the situation where we got a couple of different things that have been in flight. People have been working on different...say there are three pull requests that are all coming to completion at the same time. Then you start to go to merge something, and you realize, oh no, somebody else just merged. So you rebase, and then you wait for CI to build. And just as the CI is completing, somebody else merges something, and you're like, ah, come on. And so then you have to one more time rebase, push, wait for the build to be green. So I get that that is not an ideal situation. Right now, our team is three developers. So there are a few enough of us that I feel like this is okay. We can manage this via human intervention and just deal with the occasional weight. But in the back of my mind, of course, I want to find a better solution to this. So what I've been exploring…there's a handful of different utilities that I'm looking at, but they are basically merged queues as an idea. So there are three that I'm looking at, or maybe just two, but there's mergify.io, which is a hosted solution that does this sort of thing. And then Shopify has a merge queue implementation that they're running. So the idea with this is when you as a developer are ready to merge something, you add a label to it. And when you add that label, there's some GitHub Action or otherwise some workflow in the background that sees that this has happened and now adds it to a merge queue. So it knows all of the different things that might want to be merged. And this is especially important as the team grows so that you don't get that contention. You can just say, "Yes, I would like my changes to go out into production." And so, when you label it, it then goes into this merge queue. And the background system is now going to take care of any necessary rebases. It's going to sequence them, so it's not just constantly churning all of the branches. It's waiting because it knows the order that they're ideally going to go out in. If CI fails for any of them because rebasing suddenly, you're in an inconsistent state; if your build fails, then it will kick you out of the merge queue. It will let you know. So it will send you a notification in some manner and say, "Hey, hey, hey, you got to come look at this again. You've been kicked out of the merge queue. You're not going to production." But ideally, it adds that layer of automation to, frankly, this nuisance of having to keep things up to date and always wanting code to be run on CI and on a pull request before it gets into main. Then the ideal version is when it does actually merge your code, it pings you in Slack or something like that to say, "Hey, your changes just went out to production." Because the other thing I'm hoping for is a continuous deployment. STEPH: The idea of a merge queue sounds really interesting. I've never worked with a process like that. And one of the benefits I can see is if I know I'm ready for something to go like if I'm waiting on a green build and I'm like, hey, as soon as this is green, I'd really like for it to get merged. Then currently, I'm checking in on it, so I will restart the build. And then, every so often, I'm going back to say, "Okay, are you green? Are you green? Can I emerge?" But if I have a merge queue, I can say, "Hey, merge queue, when this is green, please go and merge it for me." If I'm understanding the behavior correctly, that sounds really nifty. CHRIS: I think that's a distinct but useful aspect of this is the idea that when you as a developer decide this PR is ready to go, you don't need to wait for either the current build or any subsequent builds. If there are rebases that need to happen, you basically say, "I think this code's good to go. We've gotten the necessary approvals. We've got the buy-in and the teams into this code." So cool, I now market as good. And you can walk away from it, and you will be notified either if it fails to get merged or if it successfully gets merged and deployed. So yes, that dream of like, you don't have to sit there watching the pot boil anymore. STEPH: Yeah, that sounds nice. I do have to ask you a question. And this is related to one of the blog posts that you and I love deeply and reference fairly frequently. And it's the one that's written by German Velasco about Say No to More Process, and Say Yes to Trust. And I'm wondering, based on the pain that you felt from this new commit, going into main and breaking the main build, how do you feel about that balance of we spent time investigating this issue, and it may or may not happen again, and we're also looking into these new processes to avoid this from happening? I'm curious what your thought process is there because it seems like it's a fair amount of work to invest in the new process, but maybe that's justified based on the pain that you felt from having to fix the build previously. CHRIS: Oh, I love the question. I love the subtle pushback here. I love this frame of mind. I really love that blog post. German writes incredible blog posts. And this is one that I just keep coming back to. In this particular case, when this situation occurred, we had a very brief...well, it wasn't even that brief because actually unwinding the situation was surprisingly painful, and we had some changes that we really wanted to get out, but now the build was broken. And so that churn and slowdown of our build pipeline and of our ability to actually get changes out to production was enough pain that we're like, okay, cool. And then the other thing is we actually all were in agreement that this is the way we want things to work anyway, that idea that things should be rebased and tested on CI as part of a pull request. And then we're essentially only doing fast-forward merges on the main branch, or we're fast forward merging main into this new change. That's the workflow that we wanted. So this configuration was really just adding a little bit of software control to the thing that we wanted. So it was an existing process in our minds. This is the thing we were trying to do. It's just kind of hard to keep up with, frankly. But it turns out GitHub can manage it for us and enforce the process that we wanted. So it wasn't a new process per se. It was new automation to help us hold ourselves to the process that we had chosen. And again, it's minimally painful for the team given the size that we're at now, but I am looking out to the future. And to be clear, this is one of the many things that fall on the list of; man, I would love to have some time to do this, but this is obviously not a priority right now. So I'm not allowed to do this. This is explicitly on the not allowed to touch list, but someday. I'm very excited about this because this does fundamentally introduce some additional work in the pipeline, and I don't want that. Like you said, is this process worth it for the very small set of times that it's going to have a bad outcome? But in my mind, the better version, that down the road version where we have a merge queue, is actually a better version overall, even with just a tiny team of three developers that are maybe never even conflicting in our merges, except for this one standout time that happens once every three months or whatever. This is still nicer. I want to just be able to label a pull request and walk away and have it do the thing that we have decided as a team that we want. So that's the dream. STEPH: Oh, I love that phrasing, to label a pull request and be able to walk away. Going back to our marketing, that really sells that merge queue to me. [laughs] Mid-roll Ad And now we're going to take a quick break to tell you about today's sponsor, Orbit. Orbit is mission control for community builders. Orbit offers data analytics, reporting, and insights across all the places your community exists in a single location. Orbit's origins are in the open-source and developer relations communities. And that continues today with an active open-source culture in an accessible and documented API. With thousands of communities currently relying on Orbit, they are rapidly growing their engineering team. The company is entirely remote-first with team members around the world. You can work from home, from an Orbit outpost in San Francisco or Paris, or find yourself a coworking spot in your city. The tech stack of the main orbit app is Ruby on Rails with JavaScript on the front end. If you're looking for your next role with an empathetic product-driven team that prides itself on work-life balance, professional development, and giving back to the larger community, then consider checking out the Orbit careers page for more information. Bonus points if working in a Ruby codebase with a Ruby-oriented team gives you a lot of joy. Find out more at orbit.love/weloveruby. CHRIS: To be clear, and this is to borrow on some of Charity Majors' comments around continuous deployment and whatnot, is a developer should stay very close to the code if they are merging it. Because if we're doing continuous deployment, that's going to go out to production. If anything's going to happen, I want that individual to be aware. So ideally, there's another set of optimizations that I need to make on top of this. So we've got the merge queue, and that'll be great. Really excited about that. But if we're going to lean into this, I want to optimize our CI pipeline and our deployment pipeline as much as possible such that even in the worst case where there's three different builds that are fighting for contention and trying to get out, the longest any developer might go between labeling a pull request and saying, "This is good to go," and it getting out to production, again, even if they're contending with other PRs, is say 10, 15 minutes, something like that. I want Slack to notify them and them to then re-engage and keep an eye on things, see if any errors pop up, anything like that that they might need to respond to. Because they're the one that's got the context on the code at that point, and that context is decaying. The minute you've just merged a pull request and you're walking away from that code, the next day, you're like, what did I work on? I don't remember that at all. That code doesn't exist anymore in my brain. And so,,, staying close to that context is incredibly important. So there's a handful of optimizations that I've looked at in terms of the CircleCI build. I've talked about my not rebuilding when it actually gets fast-forward merged because we've already done that build on the pull request. I'm being somewhat pointed in saying this has to build on a pull request. So if it did just build on a pull request, let's not rebuild it on main because it's identically the same commit. CircleCI, I'm looking at you. Give me a config button for that, please. I would really love that config button. But there are a couple of other things that I've looked at. There's RSpec::Retry from NoRedInk, which will allow for some retry semantics. Because it will be really frustrating if your build breaks and you fall out of the merge queue. So let's try a little bit of retry logic on there, particularly around feature specs, because that's where this might happen. There's Knapsack Pro which is a really interesting thing that I've looked at, which does parallelization of your RSpec test suite. But it does it in a different way than say Circle does. It actually runs a build queue, and each test gets sent over, and they have build agents on their side. And it's an interesting approach. I'm intrigued. I think it could use some nice speed-ups. There's esbuild on the Heroku side so that our assets build so much more quickly. There are lots of things. I want to make it very fast. But again, this is on the not allowed to do it list. [laughs] STEPH: I love how most of the world has a to-do list, and you have this not-allowed to-do list that you're adding items to. And I'm really curious what all is on the not allowed to touch lists or not allowed to-do list. [laughs] CHRIS: I think this might be inherent to being a developer is like when I see a problem, I want to fix it. I want to optimize it. I want to tweak it. I want to make it so that that never happens again. But plenty of things...coming back to German's post of Say No to More Process, some things shouldn't be fixed, or the cost of fixing is so much higher than the cost of just letting it happen again and dealing with it manually at that moment. And so I think my inherent nature as a developer there's a voice in my head that is like, fix everything that's broken. And I'm like, sorry. Sorry, brain, I do not have that kind of time. And so I have to be really choosy about where the time goes. And this extends to the team as well. We need to be intentional around what we're building. Actually, there's a feeling that I've been feeling more acutely than ever, but it's the idea of this trade-off or optimization between speed and getting features out into the world and laying the right fundamentals. We're still very early on in this project, and I want to make sure we're thinking about things intentionally. I've been on so many projects where it's many years after it started and when I ask someone, "Hey, why do your background jobs work that way? That's a little weird." And they're like, "Yeah, that was just a thing that happened, and then it never changed. And then, we copied it and duplicated, and that pattern just got reinforced deeply within the app. And at this point, it would cost too much to change." I've seen that thing play out so many times at so many different organizations that I'm overwhelmed with that knowledge in the back of my head. And I'm like, okay, I got to get it just right. But I can't take the time that is necessary to get it, quote, unquote, "Just right." I do not have that kind of time. I got to ship some features. And this tension is sort of the name of the game. It's the thing I've been doing for my entire career. But now, given the role that I have with a very early-stage startup, I've never felt it more acutely. I've never had to be equally as concerned with both sides of that. Both matter all the more now than they ever have before, and so I'm kind of existing in that space. STEPH: I really like that phrasing of that space because that deeply resonates with me as well. And that not allowed to-do list I have a similar list. For me, it's just called a wishlist. And so it's a wishlist that I will revisit every so often, but honestly, most things on there don't get done. And then I'll clear it out every so often when I feel it's not likely that I'm going to get to it. And then I'll just start fresh. So I also have a similar this is what I would like to do if I had the time. And I agree that there's this inclination to automate as well. As soon as we have to do something that felt painful once, then we feel like, oh, we should automate it. And that's a conversation that I often have with myself is at what point is the cost of automation worthwhile versus should we just do this manually until we get to that point? So I love those nuanced conversations around when is the right time to invest further in this, and what is the impact? And what is the cost of it? And what are the trade-offs? And making that decision isn't always clear. And so I think that's why I really enjoy these conversations because it's not a clear rubric as to like, this is when you invest, and this is when you don't. But I do feel like being a consultant has helped me hone those skills because I am jumping around to different teams, and I'm recognizing they didn't do this thing. Maybe they didn't address this or invest in it, and it's working for them. There are some oddities. Like you said, maybe I'll ask, "Why is this? It seems a little funky. What's the history?" And they'll be like, "Yeah, it was built in a hurry, but it works. And so there hasn't been any churn. We don't have any issues with it, so we have just left it." And that has helped reinforce the idea that just because something could be improved doesn't mean it's worthwhile to improve it. Circling back to your original quest where you are looking to improve the process for merging and ensuring that CI stays green, I do like that you highlighted the fact that we do need to just be able to override settings. So that's something that has happened recently this week for me and my client work where we have had PRs that didn't have a green build because we have some flaky tests that we are actively working on. But we recognize that they're flaky, and we don't want that to block us. I'm still shipping work. So I really appreciate the consideration where we want to optimize so that everyone has an easy merging experience. We know things are green. It's trustworthy. But then we also have the ability to still say, "No, I am confident that I know what I'm doing here, and I want to merge it anyways, but thank you for the warning." CHRIS: And the constant pendulum swing of over-correcting in various directions I've experienced that. And as you said, in the back of my mind, I'm like, oh, I know that this setting I'm going to need a way to turn this setting off. So I want to make sure that, most importantly, I'm not the only one on the team who can turn that off because the day that I am away on vacation and the build is broken, and we have a critical bug that we need to fix, somebody else needs to be able to do that. So that's sort of the story in my head. At the same time, though, I've worked on so many teams where they're like, oh yeah, the build has been broken for seven weeks. We have a ticket in the backlog to fix that. And it's like, no, the build has to not be broken for that long. And so I agree with what you were saying of consulting has so usefully helped me hone where I fall on these various spectrums. But I do worry that I'm just constantly over-correcting in one direction or the other. I'm never actually at an optimum. I am just constantly whatever the most recent thing was, which is really impacting my thinking on this. And I try to not do that, but it's hard. STEPH: Oh yeah. I'm totally biased towards my most recent experiences, and whatever has caused me the most pain or success recently. I'm definitely skewed in that direction. CHRIS: Yeah, I definitely have the recency bias, and I try to have a holistic view of all of the things I've seen. There's actually a particular one that I don't want to pat myself on the back for because it's not a good thing. But currently, our test suite, when it runs, there's just a bunch of noise. There's a bunch of other stuff that gets printed out, like a bunch of it. And I'm reminded of a tweet from Kevin Newton, a friend of the show, and I just pulled it up here. "Oh, the lengths I will go to avoid warnings in my terminal, especially in the middle of my green dots. Don't touch my dots." It's a beautiful beauty. He actually has a handful about the green dots. And I feel this feel. When I run my test suite, I just want a sea of green dots. That's all I want to see. But right now, our test suite is just noise. It's so much noise. And I am very proud of...I feel like this is a growth moment for me where I've been like, you know what? That is not the thing to fix today. We can deal with some noise amongst the green dots for now. Someday, I'm just going to lose it, and I'm going to fix it, and it's going to come back to green dots. [chuckles] STEPH: That sounds like such a wonderful children's book or Dr. Seuss. Oh, the importance of green dots or, oh, the places green dots will take you. CHRIS: Don't touch my dots. [laughter] STEPH: Okay. Maybe a slightly aggressive Dr. Seuss, but I still really like it. CHRIS: A little more, yeah. STEPH: On that note of our love of green dots, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeee!!! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

