Podcast appearances and mentions of eric yes

What you'll learn in this episode:   The difference between jadeite and nephrite, and why both are known as jade Why Chinese artisans have chosen to carve jade for thousands of years Why jade can be purchased at dramatically different price points How to spot a pseudo jade that has been dyed or polymer treated Why a healthy sense of skepticism is the most important thing a new jade collector can have   About Eric Hoffman   Eric Hoffman is an aficionado of Chinese jades for over 40 years. He is the owner and operator of Far East Gallery, which is dedicated to lovers of Chinese arts, antiques, antiquities, and—most especially—jades and snuff bottles. A member of the worldwide organizations Friends of Jade and the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts, jade consultant to the Chinese Cultural Relics Association, and contributing editor to Adornment magazine, Prof. Hoffman has written many articles and reviews on this fascinating subject.   Additional Resources: Website Introductory Articles on Jade: http://hoffmanjade.com/Adornment_Jade.pdf https://asianart.com/articles/hoffman/index.html   Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript: Jade is a popular gemstone that even the most avid jewelry collectors often know little about. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that two distinct stones share the same name. Enter Eric Hoffman, a jade dealer and author who is an expert on identifying different types of jade. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about jadeite jade vs. nephrite jade; why jade can either be extremely valuable or basically worthless; and how new collectors can find quality pieces. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please head to TheJewelryJourney.com. Today, my guest is Eric J. Hoffman, who's extremely knowledgeable about jade. Eric is the owner of Far East Gallery and HoffmanJade.com. He is a seller and a buyer, and he knows a lot about what makes jade valuable. He's also an author. Welcome back.    But you said there's a white jade that's a nephrite, and then there's another kind of white jade that's a jadeite, right?   Eric: That's right. When you're talking about white jade, it makes a big difference whether it's nephrite or jadeite. White nephrite is very desirable. White jadeite is kind of a waste material. In fact, it's often dyed or polymer-treated to make it look like something it's not.   Sharon: When you say something it's not, what do you mean? Is it to try and fool people? Why do carvers value white jade so much?   Eric: Again, you have to distinguish between the two types of white jade. The nephrite is desirable to carvers because it can be carved thin and it's not going to break on them while they're carving. The jadeite is generally valued for jewelry, and people don't want a white stone ring. They want the nice, imperial green, apple green jadeite. Back in the late 80s, around 1989, someone figured out how to polymer treat and dye white jadeite to make it look like the imperial green, desirable jadeite.   Sharon: Wow, there's a lot to learn when it comes to stone. The white nephrite that's called jade, when it comes to carving, it's harder to carve. Am I right?   Eric: All carving is hard, but at least the nephrite's not going to break on you. It's not going to crumble. It's not going to cleave like some minerals like fluorite, for example, might do. There are carvings in jadeite as well. It's a little less tough and a little bit harder.   Sharon: But jadeite is what was in Burma. Maybe I'm getting confused. I'm trying to keep it straight. When you talk about the Chinese, that's more of the nephrite jade, and when you talk about the Burmese, that's more of the jadeite, right?    Eric: In terms of where they come from, but there's not much of an industry in Burma carving jadeite. The jadeite comes out of the ground in Burma, and it goes immediately to China where it is made into jewelry and carvings and artifacts and so forth.   Sharon: I'm just getting confused. If somebody says to me, “This is a jade bracelet,” and it's green, what do I ask? Where it came from, or is it nephrite or jadeite? What do I ask?   Eric: The question would be is it nephrite or jadeite. The answer will probably come back that it's jadeite. When you see jade bangle bracelets, for example, they're usually but not always jadeite. Usually if it's a vivid apple green, it's probably jadeite. If it's a darker grayish green, it's probably nephrite.   Sharon: What if it's white? I'm thinking of a hand-made bangle. If they say it's white jade, is that just treated jadeite?   Eric: They would probably not stop at white. They would try to dye it or polymer treat it to try to fool you into thinking it's a more valuable type of jade.   Sharon: So, when somebody says to me, “This is jade,” they really mean jadeite, right? There's nephrite, but most things are jadeite. I'm just trying to understand this.   Eric: It's a complicated subject for sure. Most of the jewelry, but not all that you encounter, will be jadeite. There is nephrite jewelry, but it's probably 10 to one in favor of jadeite.   Sharon: When I was talking to Elyse, she was saying that most of the time the carvings are too large to be used for jewelry, as you were saying, but there are smaller things such as beads and things like that. Is that jade jadeite? Why are they made into small items?   Eric: Jade is found in small quantities, so that's one thing that limits the size. It's costly material, at least the higher grades of jadeite. That would be another thing that limits the size.    Sharon: What would icy jade be? Tell us about icy jade.   Eric: That's another interesting subject. When you're judging jadeite, you're looking at the color. You look at what's called the texture, which is the fineness of the individual, microscopic crystals. It affects the kind of polish the jade can take. You look at the clarity. You'd like to find jade that doesn't have inclusions or black spots in it. There's also something called translucence. As jade becomes more and more translucent, you get to where you can almost read text through it. That's called icy jade.   Sharon: Do you look at whether it's jade or icy jade? Do you look at it under a microscope to decide if you're going to buy it or judge it?   Eric: No, you can see right away that it's an example of icy jade, but it's fairly rare material. It didn't used to be worth anything particularly more than other jades until Christie's, some years ago in a marketing coup, changed the name from water jade to icy jade.   Sharon: Water jade to icy jade.   Eric: And it took off. In the many pieces I've handled over the decades, I only have one piece of icy jade.   Sharon: That's you've handled or that you would be willing to part with?   Eric: Both.    Sharon: Putting icy jade aside, when you evaluate a piece of jade, do you look under a microscope at all? Is that part of your process? I don't know what you look for.   Eric: Generally, no. Generally, a 10x loupe is about all you need to evaluate jade. For example, with a 10x loupe, you can look and see if dye is seeping into the little boundaries between regions on jadeite. The other instrument that is sometimes useful would be a refractometer, which is occasionally brought into play to distinguish between a nephrite and a jadeite.   Sharon: Somebody brought my mother a gift back from China, and she said it was jade. Would that have been an imitation jade? I don't know what she paid for it. I don't remember. Was it a jade jadeite versus—I mean, nephrite doesn't sound like it's in the picture.   Eric: It could have been any one of those. There are some fairly simple tests of hardness and specific gravity and so forth that you can run to tell what you're looking at.   Sharon: As a collector and, as you can tell very obviously, somebody who knows nothing about jade or nephrite or Mawsitsit or icy jade, what would you say to a collector just starting out? What should they look for? What should they have with them? I got rid of my refractometer a long time ago. I said, “Forget it. I never use it.” What would they do with it?   Eric: The one thing you should always have with you is a 10x loupe. The other thing you should always have with you is a healthy sense of skepticism. I assume that any ancient jade I'm shown is a brand-new fake until proven otherwise. When you're shown a gorgeous piece of jade jewelry, you should be a little skeptical as to whether it's natural or has been treated in some way.   Sharon: Treated meaning coated with color to make it look a different color or a stronger color?   Eric: There have been examples of coating, but I was really referring to was what started back in 1989, with the polymer treatment of pretty much worthless white jadeite.   Sharon: How would I know? How would a collector know?   Eric: It's a problem. At a certain price level, you would go to the GIA. They would look at your piece with an infrared spectrometer and tell you yes or no, whether it's natural or colored or had been treated. But this test, of course, costs a few hundred dollars, so you're probably up in the $20,000-$30,000 price range before it becomes worthwhile doing that.    Sharon: If you're buying a less expensive piece that's not a $20,000 piece, what would you say a collector should look for? Should we look for translucency? If they tell me something is old, how do I know?   Eric: If you don't have a $100,000 spectrometer laying around in your basement, you should probably look for a dealer you can trust who does have access to one, either directly or through a lab like GIA.   Sharon: I can tell you're on the East Coast if you say a basement, because who knows what a basement is out here? In fact, I did see a house with a basement, and I was floored. I thought a house with a basement in Los Angeles—   Eric: No basements in Los Angeles?   Sharon: No basements out here, or maybe just a few old, old houses. So, what attracts you? Do you like the color of the jade you buy? Whatever you put on your site, do you like it?   Eric: Yes, the colors of nephrite are more subdued and softer and more subtle, but I find them attractive. The colors of jadeite are brighter and a more vivid green. There's also lavender, which is very attractive. So, yes, the color is one thing, and the extreme toughness of nephrite, what it lets carvers accomplish.   Sharon: If something is lavender, depending on price range, you could add polymers to make it lavender? Is it nephrite or would that be jadeite, or both?   Eric: That is jadeite, yes. Unfortunately, lavender is faked as well. Polymer-treated lavender does exist. It's usually so garish looking that you can dismiss it right out of hand, but a really good imitation can be a little harder to tell. Once again, you rely on an infrared spectrometer to tell the difference.   Sharon: Do you have one lying around your house?    Eric: I have no infrared spectrometer.   Sharon: In the thousands of years they've been carving jade, whether it's in China or Burma or wherever, is there natural lavender jade? What are the natural colors?   Eric: Oh yes, there is natural lavender. It's a softer, more subtle lavender. It comes from Burma along with the other jades, so it does exist.   Sharon: Are there any other colors? There's green; there's white; there's lavender. There are different shades of green, but what else? Is that it for all the jades?   Eric: There is a red. There's a reddish brown, russet and black.   Sharon: And they all come from Burma and then they're shipped off to China? Or are they in China?   Eric: The jade is all from Burma and it's almost universally carved in China.   Sharon: So, if somebody shows me a piece—I keep going back to this example of a bangle bracelet—and somebody says it's from China, it's really been dug out of the ground in Burma and shipped off to China to be made into something. Is that what you're saying?   Eric: That's correct. If it's jadeite, the raw material came from northern Burma and the work was almost certainly done in China.   Sharon: O.K. You must really take people aback when you start asking them questions. They probably think you're just another person who doesn't know anything about jade.   Eric: Once again, you want to find a dealer you have some faith in.   Sharon: Do you think you have those dealers? Because you're a dealer, do you think the people you get your material and your carved objects from, are they trustworthy? If they call you and say, “Hey, do I have a deal for you,” do you say, “O.K., let me hear about it”?   Eric: There are dealers I buy from and there are dealers I sell to. I also sell jade books, books about jade.   Sharon: Tell us about some of the things you're written about or the names of the books.   Eric: At one point, I might have been the number one seller of jade books in the world. I've written about that. I've sent a lot of the best ones to China. Even though the shipping cost can be horrendous for a big, heavy book, it doesn't seem to bother anybody in China to pay it.   Sharon: You must have clients from all over the world.   Eric: Yeah, I've probably shipped to about 20 to 30 countries.   Sharon: Besides the books, who contacts you from all over the world to say, “Hey, I saw this object on your site”?   Eric: I get that all the time, people showing pictures. Invariably it's imitation ancient jades.    Sharon: How about when they want to buy something from you? Do they come from all over the world?   Eric: I ship all over.    Sharon: Tell us what you've written about. If you're the number one seller, people really trust what you have to say about jade. Are you writing from a mineral perspective for what to look for? What are you telling them? What are you writing about in the books?    Eric: As an engineer, it's the technical aspect I appreciate the most. Telling jade from pseudo jade has been a side specialty.   Sharon: I shouldn't send my bracelet from the swap meet to you because I should just assume it's pseudo jade. That's what you're saying, right?   Eric: It pays to have a healthy sense of skepticism. I assume everything is fake until proven otherwise.   Sharon: How would somebody prove otherwise to you? Because it's old and they're brushing the dirt off of it? How would they prove it?   Eric: Perhaps the most reliable thing in dealing with ancient jades is to take a close look at the tooling techniques and looking for modern toolmarks, which would not have been used a thousand plus years ago.   Sharon: Do you often find when you're evaluating a piece for you to buy to resell, will someone tell you, “Oh, this is made with old tools,” and then you'll find a modern tool mark and hand it back?   Eric: There's no handing back. A lot of times, you have to buy in a dark, dingy corner, no recourse, no refund, cash only.   Sharon: I guess I'm thinking about a big show or something like that. You're saying they pull you aside. Do they open their raincoat or something?   Eric: At a big show, of course, the vetting has already been done for you. But that's reflected in the very high prices, so it's hard to buy anything at a big show for resale.    Sharon: As a collector, if we were going to buy or evaluate a piece and we don't have our handy refractometer with us, what should we be doing in terms of the sense of skepticism? It's like how on Antiques Roadshow you see people all the time who believe they have pre-Columbian artifacts and they're proven to be fake. Should we look for contemporary toolmarks? Is that one tell?   Eric: You've opened another new subject, and that's pre-Columbian jade. Jade was carved in Central America roughly about the time of the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. In fact, there's some thought that perhaps there was communication between China and the jade carvers in Central America because a lot of the motifs are the same. But in Central America, at that time, they were using string and abrasives and stone files, not metal tools.   Sharon: When was this?   Eric: This would have been maybe 500 to 1,000 years ago.    Sharon: Not that long ago, really, when you compare it to China or even other places in the world.   Eric: That's right. For the first several thousand years, China carved with the same kinds of tools before they had metals.   Sharon: That's really interesting. Tell us a bit more about when we should come to a person like you, what we'll find in the books and chapters you've coauthored. Are we only going to find technical stuff, or are we going to find history? Are we going to find anything else?   Eric: There are jade books that cover all of that. Unfortunately, they're not all in the same book. The book I worked on most recently was by Richard Hughes in Bangkok. It's a big, heavy book. It's costs $200 just to mail it from Bangkok to the United States. It's not the kind of investment everybody will make, and it does focus on the gemology aspects of both nephrite and jadeite.    Sharon: When are you going to be writing your book about history? You say there's not a book that encompasses it all. Forget the minerology, but the history, the carving, how it's done. When are you going to write it?   Eric: I don't think you should wait for it. I've been assembling notes for about 20 years. Elyse asks that same question about once a week.   Sharon: So, I should come back to you in 10, 15 years?   Eric: 10 years would be good.   Sharon: For somebody like me, it would be an easier book to write because I don't know the technical stuff. The history and the carving would be interesting and fast to write.    Eric: While you're waiting the 10 years, there is actually a book that was written called “Jade Lore.” I'm not sure when it was written; possibly in the 40s. That does cover, in a very readable way, a lot of the history along with a little bit of the technical.   Sharon: But isn't it out of print because it's been so long?   Eric: It's out of print, but you can find copies. It was written by a journalist who was on-site in China around the time the Qing Dynasty was falling apart, and a lot of these pieces were coming onto the market.   Sharon: When was that? How long ago?   Eric: The Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, 1912. I think this book was written either in the 30s or 40s. It was written by somebody who really knew how to write a lively story.   Sharon: Where have you been? If you're saying you look at these objects or jewels, have you been to some of the places and seen them directly, or is it mostly when somebody brings you into a dark corner?   Eric: I've been to Taiwan. I have not been to mainland China. As I mentioned earlier, the Chinese really want to repatriate and bring back into the country the best jades as well as jade books. To get pieces of jade now, you pretty much have to stumble across American collections or European collections.   Sharon: I think that's true of other pieces too. It seems that the Chinese are very interested in repatriating a lot of older jewelry. We're being told they're the ones who drive the prices up. Is that also true in jade?   Eric: Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's a book on that subject as well.    Sharon: Which is?   Eric: On the whole subject of repatriating these pieces back into China.    Sharon: What do people do with them when they have them back in China?   Eric: What do they do with them in China?   Sharon: Yeah.   Eric: Some of those will end up in museums in China. Others end up in private collections of millionaires.   Sharon: Eric, I see Elyse in the corner there. You have to go pack your bags so you can get ready for your next trip to Myanmar or mainland China. You've been to Taiwan. Thank you very much for being with us today.    Eric: It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.   Sharon: It's been great. We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