PRESENT: Personal Collections ...dare I say Analog Collections *AJ** Comic Books (from Marvel to Garfield) * Video Games* #watchfam* Outdoor stuffs*Chris** Sports Cards* Hardy Boys blue hardcover books, Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, Encyclopedia Brown paperbacks.* LEGOs from garage sales* Guitars from garage sales* Rise of online market places, forums, and FOMO* To combat this; COLLECT FOR YOU not for speculation, or FOMO, or Instagram * CP - Have the courage to take time and have the internal conversation of why you are pursuing this collection* Bee.com (http://bee.com/)* CP - If you are collecting under the Investment mindset, are you prepared to do what it takes to sell your digital good?* NFT and blockchain tech, speculation * Is “hoddleing” just a digital “hoarder” * Feeding into addiction, the casino mentality? * Don’t be like Chris - Don’t acquire physical things with the intention of impressing people.

TOP 10 TIPS from BRANDON and CHRIS: ​Don’t neglect your past clients. There is business to be had from your past client list. ​Connect with your base – people you are related to, people you socialize with, and be sure your spouse knows what you do. ​Have clear goals – what do you really want? Create a business plan from your goals. ​Add a new business stream –Important to create 7 to 11 income streams to diversify your business – farm, door knock, expireds, etc. ​Prospect, prospect, prospect – everything you do sets you up to get paid in 30 to 60 days. ​Recap what happened this year. Digest all your transactions – where did you get that client. ​Analyze your business – why do you have the production level you have. ​Start, stop, continue - Stop doing things that make you no money. Start doing new things. Continue to prospect. ​Give new things time to settle. ​Do something to improve yourself. If you make only 1% changes, at the end of 10 days, you are 10% better, ​Share your goals and get involved in some kind of accountability either with a coach or a mentor. There is no limit to how much money you can make as a REALTOR. Find yourself a coach or a mentor We have a program to make you money, but you have to be invested.