What you'll learn in this episode: The difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), and why SEO is a worthwhile investment even if it takes time to see results Why Google's Local Services Ads give you the most bang for your buck if you're investing in SEM Why quality, original content and a great user experience are the keys to ranking on the first page of Google When it makes sense to pay for pay-per-click and social media ads How your firm's intake process and in-person service affect online rankings About Eric Bersano Eric Bersano has been deeply involved in online legal marketing since 2006. He is the VP of Business Development at Market My Market, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses generate new clients by implementing the right systems and strategies. Depending on a law firm's goals, Eric ensures the best marketing channel and modalities are implemented, including search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and TV and radio. His focus on the legal space gives Eric the network to utilize the most talented designers, programmers, and marketers in the country. His clients maintain very high rankings for competitive online searches at the city, state, and national levels. Transcript: The online marketing landscape is so competitive that it almost seems pointless to put much effort into SEO. Why try to compete with the firms that rank highest on Google? But according to Eric Bersano, Vice President of Business Development for Market My Market, that belief is misguided. Not only can the top law firms on Google get knocked off their number one spots, it happens quite often. Eric joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about the paid and organic campaign options available through Google; why you should think of your website like a book in a library; and when paid search and social media ads can pay off for your firm. Read the episode transcript here.  Sharon: Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, my guest is Eric Bersano, Vice President of Business Development for Market My Market. Eric has been in the legal marketing space since 2006 and has seen a lot of changes. Today, we'll hear all about the evolution of legal marketing and its importance to the legal marketing community, as well as why law firms need a guide to navigate the proliferation of marketing venues. Eric, welcome to the program. Eric: Thanks for having me, Sharon. Sharon: So glad to have you. Tell us about your career path. I'm sure you weren't saying this is what you wanted to do when you were in kindergarten. Eric: That's a very good point. I actually made a shift in 2006. I was working with orthopedic surgeons. I had a friend who was working at a company called FindLaw, which really put search engine optimization and digital marketing on the map for lawyers. My mom didn't raise a doctor or a lawyer, but I've worked with both. To be honest, I prefer the law field. Sharon: We'll talk more about it, but how did you get into this space, the online legal space? Eric: So, a quick background. Coming over from the medical side, one thing I always tell people is I was never going to be as knowledgeable as a surgeon. I was selling orthopedic implants, and there was no way I would ever know more than they did. My nail for the femur was very similar to somebody else's nail for the femur. When I came over to attorney marketing, I realized very quickly that this was a new animal. A lot of attorneys weren't doing marketing or weren't putting it into focus. To a lot of the old-school attorneys, marketing was hurtful, because they weren't even legally allowed to market until, I think, the late 70s. Most attorneys that had a thriving practice were using either Yellow Pages or just referral sources, and they were doing extraordinarily well. Once the internet started to become a place for people to find attorneys, it was this brand-new open ground that was really fertile. The thing I loved about it was that I could go into a law firm in January and six months later, they wanted to buy me lunch or dinner because they doubled in size or their profits had doubled. In the early days, search engine optimization was fairly easily, especially working for a big company, because it didn't take much. But as you said, over the past 16, 17 years, there has been a ton of changes. I like to keep up with all those changes to make sure my clients are profiting from those. Sharon: You're bringing back so many memories of firms saying, “Oh, I don't need any online stuff. We take care of it with referrals only. We don't market. We just do referrals,” which to me is marketing, but O.K. Eric: Right. Sharon: What does Market My Market do, and what does that mean? Eric: Good question. We get asked that a lot. When you're choosing the name for a company, you throw a bunch of things against the wall, and you're hoping for something that really defines what you do. We didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves into just legal marketing. There are a lot of companies that do that, but we do work with other professionals. That would be doctors and some accountants, and then lawyers are probably our biggest market. Market My Market is us marketing you in your market. Everybody's got a geography they cover, and our true focus is to make sure they're being as competitive as they possibly can when it comes to online. The one big differentiator we bring is that one of the co-founders, Ryan Klein, worked in-house at two extremely competitive law firms in south Florida. One was a personal injury law firm and the other one was a criminal defense firm. Both were in south Florida, which is the home of John Morgan when it comes to personal injury plus a host of other really competitive law firms. One of the things he did was bring over his philosophy from working in-house, working side by side with attorneys and knowing exactly what they wanted to see. When some people get lost in the weeds as marketers, they say, “Hey, look, your traffic is up,” or “Look how many intakes or phone calls you got,” which are great indicators, but what a lawyer really wants is signed cases. They want more high-quality, signed cases. We want to work backwards into that with our approach to make sure we're getting an increase in signed cases, not just pointing to some of the key indicators. Sharon: I'm going to stop to ask you, is John Morgan a personal injury law firm or an attorney? I've never heard that before. Eric: John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan has built kind of the Death Star of websites. He started out in south Florida as a big TV advertiser. You can't drive more than 10 feet without seeing one of his billboards. Probably five, eight years ago, he started really branching out. He's got practices in Boston and Arizona and Las Vegas. So, his one website they've grown is really competitive in a lot of markets. If you talk to any personal injury attorney in Florida they'll know John Morgan, but more and more, they're starting to know him in other parts of the country because he's starting to encroach in everybody's backyard. Sharon: That's interesting. When you said Morgan and Morgan, I've seen that, but I didn't realize it was John Morgan. This question comes up a lot: what's the difference between SEM, search engine marketing, and SEO, which is search engine optimization? What's the difference? Eric: It's a good question. SEM would be the umbrella term. Search engine marketing is all the different types of marketing you can do online with search engines. We always refer to Google because that's the 800-pound gorilla, but there's also Bing and Yahoo and some other ancillary search engines. Search engine marketing encompasses search engine optimization, but it also includes paid search. Those would be things like Google ads, or one thing that's become very popular over the last two years is LSAs, or Local Services Ads. Anybody listening to this who's done a search for a car accident lawyer in “insert city here,” you'll see three ads at the very top with a profile photo. Those are Local Services Ads. The key to those is you don't pay when somebody clicks; you only pay when you get a lead. If somebody clicks on your ads, reads all your information, but doesn't contact you, you're never charged. But if they fill out a contact form or call that tracking number, it's taken into account on your Google dashboard. You can even reject leads for a refund if they don't qualify. For example, if you're a criminal defense attorney and you get a family law lead, you can dispute that, and they'll take it off your bill. So, search engine marketing is everything you can do with search engine advertising. Search engine optimization is really the key we focus on for one main reason. Nobody goes to Google or any search engine because they have the best ads. They go to that search engine because they trust that the results that show up on the first page are the best information and resource for that subject matter. If I type in “DUI attorney Fresno,” the average person assumes that the law firm that shows up number one is the best DUI attorney in Fresno. It's not always the case, but the big advantage to the optimization piece is people will trust you more when you show up on that first page. The marketing costs are also generally fixed. What I mean by that is if I do a PPC ad and I've got a $10,000 a month budget— Sharon: PPC is? Eric: Pay-per-click. When I do a pay-per-click ad, I'm going to be charged every time someone clicks on my ad, whether they call me or not. Now, if I'm spending $10,000 in January and I spend none in February, that's a sunk cost. I'll never get that $10,000 back. But with search engine optimization, you're paying for links, you're paying for new website pages, blog articles. All of that stuff accumulates over time. The biggest thing I hear with search engine optimization from attorneys is, “Oh, we tried it. It doesn't work,” or “It doesn't work for anybody.” I would challenge you to do a search for your most important keyword in your city and look at the firm who's showing up number one. That person is fighting tooth and nail to stay there. The bigger the city, the harder they're fighting, because if you're showing up number one for “car accident lawyer Houston,” your business is exploding. You can guarantee that the people who are there want to stay there, and they'll do anything they can to keep their number one spot. Sharon: Does anybody still say, “Oh, we tried that and it doesn't work,” when it comes to SEO? Eric: Yeah, they do. To be honest, SEO is constantly changing. Companies like us, we don't claim that we know exactly what Google wants. Google gives you best practices, but they don't want to say, “Do, A, B, C and D and you'll rank number one,” because not everybody can rank number one. The one thing they've always stayed true to is that they want original, relevant content and a great user experience. That's what we've built our company principles on. The people who say it doesn't work have been burned, because no matter how great of an SEO company you are, it takes time to see results. Let's say we're talking about a competitive market like Chicago. That could take six months to a year. If you give an SEO company a year and you get nothing in that year, it's going to be hard for you to invest in somebody else and give them a full year. What happens all the time is they don't get somebody who focuses on legal. They don't know which directories to go to. They don't understand the practice areas, the keyword terms to optimize for. They might be a really good SEO company, but without understanding that legal niche, they might not be performing well enough to get them rankings. I talk to attorneys every day who are like, “Nope, I tried SEO before. It doesn't work.” It's just because it didn't work for them with the particular program they had. Sharon: When you say LSA, Local Services Ads, do you set up a separate phone number for that? Eric: The Local Services Ads are through Google, and Google has its own tracking numbers for you because they want to be able to tell you exactly what somebody searched for and clicked on to serve that ad. That's how they charge you. One of the things we do is manage those Local Services Ad campaigns, so that tracking number gets imported into our dashboard. We can actually say, “Hey, you got 10 Local Services Ad calls. You got 15 intakes. You got 20 calls from organic, and you got 15 calls from Google My Business.” We want to know which piece of the online marketing is working. There are four places for you to get business on Google's homepage: LSAs, PPC, Google Maps, and then there's organic. We really like to focus on organic because that's typically 60% or more of clicks. Not that LSAs and PPC aren't a good substitute, but anybody who's relying solely on PPC is really putting their client flow in jeopardy. It doesn't take many bad months with PPC for you to spend your marketing dollars with no return. Sharon: It used to be many, many years ago that you could say to somebody, “O.K., you don't have the budget. I understand. Here are some things you can do.” It seems like today there's not much you can do. With PPC, it seems like that's the one thing you can still do and say, “O.K., you could just start with PPC. Put all your money into PPC and start that tomorrow,” but you're saying they're missing a lot still. Eric: That's a really good point. If I'm working with somebody in a really competitive market, let's say New York City, and they have almost no web presence at all, that's going to be a really tough pill for them to swallow, for them to hear, “I need you to pay me X dollars a month for a year before you can expect anything.” But that's realistic if they don't have any SEO working at all. That's the case where I'd say, “All right, let's put together a very competitive, focused, pay-per-click campaign to start getting some clients in the door,” because the big advantage with PPC is it's instantaneous. You do the keyword research. You set up your landing pages, and you can start receiving phone calls and emails right away. Now, the downside of PPC is it's become extremely competitive. If you've ever done a search, the most expensive pay-per-click keywords, there's a list of about 180 of them that are legal keywords, things like, “I'm a car accident lawyer.” Those could go anywhere from $50 to $150 per click with no guarantee that the person's even going to reach out to you. So, I think PPC can be used sparingly to make up for that valley of death before you start to get organic results or to hyper-target something that's very timely. For example, if there's a bridge collapse or food poisoning, sometimes there's going to be a bunch of people that are injured in a very short window. Those types of cases come out all the time. You're not going to have a “food poisoning for Tyson Chicken” campaign ready to go with SEO, so in those cases it would make sense. But the most efficient, lowest cost would be LSAs. Again, you're only paying for leads. The big issue right now with LSAs is they've been around so long that if you're in a major market, there are probably at least 50 people in those LSAs already, and there are only three spots that will show up on the homepage. Sharon: And Google decides who those are. Eric: Yes, Google decides. There's some thought that having more reviews, getting consistent reviews, is going to help you show up there. You don't want to get 10 reviews in a month and no more for six months. But the number one factor for showing up in those LSAs is how responsive you are to the leads that come in. Google will know if those go to voicemail. Google will know if you're not interacting with their dashboard to say, “We have this lead” and move that through their funnel. They want to make sure that if you're getting the leads, you're treating their clients well. Remember, they're Google's client first. They went to Google for a search. If you mistreat them and don't provide them a good service, Google's not going to reward you with those rankings. Sharon: Wow! With LSAs, it seems that they would go to voicemail sometimes, because nobody's manning those phones all the time. Eric: That's another good point. The more sophisticated people become, the more efficient their front and back office are, the more profitable they'll be. In the old days, let's say 20 years ago, I don't think the average person expected someone to pick up the phone at 7:00. But if you're having a legal issue, you may not want to talk about that in the workplace. You may call on your way home or after you get home. So, if you don't have 24/7 answering, you could be missing out, and this is actual data we have with our clients. We use call tracking for every single one of our clients. Just under 30% of contacts came in either before 9:00 or after 5:00. If 30% of your contacts are coming in during off hours and you're not immediately responding, you are definitely losing out on clients. Sharon: Wow! That's a lot of person power, I should say. Eric: Exactly. If you get a hundred leads in a month and 30 of those are going to voicemail, that's not a good client experience. Sharon: Is it still possible to become number one in Chicago or Los Angeles or New York, no matter how much money you're putting out? Are those spots just long gone? Could somebody overtake somebody? Eric: Yes, it happens all the time. There are two things that will typically happen. You'll have somebody who gets really aggressive with an organic campaign. There are a lot of myths about organic. A lot of people will say they've got proprietary software; they've got a proprietary secret sauce or amazing links that nobody else knows about. The truth is search engine optimization comes down to doing a lot of things really well. It's very detailed. I's need to be dotted; T's need to be crossed. It's keeping up with trends like user experience. One quick example would be on a mobile phone, you want the contact us and phone buttons to be towards the bottom of the page because that's where people's thumbs are at, whereas on a desktop, people are used to seeing them at the top. Extrapolate that times a thousand little, tiny things, they all add up to the people who show up in those top three to five spots, which is where you need to be to get any clicks. The second thing that can jostle things up would be a Google algorithm change. Google admits that they change and update their algorithm hundreds of times a year, but each year there are usually two or three major ones, and you'll see a big shakeup. Someone who has been in the number one spot for months and months and months all of a sudden drops down to the bottom of page one or even page two. Those are opportunities, because Google is testing out some of their new changes, and they want to see if that user experience is still good. What that means is, let's say you and I are both competing for the same keyword. Somebody goes to your website and the average time on your website is 90 seconds, and the average time on my website is 20 seconds. Well, Google knows that, and they're just going to assume that your website is better; it's more engaging; it has more relevant content. When the algorithm shakes up, that one factor could cause somebody to stay higher than the person who was previously number one. I'll just end by saying this. There's no one factor or silver bullet that's going to get you to number one. Time on site is really good, and it makes logical sense when you tell somebody, but just because your time on site is great doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be number one in that market. There are so many other things that need to be done correctly to keep those rankings. Sharon: You mentioned organic. I know you said you're going to finish up, but I have a lot more questions. Eric: Sure. Sharon: When you say organic, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Eric: Organic are Google's results. They're their most preferred result. Google needs to make money, and we all know that Google is one of the most profitable companies in history, and the reason they are is because they sell ads. They sell Local Services Ads and pay-per-click. Every time someone clicks on an ad, Google gets paid. Well, underneath the ads are typically the Google Maps results first, although sometimes an organic search will show up above it. Then there are the organic links below that. If I'm looking for a pair of shoes and I type in “running shoes,” I'm probably going to see Nike or Dick's Sporting Goods as number one because they're such big, powerful websites. Organic refers to those things underneath the paid section. You basically have to walk through the paid section—a lot of people get stuck there and click on those ads. Google gets paid, but the vast, vast majority of people are going specifically to that organic section because they trust that those are the best, most relevant websites. Sharon: How do you influence organic? You mentioned blogs. Do you write? Do you have other people writing? How does that work? Eric: That's a good question. I like to use the library analogy for how Google picks out a website. Instead of websites, let's call them books. Google is our librarian in the largest library in the world, and I'm looking for a book on cookies. Not just cookies, but I want chocolate chip cookies. What's a better resource, a hundred-page book on cooking that includes chicken and roast beef and baking, or a hundred-page book on just cookies, and specifically chocolate chip cookies? What Google is looking for is the best, most relevant information. As a personal injury attorney, if I've got family law and criminal defense and estate planning and trusts and intellectual property and car accidents, I'm really diluting my message. My book is a catchall for everything. If I have a really focused book on just personal injury—and I'm talking about car accidents or brain injuries or spine injuries—now I've created a really powerful, relevant, niche source. If you do a search for Covid right now, you're probably going to find something like WebMD. You're not going to find some random website. You'll find something from the CDC because those are powerful sites that have developed their niche. So, the way to earn Google's respect is, number one, the content has to be original. They don't want to duplicate content. They're literally tracking billions, if not trillions, of websites by now, so if your content isn't original, why keep track of it? Then they want to make sure those user experience things are there: how much time on site, how quickly does the website load, how easy is it to get from one page to the next? When you ask us specifically about content, we have our own in-house team. We think content is so important, so we look for really good writers and we train them on how to research for the purposes of showing up organically. So, how to research for a keyword and then how to write so search engines can pick up on those keywords. Content is such an important part. Instead of outsourcing it to a third party, we hired good writers. These are all US-based employees of Market My Market that write, edit and post their content to the website. Sharon: With Google, I always imagined—and maybe you can shed some light on it—that there's some person somewhere who's watching all these screens and making decisions. Is this all done by a machine? Eric: Yes. Google specifically calls this machine learning. That's really where the user experience part comes into this. In the old days, back in 2006, all you really needed to do was have some good content and a couple of labels. If I was trying to rank for “medical malpractice attorney Los Angeles,” I would want to make sure that page was titled “medical malpractice attorney.” I'd want that to be the title of the first paragraph, and I'd want to use that term a couple of times in there. Well, people got wise to that, and then they started keyword stuffing. They started putting keywords all over the place. They would even put black text on a black background so you couldn't see it, but Google could read it. Well, Google is much smarter than any of us, and they can now pick up on those. They pick up on the user experience key indicators, which is how people interact with the website. They know if someone is clicking around and going to multiple pages. One of the biggest SEO terms is bounce rate. A lot of people mistake bounce rate with how fast someone bounces from the website, meaning, “I went to the website, and I bounced in two seconds.” That's not what bounce rate is. Bounce rate is only going to a single page. If I come to the homepage and I don't click on an attorney profile or a client testimonial or the car accident page, Google is marking that against me because they're saying, “People come to your website. You've got a hundred pages and they only go to one. That can't be a good search experience.” These algorithms are now taking all these learning experiences from millions and millions of searches, and they're coming up with—and Google admits this—rankings that even the Google engineers don't know exactly how they get to it. The benefit of AI is that it works while you're sleeping. The downside of AI is you're not exactly sure why the output is what it is until you dig into the weeds. That's why we see so many changes in Google's algorithm throughout the year. Sharon: AI being artificial intelligence. Eric: Correct, yeah. Google likes to use the term “machine learning.” I don't know if they just want to coin their own term, but they always refer to it as machine learning. Their computers are learning based on how people interact with the Google searches they provide. Sharon: That's interesting. I didn't know that was how they defined it. What's the difference between working with lawyers and working with financial professionals, doctors, other professional services? Eric: The biggest difference from a marketing perspective is knowing which resources are best. Most of my clients are in the legal industry. People are going to get their links from Avvo and FindLaw, but if you haven't dealt with lawyers before, you might not know the more obscure or random or even local searches. Most attorneys belong to at least one if not several bar associations. They could belong to their local city bar association. They could belong to their state bar association. All of those give them opportunities to list who they are and link back to their website. When it comes to other professionals like financial, that's not a market we dabble in. I wouldn't have the confidence to tell somebody who was a financial planner or someone big in the finance world that I know exactly where to market them, because I don't have the 17 years of experience there. When somebody can focus in on a niche, they can find all these nooks and crannies on the internet where they can market their clients to make sure they're putting their best foot forward. Sharon: Does social media play any part in this? Does that change things? Eric: When it comes to social media, there are two different ways to use it. The first one is the most labor-intensive and hardest, but it can pay off. I strongly suggest anybody who wants to do organic social media, which means you're posting about your law firm—that takes a lot of work. They say you should be posting one to three times a day, and that would be on things like TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. Now, I see your face. That seems like a lot of work, and it is. You've got to think about this, and you've got to be very inventive when you do your posts, because who is going to follow a criminal defense attorney for no reason? Who's going to follow a family law attorney? One way to use social media to your advantage organically is to take viral content that's happening right now and put your spin on it. For example, we just got past the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial that was making worldwide news. Some of the most popular posts were attorneys who were giving their two cents on that day's trial. That's a great way to do something through social media. It still takes time because you've got to keep up on whatever that trial is, and then you've got to go in and give your unique take, but that could pay off in dividends. Some of those videos were getting millions of views, which is really raising their presence.   The other way to use social media is to do paid advertising. You can do paid advertising through TikTok. You can do it through Facebook and Instagram, and what you're doing is targeting your most likely audience. If I'm a criminal defense attorney, I might be targeting males because more males are committing crimes. I might target certain areas of the county near jails or where courts are. I can geotarget those. I can put a circle around the court. Anybody who's coming in and out of this building, I want to target them with an ad. Those would be paid ads. Budgets can range in the low thousands to the high thousands, depending on how competitive that market is and how many people you want to serve ads to. Sharon: Do you take that into account? Does one hand influence the other in terms of things you're doing to optimize everything? Does that come into play? Eric: Social media doesn't have a huge organic bump to it unless you get into the extremes. If I have a post that's going viral, if I'm getting lots of mentions, if the firm name is being mentioned a lot on Twitter, that can have some effects, but that's very rare. I would say if you have somebody in the office who loves social media and they're going to post your holiday parties—for example, if somebody gives you a great review on Google, repost that review and say, “Thanks, Karen. We really love having you as a client.” Make it interactive. That's probably not going to win you a case organically, but if someone finds your social media profile, sees how active you are, gets a feel for the personality of the firm, it could get you that first phone call as they're doing their due diligence on who to hire. Sharon: Do you see social media playing more of a role as you continue in this vein? Eric: I see social media as a really good way to connect with people. I see it more as a tool for paid. There are very few attorneys that are going to spend enough time on social media, the time it needs. If you hire me to run your social media campaign, what do I know about the daily workings of the firm? That should be more of a personal thing. What you could hire us to do is to create ads for you and to serve those ads to specific people. As a general rule of thumb, social media is not a great tool for single-event personal injuries like car accidents, because it's really hard to target your audience. Where they do make a difference would be in mass torts, for example Roundup. Roundup has glyphosate in it. It was giving people non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. There were links to this. Monsanto was sued. Bellwether trials went on to prove that they were at fault, and the verdicts were coming back in the tens of millions of dollars. That is a great tool for social media because I know the type of person that used Roundup. I know the hotbeds. This wasn't your weekend gardener; these were people in the flyover states that were using tons of this stuff, literally, on their crops. People who were working on farms or in agriculture were overly exposed to this stuff and were coming down with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and a couple other types of cancer. That's great for Facebook because you're leveraging all the data they have on their users, all their attributes, their age, their income. I like social media for those kinds of campaigns, but for your typical family law attorney or criminal defense attorney, it's probably dollars that could be spent better somewhere else. Sharon: Eric, I could go on forever asking a million more questions. There's so much to all of this. Thank you being here today. Eric: Sharon, thanks for having me. I appreciate the conversation. Sharon: Greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Consolidation, innovation, and perspective all need to work together in government IT according to Eric Trexler, VP of Global Governments and Critical Infrastructure Sales at Forcepoint. IT acts as an enabler of business in the challenging landscape of government technology. Listen in to find out what Eric believes the United States IT space should be focusing on in order to stay ahead of the adversaries. Episode Table of Contents[00:25] All About Innovation with Eric Trexler [10:39] An Enabler of the Business [18:27] We Haven't Seen Consolidation [21:37] Choosing Fiefdom Over Consolidation and Innovation [27:49] The Commercial Component of Innovation [32:32] There Are Productivity Gains Out of Innovation Episode Links and Resources All About Innovation with Eric TrexlerCarolyn: Today, our guest is Eric Trexler, Vice President of Global Governments and critical infrastructure at Forcepoint. Eric is an expert in the technology industry with more than 25 years of experience with both the public and private sectors. And Eric and I used to host To The Point Cybersecurity podcast together. So today is actually a real treat for me to see your face again, Eric. So, good morning. Eric: Good morning. And it's bizarre being back on the air with you, Carolyn. Carolyn: So, today, we're going to talk about the perplexing and growing cost of cybercrime and how we can shift the paradigm. But before we jump into that, Eric, you have actually a pretty fascinating background. So, can you just tell us a little bit about your journey? Eric: My journey in IT? Or where would you like me to start? Carolyn: Let's not go all the way back to birth. Let's start at your Airborne Ranger days. How about that? And then how you got to where you are today. So yes, technology. Eric: So, I was an aimless kid at about 17 with no potential to pay for college. No easy path at the time. And I said, I'm joining the army against my mother's wishes to become an Airborne Ranger. The Requirement to Be a Navy SEALCarolyn: At 17? Eric: Yes. She had to sign the paperwork so I could join the delayed entry program. The military throws at you when you have a high ASVAB score, that's the entrance. And I had a high ASVAB score. So, I saw the Navy and they wanted me to be a nuclear engineer. And I just wanted to be a Navy SEAL back in the day before people knew what the Navy SEALs were. But you had to pick a rating, I believe they call it in the Navy. So, I'm sitting in front of the recruiter, and he's like, "Okay, but what do you want to do?" And I'm a dumb kid, I'm 17 years old. "I want to be a Navy SEAL." "Well, you can't do that. You have to have a rating. You have to have this skill at trade." And nothing, absolutely nothing was interesting to me. So, I left. I went to the army recruiter and enlisted. Because they'd let me be an airborne, I was unassigned airborne, technically. How I became an Airborne Ranger? I didn't want to be normal and I was in jump school and talked to a gentleman and I didn't want to wear chemical gear. This was right at the end of the first Gulf War, and everybody was running around in MOPP suits. If you remember that MOPP suits? Hot, heavy, you can't see. MOPP GearMark: You can't breathe. Eric: Same reason I didn't want to be in a tank or a ship or a plane. I wanted to be on my feet and I wanted to be able to move. And I was like, "I don't want to wear MOPP gear." The guy said, "Here's what you do." And that's what I did. So, I literally made the choice because I did not want to wear a helmet and I didn't want to wear MOPP gear. Carolyn: You sound like my six-year-old niece, how she chooses what she wants to do is whatever that doesn't require shoes. Eric: I was probably about as evolved at that point in time. Mark, you know what it's like to be a 17-year-old boy. I mean, you're really pretty low on the intelligent decision-making maturity scale, right? Mark: Maturity scale. Eric: I mean, you're just not there. It was...