In this episode, we meet up with Pastor Paul Ahnert from Metal Mission of Knoxville (TN). Our discussion is based on Alice Cooper's song "Stolen Prayer" from Alice's 1994 album, The Last Temptation. https://songandverseministries.com/…/gods-love-is-one-size…/ Pastor Paul Ahnert & Metal Mission of Knoxville Info: https://twitter.com/RealPaulAhnert http://themetalminister.com Donations can be made at https://songandverseministries.com/donate PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/songandverse Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/songandverse Twitter: https://twitter.com/songandverse316 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/songandverse/ "Stolen Prayer" song lyrics: I walk the streets alone On feeble bones, I ride My sins are etched in stone I got no place to hide Well, I was unshakable In what I did believe I feel so breakable But have I been deceived You showed me your paradise And your carnival of souls But my heart keeps telling me That ain't the place to go Well, I'm not invincible So I want you to leave Well, I'm so convinceable But have I been deceived I take your words and try them on [Chris] Yeah, it's a perfect fit, boy You tell me one size fits us all [Chris] Yeah, like an old straight jacket Well, tell me why I'm so afraid All my words are spoken (3 x's) In a stolen prayer I remember yesterday When things were black and white Never thought I'd get confused On what was wrong and right Well, I'm not unbreakable With armor on my skin Well, it's not unthinkable I could be fooled again I take your words and try them on [Chris] Yeah, it's a perfect fit, boy You tell me one size fits us all [Chris] Yeah, like an old straight jacket Well, tell me why I'm so afraid All my words are spoken (3 x's) In a stolen prayer You steal another minute from my life You cut a little deeper with your knife You steal a little breath from my air And you don't care And even though I'm chokin' All my words are spoken I take your words and try them on [Chris] Yeah, it's a perfect fit, boy You tell me one size fits us all [Chris] Yeah, like an old straight jacket Take this world and try it on [Chris] Man, you're lookin' good boy Stick your neck out on the block [Chris] So you won't miss nothing Stretch your finger, grab your hair [Chris] Don't you feel like screaming Feel the blood rush from your veins [Chris] Now you're a perfect zombie Now I'm down on my knees All my words are spoken (5 x's) In a stolen prayer Songwriters: Alice Cooper / Chris Cornell Stolen Prayer lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/ten-minute-podcast-compilations/id1515002941 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tenminpodfriends/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Dtm3TQpI8TyfYNevICKee YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdUC_B181v9JezC-8T4ebEg?view= Castbox: https://castbox.fm/channel/id2908704?country=us The episodes that feature in this compilation: #019 Red Swollen Dick #028 Last Words #079 Chris Don't Wanna #131 Bryan is Gonna Kill Himself #211 The Whisper Podcast Again #249 Will is Smiley and Red #286 Phones #345 W'Preesh

Nancy Pelosi took politics to a new low over the weekend by blaming President Trump for coronavirus deaths. CNN’s Chris “Don’t call me Fredo” Cuomo is spinning a narrative that Trump wants to sacrifice old people to help the economy, and leftwing pundits actually seem happy about the latest coronavirus numbers. All that and more on today’s show! Please support the channel by becoming a Patreon subscriber: https://www.patreon.com/bobbyeberle13 Ask BE -- Want to be on the show? Send in your video questions or comments: http://www.gopusa.com/ask-be/

Published Sep 29, 2017 Chris: Hey world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here in Burleigh Heads for 'Get Fact Up'. The new and improved version, delivering more content to you regularly, is in our vodcasting studio or podcasting studio. You can hire it out at Burleigh Heads as well, just enquire on our website. So here we are. Hanging on, Andrew? Andrew: Yeah, I'm good. Just had a double strength decaf. Chris: That did nothing. Andrew: Sorry, I was sitting on that one for a bit, sorry. Keep going. Chris: As you can see, we're keeping it light and humorous. So today we want to talk about the transition that's happening from broadcast, or traditional media, to online media. Basically, the millennials are moving away from traditional media and moving to social channels and whatnot for entertainment. Andrew: Well, the interesting thing about that is how we're delivering this today which, in my opinion, is shifting more towards live and daily content, and those sorts of things are happening on social. So what better way to deliver 'Get Fact Up' than through live video? Chris: Cool. Andrew: And that's what we're trying. Chris: So what are the channels that are actually performing best when it comes to live video? Andrew: Well, it's Facebook, YouTube, and then you've got other things like Instagram, which is obviously Facebook as well. It's like Facebook in your pocket, I guess you could say. And then, what else have you got? You've got Periscope. No one really uses Periscope. Chris: And also LinkedIn is coming out with their new update to allow you to shoot live video through their mobile app, and upload videos through the desktop. Andrew: Yep, LinkedIn always liked to party. But they're doing their thing. And then you've got things like Snapchat and all that, but from what I've heard, Snapchat's not gonna be around much longer. So let's not worry about that too much. Chris: Yeah, but those stories that are up there for 24 hours, they just aren't that interesting to anybody anymore. Especially the brands, I think, because ... Andrew: Yeah, it was a toy. People are getting past it. I don't know anyone that's really using Snapchat in that way anymore. And now there's also Instagram which has the same feature. Facebook has the same feature. It's really devalued that whole disposable story thing quite a bit. Chris: So with Facebook owning Instagram, we've seen a lot of changes in Instagram as well. They've actually brought in a lot of the features, their filters and all those overlays that Snapchat ... someone invented. And Facebook have kind of integrated those into both Facebook and Instagram. And Instagram have also updated their app, or their algorithm, to decrease the organic reach that people are getting to grow their channels. What problems does that present to newcomers to Instagram, do you think? Andrew: Well, I think when it went at a really saturated ... I don't want to call it a marketplace, because Instagram's not a marketplace. Chris: Channel. Andrew: It's a really saturated channel now. When I first started using Instagram and things like that, you could really grow a channel. You could easily get to two thousand followers, is that what we call them on Instagram? Yeah? Two thousand followers, just through organic means. Just through interacting with other people, and stuff like that. You just can't do it now. You don't get that sort of traction with posts and things like that anymore. You used to be able to put a post up and get two hundred likes, just by getting the right hashtag. That just doesn't happen now. You don't get that increase of followers, or that sort of thing. It's really just a feed now, and it's so saturated that if you're coming in with a unique idea, everyone is sort of doing that same thing. Everyone's coming in with a razor-sharp unique idea. You know, like the yoga paddle boarders and stuff like that. Everyone's coming in with something like that, it's just hypersaturation in there now. That's just how I feel about Instagram. Chris: We've talked about this many times, but I'm challenged by using Instagram due to the fact that when you're actually posting something, you can't actually put a link in the post, therefore not being able to redirect people off the channel onto your own. And here at MeMedia, we do a lot of content creation. We do a lot of marketing for clients. We call it integrated digital marketing. So essentially what we're doing is we're creating that content, we're using the social channels to distribute that content, and get traffic back to the website. That's an awesome indicator to Google to boost your SEO, boost your Google rankings. If you can't do that post on Instagram and actually put a link in the post and get the traffic to your website, the only way you can do that now is through using their advertising. Andrew: Using it in the profile, which is not helpful. Yeah. Chris: Or tell people to click on the link in the profile. Exactly. Not helpful. So to me, Instagram's not a great thing to use for SEO, for promoting people to come to your website, which is the media that you own. Obviously, when you're on these channels, you're only renting space. You know? And with Facebook updating algorithms, it's ... Andrew: You can't really turn that into leads, per se. You can use Instagram to get direct messages and stuff like that, but who wants to be walking around with their phone all the time replying to messages and things like that as a form of inquiry? You can't get calls and things off Instagram the way you can, unless you're doing ads and things. It's not getting it back to your website. Not in a meaningful way, anyway. Chris: They're actually using ads. Andrew: But it is a brand tool. And the people that do it well, the industries that do it well, things like cafes and clothing and things like that. But you know, they're getting their brand out there, and people see this, and they're like "I want that," and then they can go and find it. That doesn't work for everyone, that sort of effect on brand awareness doesn't work for everyone. You can't see a picture on Instagram of, for example, laser eye surgery, and think "that looks good. I'll just go and get that today." It doesn't work for everyone. Chris: So let's talk about what's happening with the aspirational youth and the Gen X, Y, Z. Basically, how they're becoming disengaged with traditional advertising. 99% of millennials are actually disengaged with traditional advertising. So trying to replicate traditional advertising methods on social channels isn't really that effective. Given that 55% of people watch videos online every day, there is this huge, I guess, shift from everyone to produce videos. Once again, they're trying to take that traditional ad that they've done previously ... Andrew: Ah, we're talking about traditional media, yeah. Chris: Yeah. They've done in traditional media ... Andrew: They're failing so hard. It's like they're jumping on these social channels and they're like "Great. So we use the TV formula on social media." And everyone goes, "I don't want to watch TV on Facebook. Goodbye." Or "I don't want to watch TV ads on Facebook, see you later." Chris: I don't even want to watch ads! Andrew: Well, yeah. And that's the thing. You have to be very creative with these new formats now. You have to really think around, okay, the people that are watching these formats, they're escaping TV. So if we come at them with ads, they're not gonna react well to it. Because they're ignoring TV and they're going to Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or something like that. Last thing they want is TV ads coming at them, because that's what they've come from. Chris: So yeah, cutting to that "Proudly brought to you by your sponsor, let's listen to a message from our sponsors," all of that type of messaging just isn't gonna work. And the reason why we're focused on millennials and these aspirational youth is because the global workforce by 2025 is gonna have 8% baby boomers, 28% Gen X, 33% Gen Y, and 31% Gen Z. So that's our audience. Andrew: It's all social media generations now, from here on in. Chris: Absolutely. Andrew: They're not going to react to a straight up sponsorship message, or a straight up advert. But the thing that's happening now is like these online sponsorship messages that happen in podcasts and things, where they just say "hey look, our podcast is funded by Rode Microphones or something like that." And people expect that. They know that you have to be able to make money out of these things. Chris: That's right. Then it comes down to authenticity. And one thing that you'll notice when you, or that we definitely notice, is that with advertising that's used in podcasts, the host of the show is actually delivering the message from their point of view. So like Andrew just said, we are proudly brought to you by one of our sponsors, Rode Microphones. And this kit is Rode Microphones kit. And it's bloody awesome! So we can actually say that, because we've used the product. Andrew: And we're literally using it right now. Chris: That's right. And just out of nowhere, we actually have extra kit if you want to do more podcast from this studio and have more people sitting at this table. So where to now? We're seeing these massive shifts to video, massive shift to live video, and what do we want to see when we're doing that? What are some of the ... we want to see reach, we want to see video views, and we want to see engagement. Andrew: The funny thing there is where it comes back to promotion. So we already know that people like live video. But you don't get an awful lot of rich engagement when the live video's happening. So with everything, eventually, it inevitably comes down to the paid promotion. Facebook used to be great. You put something on your Facebook page, or your Facebook page, followers saw it. Now, what percentage is it now? Chris: One? Andrew: It's like 1%? Chris: Organic, yeah. 1% organic. Andrew: That's so weak. So all of these new formats, they're great while they're happening and people think they're exciting, but then it becomes commonplace, and we need to look at the promotion side of things. And that's where it's a real problem. The two big contenders right now are YouTube and Facebook for the live video, and both of them had terrible paid promotion. It doesn't even exist, really. They both kind of, in their help, I'll just bring it up now. YouTube, for example, says during your event, yeah, you can create a highlight clip after your event. Or before your event get your followers excited, etc. But there's nothing for promotion of a live stream. I think you said Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned something at their F8 conference? Chris: Don't quote me on this, but it is a rumour that promotion of live video during the live stream is going to be available sometime in the not too distant future. There's a whole realm of issues that could present. Andrew: Yeah! Like, obviously it needs to happen because it's what people are getting excited about. It's where they're moving, so we have to be able to promote it. But what happens then? Because Facebook are kind of liable. They review ads, so we put like 200 ads up and they'll go through them and sixty might get through because of various reasons. How do they monitor the live video? So if someone says "I'm gonna do a video about this," but then it's about something else and it offends everyone, it looks bad for, say, Facebook or YouTube, so. Chris: Well that's where I think their feature that they've got now for videos that are uploaded is that they do have the ability for Facebook to process your captions. So for those that don't know, captions mean subtitles that appear at the bottom. That's pretty amazing technology. Obviously, that's done by a machine. And it's not 100% accurate, in fact it needs a lot of work. But if they have the ability to do that live, then potentially they can kick out those profanities and ... Andrew: Flagging things, and then someone comes in and manually watches it. Because Facebook already do that. What I've had explained to me by someone that does the forums on Facebook, there's an automatic review process, and that's what determines if your ads go live or not. And then if things get flagged, someone manually reviews it, so it's like a two step process. I think it'll be something like that. They're looking for profanity or things like that, and then someone will come in and check out that stream, maybe they check what the reactions are because people can react as they go, they can say "Like this, hate this." Maybe if it's too many people disliking it or having negative reactions, then someone jumps in. They'll have to find a solution around that if they want to monetise it, but they will monetise it because they love, especially Facebook, love monetising things. Chris: Of course, of course they do. Andrew: YouTube I'm not sure exactly how they're gonna do it. Chris: One of the most amazing things is, when we're actually creating content for our clients, is the reach and engagement that we get, and the video views that we're getting for our clients here at MeMedia. But one thing that's been amazing, and that's in a new venture that we've co-founded with two other directors, Leigh Kelson and Scott Burke, for Beach City, is amazing reach. Which is 1.8 million reach, 434,000 video views, and 109,000 post engagements on those videos. Andrew: And that's mostly with live video? Chris: Yes. All live video. Truly spectacular engagement, and that's the key metric that we're looking at there. Supposedly, 10% is excellent engagement, and we're actually getting over 20%. Given the multitude of places where we can post video, which we spoke about before, Facebook's an awesome place to get reach and engagement. People are spending less time actually viewing the videos on Facebook than they are on YouTube. Andrew: Definitely, significantly less. But YouTube's a video platform, so people are expecting it. There's still this sort of interrupted feeling for the live video on Facebook, because you get that notification saying "so-and-so's live." Some people just don't react so well to it. Some people are into it. Facebook's a feed of the content you're interested in there. So sometimes, "so-and-so's live" could be disruptive to someone just wanting to look at memes or something like that. But YouTube? Definitely, people are ready for live video on YouTube. Chris: There's a huge reason to post on YouTube, as we've discussed many times, and the reason why we post on YouTube is that obviously, Google doesn't crawl through Facebook's content to list it in the search engine results pages, which is the Google listings when you do a search. Whereas when you do post on YouTube, then there's an opportunity for those videos to appear in the search. Andrew: And that's something we often say to clients, it's like if you can't get a page rank for something because your competitors have great content for something, do they have videos? Probably not. Google's gonna favour videos, because they own YouTube. So that's a good way to sneak past. It's always a good reason to be putting videos on YouTube. Chris: And there's so many different ways you can create videos, whether it's slideshows or chats or podcasts. Andrew: Exactly. The other thing that's good about YouTube is it's always been a video platform, so it's more like a library than Facebook. Facebook's a feed, so things get lost if you post a lot. Things'll just disappear back. And people don't really go backwards through your feed too much. They might see something they like, and then they'll think "okay, let's look at old videos." It's not as easy to do with Facebook, but if someone sees something they like on YouTube, they can subscribe to you. They can get all your new videos. They can look at all your archived videos. It's a lot more organised for that sort of thing. But, the connectivity of people's not there on YouTube. Chris: No, that's right. Because I mean, there's just not as many people there. With Facebook having two billion plus monthly users ... Andrew: Yes. Let's bring that up. Chris: Over two billion monthly active Facebook users, with ages 25 to 34 making up 29% of those users worldwide. Andrew: Yeah, so this is all the people we're talking about. They're Gen Y, X, and millennials. They're all there, and they're online all the time. Something like 28 times a day someone checks their Facebook, on average. Chris: Of course. Andrew: In these generations. Chris: We're highly addicted beings and we really had no chance when the smartphone came around, to not be addicted according to Simon Sinek, the famous author. Some other stats. Like we said, the decline of broadcast TV. 24% decline in live TV for 18 to 24 year olds since 2016. There's a clear shift to social. There's a clear shift to YouTube. There's a clear shift to online. There's a clear shift in your very home, watching multi devices being used in the same room while the TV is still on, but just playing some average stuff in the background, to put it nicely. Andrew: That's, yeah. That's on a timeline that you can't really control. Chris: Yeah, so everything's on demand. 65% of global media consumers choose video on demand. Far out. Andrew: We're not even considering things like Netflix, the actual streaming TV services. Half the time when someone's saying TV, they actually mean Netflix. "I watched TV last night." They watched Netflix last night. That's another thing. But I suppose what we're getting at here about all this shift is what can you do about it? How can you leverage this from a marketing perspective? And that's where it gets interesting, because everyone's still trying to figure it out. How does this work? We're still trying to figure it out. And we're finding things that work, but how far can you push that before people start to get annoyed because you're in their personal downtime? If you're annoying someone on Facebook, you're in their downtime and people don't like being annoyed in their downtime. That's where it's leading edge right now, we're trying to figure out how to make this work. But the thing is, the big difference between traditional media and this new type of media like Facebook and YouTube and all this live video stuff is, you've got analytics, you've got metrics, so you can actually see the data behind this. You can see publicly accessible data about what people are reacting to, the results you're getting, and all that sort of thing. You're never gonna get that with TV. If you approach a TV channel and say "I want to put ads up," they'll tell you "You're gonna get so-and-so people, this many people watching it today." Chris: This is what our reach is per month and how many people we're reaching, this demographic. But you don't actually know what your specific ad or mention in the show, how many eyeballs it hit and how many people actually liked it. Andrew: And even if a TV's on, if there's a TV on and there's a family of five watching the TV, four of those people are on Facebook at any given time. So they can't really prove that. You see those, cinema advertising, which is probably even a step down from TV. You're watching a movie and it says "Cinema advertising works!" And you'll be the only person in the cinema. There's something wrong there. How can they prove any of this anymore? Chris: So clearly we've got a shift to social media, online media, and on-demand media. And we can actually give valuable ROI in terms of statistics and metrics of who viewed your particular piece of content, brand, you know, ad. So there's no time like the present, obviously, to make these shifts. And there's plenty other ways that are happening right here right now that ... you know, like, influencing marketing is another way to ... Andrew: Ah yeah, that's a mince higher with your podcast. Chris: Yep. I think we're gonna have to talk about that another time. So thanks very much for listening. Like we said, we hope you like Get Fact Up. The new way we're delivering, it somewhat helps our production time, helps us produce more content, and you can hire this studio too. Simply inquire on memedia.com.au. Thanks, and thanks to Rode Microphones for helping deliver this vodcast.