Our guest today is Eric Crowley, a tech investment banker with GP Bullhound. With investments in companies ranging from Spotify to Whoop, and clients such as AllTrails, Pinkbike, and Lingoda, GP Bullhound provides transaction advice and capital to many of the leaders in the Consumer Subscription Software space.On the podcast we talk with Eric about his 2021 report on Consumer Subscription Software, the truth about LTV calculations, and the new era of organic user acquisition.In this episode, you'll learn: Was 2020 just a “COVID Bump,” or a shift in consumer behavior? Are the Bumble & Duolingo IPO multiples justified? How savvy developers are adapting to Apple's App Tracking Transparency The truth about LTV The new era of customer acquisition Links & Resources Spotify Whoop AllTrails Pinkbike Lingoda Bumble Duolingo Instacart Match Group Netflix Noom Weight Watchers Tinder The Dyrt Day One Journal Automattic Tech Crunch Scribd Pandora Eric Crowley's Links Follow Eric on Twitter GP Bullhound GP Bullhound insights Eric's LinkedIn GP Bullhound 2021 CSS survey Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode Transcript00:00:00 David:Hello, I'm your host. David Bernard. And with me, as always, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Eric Crowley, a tech investment banker with GP Bullhound. With investments in companies ranging from Spotify to Whoop, and clients such as AllTrails Pinkbike, and Lingoda, GP Bullhound provides transaction advice and capital to many of the leaders in consumer subscription software.On the podcast, we talk with Eric about his 2021 report on consumer subscription software, the truth about LTV calculations, and the new era of organic user acquisition.Hey, Eric, welcome to the podcast.00:00:56 Eric:Hey, David, Jacob. Thanks for having me back. It's always a pleasure. 00:00:59 David:Yeah. Every year you release this report, so we had to get you back. This is the third annual Consumer Subscription Software Report, and I wanted to kick off just asking you a little bit about the motivation, and where your headspace is in thinking about creating this. Who the target is, and what kind of questions you're asking yourself as you prepare this report.00:01:24 Eric:Yeah. The report is the GP Bullhound Consumer Subscription Software Report. I call it CSS, which is kind of a playoff SaaS. This is the third year I've been writing it, and it started back in 2018. I worked with a company called AllTrails that was starting to monetize really well by selling subscriptions.It was like a light bulb went off in my head. I was like, this is a phenomenal way to provide a consistently improving product to consumers, where the margins are pretty good. It's easy to access a ton of different people globally through the app stores or through the web, and I just got really excited about it.I started putting some notes down on my own, and then GP Bullhound really supported me in saying like, “Hey, this is actually a pretty big trend. There's gonna be some amazing companies built around this space,” and companies like RevenueCat, that are supporting CSS companies, are just as exciting.So, we've been slowly educating ourselves. The goal behind the report is really just to force me to do some thinking about the space. What it looks like. What it will be. As a banker, you can quickly focus on transaction, transaction, transaction, and not really do any long-term thinking about where the world's going.It's putting myself in your guys's shoes. You guys are building RevenueCat not for what the world looks like today, but for what the world looks like in three to five years. I try to take the same approach with CSS, and think about where's the world going to go. So I talked to a lot of smart people as I put the report together. Entrepreneurs, investors, get their opinions.You guys can see their interviews in the report, and then ultimately we publish it. The audience I like to think about is entrepreneurs, people that are thinking about starting a CSS company, or already launched one, and they're looking to improve their metrics, or think about their target audience as entrepreneur-rich.By partnering with them, investing in their businesses, it takes them to the next level. The other way I like to think about it, it's my own personal scoreboard. I love to flip back two years ago and see, was I right about this company? You're publishing in public, so people can always come back to you and say, “Man, you were way off.” So, I look forward to that.00:03:26 Jacob:I remember the F finding the first one, the 2018, I guess, reporter 2019, whenever the first one you put out,00:03:33 Eric:2019, I think that's how we met actually.00:03:36 Jacob:Did you reach out to me or? I think I found it, or I don't remember what it was, but00:03:39 Eric:We've had a mutual friend, Nico introduced us and said, Hey, you guys should talk about this. and then I think we just went off on a two hour tangent.00:03:47 Jacob:But yeah, I remember being, it's still, there's still not a ton of like really focused research or writing on this space. and I think that, that, you know, this will probably won't be true for very long, right. As long as it continues to grow, but like going back to like who it's for. I mean, I imagine it as some, you know, end of the day, if you're employing.Pushing into some kind of lead gen. Right. But it does provide a lot of value for, you know, even if you're not interested in a transaction or whatever, just. Some like holistic data on a space. Cause like, I, the same, I mean, Eric, you said we're, we're thinking three and five years in the future. It's like, I wish like a lot of times I'm thinking like three to six weeks in the future.Right. and so it's even useful, I think, you know, even if you're, you know, I, you know, we're, we're in a bit of an interesting place as a infrastructure provider to be at kind of a bird's eye view, but it. Founder on one of these CSS apps, you know, like it is useful for you to know, like what's the meta environment, how's it evolving, you know?And if nothing else to like connect you with other people who have experimented with things and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think it provides beyond, beyond the, the, the lead gen aspect of it. It provides a lot of value for people. So I'm glad, I'm glad you're, you're still doing it. 00:05:04 Eric:Yeah. And just for any of the listeners, it is free. So you just go to the GP, bullhorn.com website. It's all easy to download and then you can see all our past reports as well. So 00:05:12 David:Yeah, and we'll drop it in the show notes. but, yeah. And, and, and speaking of all that, you know, it, it's something we as RevenueCat want to get more into as well. I mean, just seeing how much value you've created in producing these reports, and we're kind of sitting on a, you know, Processing over a billion dollars a year in, subscription revenue.We've got a lot of interesting data that, that we, that I'm very personally excited to share that we haven't, kind of had the infrastructure to, to do yet, but are, are getting there. And, so hopefully we'll, we'll have our own kind of, state of subscriptions that dives into the data and some of the trends and stuff in a different way than, than your kind of, strategy and higher level look at things.But when one thing that has happened, in the actually. It was announced before your last report, but actually implemented since your last report. And that's the app tracking transparency and iOS 14, which didn't actually ship till iOS. What was it? 14.4 or five or something. So, so we're kind of just now starting to see the impacts of it.And, and, you know, you took a couple of slides in your report to start discussing it. And it really is kind of one of the biggest topics and top of mind for subscription app developers, because it really is a huge shift in the landscape. So I want it to. Start with talking about that. And one of the things you shared in the, in the presentation is that you feel like it's a short-term pain, that's ultimately going to lead to a long-term gain.So I'd love to hear your thinking around what that pain is, but then also what you see the long-term game being.00:07:01 Eric:Yeah, it's a, it's a, great point. And, you know, anytime apple or Google make changes to their, their, their app stores, right. It's a seismic shift throughout the industry because it's something that impacts everyone. And so everyone has to be aware of these changes and then ultimately have a plan for them.And so I think that the change you're talking about David is really the. The implementation of, removing tracking for a lot of, a lot of these businesses specifically, like. And so what the change did with IDFA, is it, it really deprecated the ability for, for marketers within some of these CSS businesses to really accurately target people, specifically using Facebook or some of these other social networks.And so what it's doing is it. It's impacting the conversion rates on, CSS, CSS, businesses, marketing to consumers. And so if you just can't find that person that just is in love with, for example, biking, if you're a Strava marketer, it just takes you a lot longer to find that specific subscribers you might have to market to 10 people now to find two subscribers versus before you can market to five people and find two subscribers.And so it just means marketing efficiencies going down. And that can mean. Growth rates. It can impact conversion rates and ultimately impact just financials of these businesses. And so it's a pretty important consideration for any, CEO marketing team on how they go out and get their, their business in front of consumers.If Facebook's no longer as efficient, they have to find other ways. And so. So my, my thought is like, this is a short-term problem, right? It's something that's going to take people two to three months to adapt and find a new way to reach consumers. But ultimately my hope is for the space is you see the long-term game, which is what I was referencing.People really focus on organic ways of acquiring customers. Right? So instead of just pumping ads through Facebook and trying to find someone who fits a profile, you spend a lot more time really narrowly targeting your demographic, your niche, and then finding ways for them to find your product organically either.You know? So like a company that I work with, we sold a company called Pinkbike and so what they do is they partner with, the trade associations for mountain. And those trails associations now act almost as the marketing partner of pink bike to let consumers know about the fact that all the trail details.Is on, is on the pink bike app or it's called trail forks. And so that's, that's a really powerful, organic customer acquisition tool that they don't have to pay for. And so you're seeing, seeing the same thing happen with, like Strava is doing this, pre.com recently partnered with the NFL. So if your team's got a last fourth quarter fuel goal and you need to get something kicked, you can go to pray.com and submit a prayer for your kicker. I wish I was joking. It's a pretty brilliant idea. So I think this is really good for the sector overall, but yeah. Happy to dive into it. It's it's a fascinating00:09:37 Jacob:We it's a callback to a sub club podcast content, but, Greg, this, the plant app, this is something that they were doing, which is like, we're partnering with, plant nurseries. Yeah. To like, get their app into people's hands. And, yeah, I don't know if it's an earned media or. Bought media, but this is more like this is earned, right?This is like building an audience. You've seen it in the maker community, actually a lot, like in the indie SaaS community, more it's a different game when it has to be consumer scale. Right? Like there's a little bit different. You have to build maybe a bit more than you would in like, oh, just blog about.Built this thing and that's enough to get Indies, but you can apply the same thing, right? It's like produce content, produce something like low investment for users to get engaged with your brand because you're not building an app unless you have some, I mean, maybe you are, but you're not going to build something with very high, like multiples.Like if you're, if you don't have something unique to offer in the first place, but put that into like a more like lightly consumable format, start to build that audience and then make that an on-ramp and yeah, I agree. Like that's, that's something you own, right? Like your brand is. your brand doesn't exist on the app store, right?Like your brand can exist outside of these, like shifting sands and regulations and whatnot, and ultimately is like, you know, going to get reflected in your asset value if that's something you care about. Right. So, 00:10:53 Eric:Yeah, that's a key thing we talk about, right. If any business that we look at that's potentially selling or, or thinking about raising capital, right? It's like, how are you finding your. And if you're, if you're one channel is Facebook, and then consequently, like doing Facebook ads or apple ads on the, on the app store, that becomes pretty challenging.And so you want it to be such a good product, right? So it involves more work upfront. And just as you're talking about Jacob, the product's gotta be better. It's gotta be more efficient. It's got to reach consumers where they are with the problem they have. it becomes a lot more viral and a lot more sticky.So I think, I think it's going to be good for the sector.00:11:26 David:You wouldn't want to name names of course, but I am curious if. Had any clients, or just talks about anybody in the space where they were very reliant on Facebook specifically, and then, and have really struggled as things have changed. You know, I've been seeing some tweets around the, the consumer packaged goods space where some of these CPG companies are really struggling.And so I'm just curious. You know, without naming names, if, if there's any kind of high level things you could share around, apps that have struggled in this new paradigm. 00:12:02 Eric:Yeah. I mean, I definitely can't name names, you know, obviously I keep everything confidential with my clients, but even non-clients, you've seen CACs go up 20, 30%. you see, like, if you think about like conversion rates from installs to subs, That's a big metric of actual intent. Did you find the right user, right?Did someone just click on it and download it? Great. But if they're not actually subscribing that wasn't a successful transaction for you. And so the way I think about this, David is it's the app stores made tracking a lot harder, so it's harder to find your right consumer. So imagine if you're a CPG company, you walk into a grocery.And instead of stuff, being laid out perfectly across the shelves at the right height for you, they just tossed everything in the middle of the store and said, find what you want. Just go pick it out. Right. You're going to have much lower conversion. You're going to have much lower purchase rates because people aren't being targeted with the stuff they want to see.And so I think now you have to find, you know, it becomes more of a specialty situation where you're walking into a store that has stuff for just outdoor gear or very healthy granola. Right. And you're going specifically to that store for that. That's probably better in the long term, for a lot of these companies, 00:13:01 Jacob:Yeah, but there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of folks that have benefited from this ease relative ease, right. And any sort of market disruption is going to be painful. I was like, anecdotally, I mean, David, we've heard on this podcast and elsewhere people who have just like straight up pause acquisition, who are like all re scrambling because yeah.You get it tuned to this very fine knife edge. And I imagine for like consumer physical goods, like DDC stuff, it's even worse because their margins are thinner than software. Right. 00:13:28 Eric:And you've got inventory and everything. Yeah. It's a totally different. 00:13:31 Jacob:But, you know, as you do like you, the market reshuffles and the people, I can figure it out, the fastest are gonna are going to come out the best.So. 00:13:39 Eric:There's going to be a shift though. So people under this is like that seismic shift that just shows how much of your reliance is on maybe one or two channels. Right? Two, two major tech companies sitting here in San Francisco. If you're super, truly relying on those and you're doing great, fine.But if a bump happens, right, how exposed are you? And so like, this will be a benefit. Right. I think it's going to be a huge benefit for Tik TOK. Right? I think people are finding really good ways to acquire customers through tic-tac. And so that's a very interesting channel. I think it'd be really good for influencers, right?If you have people that are very passionate about a certain space and then they go out and, you know, have a very core customer base that loves what they do specifically. It's going to be pretty powerful for them to.00:14:18 David:Yeah, and I was just gonna say, anecdotally, you know, we haven't done a super deep dive in our data, but at a, at a high level, I was. Bracing for our numbers to take a big dip. Like I, I mean, Jacob and I had talked about it in the spring about, you know, how, what is going to look like for RevenueCat, you know, are some of these subscription apps just going to completely unwind and people are apparently figuring it out because you know, it keeps going up until the right. 00:14:49 Jacob:I mean the consumer, the consumer need hasn't disappeared. Right. So maybe if they just weren't driven, you know, it's not going to, it can't just disappear overnight. Right? Like if you never, if you, if you are a Coke fan who never saw Coke out again, and it's like, you're still gonna buy it. Right. Like there's, there's, there's a certain amount of demand.That's just going to find the supply. But, but yeah, no, I mean, it's hard for us to, to definitively say looking at our data and aggregators. Cause there's so much, but they're definitely. Like this summer was definitely slower than we've had in the past. Like on my, as I'm writing my investor updates of the year and each month and stuff looking at it.But yeah, it wasn't like this catastrophic, you know, macro thing. And they were talking about a lot of like, you know, probably outliers that we hear about people who were affected, you know, more than others, but overall. I, I don't think our, I don't think our prediction last year of, of a potential recession was necessarily false.Like it doesn't, it definitely doesn't feel like it's sped up the ecosystem. Right. But it doesn't necessarily feel like a depression, right. Maybe, maybe a slight recession or just the normalization. 00:15:49 David:Looking at our data in aggregate that, some folks use this to their advantage and actually, and, and accelerated because they knew it was coming and they did focus more on product and organic and other things. And so for whatever, you know, losses, there were. Other folks more than made up for that.And that's it kind of the interesting thing about working with so many, I mean, we're closing in on 10,000 apps on revenue cat. And so, you know, you kind of have a pretty broad basket where you, you know, there are going to be winners and losers, but in aggregate subscription apps are just continuing to tick along and do really well. 00:16:26 Eric:David it's like you read directly from bullets on my report. I, I, I completely agree with you.00:16:34 David:Another thing I wanted to dive into was the, the COVID bump. Cause that's, that's another thing that's kind of been on everybody's mind is simultaneous to this. I was 14 and, and this is something we've talked about again internally, with revenue cat, is it. This summer was the, everybody who was vaccinated and, and Delta hadn't kind of bumped yet.And so, you know, may, June and July, there was a big shift socially. kind of it felt like it, especially in the U S that we were coming out of the pandemic. and, and so simultaneous to the app, tracking transparency, going into effect, we had these like societal shift. And then now we're kind of back into it a little bit with the Delta surge, but just curious what your thoughts are on how much of the boosts we saw in 2020 really was dependent DEMEC and then how much of that will actually linger as kind of shifting consumer preferences and shifting consumer spend.00:17:36 Eric:Yeah. I mean, there's, there's absolutely a companies that benefited from us is called the removal of inf in in-person conversations. Right? So like Bumble and DuoLingo, two companies that both went public, right. They both benefited because their, their business model is designed around, not meeting in person for the first couple of conversations.Right. And so. There's no way to say that they didn't benefit. the way I think about it, though, in this, in the CSS space, it's very similar to like the overall e-commerce space, right? Is consumers looked around to find a solution for a problem they're having right. Instacart you couldn't, you couldn't go to the grocery store or maybe you felt less comfortable going to the grocery store.So you tried an Instacart for the first time. Maybe you were, you know, thinking about meeting someone, you know, long-term but you never, you never wanted to try online dating or you couldn't go to the bar. So you tried online dating for the first time and sorry. What the pandemic did was it really opened up people's eyes to other options from what they'd been doing for the last 20 years, 50 years, whatever it was.And so they had to find other solutions to, you know, their demands, their needs. And so I don't, I think it's absolutely a COVID bump, but I still look at it as really as an accelerant of people adopting new products and services that they would have tried in three to four years. but the pandemic kind of pushed them to try something, to move out of their comfort zone and try something new.So, you know, I absolutely think you'll see a little bit of a downshift in, in some of these companies that had a really big boom, right? Like language learning. People had nothing to do for four to five months, especially over some of the winter times. So people tried new hobby, tried language learning, you know, that'll probably go down a little bit, but overall, if you look at it from like a five-year trend, It's going to be up substantially from where it was in 20 17, 20 18, 20 19, and 2020, you know, made it look like a little bit of bump, but eventually I think those companies will continue to grow and surpass what anything they did in 2020. 00:19:21 David:Yeah, that's really interesting.00:19:22 Jacob:I'll back that up as well with the, the unreleased, Jacob looks at graphs and then gives a, gives a hand wavy descriptions of them. But we, yeah, we, we were, I was kind of bracing for it as well. And then I would say this summer was slow and like, David was. We're not sure why. I think it was, I think it was a number of factors things have since picked up again.But I think generally summers are slow for software a and then B. Yeah, I think we were seeing kind of like a little bit of the payback for, for COVID perhaps it's a, it's a vial. I think it's a plausible theory. We don't, it's really hard to prove. but we have not seen, you know, we, we saw our COVID experience was really drastic.And we have not seen. Similar, like back off from that, like, it has been like, it has been like we just compressed six months and I'm saying partially, this is just revenue casts, individual story because of where we were last year. But then I think also it's, it's indicative of the system in general.It's like, I think, yeah, we just compressed a whole bunch of, like consumer behavior change into like a very short period of time. And yeah, we're not gonna be able to keep that up. Right. We're not gonna be able to continue. To, to crunch that in, or we'll run out of consumers eventually. But, but it doesn't look like everybody's, you know, because, you know, I think the story for CSS in general, it's like we've delivered value for people, right?Like it's, it's a good, it's a good product, right? The whole line, not every product is good, but in general it's like a it's, it's a decent deal. And so I, I think more people discovering that. Yeah, it can only get bigger, right.00:20:55 Eric:Yeah, I think we talked about it in our first year, our first time together, right on the last podcast, which is if these businesses are truly making consumers' lives better, this is going to be a very long-term.00:21:04 Jacob:Yeah. 00:21:05 David:And speaking of that, and the two companies you just mentioned, in the, Time since we last spoke, but Bumble and DuoLingo went public and some other consumer subscription, apps went public. so tell me a little bit about your, your perspective on the, the public investor. Excitement for CSS.I mean, we're seeing pretty high multiples in the both of those IPS did, did very well. so what are you seeing in the, in the public investor space?00:21:33 Eric:Yeah, I think, I think the public market has really woken up to this business model, the power of it and understanding, you know, it's public markets. They do a lot of pattern matching, right? If they've seen something be super successful, they look for something that looks similar to that. And so I think a lot of people are waking up to, how powerful Salesforce is not waking up.They're well awake, very aware of SAS businesses. But I think they're seeing that same pattern starts to take, hold on, CSS. It just has different metrics. Right? And so, you know, Bumble's now public, the match group's been public for quite some time. Once I spun out of IAC, you've got Netflix and Spotify, which are fantastic examples of the international global reach of Content, and how consumers are very sticky for something they love.And so. These businesses who can get to scale really quickly, like you nuMe, right, is a competitor to weight Watchers. Weight Watchers has been around for decades, but Newman built a better mouse trap and they acquired customers at a really quick rate. And, you know, they're well over 400 million in revenue and ready for the public market.So I expect them to go public. Pretty soon. And so I think there's going to be a lot of businesses that follow them that are using this, this metric. So, and then that'll cascade all the way through, from public market investors as, as exit opportunities all the way down to, you know, series a series B investors, seeing this business model work and scale.00:22:47 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, I guess my, like, what's your, like, I, I, when, when we started seeing these go public in the last, like couple of years, so, well, I mean, honestly, it's like, Since we started RevenueCat, like was actually the, kind of the first unicorns, even like, I guess Bumble might've been passing unicorn when we got started, but like there weren't a ton and now it's like every, every month there's a funding announcement for a CSS company.That's a, that's a university. I mean, partially that's just like valuations going up and stuff like this, but like, how do you see. The evolution of this market. Long-term, you know, so DuoLingo pops becomes the first, you know, are they going to be like Salesforce and just be dominant in that space forever?Or do you see it being maybe more dynamic than sasses?00:23:31 Eric:I think it's a little more dynamic than SAS for, for a couple of reasons. One, new consumers like to try stuff, right. And so if it's with like a Salesforce or something, right. That integrates into your day to day operations from a business model perspective, right. So if something breaks there, right.Your business. 00:23:47 Jacob:Is very high. 00:23:48 Eric:Yeah, it's a little higher, right. And it's not just you using it. It's your entire business. Right? So you've got 10 people using this product or 20 people or 5,000, depending on the size of your company. Right. In CSS. It's it's you, maybe you and your family. Right? So it's a little bit of a different switching cost.So that's, that's one. However, these companies can scale a lot of. and they can, they don't have like the heavy, heavy cost and, you know, on the sales and marketing side. So I think they have an ability to actually get to profitability a lot faster, especially if they have an organic customer acquisition engine.And so I think that's going to be a big difference between that, between CSS and SAS. 00:24:23 Jacob:So, yeah, you mentioned the metrics are different. What are, what are the metrics that folks are, public investors are looking at for these companies that it might be different from a SAS company?00:24:33 Eric:Yeah. I mean, a lot of them are the same metrics, but the numbers that are like good are different, right? So like on a SAS business model, right. Revenue growth is just as attractive as a CSS business model revenue growth. Right. Everyone wants to see high double digits, triple digit numbers on revenue growth.But like an interesting thing is net revenue retention. Now that's very different, right? In CSS, you typically don't upcharge people or have additional seats be filled because it's just one person. Right. So, you know, maybe you get an. 00:24:59 Jacob:It's not much expansion opportunity. 00:25:00 Eric:Yeah, you can, you can do maybe some, some packages, upgrades, and people are starting to experiment that you can pack it and you can experiment with bump, bundling 00:25:07 Jacob:But it's certainly never going to be greater. It's never going to be net positive, right? 00:25:11 Eric:No, you're never going to see a net positive number where a lot of the SAS businesses, right.People are looking for net revenue, retention, numbers of north of one, 20, 120% net revenue retention 00:25:18 Jacob:I mean the opposite of churn, right. Which if you have a CSS business with opposite, Congratulations. like 00:25:25 Eric:Yeah. You're doing something well, and I haven't found it yet, but yeah, 00:25:28 Jacob:You might be the only one 00:25:29 Eric:Yes, I think that's right. 00:25:31 David:Quick, point though, to counterpoint to what y'all were both just saying, of all the apps, dating app, it's totally slipping my mind. 00:25:40 Jacob:Tinder. partnership. David, look at us. We're like on a wavelength. 00:25:46 David:They, they have in-app purchase. They have consumable in-app purchases to boost your, profile. They're one of the few that I've seen that could potentially actually have a. A a positive, net revenue retention. whereas most subscription apps are just a subscription. it's going to be interesting to see if other subscription apps can pull off that sort of model that you could actually generate a, a net net revenue retention. 00:26:19 Eric:I think you nailed it, David. So that's coming from. Right. I think people first experimented with, Hey, how do I get someone to buy my product every year or every month? Right. And now is how do you make it even better? So they're starting to listen to their core users. And we talk about this a little bit on the LTVs.And what do these people want and what makes this experience even better for them. And I think you nailed it with Tinder, right? It's the most, it's the easiest thing to convince people to, to encourage more is more, you know, more relationships, right? People love more relationships and people are willing to pay for that.And so, you know, then what else, what else could this go down the path of, right. What other options could people pay for additional services? Or what we've seen is like marketplaces or transactions spinning on. Right. So if you have a really passionate user base and they're going out there doing, camping, for example, like on, on the dirt, it's a camping site, right?What about doing a marketplace to buy and sell use tents right now is not a subscription, but now if someone's paying, like, okay, now they bought something through your marketplace and you get 10% of that purchase price. So there's going to be a lot of stuff. I think that happens there, to encourage that, to encourage that LTV numbers start rising, I just haven't seen a ton yet, make it happen above 00:27:26 Jacob:It's a scale problem. I need to do that either be at such scale for that to make sense. So I was going to say for anybody, listening to this, that hasn't reached 20 million in ARR, probably north of that do not add a marketplace to your 00:27:37 Eric:I totally agree with that. Very, very much focused focus, focus. And so I would even say like closer to 50 00:27:43 Jacob:Yeah. I mean, until you're like, how do we get this thing public? Or how do we show, like, how do we show like N plus one revenue streams, right? Like it's kinda more what it's about than it is necessarily the revenue generated. 