Published Apr 19, 2018 Chris: G'day world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from MeMedia studio here at Burleigh Heads and I have with me today our usual suspect, Andrew Groat and a guest, Brendon McAlpine from Internet Removals. How are you going Brendon? Brendon: Good morning, thank you for having me, I'm great. Chris: How are you going, Andrew? Andrew: Yeah good. Chris: Awesome, so today we've invited Brendon in because Internet Removals is a company that we believe every business out there needs help from and one of those reasons is because it's all well and good you marketers like us, driving traffic to websites and pages and improving conversions and all the rest of it but it's no good if your reputation is sub-par. Brendon: Correct. Chris: So, Brendon, do you want to tell us a little bit about Internet Removals? Brendon: So, hard to believe, but I am an online content removalist, we help businesses remove content from the internet, quite simply. When you have a negative online footprint, the misdirection's horrendous in the sense you could spend hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars getting directed to website, on Google, we're talking about Google's platform, but it's just bombarded with some negative content from the past or new or for whatever reason. And it's our business to help people let the right platforms know that the content is either misleading, untrue, false, defamation and getting the content down. Google Reviews is a platform that I don't think anyone want to be on sometimes, it's not initiated by the company in themselves, it's just you get an email saying, "Yeah, "let's become Google Reviews." but unfortunately it opens up a can of worms in a sense, simple as a customer not getting her dog cut correctly and they've got a platform to just put a barrage of negative reviews and you're measured on it unfortunately with Google Stars. People, their online footprint's pretty important, it has to be now more than ever. So yeah, that's what we do, remove content from the internet for corporate as well as public and public's more the bad side of the internet in the sense of image-based abuse as well as revenge porn unfortunately that's where you've lost content between yourself and a partner and they post it online, we do our best to let the people know to get it down quick. Chris: What was that term? Brendon: Revenge porn? Chris: I've never heard that one. Brendon: Oh wow it's big Andrew: Yeah it's huge. Brendon: Yeah it's a name now that's, I mean the government's spending millions of dollars on different commissions to recognise it and to get it prosecuted as domestic violence, which it is. As you know, domestic violence isn't just measured by fists and that sort of stuff, it's the mental abuse. Chris: Yeah, it's cyberbullying. Brendon: Yeah, look we've been doing it six years, so we've been at the coalface if not the leader in a sense, getting content down and recognising it but now new laws are coming out and people are starting to recognise that it is abuse and that's as simple as breaking up with someone and sending a barrage of messages threatening them, saying, "I'm going to post this stuff of you," we monitor it and then if it goes online we do everything we can as quick possible to get it down. Yeah that's the nasty side of it unfortunately but in businesses you've just got to look at your footprint and see if there's a problem. Chris: What have we likened having bad reviews to before? Andrew: It's similar to if you had a physical business and you had a whole bunch of people protesting out the front you wouldn't get an awful lot of people through the door and this is basically the digital version of that, the online version of that. And what I found was interesting, what you were saying before is that a great deal of the reviews and stuff, the negative reviews are bogus. Brendon: Yeah, a lot, most of them, I mean you can see it in the review, companies engage us to find out what the problem is and where it stemmed from as well as to remove it, put all our means possible to get the content down. And I've seen cases where, I'll give you an example of a real estate agency had a rental property with a person and that person obviously had a-- whatever happened between the person renting it from the real estate went pear shaped. Which is normal. And in Queensland property laws are pretty strict, you know, there's guidelines on how to do things but either way that person that was renting it didn't like what happened, had all the right procedures in moving them out, they weren't paying rent or whatever but decided to take their grievances online so they found out the person who owned the property had a business. Barraged it, put a massive amount of content on there, where they could, Google Reviews, saying stuff that was really relating to their business but they had no identity with them, they didn't know these people he just wanted-- he was calculated and said, "This is how I'm going to ruin it." And then he found out the daughter had a business, did the same thing and unfortunately that daughter's business relied heavily on the way she's looked in the market, it was all lies. And unfortunately what we've got to do is get that message and that story to Google through all their means and that's exactly what we do. Chris: Which is a full time job, I'm sure. Brendon: Yeah, it is. Chris: So, essentially, it was really a good point that you made there about practically every business out there on the internet, even if you're not on the internet, you can have a Google My Business page which is capable of having anybody from around the world post a review on it. Brendon: Correct. Chris: And you may or may not know it. Brendon: Yeah. Chris: And most people don't, in fact we had a client recently that signed up for our marketing services and the first thing we did was an audit based on all of their channels that they either knew about, owned or didn't know about, unowned. Brendon: Correct. Chris: And found that basically their reputation was quite bad. And that was actually through no fault of their own in some regards, there were some really good ones and really bad ones, so their star rating was sitting quite low under the threes, due to the fact that they've had some people out there post some negative stuff that just either wasn't true or there might have been an element of truth in it and the rest was crap. The interesting thing about that one is they weren't even aware of the Google My Business page being set up and they weren't aware of the Facebook page being set up. Some had been set up by staff that had since left and some of it was just set up by people doing the reviews. They didn't know even know it was there Brendon: That's very common. Setting up fake profiles to discredit a business is huge, there's that many businesses out there I've seen that have had fake profiles up and they've gone, "Wow." And it's explained their reasons for drop offs and turnover and their volume's still good but customer callings have changed and stuff. Yeah attacks like that, it's more common than you can imagine. I mean, let's put it in perspective, let's say there was an employee of a floor shop who was rude. Who was really not a good customer service person, so that business owner's gone through the process of employing this person, he's now recognised that, not just through Google Reviews, but through customer's saying, "This guy's not good for my business," and he'd take the means either of training him or moving him on. Fair enough, the guy's moved on. On those reviews they'll state the name most of the time, that, "This guy, this and this," and should those reviews stay if the business has fixed the problem? Andrew: No. Brendon: Correct. That's a big part of what we see, most businesses fix a problem but unfortunately the bad name stays for good. I look at Google like this, and I probably changed this story a few times, but let's say we back in the Mediaeval times and they used to have billboards, big billboards, so you walk down the village street and there's that sign that has blacksmith, so-and-so and that's Google the billboard. Now if someone put up there the blacksmith and really nasty content, what would happen? The village, I guess the king would come along and pull it off. Chris: Or the guy would go out of business. Brendon: Correct or either way, the village would get together and say, "That shouldn't be there because it's against the law," all these different laws. And that's how it should work, we should be able to pull it down if it's illegal. Unfortunately with Google, there's a long process to let them know. Their problem's bigger than it is, I mean they get a quarter of a million flagging every day and what people don't realise is Google do take content down, it's just the way you take it, you make sure that the content's correct. You've got to look into each review and make sure that it's strength in what you're telling them and then it ticks all the boxes to get it escalated to a moderator, that's that person in whatever country that's got six seconds to read it so you want to get everything correct to there for them to go, "Well I believe everything "at the front end is correct, "so I've just got to read this and yep, "if it seems legit we'll get rid of it." And that's how primitive it is, it's primitive. Andrew: It's an incredibly easy process to set up an account and leave a review or set up a Google My Business page for another business, but it's much harder to get it down, I think that's half the problem here. Brendon: It shouldn't be. Andrew: You don't need any form of identity or anything to be able to leave a review on a business. Brendon: Correct, no qualifying really. I mean, I see reviews, they show you the location where they leave the reviews and you have to scream, "Bots," you have to scream, "It's computerised," or, "Someone's done this." This is on positive reviews, I'll just tell all of the viewers out here, do not engage in companies that give you positive reviews, okay? Because if the ACCC rings up and says, "I want to know that guy's name and I want to speak to him "and I want him to sign a stat dec saying "that you wrote the review," It's a $22,000 fine if you're wrong. And people engage these, I think they call it brushing, these bot companies to increase Google Reviews. Unfortunately the reviewer's not as dumb as you think. They'll look at it and go, "It's a guy's name that I can't pronounce "and then there's another ten of them." And you see different locations all over the world and you put two and two together and go, "No, it's not true. Andrew: Yeah and you're a local Gold Coast business. Brendon: It's the worst thing you can do. Never put false content up in the sense of positive reviews. Chris: Yeah so there you go, you can get stung both ways. I think it's great that Google reviews and the ability to get reviews from people exists because it's important as business owners that we keep our customers centric to the operations of our business. They give us insights to our business that we otherwise just cannot see, you know? And there's a fantastic interview that my co-founder for BeachCity just did with a gentleman by the name of Nicklas Bergman, best-selling author of The Tech Storm, great book, you should go and read it. Nicklas interviewed the chairman of Ikea. Now I'm not going to reveal what the chairman said, but you need to go and watch it. In a nutshell, be consumer-centric. And the way that he did that was fantastic, go and watch the video, we'll link to it in these comments. But that was a really valuable lesson from that chairman of Ikea, that they keep, or he in particular, keeps his customers at the centre of their operations of their business and knowing what they want is valuable for the future growth of the business, it's valuable for the current operations of the business, it's valuable for knowing how to deal with your current clients and what they expect from you and if you can't get around to a lot of your customers yourself, you do need to take heed of the potential that they have already gone and commented online and if they haven't then you should be talking to them anyway you should be talking to your customers. Internet Removals sounds like a fantastic business for my mind and I'm not saying this to butter you up or to tell people to go and get business from you, but I know in everyday operation of running businesses that shit can happen, yeah? Yeah I might deserve some of those bad reviews but if they're managed correctly that potentially I could get them removed, resolved and therefore improve my reputation and because I've improved my systems or I've changed something in the business or I've got rid of that person as you mentioned earlier. So I think it's a fantastic business and service that you're offering because I don't have time to do that. Brendon: That's exactly it and the time it takes for you to go and research the policies of a big provider and find out what's the process to get the content down correctly and be in that part of 150,000 applications, of which ours are coming up front because we're doing it right, is key. Every business owner I know and dealt with respect the customers and listen to them because it's their business, they wouldn't be in business if they didn't understand customers. They would prefer that the reviews are controlled in a sense of it goes to their website, all these big companies have these processes of letting them know there's a problem. The problem is, when you have something like Google Reviews, that it become a mob mentality when someone puts a review up and then you get some disgusting content that just has no relevance and that's where our customers feel it's completely unfair and it shouldn't be their biggest measure really. I mean, Google's it, guys. Google is it. I mean, what else do you use to find content? Andrew: Yeah and your reviews appear before everything else. Brendon: Correct. Andrew: It's the most prominent thing on the search result. Brendon: I had one customer who was going to spend lots of money on advertising and that particular advertiser gave me a call and said, "Man, can you look at this guy's footprint, "this guy's about to dump a tonne of money." I looked and I said, "Man, I would wait six to twelve months "until we can get some results before you even invest." There's no point making that redirection. And the customer stood back and I got to mediate with him and said, "Have you looked at the concerns?" He said, "Yeah," and again, that was about an employee. He said, "We got rid of him, he's gone. "We've done everything that we can "to resolve that issue, we saw." It just didn't need to be made public and stay there and just drag all these customers away. Andrew: The big problem there and we keep saying that you need to take Google My Business and Google Reviews seriously, is people think that they go away eventually because, I mean the old mentality was, if you have a bad name out there and you turn things around that eventually word gets out that you've improved your business. It doesn't work like that on Google, they stay there forever unless you do something about it. Brendon: Correct and it's important, there's no doubt about it. Not only for the corporate world but for the public, as I said, we help the public more than anything with getting content down. I mean, education's a big thing on us, for schools we're about to do education pieces for year eleven and twelve, for me to sit there and say, "Hey guys, "you're about to step into the corporate world, "I just want you to step back and look how you "present yourself online. "If there's any issues, clean it up now." Because we have employers call us to check out people's online-- Chris: I've done that myself. Andrew: That's certainly something that's happened here. Chris: So if you're ever going for a job interview beware of Google because I've done it, I've just Google searched people's names and funnily enough, I still employed someone, even after I saw all of the crap that they were writing on social media channels. But I took it for what it was, they just didn't think. They just went, "Ah you know, "I'm just having a conversation with my friend, "it's only me and my friends that can see it, "we're having a bit of banter." And, you know, lots of swearing and calling each other names and all that sort of stuff. "That's just fun banter, that's what we do in our lounge room." Yeah, that's right. Brendon: It's not in your lounge room, man, it's in a stadium full of 1.5 billion people. Andrew: Yeah, but when one day you're going to be managing business social media profiles and things like that you need to be aware that people need to be able to trust that you're not going to have it come back to you. Brendon: Ever since I've been doing this I've deleted a lot of posts of mine that weren't that bad but I've looked at it and gone, "What's the perception another person's going to take of it?" And go, "You know what? It's not worth it." You know, it's not me, I'm only saying a joke between my mates, yeah plenty of times I've deleted posts, because I've thought about it, only because I know about it. Chris: Well, I've been sued for making a comment on a Facebook group. Because I basically said something about somebody that maybe I thought would have been true but it wasn't. And I was just trying to be a helpful citizen. It turned out to be, you know, if I had my time again I wouldn't have written it. Brendon: It's funny you say that because we have people that ring us to help them, because they're being sued to get content down from a provider. We've actually had people that have rung us quite a few times that have said, "I've said something, I want to get it down." And we go, "Okay, what did you say?" And then we look and it's, right, same process. So there's people out there, a lot of people going, "I wish I'd never said that. "I can't get it down." I talk to my daughter about this every day. How you present yourself online is how you present yourself on the market. Andrew: Yeah it might be just a matter that you got hot headed about something but the problem is it stays there forever now if you don't take it down. Brendon: Yep, and content is a lot harder to take down and a lot easier to put up. I mean I tell businesses, I had a guy recently ring me and ask me about, "Google Reviews, Google My Business sent me an email saying do I want to register." I said, "Don't even bridge with them, "I'd prefer you didn't. "Establish your business now, iron out all the kinks, "all the parts that could go wrong "where people could write a review "about you making a mistake." I said, "Wait twelve months and have a look at your business "and then decide if you're prepared to go on Google Reviews. "Because those twelve month periods are the periods where "you're going to have ups and downs in your business "and you're going to open yourself up "so just wait twelve months." I just said, "Don't, don't open Google Reviews." Google Business, do not, my opinion. Unless you're ready and your business is safe, it's one of those areas where you can't. Chris: What do you mean? Sorry, what do you mean by that? Don't open Google Reviews? Brendon: So Google Business will find out about your business and they'll let you know. "Hey, do you want to be on Google Business?" And you go, "Yes, of course." Details, where your address is and that sort of stuff. Chris: But anybody can go and create one of those. Brendon: They can but they also promote it. Do you know what I mean? We've had them call us quite a few times, saying, you know, not call us but notify us. But I say either don't or just check out your business as a high-risk area where, you know, if you're in the car industry, reviews are are, you know. I feel sorry for those car dealerships because really, all they're doing is selling a brand new car, okay? And you decide to buy it or not. And they invest a lot of money, those people that own those businesses, millions of dollars and the land to store the cars. If you have a pleasant experience coming in. And I don't want to name these particular hashtag because it could promote the thing, but there was one particular hashtag where a guy's bike got damaged and he decided to hashtag with a group of Australian larrikins who had no idea of the context of what happened, and barraged this social media with hundreds of content. And that's terrible and this business owner's invested a lot of money, spending with the Mercedes and the BMWs to get the licence to be part of their website, they pay a lot of money for that just like McDonald's does, to own a McDonalds. And now he's got a one star and there's 300 reviews, because of the hashtag. And these guys had no idea. And the simple thing that happened was yes, they did drop the bike and they scratched it and they fixed it. But the guy wasn't happy, for whatever reason, so he decided to hashtag it. And there was 300 terrible comments. Andrew: From people who had nothing to do with it. Brendon: Nothing to do with it. No idea, don't even know the person it happened to, it was just part of that group. And we spend a lot of time fighting those groups too. Those social media pages, unfortunately Facebook's honestly gone to ground right now and our response time back from is just pitiful. Chris: Yeah shutting down pages is probably easier. Brendon: I mean, yeah, it's all about the numbers, there's 100,000 people on their Facebook page. Pretty bad stuff, it's either got to have terrorism or child or sex related before they'll take it down, if it doesn't, they can do what they want. Chris: So I think we should probably pull it up there, we could go into some really great stories. Brendon: Maybe another time, love to have a chat. I'm pretty sure people want to know more. Chris: Absolutely, Brendon, how do people reach out to you? Brendon: Yeah look, our website as well as we've got a 1300 number that we can-- Chris: What's the website? Brendon: www.internetremovals.com.au If you type in content removal Australia it'll pop up on Google's search words as well. As well as I've got a Twitter page which is @contentremove, I think, I can't remember the exact-- Andrew: We'll put all the links in the bottom. Brendon: But yeah, just be aware of your footprint is all I'll say and have a look, if you watch this, step back and go, "I'll just have a little look." Any issues, let me know, if not, education is to be good. Chris: Don't drink and review, don't just think that you're in your own little lounge room when you're reviewing. And I know I've learned some lessons, maybe the hard way. And it's best not to. Brendon: Thanks for having me too guys. Chris: Thanks for watching guys, that's episode 84 of Get Fact Up, you know where we're at but I'll tell you anyway. We're on memedia.com.au you can watch the full episode there, also on YouTube and on Facebook, just search for MeMedia on Facebook. Thanks for watching, we're back next week for another episode of Get Fact Up.