00:27:53 Eric:I'm just a dreamer though. You're just a realist. I'm here, I'm here. And you're just telling me all that stuff that could go wrong. 00:27:58 David:One of the things you just kinda touched on that I wanted to dive deeper into was, was a truth about LTVs. And I love this slide on the, on your presentation, kind of defining these two cohorts, which I've never heard, defined this way. And I really loved the analogy and I'm going to start sort of stealing it from you and use.And crediting you of course. but in the presentation you define, tourists and locals, and then talk about kind of the importance of identifying these different cohorts. So tell me about Who the locals are and why that matters and who the tourists are and how companies can start, analyzing their data to understand this and better target marketing, better, craft the experience in the app and, and those sorts of things. 00:28:46 Eric:Yeah. So we're going to geek out here guys, and, really go deep into STSS. Right? So this is where, this is where my brain goes sometimes on a Saturday night, which is just exciting. but so the way I've been thinking about CSS a lot, and so the LTV component of CSS, which is lifetime value, Which I'm sure all your listeners are very, very well aware of is kind of like how much money can you make from this consumer over time.Right. And it's a function of your pricing and it's an, a function of your turn rate. And so, a lot of people are very focused on this metric as investors or buyers, right? Because it's effectively, how valuable is your customer? So it's an extremely important metric. The problem with this metric and lots of other metrics is it's, it's derived from an app.Right. It's looking at all your users that come into your, in your ecosystem is paying customers. And then how do they perform over time? and it's, it's driven, it's driven off an average of all your users. And so when I've gone through some of my client's data and you look at their user base, right, we, we quickly discovered there's a, there's kind of two different profiles.And I won't use any names here, but let's just, let's just say it's, a walking company, right? So you're, you've got people that go out and they, they sign up, you have a hundred people that. And 20 of them start walking every day and they're, and they, this is what they love and they're tracking, they're walking and you've got another 40 that do it for like a month or two.And then they kind of drop off and then just like, I'm going to go do biking or skateboarding or something. And I switch and you've got another people that sign up. They subscribed to it because their friend pressured him into it and they hate walking and they're never going to walk again and they turn off immediately.Right. So you kind of have those three different groups, some that are just going to do whatever. Some that do it for two to three months and then leave. And then some that do it the first month. And then say, forget this. I'm never going to use this again. And so the problem is your LTV of each one of those three groups are very, very different.And so what, we've, what we've been guiding investors and entrepreneurs, as they think about their growing their businesses, really find out who those locals are, who those people that are going to come and use your app every day, every week, every summer, whatever, whatever the metric is that you're looking.And find ways to measure that, right? Because ultimately that's who you need to bring to your community. And one, those people make the community run more robust, right? Cause they're constantly contributing feedback into the. To, they're much more likely to stay around with you guys. And so you need to find those tools that they're looking for.Right? Like seeing around the corner and saying like, okay, this person loves walking. What else can I provide them? What about a weather forecast? So now that they are about to go out and walking, you know, what does the weather look like? And, oh my God, this is now, this is my one-stop stop for, for walking.And so I think w we've been guidinGP Bullhound's like if you use the averages as a broad metric and that's great, and you should, because investors are going to want to know that, but, but really dig deep into your, your cohort and understand like who's using this every day, all day and what do they need. And so if you can really identify that and show that LTV to, to invest in.I think you can get people a lot more excited than just like that average LTV, right? Cause this shows them potential of what it can be over three to five years, which is really important if you're two or three year old company. Right. And try to convince someone to invest in you showing them that lifetime value of the tour or the locals is going to be a lot more valuable than that average.00:31:46 Jacob:I mean, if you think about just as the, you know, I think it's one of the, you highlighted one of the hard parts of assessing these businesses early on, is that yeah. Your cohort, your total subscriber base is very heavily biased on like your most recent cohort, because often you're also growing, right?Like that's often, like your most recent cohort might be the size of your first five, you know? just because, and for that reason you can really have scurry looking data. but you know, if you think five years from now, mostly. Those other two groups you mentioned there they'll have turned out from most cohorts.Right? And then the only ones remaining for four years of cohorts will be these locals and these long-term retention. And then your total subscriber base is gonna look very different than it does today. Right. And yeah, I'll admit revenue. I've tried to solve this problem in the product. And we still are trying to solve this problem in the product.It's how do we like show people? Cause you're, you're dealing with a mixed population, right? And like you, you can also also run into a problem with begging the COO or like doing very, like, look, you got to invest in and say like, look, look how great my retention is. If I just ignore them. Bad users. Right?Like, let me just look at the good ones. Right. But there is something there in that. What you're talking about, Eric, that long, that very long-term view is that if these users really do retain for a long time, eventually they will be the lion's share of. Subscriber base. And that churn that we talk about, like, you know, if you're adding 1% of your total user base, the most you can experience off of that as like 1% of churn, right.Versus when you're adding half, you know, if you have 110,000 subscribers and you add 10,000 in a month, that's going to be a huge effect to your overall subscription subscription base. Right. so yeah, I think, I think, you know, we certainly have a lot to build on the tooling side. Right. And I think it goes to what you're talking about.Air. We're very early. Like, I think we've just kind of solved infrastructure, like infrastructure. I mean, I would even say kind of, cause there's a lot for us that we need to do yet. but as far as like data science and actually yeah. Being able to outside of a spreadsheet, understand this stuff. It's it's, it's not trivial.It's not trivial. All 00:33:51 Eric:It's extremely hard. And I think like, cause there's so much more you could do once you've broken those two cohorts into tourists and locals, right? Like how do you acquire the locals versus how do you acquire the tourists? Are tourists coming through like Facebook, apple store and the locals are coming from referrals.Okay. So maybe your Facebook spend, is that even worth doing the spending on right. If they're, if they're turning off after a month or two, you know, subscribers is a vanity metric, right. If they don't. All right. You can grow. We talked about this in our 2020 report. We have like this cheetah versus thoroughbred.Right. And it's really easy to show a ton of growth. And you've got all these subscribers and everything is fantastic. Right. But if those subscribers get tired and they turn off right away, you kind of probably wasted money on them. Right. Maybe you got paid back in a month, right. So you didn't lose like on the CAC spend right in here, but you're not building your business.Right. You're just gonna you're pinching pennies. 00:34:36 Jacob:But not a lot of work. Right? Like it's not actually getting translated into business 00:34:39 Eric:Exactly. So is it better to kind of focus on the product, right? Figure out what those, those, tourists are using and spend less time on the marketing side and really nailed the products like, Hey, you'll probably grow slower, right? And That's an issue. That's a risk you have to take, but maybe you can grow more efficiently, more capital efficiency.00:34:55 Jacob:Capital's free now, so that's not a 00:34:58 Eric:That's a fair point of half my fault, I'll take full responsibility for some of that. Right. 00:35:03 Jacob:I think it's interesting how this like feeds into, you know, kind of going back to targeting and ad targeting how often. Optimized Facebook campaigns on like trial conversion. And that doesn't even that doesn't, that's all your tourists and your locals. I mean, maybe some of those that never even start a trial would be cause, but there's a lot of tourists in that group that started trial right.Or convert a trial. And a lot of people are targeting off of that. Right. And so as these methods become less. Good. it will force it'll force developers to yeah. Maybe do one of these scary things actually talk to users, right? Like actually like find those locals, like go in your analytics. And I think just the thing as you were talking about, I just want to point out that, like, I don't think you necessarily need to define this off of monetization retention either could just be retention, like pure usage retention, but it could also be engagement.Yeah. I think about the way Facebook, Oriented their growth teams very early on, which was like findinGP Bullhound that connected, like that was a really key step for them in their product, was to get people to make like three or four. I forget there's some number of friends and they oriented all of their growth efforts around that.Find the thing that people do in your. Shows that they're engaged and give them opportunities to show that. And then, you know, you can use that as an indicator. Okay. Talk to those folks and actually talk to them, right? Like find out, always put something in your app that lets you reach out to them in some way.And like, have you can get on a zoom call. I've done. It's easier now in SaaS land because like, I, I, I, people I'm an app. People like I know how to talk to them, but when we were, when I was working in consumer. Phone calls were more awkward, right? It was different. You're not going to books like outside of computer land, but still like just incredibly valuable.And, and, and, and I think like, you know, if we want to talk about the way to build the way to fully realize how CSS is going to, I'm just going to go all in on your turmeric, by the way, I said, I'm going to, 00:36:57 Eric:That.00:36:57 Jacob:I'm going to push it. We're going to standardize. But 00:36:59 Eric:It's not trademark, but knock it out. 00:37:01 Jacob:All right. So to fully like, to fully realize the potential to like help problems for people.Like, I think we need to lean into this more of this model. Right. Rather than I've always kind of like had an uncomfortable relationship with how our RevenueCat fits into the like hyper fast monetization stuff. Right. I'm like, get users, check your CAC, put more money into Facebook. Right. And so, the more the industry gets away from that. The happier I am. I don't know. Like you said, maybe it doesn't go quite as fast, but I think the overall Tam will be larger. Right? If we take that approach,00:37:33 Eric:Think that's right. And, you know, I mean, I've talked to a bunch of founders that haven't raised capital. Right. And they build something that like their users love. Right. Like, so I don't know if you guys saw the deal with day one that got bought by automatic braised almost as your outside capital.Right. He built. 00:37:46 Jacob:Big fans that they won. 00:37:47 Eric:Yeah. Yeah. I was a big,I got it's an awesome business and he did that exact same thing. Right. He just listened to his users. He didn't care about vanity metrics grew really nicely. Right. And it wasn't like, you know, he's not getting tech crunch publishing, but that's fine. Right. You know, on an amazing business.And then, you know, I've got a fantastic exit out of it. So I think, I think people are really waking up to that's a very much a possibility here in the.00:38:08 David:Yeah, one thing I wanted to highlight too, in that graph that you made, and for people that are listening to this, you can go to the show notes. We'll have links to the, Eric's presentation and you can find this chart, but to visualize it00:38:25 Jacob:Page 18. it open right here. 00:38:27 David:Following along at home, the, line for the locals drops.So, you know, even, even for locals, you're going to have some turn early on, but then it essentially flat lines. and I'm sure you did that very purposely to kind of illustrate how. How long term some of these, these, this retention can end up being, and it's something we've actually been talking on the podcast about recently is that we're so early in the space.We don't even really know what, how to measure LTV. Cause you're going to have people who ended up subscribing for decades. and years and years and years, if not decades. And so, and, and then, you know, to your point about the cheetah versus thoroughbred, another great chart in the patient number, Jacob Page number00:39:16 Jacob:I 00:39:17 David:Cheetah versus thoroughbred but in that tuna versus thoroughbred, The other aspect to locals, and we're kind of touched on it earlier is that those cohorts start to stack. So when you identify this cohort, that is going to be a very long-term cohort. That's going to stay subscribed and have very low churn. You, you acquire a hundred thousand this year, and then they're still there next year.And you put a hundred thousand on top of that. And those are still there next year. And by year three, you know, you just continue to grow this pie of people who are very, very sticky in the product. And I think that's part of what. you know, what you're talking about with delinquent and Bumble and other companies is like, we're still just starting to understand even as different as this is from SaaS.We're starting to see similar dynamics as far as. Early on the churn is so high, but then you do have this really strong stickiness over the long-term that, that, that can build a really healthy business of people who really love your, your product and really are invested in it and are going to stay for a really long time.So yeah, I just wanted to point that out that, that I, I love that aspect of the chart of how flat that line is for the locals. 00:40:35 Eric:I mean, you, you can see it in your own spending patterns, right? Like how many of you guys have subscribed to Netflix or Spotify for more than five years? I bet it's a good chunk of your listeners. Right? So, I mean, if I look at my phone, right, I'm going to subscribe to all trails for the next decade, 00:40:47 Jacob:Yeah, I've got CSS. I I've started subscribing to in 20 13, 14, like as 00:40:52 Eric:Yeah. 00:40:52 Jacob:It was a thing, 00:40:53 Eric:I've, been a script user for four years and I still download audio books or download other books from like the San Francisco library. Cause I'm probably the cheapest banker of all time. but you know, I still use script 00:41:04 Jacob:It's finding margin, Eric you're finding margin. That's what that is. 00:41:07 Eric:Exactly. I've pinched counties all day.But yeah, so I mean, I, I think those tails David to your point are still being written. And so that's the whole point, right? If you use average LTV and you say, all right, well, we have 30% churn that math means you lose every user in three years, and that's just not how it works. And if with really good businesses that are delivering value, right?And so then once you convince people of that, right, the investment case becomes a very different company.00:41:30 David:And speaking of that, you, you had a great, slide on investor benchmarks. And so I wanted to get to that real quick, tell me about how you, how you thought. These different metrics. And what, and how investors think about these metrics? Because you know, we're talking about LTV and in there you have LTV to CAC of you, you know, for a really strong app, that investor would be super excited about.You're closest to. Six X versus less than three X, you start to cool off. So, yeah. Walk us through each of these metrics and kind of how you think about it, how you think investors think about it, And even how that's kind of maturing as we understand the space better. 00:42:10 Eric:Yeah. And just to note like these metrics are all different for different types of businesses, right? If you've been around for a year, these metrics are very different versus if you've been around for 10 years, right. If you're in high growth, you know, venture back, spending a lot of money, these metrics look very different than if you're a bootstrap business, you know, just trying to inch out.You know, 10% growth a year. Right. So they can be very different. And the important thing is how does the story of your business and what you're trying to accomplish tie to these metrics? Right. So that's what we spent a lot of time talking to founders about is, is what's good based on what you're trying to do.Right. So it's just how you, how do you tell your story through the metrics? but yeah, so a couple of your points on the S on the slide, we talk about like user growth rates, gross margins, LTV to CAC, churn rates, free to paid conversion rate, and then sales efficiency. and then, you know, just to talk about something different, we, we talked about LTV a little bit earlier, but maybe talking about, churn, right.And so like how quickly do people churn off? Right. And so that's, there's a couple different ways to interpret churn, right? It's one, they didn't find your product. Too. They thought it was really expensive. or if they're not turning, they really love something you've put together. Right. And they decided to pay you multiple times for that either monthly or annual.And so what we just try to do is try to tell the story of where the business is at and where it's going by looking at these metrics. And so, you know, that's why it's so important to truly understand these metrics, because if you don't understand the metrics, it's hard to tie that to the story. so we spent a lot of time with any client or even non-clients just talking about this stuff to truly understand, you know, what investors care about.And it's, you know, if someone's buying the business, they may care a very good. They may care about very different metrics for someone who's investing your business for growth, right? So someone's going to put 40%, $40 million on your balance sheet to go grow. They may be focused less on LTV to CAC now because your LTV is not formally formed, right.They don't know how good it is, but they will focus very heavily on churn, which is a reflection of how good your product is and how good you're finding consumers that love your product. Right. So those, those are metrics that they may focus. They made me more comfortable spending a lot of money in the next two years.Right. So your CACs going to look a lot worse because they watched, you acquire a lot of users to make the platform a lot better. Right. And a lot of CSS businesses, right. UGC is a, is a, is a spinoff of user activity on the post. Beautiful uploading photos reviews. They're adding new new items on, on the platform for other users to use.And so it's worth spending more money to get those people in the first two to three years because your platform becomes that much better and that much more valuable, right? So you may be willing to burn down to a, an LTV to CAC of three X or something like that in the near term, or sometimes even two extra one X, because it's a land grab for those.Once you're on their platform right now. You want to see that LTV to CAC, start to move up a little bit, right? So you start to put it to four or five, six X, LTV to CAC. So it's all about where your business is. It's each different stage, but it's important to have a story and a message around why your numbers are, what they are.00:45:03 Jacob:Of the, I have the slides up in third slide, 37 for anybody who's following along at home. all of these as a veteran SAS CSS person, every annual user growth rate, gross margin to be cash I'll clear me, sales efficiency ratio. Can you talk about that one? Cause that one's, that one's, not as a little foreign to me. 00:45:22 Eric:Yeah. It's, it's a, it's more of a metric that's come out of SAS just to be honest. So it's thinking about like, it involves like how, how many users are you gaining? It's how much revenue you're gaining versus how much money are you putting out there? So it's a little bit of a different metric. and most CSS businesses don't get to that yet because they typically don't have heavy sales team.And so we've included it because you're starting to see some of these CSS businesses really start to grow. And so how much revenue gaining versus how much revenue you're losing and how much is it costing you to do that? And so that's when you're starting to get into like the tens to $20 million of, of, marketing spend a year, it's, it's, important to understand like how efficient is that spend being, and this is the best metric 00:46:00 Jacob:We, it says called sales, but you actually throw in marketing, spend in there as well. So it's like all go to market spend 00:46:07 Eric:Yeah. Are using head count, not just like the ad dollars. right. 00:46:10 Jacob:Right. 00:46:11 Eric:It's like a fully loaded CAC number, like 00:46:13 Jacob:Your, all of your people telling Facebook what to do, 00:46:17 Eric:Yep, exactly. Exactly. 00:46:18 Jacob:Content graders, like all that stuff, right? Yeah. 00:46:20 Eric:If you've got a hundred people running around campus, right. Promoting your app. Right. Okay. How much those people cost. Right. So it's an important way to think about how much you grow. And it's a way to think about like how well can you grow a capitally efficient capital with limited amounts of capital.So it's an important one. We look at it, it's typically a later stage, right? So you've gotta be like north of 20 million of 00:46:40 Jacob:So he's going to be super high when you're small, right? Because you're, you're your. 00:46:43 Eric:Sir. Request important. 00:46:44 Jacob:People are discreet. Right. And that you can't, you're not continuous. So, and also your, your, your revenue just grows less because of like, you know, you're smaller, you're less, well-known like, you're less is momentum is things like this. 00:46:56 David:Well, we're starting to run low on time, but there's so much more I want to talk to you about, but just to hit one last thing. I also love this chart you did, of Pandora versus Spotify. It's such a. And encapsulation, really everything that we've been talking about on this podcast is to see how well Spotify revenue has compounded over the past few years versus a Pandora, which, which look was the juggernaut.You know, when, when, when Spotify started. so, so walk us through this chart. And in how and why you think, you know, Spotify was able to, to grow the way they did while Pandora really struggled. And obviously there's a ton of, you know, other business factors and execution and other things. But, but I think overall, this does speak to the power of CSS.00:47:54 Eric:Yeah. And this is, this is something we did back in 2020 when we were just trying to decide like, Hey, what's is this CSS thing real? And, and a big question you get from, from investors. And listen, I think a lot of them have stopped asking this question because the case studies are out there is why would someone pay monthly or annually for something they can get for free?And by get for free, it means listening to, or watch. Right. And so I wanted to see like, alright, graphically or like actually numbers to will people, more companies make more money by making that really hard decision and say, pay me for what I'm giving you first. I'll give you something for free and exchange every half hour, you watch two minutes of ads, right?That's a really hard question to say, because it involves you putting a lot of value in your product. And so entrepreneurs, you know, product developers have to. Is this worth money or am I giving something out to people that, Hey, they'll kind of use it if they get it for free. Right? So it's a, it's a gut check for people to say, like, did I build something that someone will buy?That's hard. That's really challenging. Ask yourself, especially if you've started with advertising. and Spotify, you know, listen, they were a small company based in the Nordics, right. Versus Pandora US-based juggernaut and, and raised a lot of money. Right. That's a tough challenge. And so they took a really tough thing and said like, Hey, we're going to get.And make people pay for our product and we're going to make it better. But the crazy thing that happens though, right, is you make so much more on a user from subscriptions than you do from average. Right on advertising. You're trying to pick up pennies per subscription on some or pennies per user on the subscriber.You're making 10, 20 bucks a month, depending maybe maybe $60 a year for a subscriber. So the amount of users you have compounds so quickly, and then if you have that heavy retention, all of a sudden, you've got these really thick layers of cashflow that come in every year, use that cashflow. You invest it back in.He invested back in product and you do it again and again and again, and all of a sudden you've got a better product. And if you have a better product, people will come to it. And if it's something that they're using daily, right. Why would you not be comfortable like paying five bucks? Right. If I think about like how much my Netflix subscription is, right.It's $11 a month or something like that. Right. Well, I probably watch 10 hours of Netflix a month, right? So I'm paying a dollar an hour to be entertained. Pretty good deal. And so, like, I think if people, people start doing that math and you start to see like how powerful that that subscription is for user versus an ad driven, it becomes pretty interesting.And so I think you've seen this case study play out over and over and over across CSS, where if you build a good enough product, you know, a 10 X product versus the free option, people will pay for it. 00:50:24 David:And Spotify does double dip as well, which is interesting is that they have a good enough free tier and people can listen for free. But they choose to spend, even though they can. And so, so Spotify is a great example of, of double-dipping with a great freemium tier, but then a good enough product in a compelling enough reason that people will pay.00:50:47 Jacob:Yeah, another dimension. I don't know the specifics of Pandora and Spotify. It's like fundraising history, but if you have like the subscriber. Subscription revenue momentum makes capital more easy to access. And you look at some of this. I think of some of the strategic stuff that Spotify has done. Like they got the Beatles on Spotify pretty early on and lets up, they spent big on partnerships and Content and stuff.And if you have momentum, if you have hard dollars, it's a lot easier to go to an investor and be like, Hey, like I want to raise X million dollar. Revenue growth. I have, like, this is very clearly a business. I can remember raising money in the pre revenue is everything era or like trying to raise money.And it was like a lot harder. Right. Cause it was just like hand waves and we're going to grow and like, and now it's like, yeah, for better or worse, you go over the curtain and you show something. Right. But the big benefit too, I think for founders, it's not just for investor, for founders. It's like, yeah, you build a great business.You're building a safety net, right? Like if you can't fundraise, it's not the end of the world. Like you have options. And I think that's part of the reason why also, I mean, now we're getting into fundraising like macro, but that's part of the reason the funding environment is crazy because businesses are sturdier than they've ever been.Like they need capital less than they've ever needed it. Right. And so like, that's why it's gotten cheaper. or, you know, evaluation's gotten higher same thing. Right. So, Anyway. Yeah. And this is a fascinating to put this. I already was not on here, which was my horse. And I was like really pulling for them.And then it gets to a whole different story of why that's not on there. But, but yeah, it's fascinating.00:52:11 David:Well, I think that's a really fun place to end the story of Spotify, one of the biggest juggernauts in the space. We're going to include in the show notes a link to the report, a link to your LinkedIn and Twitter to follow along.Anything else you want to share as we wrap up? 00:52:27 Eric:No guys. Always a pleasure to join you. One thing for your audience users, we are trying to make the GP Bullhound CSS report a resource for founders. This year, for the first time ever, we did include a link to a survey.So, if you want to contribute your data, what we'll do is aggregate everything, anonymize it, and then we'll provide back a summary to users to say, “Hey, here's your LTV to CAC. How does this compare to other founders at this stage?” We are trying to be a resource. I'll probably give you guys that link, if you don't mind. We'd love to have as many people as possible. No pressure.Of course, all of it would be anonymized. This isn't a marketing tactic for us. It's us giving back to the community. We'd love people to take a second to do the survey, but if not, don't hesitate to email me, tweet at me, hit me on LinkedIn with questions, comments, and specifically stuff We got wrong. Absolutely love to hear where we can learn.00:53:22 Jacob:Yeah. 00:53:23 Eric:Because we're not building, we're just talking about what you guys are doing.00:53:26 Jacob:By the time you print this thing, it's like, stuff's changed, right? Like it's changing so fast.00:53:32 Eric:The whole Apple thing when we were publishing was happening everyday. And I was like, this is unbelievable.00:53:36 Jacob:And wait to...00:53:36 Eric:Since July, and I have to change every minute. Yeah. I had to change a PowerPoint. You guys had to change code. So I think one was a lot harder.00:53:44 David:Well, it was great having you on, Eric, and we'll have to make this an annual thing.00:53:49 Eric:Sounds good.You're welcome.00:53:51 Jacob:Yeah, we'll see you next year. 00:53:52 David:See you in 2022.00:53:54 Eric:All right. Thanks David. Thanks Jacob.