Description Virtual Reality.  Augmented Reality.  Global Online Collaboration.  Smart Phones. Smart TV’s.  Smart Watches.  Smart Cars. Artificial Intelligence.  Does trying to keep up with today’s technology make your head spin?  How did we get here?  What’s next?  Today we bring in an expert on the technology of education past, and the digital tech that’s going to take us into the future (no pressure there) Hall Davidson. Lessons Learned Chris - Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good (attributed to Voltaire, paraphrasing an early Italian dictionary). Daniel - Google Doodle - Celebrating Bach - AI Dennis - Where in Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego Fun Fact Original Oregon Trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(series) Notes & Links Last week we celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web. This week we’ve brought in a special guest who’s been helping teachers use the power of the web since its inception and also is on the forefront of how internet connectivity can impact students today and into the future.  Please welcome our...   ...SPECIAL GUEST: Hall Davidson http://www.discoveryeducation.com/what-we-offer/professional-development/speakers-bureau/hall-davidson.cfm

In this podcast, Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about Brexit Change Management. Brexit is an example of complex change, but businesses need to start making changes and identifying the opportunities that are the hallmark of all change. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/.Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thought leadership please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren's books about IT Leadership (The CIO Navigator) and Data Privacy (The Little Book of GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast, Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the fact that it is now less than 100 days until GDPR comes into enforcement and some of the areas that companies should be addressing as part of their implementation plans. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren's books about IT Leadership (The CIO Navigator) and Data Privacy (The Little Book of GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast, Paul Chadburn (an IT Consultant at Fifth Step) and Chris Don present the second part of their Application Landscape series. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren Wray's books about IT Leadership (The CIO Navigator) and Data Privacy (The Little Book of GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast, Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the hot topic of mergers and acquisitions (often called M&A) and why it is important to have a framework approach to M&A no matter if you are on the buy or sell side. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren's books about IT Leadership (The CIO Navigator) and Data Privacy (The Little Book of GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast, Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about cyber liability, GDPR and Brexit. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren's books about IT Leadership (The CIO Navigator) and Data Privacy (The Little Book of GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast, Paul Chadburn and Chris Don discuss application landscapes and the challenges that they can present organisations and IT leadership in particular.  Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren Wray's books about IT Leadership and Data Privacy (EU GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the innovative CIO, and what IT Leaders need to do to become an innovative CIO. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Darren's books about IT Leadership and Data Privacy (EU GDPR) are available by searching your local Amazon store or by visiting: USA: https://amazon.com/author/darrenwray UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 CA: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Darren+Wray DE: https://www.amazon.de/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33 IT: https://www.amazon.it/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  JP: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  IN: https://www.amazon.co.in/Darren-Wray/e/B074N23S33  

This podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the messages for IT leaders from an industry event in Monte Carlo that Darren attended recently. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

This podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the increasing need within businesses of all type for strategic change.  Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast, Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about the importance of creating a data breach plan, in the light of the recent data breach plans. If you need help to implement a data breach plan for your organisation speak with the Fifth Step team, see https://www.fifthstep.com/contact, or email enquiries@fifthstep.com for more information. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinking please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

It's been a long time ~ shouldn't a left you ~ without a dope pod to step to, to step to... Catching up on some lengthy Watchlists from the hiatus, including a The Media By Us team-watch of the horror movie IT - we end with a Breezy on the Streets (News!) to fill that hour-long void in your week. > Direct podcast RSS feed: here!  > Contact: email, Facebook (movies, TV, games), and Twitter! > Check out The Media By Us Facebook Page too! > Review us on iTunes, Google Play, or anywhere! The Watchlist (0:51) Chris: Don't Think Twice (1:15), Friends from College (2:11), Wonder Woman (4:22), Narcos (8:14), Vikings (17:41), Preacher (28:54) TJ: Dirty Grandpa (10:14), Mr. Holmes (10:40), Sleight (12:13), Baywatch (12:49), Chef (13:54), The Invitation (15:55) Brent: The Founder (19:38), The Stanford Prison Experiment (21:39), Birdman of Alcatraz (23:09), Brubaker (24:22), Game of Thrones (27:31), Lost rewatch (29:05) David: Death Note (30:38), The Big Sick (34:24), Colossal (36:02), BoJack Horseman (37:32), You're the Worst (38:03), Halt and Catch Fire (38:14), Final Fantasy XV (38:55) Cross-Talk: We all saw It! (40:15) Breezy on the Streets (52:16) 52:22 - Too many Joker movies coming out? 55:17 - Rumor that new mystery Bethesda VG coming out this year 56:04 - FPS Destiny 2 is out - which is cool for people 56:19 - Best Bet this Weekend: mother! Warning: Some mild language. Some language is picante. > Intro theme courtesy of The Willow Walkers > Outro song "Extemporaneous  Birth" courtesy of Boo Reefa

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about how to go about implementing GDPR, and what companies should think about during this process. If you need help to implement GDPR speak with the Fifth Step team, we're already helping clients implement GDPR compliance around the world - email enquiries@fifthstep.com for more information. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about the importance of a holistic approach to IT Governance. Read more on this topic and others on the Fifth Step Blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.  

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about Data Classification within GDPR, what are some pointers to understanding how sensitive your data is?.   Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.       Data classification is a vital part of becoming GDPR compliant, after all with out understanding what data you have, which categories it fits into, how will your organisation be able to understand which of its data and systems are processing Personal Data and/or Personal Sensitive Data.

It’s another road trip special! Dave and Chris present another edition of “Chris Don’t Know This” recorded during their drive from Pennsylvania to Florida. In this round, Chris must identify 35 of the 50 TV Theme song’s Dave plays him. This series is made possibly by the generosity of our Patreon supporters. To learn how you can help support all the work we do at NeoZAZ and get access to Patreon exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page at:https://www.patreon.com/neozaz. Get all the latest from NeoZAZ from our social media pages: Follow NEOZAZ on Facebook. Follow NEOZAZ on Instagram. Follow NEOZAZ on Twitter.

This is part 3 and the exciting conclusion of the Road Trip Special Trilogy; “Chris Don’t Know This - Movie Scores”! Dave compiled a playlist of 138 movies scores to quiz Chris with during their drive from Pennsylvania to Florida. This series is made possibly by the generosity of our Patreon supporters. To learn how you can help support all the work we do at NeoZAZ and get access to Patreon exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page at:https://www.patreon.com/neozaz. Get all the latest from NeoZAZ from our social media pages: Follow NEOZAZ on Facebook. Follow NEOZAZ on Instagram. Follow NEOZAZ on Twitter.

This is part 2 of the Road Trip Special Trilogy; “Chris Don’t Know This - Movie Scores”! Dave compiled a playlist of 138 movies scores to quiz Chris with during their drive from Pennsylvania to Florida. This series is made possibly by the generosity of our Patreon supporters. To learn how you can help support all the work we do at NeoZAZ and get access to Patreon exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page at:https://www.patreon.com/neozaz. Get all the latest from NeoZAZ from our social media pages: Follow NEOZAZ on Facebook. Follow NEOZAZ on Instagram. Follow NEOZAZ on Twitter.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about Brexit, and what CIO's, the C-suite, boards and companies as a whole should be doing by providing a framework to consider the challenges of Brexit is presenting. Many companies will have systems that they will use to capture and maintain the risks and opportunities identified by this framework. To enable companies of all sizes to benefits of the framework we have included an excel document that you can use as a template. If you would like to download the template it is available from: https://www.fifthstep.com/uploads/Brexit Risk Capture Template.xlsx Read more on this topic on the Fifth Step Blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

This is part 1 of the Road Trip Special Trilogy; “Chris Don’t Know This - Movie Scores”! Dave compiled a playlist of 138 movies scores to quiz Chris with during their drive from Pennsylvania to Florida. This series is made possibly by the generosity of our Patreon supporters. To learn how you can help support all the work we do at NeoZAZ and get access to Patreon exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page at:https://www.patreon.com/neozaz. Get all the latest from NeoZAZ from our social media pages: Follow NEOZAZ on Facebook. Follow NEOZAZ on Instagram. Follow NEOZAZ on Twitter.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about the CIO Priorities for 2017, from this year's Harvey Nash and KPMG CIO Survey (https://www.hnkpmgciosurvey.com/) Read more on this topic on the Fifth Step Blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about ransomware, how the recent Wanna Crypt incident has changed public perception, and what organisations (big or small) should be doing as a minimum. Read more on this topic on the Fifth Step Blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

每周二，我会和你分享一段英语表达，着重讲解各种发音规则或技巧，并且在音频中留出空余时间，你可以模仿跟读练习发音。关注公众号Chris的声音，可以获得发音卡片。英文版Don't worry. There's always a way around. We can work it out.中文版别担心。路总会有的（总会有办法的）。我们一起度过（解决）。

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about Project Change, and how to recognise that your project teams are overloaded.  Read more on this topic on the Fifth Step Blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/Signs-your-Project-Team-Are-Overloaded Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about GDPR, and how to implement it. This is the first in a series of Podcasts about implementing GDPR, and covers the assessment stage. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about the 5 Pillars of Regulated Businesses, and how regulation is increasingly not just for large enterprises. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

Husband and wife duo 'Terra Bella' are this week's guests on The Stage. Their 'Road to Forever' album in gaining national recognition and the team talk with Chris & Don about that rise in stardom. You'll also hear some great cuts from their album along with this week's music news with Gator Glass and the Music Row Report!

Husband and wife duo 'Terra Bella' are this week's guests on The Stage. Their 'Road to Forever' album in gaining national recognition and the team talk with Chris & Don about that rise in stardom. You'll also hear some great cuts from their album along with this week's music news with Gator Glass and the Music Row Report!

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) is interviewed by Chris Don about the 4th industrial revolution that Darren believes started in 2010. What changes can we expect, and what should companies do to survive and thrive in the 4th industrial revolution. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts If you would like to ask a question to be answered during the podcast, then please email podcast@fifthstep.com, or Tweet your question to @FifthStep using #Podcast. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the hot topic of resiliency and business continuity, the approaches to take and the frameworks that organisations should look at. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting material for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.  

In this podcast Darren Wray (CEO of Fifth Step) and Chris Don talk about the recently published New York Department of Financial Services Cyber Security Proposal (NY DFS), and what it means for not only the organisations that are regulated in New York, but some of the wider implications, as well as how NY DFS links with and overlaps with the forthcoming EU regulation GDPR.   Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/fifth-step-podcast/id1120715395?mt=2, or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocketcasts/) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/.   Find this and other podcasts from Fifth Step on our website, along with supporting materia for the Podcast at https://www.fifthstep.com/Podcasts   Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com.   Please follow us and ask any questions on Twitter @FifthStep, or on LinkedIn, for questions please use #podcast (c) 2017 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved.https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 7 - Unlocking the creative CIO  In this the 2nd Podcast about the changing role of the CIO, Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about how to unlock the creative CIO. Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/fifth-step-podcast/id1120715395?mt=2. Or add us to your favourite podcast player (our favourite is Pocket Casts which is available for all popular mobile platforms) by searching for Fifth Step Podcast within the app, or add our feed address: http://fifthstepltd.podbean.com/feed/. Thank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Read more about createing a budget checklist on our blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog  (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 6 - The Changing Role of the CIO In this Podcast, Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about how the role of the CIO is changing and evolving; it is no-longer about keeping the wheels turning, it's increasingly about: Being a profit generator not just an efficiency creatorUnderstanding the business and being able to contribute to innovation and product creationAiding, enabling and where appropriate creating the digital strategyCreating and promoting agilityThank you for downloading this Fifth Step Podcast, to learn more about Fifth Step and our thinkings please visit https://www.fifthstep.com. Read more about createing a budget checklist on our blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 5: Overcoming Resource Challenges and Magnifying Your Resources IT and Cybersecurity resources are constrained, in this In this podcast, Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about how you can magnify your resources through the appropriate use of technology, outsourcing and co-sourcing, as well as some of the things to think about along the way. Read more about createing a budget checklist on our blog: https://www.fifthstep.com/blog (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 4: Budget Checklist It’s that time of year again when those with budget responsibility are being asked to submit their budgets numbers. With this in mind, it is worth remembering that of all the areas up for review by the Board, IT will often be the most hefty. Looking into the future: While you may not have a crystal ball to help you with budgeting, intelligent planning will help you make good decisions. In this podcast, Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about some of the challenges. Read more about createing a budget checklist on our blog: http://www.fifthstep.com/Drawing-up-an-IT-budget-checklist-2016 (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

What is the impact of the UK Brexit leave vote on organisations? And why is vendor/supplier management an increasingly hot topic for companies at the moment? What should organisations be doing in respect to vendor management. Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about some of the challenges. (c)2016 Fifth Step Limited https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 2 Brexit, Data Protection and GDPR The UK stands on the edge of a potentially large change for its citizens and businesses alike. How could these changes impact data and data protection, and what should organisations be thinking about. Darren Wray, Fifth Step's CEO talks with Chris Don about some of the challenges. GDPR is the new EU Data Protection requirement, that comes into force in 2018, what is it and what are some of the implications for businesses, and what should they be thinking about now. Read more about GDPR on our blog: http://www.fifthstep.com/Data_Protection_Changes_Are_Insurers_Ready_for_GDPR (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

Episode 1 Project Management and Cyber Security Effective cyber security management is anenterprise-wide responsibility. As Fifth Step's CEO, Darren Wray spends a lot of time talking to members ofboards and c-suites around the world about how their organisations deal withCybersecurity risks. The most common question he gets asked? “What should mycompany do about its Cybersecurity?”----more---- In this episode, Chris Don speaks to Darren Wray, and asks him to explain the 3 things that he recommends that organisations do, and the reasons why. (c) 2016 Fifth Step Limited, All rights reserved. https://www.fifthstep.com

Dissecting Docs covers the films Women Behind the Camera, Through A Lens Darkly, Chris & Don, and Exile Nation. For information about Carole Dean and From the Heart Productions please visit www.FromtheHeartProductions.com. To learn more about Don Schwartz and his film reviews visit http://fromtheheartproductions.com/radio-blog/don-schwartz-blog/.