Corona VirusI've been watching Contagion while listening to R.E.M. Contagion has gotten a huge boost.There is a guy in my office that started coughing this week. Things might get primal. NBA season canceled. NHL season paused. March Madness canceled. Baseball spring training canceled, season delayed.Tom Hanks has the corona.Would you be willing to sacrifice Tom Hanks?Rod's novel idea for people with corona virus. History of Pennsylvania and the Spanish fluOver under on the Corona virus. Ward: May Eric: April 15 Rod: End of April Caleb: 4:20And now from KFCWill Tom Hanks die? Ward: No, he's rich. Eric: Yes. Rod: No. Caleb: Yes.Will schools close.

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Panel: David Kimura Eric Berry In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk amongst themselves about their favorite software, equipment, and apps. Both Eric and David thoroughly share their preferred picks within these categories, and they explain how and why they use the specified item. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io 1:03 – David: Welcome! Today, Chuck is not feeling well. I am David and today we have Eric Berry on our panel today. It is just the two of us today. I want to talk about our development environment. What is your setup like? Do you have an office space and your hardware? 1:58 – Eric: I Have a room in my basement that has everything that I need. I do work from home. There is my guitar, my geek toys and more. For my hardware I am using 2017 MacBook Pro (16 GB of ram). The 13-inch is convenient, but I upgraded b/c I do a lot of traveling. I do pull the iPad out and use DUET. You no longer have to use a cord. I have a monitor that is 30-inches and it’s gorgeous. That is my hardware setup. I am not a mechanical keyboard guy, and I stick with the Apple super flat keyboard. I do use Bestand – it’s a holster for the keyboard and the track pad. What do you have? 4:35 – David: I have a Frankenstein setup. My needs change, over time, and when that changes my hardware changes. Back in the day I did not have a Mac and I used a Windows machine. I used to be a gamer, but then met my wife and then stopped b/c she didn’t like for me to waste time. My setup is more proper. I have a baseline iMac Pro b/c there was a great deal of $1,000 off. The other option was an iMac. I like the desktop b/c that’s where I do work – at home. It was a $4,000 investment. I am on my computer ALL the time it was worth it to me. I got the wall-mount for me, and I have more monitors wall-mounted, too. 8:00 – David: That is my monitor and computer setup. I have an eco-rhythmic keyboard b/c of childhood injuries. I have a really old Microsoft keyboard from 2005 something. It was cheap but I like the style of it. For my mouse I have a Logitech mouse. I love the feel of this thing. It has a side scroll left and right, and up and down. Especially when I am looking at code. It helps with my video editing, too. My mouse is my favorite to-date. I don’t have too much plugged into the Mac. I have a GoDrive, which has everything on it – my whole life’s work is on there. If there is ever an emergency I know to grab that. Back things up in case of an emergency would be my tips to you all. 11:40 – Eric: I have struggled with backing things up actually. The problem that I have is that I am constantly moving my laptop. I have this guilt and fear of doing it wrong. 12:33 – David: I have this work laptop – I don’t back that up every day.  David gives Eric his suggestions in regards to backing files up. David mentions Back Blaze. 14:05 – Eric: That makes sense. I live in the Apple eco-system. I have my phone, watch, 40 iPads, laptop – everything backs up to the Cloud. The date we are recording this is 10/30/18. Apple just announced a new upgrade. I feel like this could compete with an actual laptop computer. Eric asks David a question. 15:35 – David: ...My main problem with that is that you might already have a developmental machine. It’s a stationary computer then it’s not feasible to take on the go. I do have an iPad Pro and I will take that on the go. I can login to my home network. BLINK – I used on my iPad Pro. David continues to talk about his setup. 19:00 – Eric: I kind of agree with you. I have seen it used quite a bit. My brother does everything online for his job. The pros are that if you are training, and his company is configured that way. The pros is that you can code from anywhere on anyone’s computer. I am glad that it DOES exist. It’s not Cloud9 but someone does offer... 20:20 – David: I think going to a solo screen does hurt my productivity – working on the iPad vs. working on the computer. I could get faster and faster but only to a certain degree. If you have the resources – then I don’t think it’s sustainable. However, if you don’t have the resources it’s better than nothing. At least you are coding and that’s important. 22:15 – Eric: I think of the audience we cater to with Ruby Rogues. I wonder if our listeners are strapped for cash or if they do have the resources to get the job done? 22:48 – David: If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have to buy a Mac. If Cloud hosting isn’t your thing there are different options. You have DOCKER, and use Windows as your main editor, and the WSL. I wanted to do a test – I bout a laptop for $500-$700 and you can get away with doing what you need to do. Learning how to program and code with what you have is great! 25:00 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 26:05 – Eric: Let’s talk about the software developer environment. Nate Hopkins isn’t on today, but you can’t change his mind – I am VEM all the way. I think Cuck is EMAX. 26:43 – Eric: What do you do? 26:45 – David: I use VS code. David talks about the benefits of using VS code. 27:37 – Eric: Yes, 100%. I met the lead engineer behind VS code. They just made a new announcement. I have been using VS code for quite a while now. The integrated terminal and other features are awesome. Pulling me out of Sublime Text was a really, really hard thing for me. 29:28 – David: Sublime text, yes, but I got tired of the 40-year long beta, and the lack of expanding it, too. VS code has won my heart over. 30:53 – Eric: My guess is that they are going to leave it alone. I am sure they will connect the 2 teams. Think of how much work has gone into ATOM. That would be a hard pill to swallow. 31:20 – David: At the end of the day, though, it is a company. You don’t need 2 different editors when they do the same thing. 31:40 – Eric: I would have to disagree with you. Maybe they won’t merge the 2 but they just become different between ATOM (React and React Native) and... 32:22 – David: Why would a company cancel something only have 1 season? (Clears throat...Fox!) 32:58 – Eric: I open very large files with Sublime. Sublime handles this very easily. This goes back to: why am I opening up very large files? 33:31 – David: It’s a log file don’t lie. 33:40 – David: What browser do you use? Safari? 34:03 – Eric: Safari is nice for non-developers. Safari is lightweight and very fast. I have been a browser whore. I go from bedroom to bedroom from Opera to Firefox to Chrome. I fall into the Chrome field though. I have a problem with Chrome, though, and that it knows me too well. Google can sell my data and they do. 37:14 – David: With BRAVE, weren’t they doing something with the block chain and bit coin to reward you for browsing? 37:38 – Eric: Yeah I think that’s being run by... 38:03 – David: I still use CHROME b/c I like the extensions. It’s important to know why you are picking a certain browser. When you are talking about development you need to know who your target audience is. What kind of apps do you use? 39:54 – Eric: It’s interesting to see how much traffic the Android Browser gets. You want to switch over to other parts? For my tech software...I use Polymail.io for email. I use THINGS to keep me on-track, I use SLACK, BRAVE BROSWER, iTerm3 and MERT. I use FANTASTICO (calendar), and I use BEAR (for my note taking). What about you? 41:21 – David: I use iTerm3, too. I’m on 3 different Slack channels. I have been using DISCORD. Other tools that I use are SPECTACLE (extension) among others. I try to keep it slim and simple, though. Another one is EasyRez (free download) and you can adjust the screen resolution on your desktop monitors. It’s important to target my audience better. I do like PARALLELS, too. 44:24 – David continues: Screenflow, Apple Motion, and Adobe After Effects CC. 45:04 – Eric: I use 1 PASSWORD and BETA BASE. 46:04 – David: Have you heard of Last Pass? 46:15 – Eric: Oh sure! I have been using though 1 Password and I guess there some loyalty there. 46:54 – David asks Eric a question about 1 Password about pricing. 47:12 – Eric: I want to pay with money than with something else. 47:23 – David: It’s owned by LogMeIn, and they have tons of experience with security. 48:00 – Eric: I am going to put an article here that compares all these different apps so you can see the similarities and differences side-by-side. 48:40 – David: Anything else? Banking passwords? 48:54 – Eric: Nah, I am excited to see where we are. I like Mojave for the desktop but I don’t like it for the constant number of resets that I’ve had to do. I love what I do. 49:34 – David: Yeah, I agree. I haven’t experienced any major setbacks, yet. 49:55 – Picks! 50:03 – Eric: I think this whole episode has been PICKS! 50:15 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! End – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Ruby Rust Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular React React Native Komodo Bestand Duet Atom.io EasyRez Polymail.io Docker Adobe After Effects CC LogMeIn Brave 1 Password iTerm3 VS CODE iPad Pro Last Pass GoDrive Mojave EMAX Back Blaze Discord Sublime Text AWS Cloud9 StatCounter GitHub: Mert Bear App Process.st Pi-Hole Sponsors: Sentry Cache Fly Fresh Books Picks: Dave ProxMox Pi-Hole Eric Open Source Funders

Panel: Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Eric Oestrich In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Eric Oestrich who is a web developer who resides in Indianapolis, Indiana. He and the panel talk about ExVenture, Gossip, Cowboy, Raisin, Grapevine, and much more! Listen to today’s episode to hear all about it! Finally, check out Eric’s ElixirConf talk and his blog, too! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:51 – Charles introduces the panel. 1:14 – Nate talks about his background. 1:27 – Chuck: My first programming job I worked with Nate. Nate also works now with Eric Berry. We have a special guest and that is Eric Oestrich. Tell us who you are, please! 1:55 – Eric: I work for Smart Logic, LLC. We are a consultancy who has moved to Elixir for the last 2 years. 2:14 – Chuck: Tell us what ExVenture is? 2:46 – Eric: Late 80’s to mid-90’s it’s like a MUD tech space game. Eric goes into detail of what ExVenture is. 3:28 – Panel: Familiar with MUDS. 3:36 – Panel: Audience can’t tell that Eric isn’t an old guy. Eric – you aren’t an old gentleman – how did you get into it?! 4:02 – Eric: The concept has fascinated me. It’s pure game mechanics. In school I wrote things in Python and try to make it threaded. Never got it going. After that I wanted to do a MUD but not good enough in C and couldn’t get it working in Ruby neither. But one faithful day (a year ago) I got an echo and chat server and now we have a MUD. 5:02 – Panel: Why should you be interested? I will tell you why. ExVenture is an open source... I encourage everyone to dig into and play with it! It is a game (so that makes it more fun) but you are dealing with game mechanics. I am also curious where you wanted this to go? What made you say: I want to create this and make it open source? 6:37 – Eric: I like it and work has mostly played for it. It’s MIT because of that. Early in the project (between client work) it was a common thread and that’s why it’s open source. 7:27 – Panel: I ran into you at the conference and you were showing me... Talk about getting metrics out of your system, please? 8:20 – Eric answers the question. 9:09 – Panel: When people are trying to get metrics out of their system – what EVEN makes a good metric? 9:21- Eric: I am trying to figure that out myself, actually. I want to know how long it takes for someone to login? Is that someone trying to hack into my system? If you speak at a global channel or something else... Eric goes into more detail. Eric also mentions Prometheus. 10:31 – Panel: You mentioned: What would you want to see on a dashboard? 11:01 – Eric answers the question and mentions Prometheus EX. 12:19 – Panel: As you starting building this you were pulling libraries out of it and making them separate libraries. Are you pretty proud of GOSSIP? 12:37 – Eric: Yes! Gossip is based on web sockets and it’s a cowboy socket. Eric talks about Gossip. 13:10 – Panel: What other clients are you trying to support? 13:15 – Eric: There is a JavaScript client and Node-based game called... There is a bundle system for that. There is also a Python option. The one thing we haven’t done yet is a C client. That is important b/c most of the games that you could connect to are 25-30 years old. 14:26 – Panel asks a question. 14:34 – Eric: That is the C client we are waiting for. 14:43 – Panel: You talked at the conference (see the show notes) you talked about things you learned along the way. Can you talk about your process? What kind of bottlenecks and how did you resolve those issues? 15:10 – Eric answers the question. 16:44 – Panel: Did you run out of processes? 16:47 – Eric: The VM shut-off – it was just done. That was the first go-around. 19:27 – Eric: After the ElixirConf, I wanted to see how far I could push it. Eric continues. 19:51 – Panel: I want to identify some of these principles you just talked about. First, the major block was the gen server is a single process. 20:21 – Panel. 20:24 – Panel: I think that is a common mistake when people come to Elixir in the beginning stages. How did you solve it? 20:50 – Panelist answers the above question. 21:30 – Panel: That’s one of the big things. It’s an architectural issue. Second, you mentioned really LARGE messages. You were sending around really large messages. 22:20 – Eric: For every 100 players was a gigabyte of ram – it was a lot. And that was mostly b/c every copy...when a new character enters the room then that message gets sent out then it gets copied again, and... 23:08 – Panel. 23:24 – Panel: The third one you mentioned was around data base blocking or...? Can you talk about this one a little more, please? 23:33 – Eric answers the question. 24:02 – Panel. 24:30 – Eric: It was always saving...I tricked Echo into saving...There is a lot of things that could be better to save specifically faster. 24:52 – Panel: I think people would hit those 3 points eventually – there is a lot of value to that. 25:09 –Eric: Yes that was near the end of my ElixirConf talk and my blog. 25:23 – Panel. 25:33 – Eric: It came out in May and I figured out that I needed to learn how to cluster in Elixir. That’s what the ElixirConf was a bout from single node to multiple nodes. Eric continues. 28:38 – Panel: When you have a cluster – and I join – when I transfer from one room to another room, I could be passed off to another server or node? 29:01 – Eric: Whatever you mean by “being passed off.” Whatever server you land on that’s the one you will be on. The magic is that... 30:08 – Advertisement: Fresh Books! 31:15 – Panel: I am going through the code base now and I am excited. It’s going to help me get better at Elixir. 31:32 – Eric: That’s the point of ExVenture. 31:48 – Panel: You host a server so people can see what it’s about – and that’s Mid Mud, right? 32:09 – Eric: Yep, the first hour of you playing. There is a town crier, you request, and then combat monsters. Also, it is plugged into Gossip and you can talk to them. 32:44 – Eric: Yep, there you go: player logged-in! 32:55 – Panel: Maybe not b/c it will turn into a new podcast soon. 33:07 – Panel: What if I want to use Gossip, what is involved there? 33:16 – Eric: Gossip.Haus/docs – Go there! Set it up and start sending and receiving events. 34:40 – Panel: When I was trying to understand the Prometheus metrics it helped. And then in downloading it (as a tip), for me, it was easy to use the DOCKER instructions. 35:32 – Eric: Yep, that was done by a community member. 35:40 – Panel: Are you looking for people to contribute? 35:50 – Eric: Yep, I have a public Trello board. There are 2 tags. 36:12 – Panel: Sounds like you have people involved? 36:22 – Eric: Bunch of people came on after the ElixirConf. 36:33 – Panel: If people download it (another tip) in the SEEDS file you will find out the admin username and password. I guess that’s something you can add. Login: ADMIN and Password: PASSWORD. What I thought was fun (playing with it) in the admin screen I got a sense that it’s generic enough that I could create a space game. Like playing with sectors of space. Does that make sense? 37:42 – Eric: I don’t want it to be tied JUST to fantasy b/c that’s what MUD is. Everything should be good for historical/ fantasy/ etc. any genre that you want to do! 38:13 – Panel: I could see a HackFest and the company could create one for their business. You could have a lot of fun with it. 38:38 – Panel. 38:44 – Panel: Hidden things on their websites. 38:50 – Eric: Search TEXT ADVENTURE in Google Search. See show notes below. 39:24 – Panel: There is a whole subculture that people are interested in and I didn’t know that these people existed. I think that is interesting. 39:45 – Eric: There are tons of games out there that are 20+ years old! 39:55 – Panel: What is your favorite old school MUD game? 40:02 – Eric lists his favorite old school games! One of them is Achaea! 40:51 – Panel: I like the status bars are really cool. If you haven’t played it you have a health bar. Also you have these expiring times and it’s very cool – modern MUD. 41:22 – Eric. 42:00 – Panel: You came from a Ruby background – what was your transition to Elixir like for you? How did you come to Elixir? What was that like for you? 42:15 – Eric: Yeah some of my friends were into Elixir from a functional standpoint about 2 years ago. They were reading about Phoenix and such. They wanted to see how it was going to go. 43:06 – Panel: Try by fire. Coming from Ruby to Elixir – what some advice would you give the same person? 43:37 – Eric: It was less of a culture shock b/c Phoenix was still kind of “Railsy.” 44:35 – Panel: When I was first learning ERLANG, and telling them that it was a standard library. 44:59 – Eric: It’s using Cowboys Ranch. 45:19 – Eric: There are a number of people out there that they want people to run to SSH b/c it’s more secure. 45:46 – Eric: I guess if we are on this topic about secure... 46:40 – Chuck. 46:51 – Panel: I think there is a lot of value, Eric, and the lessons you’ve learned and the path you’ve gone down. If you are new to Elixir going to ExVenture is a great way to start. 47:20 – Eric. 47:35 – Panel: Just run the format and we can do it that way. I encourage people to download it and see what it’s like as a user, and play with it as an admin. We have a Meetup coming up this Thursday. Eric is coming in virtually into our Meetup group. 48:29 – Eric: Gossip is open source. Grapevine and Raisin – check these out, too, b/c they are open source, too. 48:58 – Panel: Where can people contact you? 49:05 – Eric: Twitter! GitHub! Mudcoders.com. 49:39 – Picks! 49:44 – Ad: Lootcrate.com Links: Ruby Elixir Elm Atom.io Flutter.io JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang ExVenture Ex_Venture ExVenture’s Trello Board Prometheus Prometheus EX Gossip GitHub: Gossip 2018 – Conference Talk @ Elixir Conf with Eric Oestrich Eric’s Blog Libcluster Raft – GitHub.io – The Raft Consensus Algorithm pg2 MidMUD Gossip/Haus/Docs ExVenture: Docker Environment Google: Text Adventure Achaea Cowboy SSH Grapevine Raisin ASDF Plugins Eric’s GitHub Eric’s Twitter Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm Packages MetaBase Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Eric MUD Coders Elixir LS Mark ASDF Library Josh Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm UI Nate Mentoring and Paired Programming Metabase Charles Monster Hunters International

Panel: Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Nate Hopkins Charles Max Wood Special Guest: Eric Oestrich In this episode of Elixir Mix, the panel talks with Eric Oestrich who is a web developer who resides in Indianapolis, Indiana. He and the panel talk about ExVenture, Gossip, Cowboy, Raisin, Grapevine, and much more! Listen to today’s episode to hear all about it! Finally, check out Eric’s ElixirConf talk and his blog, too! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!  0:51 – Charles introduces the panel. 1:14 – Nate talks about his background. 1:27 – Chuck: My first programming job I worked with Nate. Nate also works now with Eric Berry. We have a special guest and that is Eric Oestrich. Tell us who you are, please! 1:55 – Eric: I work for Smart Logic, LLC. We are a consultancy who has moved to Elixir for the last 2 years. 2:14 – Chuck: Tell us what ExVenture is? 2:46 – Eric: Late 80’s to mid-90’s it’s like a MUD tech space game. Eric goes into detail of what ExVenture is. 3:28 – Panel: Familiar with MUDS. 3:36 – Panel: Audience can’t tell that Eric isn’t an old guy. Eric – you aren’t an old gentleman – how did you get into it?! 4:02 – Eric: The concept has fascinated me. It’s pure game mechanics. In school I wrote things in Python and try to make it threaded. Never got it going. After that I wanted to do a MUD but not good enough in C and couldn’t get it working in Ruby neither. But one faithful day (a year ago) I got an echo and chat server and now we have a MUD. 5:02 – Panel: Why should you be interested? I will tell you why. ExVenture is an open source... I encourage everyone to dig into and play with it! It is a game (so that makes it more fun) but you are dealing with game mechanics. I am also curious where you wanted this to go? What made you say: I want to create this and make it open source? 6:37 – Eric: I like it and work has mostly played for it. It’s MIT because of that. Early in the project (between client work) it was a common thread and that’s why it’s open source. 7:27 – Panel: I ran into you at the conference and you were showing me... Talk about getting metrics out of your system, please? 8:20 – Eric answers the question. 9:09 – Panel: When people are trying to get metrics out of their system – what EVEN makes a good metric? 9:21- Eric: I am trying to figure that out myself, actually. I want to know how long it takes for someone to login? Is that someone trying to hack into my system? If you speak at a global channel or something else... Eric goes into more detail. Eric also mentions Prometheus. 10:31 – Panel: You mentioned: What would you want to see on a dashboard? 11:01 – Eric answers the question and mentions Prometheus EX. 12:19 – Panel: As you starting building this you were pulling libraries out of it and making them separate libraries. Are you pretty proud of GOSSIP? 12:37 – Eric: Yes! Gossip is based on web sockets and it’s a cowboy socket. Eric talks about Gossip. 13:10 – Panel: What other clients are you trying to support? 13:15 – Eric: There is a JavaScript client and Node-based game called... There is a bundle system for that. There is also a Python option. The one thing we haven’t done yet is a C client. That is important b/c most of the games that you could connect to are 25-30 years old. 14:26 – Panel asks a question. 14:34 – Eric: That is the C client we are waiting for. 14:43 – Panel: You talked at the conference (see the show notes) you talked about things you learned along the way. Can you talk about your process? What kind of bottlenecks and how did you resolve those issues? 15:10 – Eric answers the question. 16:44 – Panel: Did you run out of processes? 16:47 – Eric: The VM shut-off – it was just done. That was the first go-around. 19:27 – Eric: After the ElixirConf, I wanted to see how far I could push it. Eric continues. 19:51 – Panel: I want to identify some of these principles you just talked about. First, the major block was the gen server is a single process. 20:21 – Panel. 20:24 – Panel: I think that is a common mistake when people come to Elixir in the beginning stages. How did you solve it? 20:50 – Panelist answers the above question. 21:30 – Panel: That’s one of the big things. It’s an architectural issue. Second, you mentioned really LARGE messages. You were sending around really large messages. 22:20 – Eric: For every 100 players was a gigabyte of ram – it was a lot. And that was mostly b/c every copy...when a new character enters the room then that message gets sent out then it gets copied again, and... 23:08 – Panel. 23:24 – Panel: The third one you mentioned was around data base blocking or...? Can you talk about this one a little more, please? 23:33 – Eric answers the question. 24:02 – Panel. 24:30 – Eric: It was always saving...I tricked Echo into saving...There is a lot of things that could be better to save specifically faster. 24:52 – Panel: I think people would hit those 3 points eventually – there is a lot of value to that. 25:09 –Eric: Yes that was near the end of my ElixirConf talk and my blog. 25:23 – Panel. 25:33 – Eric: It came out in May and I figured out that I needed to learn how to cluster in Elixir. That’s what the ElixirConf was a bout from single node to multiple nodes. Eric continues. 28:38 – Panel: When you have a cluster – and I join – when I transfer from one room to another room, I could be passed off to another server or node? 29:01 – Eric: Whatever you mean by “being passed off.” Whatever server you land on that’s the one you will be on. The magic is that... 30:08 – Advertisement: Fresh Books! 31:15 – Panel: I am going through the code base now and I am excited. It’s going to help me get better at Elixir. 31:32 – Eric: That’s the point of ExVenture. 31:48 – Panel: You host a server so people can see what it’s about – and that’s Mid Mud, right? 32:09 – Eric: Yep, the first hour of you playing. There is a town crier, you request, and then combat monsters. Also, it is plugged into Gossip and you can talk to them. 32:44 – Eric: Yep, there you go: player logged-in! 32:55 – Panel: Maybe not b/c it will turn into a new podcast soon. 33:07 – Panel: What if I want to use Gossip, what is involved there? 33:16 – Eric: Gossip.Haus/docs – Go there! Set it up and start sending and receiving events. 34:40 – Panel: When I was trying to understand the Prometheus metrics it helped. And then in downloading it (as a tip), for me, it was easy to use the DOCKER instructions. 35:32 – Eric: Yep, that was done by a community member. 35:40 – Panel: Are you looking for people to contribute? 35:50 – Eric: Yep, I have a public Trello board. There are 2 tags. 36:12 – Panel: Sounds like you have people involved? 36:22 – Eric: Bunch of people came on after the ElixirConf. 36:33 – Panel: If people download it (another tip) in the SEEDS file you will find out the admin username and password. I guess that’s something you can add. Login: ADMIN and Password: PASSWORD. What I thought was fun (playing with it) in the admin screen I got a sense that it’s generic enough that I could create a space game. Like playing with sectors of space. Does that make sense? 37:42 – Eric: I don’t want it to be tied JUST to fantasy b/c that’s what MUD is. Everything should be good for historical/ fantasy/ etc. any genre that you want to do! 38:13 – Panel: I could see a HackFest and the company could create one for their business. You could have a lot of fun with it. 38:38 – Panel. 38:44 – Panel: Hidden things on their websites. 38:50 – Eric: Search TEXT ADVENTURE in Google Search. See show notes below. 39:24 – Panel: There is a whole subculture that people are interested in and I didn’t know that these people existed. I think that is interesting. 39:45 – Eric: There are tons of games out there that are 20+ years old! 39:55 – Panel: What is your favorite old school MUD game? 40:02 – Eric lists his favorite old school games! One of them is Achaea! 40:51 – Panel: I like the status bars are really cool. If you haven’t played it you have a health bar. Also you have these expiring times and it’s very cool – modern MUD. 41:22 – Eric. 42:00 – Panel: You came from a Ruby background – what was your transition to Elixir like for you? How did you come to Elixir? What was that like for you? 42:15 – Eric: Yeah some of my friends were into Elixir from a functional standpoint about 2 years ago. They were reading about Phoenix and such. They wanted to see how it was going to go. 43:06 – Panel: Try by fire. Coming from Ruby to Elixir – what some advice would you give the same person? 43:37 – Eric: It was less of a culture shock b/c Phoenix was still kind of “Railsy.” 44:35 – Panel: When I was first learning ERLANG, and telling them that it was a standard library. 44:59 – Eric: It’s using Cowboys Ranch. 45:19 – Eric: There are a number of people out there that they want people to run to SSH b/c it’s more secure. 45:46 – Eric: I guess if we are on this topic about secure... 46:40 – Chuck. 46:51 – Panel: I think there is a lot of value, Eric, and the lessons you’ve learned and the path you’ve gone down. If you are new to Elixir going to ExVenture is a great way to start. 47:20 – Eric. 47:35 – Panel: Just run the format and we can do it that way. I encourage people to download it and see what it’s like as a user, and play with it as an admin. We have a Meetup coming up this Thursday. Eric is coming in virtually into our Meetup group. 48:29 – Eric: Gossip is open source. Grapevine and Raisin – check these out, too, b/c they are open source, too. 48:58 – Panel: Where can people contact you? 49:05 – Eric: Twitter! GitHub! Mudcoders.com. 49:39 – Picks! 49:44 – Ad: Lootcrate.com Links: Ruby Elixir Elm Atom.io Flutter.io JavaScript Visual Studio Code React Erlang ExVenture Ex_Venture ExVenture’s Trello Board Prometheus Prometheus EX Gossip GitHub: Gossip 2018 – Conference Talk @ Elixir Conf with Eric Oestrich Eric’s Blog Libcluster Raft – GitHub.io – The Raft Consensus Algorithm pg2 MidMUD Gossip/Haus/Docs ExVenture: Docker Environment Google: Text Adventure Achaea Cowboy SSH Grapevine Raisin ASDF Plugins Eric’s GitHub Eric’s Twitter Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm Packages MetaBase Sponsors: Loot Crate Get a Coder Job! Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Eric MUD Coders Elixir LS Mark ASDF Library Josh Brooklyn Nine-Nine Elm UI Nate Mentoring and Paired Programming Metabase Charles Monster Hunters International

Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Eric Berry Special Guests: Rahul Mahale In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Rahul Mahale. Rahul is a Senior DevOps Engineer at BigBinary in India. He has also worked with SecureDB Inc., Tiny Owl, Winjit Technologies among others. In addition, he attended the University of Pune. The panel and the guest talk about Kubernetes. Show Topics: 1:25 – Swag.com for t-shirts and mugs, etc. for Ruby Rogues / DevChat.tv. 1:49 – Chuck: Why are you famous? 1:57 – Guest’s background. 4:35 – Chuck: Kubernetes – Anyone play with this? 4:49 – Panelist: Yes. Funny situation, I was working with Heroku. Heroku is very costly, but great. The story continues... 6:13 – Panelist: I was so overwhelmed with how difficult it was to launch a simple website. Now, that being said we were using the Amazon EKS, which is the Kubernetes. They don’t have nearly as much good tools, but that’s my experience. 6:48 – Chuck: I haven’t tried Kubernetes. 8:58 – Rahul: I would like to add a few comments. Managing Kubernetes service is not a big deal at the moment, but... 11:19 – Panelist: You wouldn’t recommend people using Kubernetes unless they were well versed? What is that term? 11:40 – Rahul: Not anyone could use the Kubernetes cluster. Let’s offer that complexity to another company that can handle and mange it. 13:02 – The guest continues this conversation. 14:02 – Panelist: I didn’t know that Kubernetes needed different nodes. 14:28 – Rahul continues this topic. 15:05 – What hardware requirements do they need? 15:19 – Rahul: Yes, they do need a good system. Good amount of memory. Good network space. 15:45 – Panelist asks Rahul a question.  16:30 – Rahul: Let’s answer this into two parts. Kubernetes topic is being discussed in detail. 18:41 – Chuck adds comments and asks a question. 18:58 – Rahul talks about companies and programs. Check out this timestamp to hear his thoughts. 20:42 – Another company is mentioned added to this conversation. 21:55 – Additional companies mentioned: Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. (Rahul) 22:14 – Chuck: It’s interesting how much community plays a role into success stories. Whether or not it’s best technologies it comes down to where there are enough people to help me if I don’t know what to do. 22:43 – Rahul: People, even enterprises, are there. 23:15 – Chuck: At what point (let’s say I docked my app) should they be looking at Kubernetes? Are you waiting on traffic? How do you make that call? 23:56 – Rahul answers the questions. 26:29 – Rahul: If your application is... 27:13 – Announcement – Digital Ocean! 27:51 – Chuck: How does someone get started with Kubernetes? 27:53 – Rahul answers the question. 30:00 – Chuck: It sounds like you have an amateur setup – Dave? 30:21 – Dave: I think the problem is that there is not a Kubernetes for dummies blog post. There has always been some sort of “gottcha!” As much as these documents say that there are solutions here and there, but you will see that there are networking issues. Once you get that up and running, then there are more issues at hand. The other strange thing is that once everything seems to be working okay, and then I started getting connectivity issues. It’s definitely not an afternoon project. It takes researching and googling. At the end, it takes a direction at large that the community is investing into. 32:58 – Chuck makes additional comments. 33:21 – Dave adds more comments. Sorry bad joke – Dave. 33:40 – Topic – Virtualization. 34:32 – Having Swamp is a good idea. 34:44 – Rahul adds his comments. 36:54 – Panelist talks about virtualization and scaling. 37:45 – Rahul adds in comments about the ecosystems. 38:21 – Panelist talks about server-less functions.  39:11 – Rahul: Not every application can... 40:32 – Panelist: I guess the whole downside to... 41:07 – Rahul talks about this. 43:03 – Chuck to Eric: Any problems with Kubernetes for you? 43:05 – Eric: Yes – just spelling it! For me it feels like you are in a jet with all of these different buttons. There are 2 different types of developers. I am of DevOps-minded. That’s why we are getting solutions, and tools like Heroku to help. When I listen to this conversation, I feel quiet only because you guys are talking about spiders and I’m afraid of spiders. 44:44 – Dave to Eric: Having information and knowledge about Kubernetes will help you as a developer. Having some awareness can really help you as a developer. 45:43 – Chuck: There are all these options to know about it – they way he is talking about it sounds like it’s the person on the jet. Don’t touch the red button and don’t’ cut the wrong wire! It feels like with software – it’s a beautiful thing – you erase it and reinstall it! 46:50 – Dave: What? What are all of these crazy words?! What does this exactly mean? The visibility is definitely not there for someone who is just tinkering with it. 47:16 – Rahul: It’s not for someone who is tinkering with it. Definitely. 50:02 – Chuck: We have been talking about benefits of Kubernetes – great. What kinds of processes to setup with Kubernetes to make your life easier? 50:40 Rahul answers the question. 53:54 – Rahul’s Social Media Accounts – check them out under LINKS. 54:29 – Get a Coder Job Course Links: T-Shirts for Ruby Rogues! Get a Coder Job Course Ruby JavaScript Phoenix Heroku Amazon EKS Kubernetes Kubernetes Engine Kubernetes Setup AKS Kubernetes – Creating a single master cluster... Kubernetes GitHub Docker Rancher Learn Kubernetes Using Interactive...by Ben Hall Podcast – All Things Devops Nanobox Cloud 66 Chef Puppet Ansible Salt Stack Orange Computers Rahul Mahale’s Blog Rahul’s Talks and Workshops Rahul Mahale’s LinkedIn Rahul Mahale’s Facebook Rahul Mahale’s Kubernetes Workshop via YouTube Sponsors: Sentry Digital Ocean Get a Coder Job Course Picks: Charles Conference Game – TerraGenesis – Space Colony Book – The One Thing Dave Orange Computers Eric Cloud 66 Nanobox Rahul Podcast – All Things Devops Kubernetes

Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Eric Berry Special Guests: Rahul Mahale In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Rahul Mahale. Rahul is a Senior DevOps Engineer at BigBinary in India. He has also worked with SecureDB Inc., Tiny Owl, Winjit Technologies among others. In addition, he attended the University of Pune. The panel and the guest talk about Kubernetes. Show Topics: 1:25 – Swag.com for t-shirts and mugs, etc. for Ruby Rogues / DevChat.tv. 1:49 – Chuck: Why are you famous? 1:57 – Guest’s background. 4:35 – Chuck: Kubernetes – Anyone play with this? 4:49 – Panelist: Yes. Funny situation, I was working with Heroku. Heroku is very costly, but great. The story continues... 6:13 – Panelist: I was so overwhelmed with how difficult it was to launch a simple website. Now, that being said we were using the Amazon EKS, which is the Kubernetes. They don’t have nearly as much good tools, but that’s my experience. 6:48 – Chuck: I haven’t tried Kubernetes. 8:58 – Rahul: I would like to add a few comments. Managing Kubernetes service is not a big deal at the moment, but... 11:19 – Panelist: You wouldn’t recommend people using Kubernetes unless they were well versed? What is that term? 11:40 – Rahul: Not anyone could use the Kubernetes cluster. Let’s offer that complexity to another company that can handle and mange it. 13:02 – The guest continues this conversation. 14:02 – Panelist: I didn’t know that Kubernetes needed different nodes. 14:28 – Rahul continues this topic. 15:05 – What hardware requirements do they need? 15:19 – Rahul: Yes, they do need a good system. Good amount of memory. Good network space. 15:45 – Panelist asks Rahul a question.  16:30 – Rahul: Let’s answer this into two parts. Kubernetes topic is being discussed in detail. 18:41 – Chuck adds comments and asks a question. 18:58 – Rahul talks about companies and programs. Check out this timestamp to hear his thoughts. 20:42 – Another company is mentioned added to this conversation. 21:55 – Additional companies mentioned: Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. (Rahul) 22:14 – Chuck: It’s interesting how much community plays a role into success stories. Whether or not it’s best technologies it comes down to where there are enough people to help me if I don’t know what to do. 22:43 – Rahul: People, even enterprises, are there. 23:15 – Chuck: At what point (let’s say I docked my app) should they be looking at Kubernetes? Are you waiting on traffic? How do you make that call? 23:56 – Rahul answers the questions. 26:29 – Rahul: If your application is... 27:13 – Announcement – Digital Ocean! 27:51 – Chuck: How does someone get started with Kubernetes? 27:53 – Rahul answers the question. 30:00 – Chuck: It sounds like you have an amateur setup – Dave? 30:21 – Dave: I think the problem is that there is not a Kubernetes for dummies blog post. There has always been some sort of “gottcha!” As much as these documents say that there are solutions here and there, but you will see that there are networking issues. Once you get that up and running, then there are more issues at hand. The other strange thing is that once everything seems to be working okay, and then I started getting connectivity issues. It’s definitely not an afternoon project. It takes researching and googling. At the end, it takes a direction at large that the community is investing into. 32:58 – Chuck makes additional comments. 33:21 – Dave adds more comments. Sorry bad joke – Dave. 33:40 – Topic – Virtualization. 34:32 – Having Swamp is a good idea. 34:44 – Rahul adds his comments. 36:54 – Panelist talks about virtualization and scaling. 37:45 – Rahul adds in comments about the ecosystems. 38:21 – Panelist talks about server-less functions.  39:11 – Rahul: Not every application can... 40:32 – Panelist: I guess the whole downside to... 41:07 – Rahul talks about this. 43:03 – Chuck to Eric: Any problems with Kubernetes for you? 43:05 – Eric: Yes – just spelling it! For me it feels like you are in a jet with all of these different buttons. There are 2 different types of developers. I am of DevOps-minded. That’s why we are getting solutions, and tools like Heroku to help. When I listen to this conversation, I feel quiet only because you guys are talking about spiders and I’m afraid of spiders. 44:44 – Dave to Eric: Having information and knowledge about Kubernetes will help you as a developer. Having some awareness can really help you as a developer. 45:43 – Chuck: There are all these options to know about it – they way he is talking about it sounds like it’s the person on the jet. Don’t touch the red button and don’t’ cut the wrong wire! It feels like with software – it’s a beautiful thing – you erase it and reinstall it! 46:50 – Dave: What? What are all of these crazy words?! What does this exactly mean? The visibility is definitely not there for someone who is just tinkering with it. 47:16 – Rahul: It’s not for someone who is tinkering with it. Definitely. 50:02 – Chuck: We have been talking about benefits of Kubernetes – great. What kinds of processes to setup with Kubernetes to make your life easier? 50:40 Rahul answers the question. 53:54 – Rahul’s Social Media Accounts – check them out under LINKS. 54:29 – Get a Coder Job Course Links: T-Shirts for Ruby Rogues! Get a Coder Job Course Ruby JavaScript Phoenix Heroku Amazon EKS Kubernetes Kubernetes Engine Kubernetes Setup AKS Kubernetes – Creating a single master cluster... Kubernetes GitHub Docker Rancher Learn Kubernetes Using Interactive...by Ben Hall Podcast – All Things Devops Nanobox Cloud 66 Chef Puppet Ansible Salt Stack Orange Computers Rahul Mahale’s Blog Rahul’s Talks and Workshops Rahul Mahale’s LinkedIn Rahul Mahale’s Facebook Rahul Mahale’s Kubernetes Workshop via YouTube Sponsors: Sentry Digital Ocean Get a Coder Job Course Picks: Charles Conference Game – TerraGenesis – Space Colony Book – The One Thing Dave Orange Computers Eric Cloud 66 Nanobox Rahul Podcast – All Things Devops Kubernetes

Panel: Charles Max Wood Dave Kimura Eric Berry Special Guests: Rahul Mahale In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Rahul Mahale. Rahul is a Senior DevOps Engineer at BigBinary in India. He has also worked with SecureDB Inc., Tiny Owl, Winjit Technologies among others. In addition, he attended the University of Pune. The panel and the guest talk about Kubernetes. Show Topics: 1:25 – Swag.com for t-shirts and mugs, etc. for Ruby Rogues / DevChat.tv. 1:49 – Chuck: Why are you famous? 1:57 – Guest’s background. 4:35 – Chuck: Kubernetes – Anyone play with this? 4:49 – Panelist: Yes. Funny situation, I was working with Heroku. Heroku is very costly, but great. The story continues... 6:13 – Panelist: I was so overwhelmed with how difficult it was to launch a simple website. Now, that being said we were using the Amazon EKS, which is the Kubernetes. They don’t have nearly as much good tools, but that’s my experience. 6:48 – Chuck: I haven’t tried Kubernetes. 8:58 – Rahul: I would like to add a few comments. Managing Kubernetes service is not a big deal at the moment, but... 11:19 – Panelist: You wouldn’t recommend people using Kubernetes unless they were well versed? What is that term? 11:40 – Rahul: Not anyone could use the Kubernetes cluster. Let’s offer that complexity to another company that can handle and mange it. 13:02 – The guest continues this conversation. 14:02 – Panelist: I didn’t know that Kubernetes needed different nodes. 14:28 – Rahul continues this topic. 15:05 – What hardware requirements do they need? 15:19 – Rahul: Yes, they do need a good system. Good amount of memory. Good network space. 15:45 – Panelist asks Rahul a question.  16:30 – Rahul: Let’s answer this into two parts. Kubernetes topic is being discussed in detail. 18:41 – Chuck adds comments and asks a question. 18:58 – Rahul talks about companies and programs. Check out this timestamp to hear his thoughts. 20:42 – Another company is mentioned added to this conversation. 21:55 – Additional companies mentioned: Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. (Rahul) 22:14 – Chuck: It’s interesting how much community plays a role into success stories. Whether or not it’s best technologies it comes down to where there are enough people to help me if I don’t know what to do. 22:43 – Rahul: People, even enterprises, are there. 23:15 – Chuck: At what point (let’s say I docked my app) should they be looking at Kubernetes? Are you waiting on traffic? How do you make that call? 23:56 – Rahul answers the questions. 26:29 – Rahul: If your application is... 27:13 – Announcement – Digital Ocean! 27:51 – Chuck: How does someone get started with Kubernetes? 27:53 – Rahul answers the question. 30:00 – Chuck: It sounds like you have an amateur setup – Dave? 30:21 – Dave: I think the problem is that there is not a Kubernetes for dummies blog post. There has always been some sort of “gottcha!” As much as these documents say that there are solutions here and there, but you will see that there are networking issues. Once you get that up and running, then there are more issues at hand. The other strange thing is that once everything seems to be working okay, and then I started getting connectivity issues. It’s definitely not an afternoon project. It takes researching and googling. At the end, it takes a direction at large that the community is investing into. 32:58 – Chuck makes additional comments. 33:21 – Dave adds more comments. Sorry bad joke – Dave. 33:40 – Topic – Virtualization. 34:32 – Having Swamp is a good idea. 34:44 – Rahul adds his comments. 36:54 – Panelist talks about virtualization and scaling. 37:45 – Rahul adds in comments about the ecosystems. 38:21 – Panelist talks about server-less functions.  39:11 – Rahul: Not every application can... 40:32 – Panelist: I guess the whole downside to... 41:07 – Rahul talks about this. 43:03 – Chuck to Eric: Any problems with Kubernetes for you? 43:05 – Eric: Yes – just spelling it! For me it feels like you are in a jet with all of these different buttons. There are 2 different types of developers. I am of DevOps-minded. That’s why we are getting solutions, and tools like Heroku to help. When I listen to this conversation, I feel quiet only because you guys are talking about spiders and I’m afraid of spiders. 44:44 – Dave to Eric: Having information and knowledge about Kubernetes will help you as a developer. Having some awareness can really help you as a developer. 45:43 – Chuck: There are all these options to know about it – they way he is talking about it sounds like it’s the person on the jet. Don’t touch the red button and don’t’ cut the wrong wire! It feels like with software – it’s a beautiful thing – you erase it and reinstall it! 46:50 – Dave: What? What are all of these crazy words?! What does this exactly mean? The visibility is definitely not there for someone who is just tinkering with it. 47:16 – Rahul: It’s not for someone who is tinkering with it. Definitely. 50:02 – Chuck: We have been talking about benefits of Kubernetes – great. What kinds of processes to setup with Kubernetes to make your life easier? 50:40 Rahul answers the question. 53:54 – Rahul’s Social Media Accounts – check them out under LINKS. 54:29 – Get a Coder Job Course Links: T-Shirts for Ruby Rogues! Get a Coder Job Course Ruby JavaScript Phoenix Heroku Amazon EKS Kubernetes Kubernetes Engine Kubernetes Setup AKS Kubernetes – Creating a single master cluster... Kubernetes GitHub Docker Rancher Learn Kubernetes Using Interactive...by Ben Hall Podcast – All Things Devops Nanobox Cloud 66 Chef Puppet Ansible Salt Stack Orange Computers Rahul Mahale’s Blog Rahul’s Talks and Workshops Rahul Mahale’s LinkedIn Rahul Mahale’s Facebook Rahul Mahale’s Kubernetes Workshop via YouTube Sponsors: Sentry Digital Ocean Get a Coder Job Course Picks: Charles Conference Game – TerraGenesis – Space Colony Book – The One Thing Dave Orange Computers Eric Cloud 66 Nanobox Rahul Podcast – All Things Devops Kubernetes

Join Christian "Spootyone" Kingsbury and Eric "Yes, he's also still alive" Knappe as they return to making podcast episodes. What happened? Where did they go? Do they not care about their fans? No, they don't. Nah, just kidding. Gotcha! Get in here.

In this episode: Jim gives up driving, Geof promises to write shorter show notes (next time), Ben is scared shitless for the human race and Eric finds 200 hours in the week. Please note that the opinions expressed here are not that of Rally Interactive and any possible reference to anyone living or deceased is purely coincidental. Also, we have no idea what we are talking about. Send feedback to podcast@rallyinteractive.com or http://twitter.com/rallybanter # Side project: http://www.verse-co.com - Side project of Nguyen Le - 2,300 designers on the mailing list! - Behind the scenes on a project: from inquiry to delivery - http://www.verse-co.com/journal/2016/3/13/step-into-my-studio - Nguyen's work: https://dribbble.com/newincreative - Process masterclass: http://www.verse-co.com/process-masterclass # Mentioned and discussed on the show - Future topic: should design require a license? How do you balance work and life? (4:00) - Is work play? - On working 9–6. - Does working odd hours help cut out distraction from others? - Turning all notifications off - Social pressure to respond: do we put it on ourselves? - Can you allow yourself to not get distracted? - Living in Utah for outdoors and hobbies - Lunch bike rides and guilt - Vacation policies and blocking off time - Unwinding in the outdoors with exercise - Is working all night ever worth it? - Getting ideas outside of the office - Thinking more before taking action Tangent: Technology and the possible consequences (21:30) - Virtual reality as a future - Guy on subway car in VR: http://youtu.be/ryNs6rddECw - Augmented Reality VS Virtual Reality - Omata: http://www.omata.com/ (Buy 10!) - Omata on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/omata/omata-one-analog-gps-speedometer - Rhys Newman: https://www.twitter.com/rhysys - Julian Bleecker: https://www.twitter.com/darthjulian - Benefits of an analog dial over digital readout - Technology as an educator - Technology as a motivator Back to: Work and life balance (29:30) - Relationships and work - Shout out to significant others that are designers! - Eric: summer concert > working late - Ben on starting Rally and how it affects his relationships - Payroll & business burdens - Working to live vs living to work - Creating an environment where people can have lives - Trust in people to get work done - On burnout… - Some behind the scenes at Rally during a stressful time - Stenographer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_reporter Do you have a good work life balance? (47:00) - Eric: Yes. Tipping towards work. - Jim: Pretty good. Could do more for himself. - Ben: 6 days in a row of bike riding. Always swayed towards work. - Geof: Leans heavy towards work. But took time off to fly fish. And we're all going camping! # Ben Cline Part owner, designer and string cheese consumer at Rally Interactive. http://twitter.com/yocline # Jim DeBrock Designer at Rally Interactive and Logic Pro tutorial consuming beast. http://twitter.com/jimdebrock # Eric Atwell Designer at Rally Interactive and owner of reflective shoes. http://twitter.com/ericatwell_ # Geof Crowl Designer at Rally Interactive and connoisseur of fine italics. http://twitter.com/rectangular

Aloha! I was delayed getting Epi66 out because I was out of town in Hawaii for a vacation last week and pretty much technology free. Had a great time but it was one of those vacations that you need a vacation to recover from when you get back. Or I would have if it wasn't for the fact I knew that folks would be clamoring for their next helping of Succotash! This episode marks that first time since we started over two and a half years ago that pretty much all the clips were sent in by comedy podcasters. I usually am out there, sweating in the cloud, harvesting clips myself so it was quite a treat to get back from vacation and find the TweetSack brimming over with sweet, sweet clippage. The exception is this show's visit to the Chillpak Hollywood Hour, where Phil Leirness reveals to Dean Haglund the subject of a Skype call he and I had, along with confederate Taylor Ripley. We've begun the earliest stages of trying to put a new podcast network together. Too early to reveal much more than that, but the ball is rolling. I love that my friends in the Pod Mafia - which is not a network but a closeknit bunch of podcasters who share information, visit each other's shows and do various favors for each other - have begun supply this show with our "post farewell" succotash recipes. For those hardy few listeners who venture past announcer Bill Heywatt's signature "Good-bye!" at the end of each show, I've been laying an Easter egg since the beginning of the year: The audio of recipes for succotash that I've been snipping off of YouTube. But I've cleaned out that pantry and need more fodder. This week the show is visited by Chef Terry, courtesy of Ed Wallick and his Don't Quit Your Daycast podcast, for a Cajun version of the popular Early American dish. We continue to serialize Jason McNamara's Boganwood pod mini-series this week, with Episode 5. As we've been doing, that chapter is prefaced with a snippet of a conversation I had with "Jabs" about the origins of the show. And, as is standard, we've got our two-minute Burst O' Durst provided by the waterboard of political comedy Will Durst. THE 10 MOST ACTIVE SHOWS IN THE STITCHER TOP 100 COMEDY PODCAST LIST Here's the hottest action - up OR down - on Stitcher's Top 100 Comedy Podcast lineup: 35. SModcast >> FEaB +2539. SModcast >> Edumacation +1353. Who Charted? -1559. Comedy Of The Week +1571. If I Were You -3077. Sex Squad +1982. Superego +5590. The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling +2291. Harmontown +3699. That American Life +102 SPLITSIDER Over on Splitsider.com, you can find my review for This Week In Comedy Podcasts. I'm listening in on The Bugle podcast, co-hosted by John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. You're probably aware that Oliver's been filling in on The Daily Show since early June, when host Jon Stewart took time off to direct a movie. I wanted to see if he was still showing up for the podcast gig and, indeed, he's managing to pull it off. THE CLIPS The Joey Medina ShowJoey Medina is a New York comedian right out of the Bronx. You may have seen him on The Original Latin Kings Of Comedy DVD or performing in clubs around the country. And he can be seen in the classic film Zombie Strippers. His podcast is episoding in the 60’s now – see, I’m making up verbs: episoding – and he alternates between interviewing comedians and porn stars. (It’s kind of amazing how often comedians with podcasts interview porn stars or strippers. Are there porn star podcasts where they interview comedians? Let me know.) The Joey Medina Show had jumped several HUNDRED places a couple of weeks ago to get into the Top 100 on Stitcher and, although it’s slid out of there this week, it’s still going strong. Here’s a slice from a recent epi where he asks guest Tessa Lane how she got into doing porn. The Geek GenerationWe got an email from our friend Rob Logan over at The Geek Generation podcast that reads: Hi, Marc! With the social media attention that Sharknado has been receiving, I thought your listeners might enjoy some exclusive audio from the sequel! And he sent along a clip from his and co-jhost Mike Volpe's Epi143 with that exclusive trailer. Foster The PodcastWe got a clip in from comedian Justin Foster and his namesake podcast, now 20-something episodes in. He’s in LA, originally from Dallas, and sent along this note: Here's a clip from my podcast Foster the Podcast, the official show of comedian Justin Foster. Short, hilarious, and insane stories from some of the most interesting people I know. Missing kidneys, partying with navy seals, and getting fired by James Franco, are just a few of the stories you will hear every week. I’m not sure who his guest is in this clip, but it’s someone who got drunk from a little person pouring booze from a hut behind a bar somewhere, who then got arrested. The comic, not the midget. An Idiot At Home This show's pretty new – there have only been five or six episodes of An Idiot At Home – and it comes from host James Proudlock and permaguest Karl Stott over in Shotten Colliery in the UK. It’s a podcast that focuses on music AND comedy which, in the case, seems to be drawn from the news. Positive PodcastI appreciate Adam and Josh of the Positive Podcast sending a clip with a nice note: Hey saw your post on twitter here is a clip from episode 23: Testosterone Zone the latest episode of our podcast. Thanks for doing something like this love to get new listeners. We will shout you guys out next episode. Hope you Enjoy! That’s all great but Adam and Josh didn’t send along much information about their actual show. After a bit of digging, though, I think they’re from Chickopee, Massachusetts, and that their show bounces around between music and comedic commentary. In this clip they chatter on about public drunkenness. Talking RubbishThe show's last submitted clip comes via email from a husband-and-wife podcasting team, Eric and Stacey, who host Talking Rubbish. Their cover note into the TweetSack reads: Hello Succotash! Love the show (first heard of you on Podcasting101) and thought I'd try to get you a clip of our show "Talking Rubbish" with Eric and Stacey. This is from show 21 “Ballwater / the worst show ever”, its the very end of the show and I try to explain one of my many phobias (while drunk) to Stacey who ends up not being very supportive and just starts cry laughing. Hope its good enough to be on your show, Thanks! Eric Yes, Eric – congratulations! Your clip IS good enough for Succotash!  Epi 66, at just a hair over 57 minutes, may be the shortest episode we've done this year. Next week should be more robust but hey, for what you're paying, you're still getting a hell of a show! So get out there and pass the Succotash! — Marc Hershon

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:16 - Keeping Passion for Work Alive Happiness vs Money Maslow's hierarchy of needs 04:14 - Making it a Craft 08:45 - Client Fit Raising Rates 10:41 - “Safety” and Satisfaction The Ruby Freelancers Show 012 – Getting Starting as a Freelancer 13:41 - Self-Actualization Community Exposure Praise 25:04 - Practice Every Day Mastery by Robert Greene 27:08 - Having Outlets 31:31 - Change & Creating New Habits Balance Tiny Habits w/ Dr. BJ Fogg The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg 38:34 - “Serious Practitioners” Picks Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer (Jim) Multitenancy with Rails by Ryan Bigg (Jim) Writer's block and the drip: Seth Godin (Eric) Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard (Evan) Transcript EVAN: Eric, you there? ERIC: I'm chewing... EVAN: I don't believe I've heard that particular voice before...  [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you'll get 50% off when it's released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] EVAN: Hello! And welcome to the Ruby Freelancers Podcast! Today, I am hosting -- my name is Evan Light. Normally we have Chuck Wood hosting, and I have here Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! EVAN: Eric is only somewhat conscious, so we can only ask yes or no questions. ERIC: Yes. EVAN: [laughs] And Jim Gay! JIM: Hello! EVAN: So today we decided we are going to talk about "keeping the passion for the work alive", and the tradeoffs involved in doing work we enjoy versus doing work that pays well. This came from a Skype chat that Jim and I, I guess we're getting into undecide during other Skype chats [inaudible]. And I was explaining that I value doing client work that I enjoy more than earning a buck. And Jim was pushing and pointing that, pushing out pushing back that earning a buck is really gushed or unimportant. JIM: Yeah I think we're both kind of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. When we were talking earlier before we started recording the show, I was thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs which -- if people aren't familiar with that, basically on the lowest level of hierarchy it's like "can you survive?" Are you eating? ERIC: The reap of your head? JIM: Yeah, exactly. That type of thing. And then higher up the scale is like the top self-actualization; being pleased with who you are. And I think as long as you've got enough income coming in that you can pay for your house and feed your family and things like that, then you can start going up the path that's like figuring out "okay do I actually care about the work that I'm doing?" EVAN: But there's also -- Well, yeah, okay so potentially there's (I don't know if this is a matter of potentially -- I really need to complete this sentence though), there's the boundaries where we perceived to those boundaries to be in Maslow's hierarchy. I mean this is something -- Maslow's hierarchy: self to something like consider a lot, but the question of where you perceived those boundaries to be might different from person to person. The physiological,

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:16 - Keeping Passion for Work Alive Happiness vs Money Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 04:14 - Making it a Craft 08:45 - Client Fit Raising Rates 10:41 - “Safety” and Satisfaction The Ruby Freelancers Show 012 – Getting Starting as a Freelancer 13:41 - Self-Actualization Community Exposure Praise 25:04 - Practice Every Day Mastery by Robert Greene 27:08 - Having Outlets 31:31 - Change & Creating New Habits Balance Tiny Habits w/ Dr. BJ Fogg The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg 38:34 - “Serious Practitioners” Picks Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer (Jim) Multitenancy with Rails by Ryan Bigg (Jim) Writer’s block and the drip: Seth Godin (Eric) Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard (Evan) Transcript EVAN: Eric, you there? ERIC: I'm chewing... EVAN: I don't believe I've heard that particular voice before...  [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] EVAN: Hello! And welcome to the Ruby Freelancers Podcast! Today, I am hosting -- my name is Evan Light. Normally we have Chuck Wood hosting, and I have here Eric Davis. ERIC: Hi! EVAN: Eric is only somewhat conscious, so we can only ask yes or no questions. ERIC: Yes. EVAN: [laughs] And Jim Gay! JIM: Hello! EVAN: So today we decided we are going to talk about "keeping the passion for the work alive", and the tradeoffs involved in doing work we enjoy versus doing work that pays well. This came from a Skype chat that Jim and I, I guess we're getting into undecide during other Skype chats [inaudible]. And I was explaining that I value doing client work that I enjoy more than earning a buck. And Jim was pushing and pointing that, pushing out pushing back that earning a buck is really gushed or unimportant. JIM: Yeah I think we're both kind of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. When we were talking earlier before we started recording the show, I was thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs which -- if people aren't familiar with that, basically on the lowest level of hierarchy it's like "can you survive?" Are you eating? ERIC: The reap of your head? JIM: Yeah, exactly. That type of thing. And then higher up the scale is like the top self-actualization; being pleased with who you are. And I think as long as you've got enough income coming in that you can pay for your house and feed your family and things like that, then you can start going up the path that's like figuring out "okay do I actually care about the work that I'm doing?" EVAN: But there's also -- Well, yeah, okay so potentially there's (I don't know if this is a matter of potentially -- I really need to complete this sentence though), there's the boundaries where we perceived to those boundaries to be in Maslow's hierarchy. I mean this is something -- Maslow's hierarchy: self to something like consider a lot, but the question of where you perceived those boundaries to be might different from person to person. The physiological,

Panel Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Discussion 30x500 by Amy Hoy See Project Run Refactoring Redmine Redmine Tips Authoring Ebooks Chirk SAAS Freelance Funnel Newsletters iPhone Apps BDDCasts Rails Beginning course Evan's iPad app Scratch your own itch Marketing works well over time Batch up work Scheduling blog posts Bufferapp.com Budgeting time to do product development Marketing takes up the most time microconf Micropreneur Academy Why are you building what you're building? Project vs Product Momentum Marketing to build momentum 4 Hour Work Week Lean Startup How do you find a product to make that your market wants to buy from you? Yes, 50 scientific whatever,.... Product focused business - The product is the most powerful Market focused business - The market is the most powerful Opportunity cost of product development Time and location freedom Picks Seth Godin's blog post on "People think Photographers spend their time..." (Eric) 21 times (Eric) 30x500 (Eric) Tripit (Evan) Steven Baxter's manifold series (Evan) Nathan Lowell's Trader Tales (Evan) Hugo and Nebula awards (Eric) Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive (Jeff) James Bond - Ian Fleming (Jeff) Robert Heinlein (Jeff) Goodreads (Chuck) Things (Chuck) Siri + Reminders on the iPhone 4S (Evan)

Panel Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Discussion 30x500 by Amy Hoy See Project Run Refactoring Redmine Redmine Tips Authoring Ebooks Chirk SAAS Freelance Funnel Newsletters iPhone Apps BDDCasts Rails Beginning course Evan's iPad app Scratch your own itch Marketing works well over time Batch up work Scheduling blog posts Bufferapp.com Budgeting time to do product development Marketing takes up the most time microconf Micropreneur Academy Why are you building what you're building? Project vs Product Momentum Marketing to build momentum 4 Hour Work Week Lean Startup How do you find a product to make that your market wants to buy from you? Yes, 50 scientific whatever,.... Product focused business - The product is the most powerful Market focused business - The market is the most powerful Opportunity cost of product development Time and location freedom Picks Seth Godin's blog post on "People think Photographers spend their time..." (Eric) 21 times (Eric) 30x500 (Eric) Tripit (Evan) Steven Baxter's manifold series (Evan) Nathan Lowell's Trader Tales (Evan) Hugo and Nebula awards (Eric) Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive (Jeff) James Bond - Ian Fleming (Jeff) Robert Heinlein (Jeff) Goodreads (Chuck) Things (Chuck) Siri + Reminders on the iPhone 4S (Evan)

asset title: Episode 8: Imperative - Your call is important to us filename: ra_08.mp3 track number: 8/22 time: 11:04 size: 9.08 MB bitrate: 112 kbps In 'Your call is important to us,' we begin looking at l'imperativo - one of the four formal verbal moods in Italian. The imperative is used to issue direct commands: you tell someone to do (or not to do) something. When you address someone formally in Italian, you use the third-person subjunctive, and that's a rather indirect method. In this episode, we're looking at the 'true' imperative, for first and second person. Let's listen as Antonella phones home from the Villa Borghese in Italy ...Dialog: A phone call from the Villa BorgheseitalianoAntonella: Oh, sì, Apollo e Dafne di Bernini, il più grande scultore mai esistito - incredibile! Questo posto è incredibile, Eric! È stupendo. C'è tutto: Tiziano, Caravaggio... Oh, oh, scusa, qui, io sono qui con i miei trentacinque studenti, che sono un po'... agitati. Dobbiamo entrare, dobbiamo comportarci bene, quindi ... però, no, sarà magnifico ... Okay, Eric, scusa un attimo, okay, un momento ...Ragazzi, per favore, state zitti! Sono al telefono!Finite di mangiare! Okay? Ah, lasciate gli zaini lì nel deposito! Metteteli ... Mettete le macchine fotografiche dentro, d'accordo? Sì, e, aspettatemi all'entrata, all'ingresso.Per favore, Grant, scusa, portami i biglietti ...Tu, Anna, Anna, no, no, non portare quel bottiglione d'acqua dentro. No. Grazie, mettilo nel cestino della spazzatura. Va bene, grazie. Oh, Eric, stavo dicendo, qua - Uh, ah, Cristina, ciao, ciao, bella, vieni, vieni ...Eric, niente, dobbiamo aspettare la prossima. Devo scappare, è arrivata la, la nostra guida. Senti, mi mancherai tanto, Eric ... Salutami tutti a Austin ...Eric: Sì, e rilassati, Antonella. Ma, senti, prima di andare via, dillo ancora una volta.Antonella: Ah, grazie. Arisentirci!EnglishAntonella: Oh, yes, Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. Bernini, the greatest scuptor there ever was - incredible! This place is incredible, Eric! It's stupendous.There's everything: Titian, Caravaggio ... Oh, oh, sorry, here, I'm here with my thirty-five students, who are a little ... shaken up. We have to go in, we have to behave ourselves, so ... but no, it will be magnificent ... Okay, Eric, sorry, just a second, okay, one moment ...Guys, please, quiet down! I'm on the phone!Finish eating! Okay? Ah, leave your backpacks there in the cloakroom! Put them ... Put your cameras inside, all right? Yes, and wait for me at the entryway, and the entrance.Please, Grant, excuse [me], bring me the tickets ...You, Anna, Anna, no, no, don't take that bottle of water inside. No. Thanks, put it in the wastebasket.That's fine, thanks.Oh, Eric, I was saying, here - Uh, ah, Cristina, hi, hi, my dear, come, come ...Eric, that's it, we'll have to wait til next time. I've got to run, she's here, our guide. Listen, I'm going to miss you so much ... Say hello for me to everyone in Austin ...Eric: Yes, and relax, Antonella. But listen, before you go, say it just once more.Antonella: Ah, thanks. Arisentirci! ('Until we hear each other again!')