Podcasts about even amazon

What happens when you decide to chase a dream despite overwhelming self-doubt? Melanie O'Reilly-Ralictors faced this exact question when planning her first-ever motherhood summit. Her powerful story demonstrates that courage isn't the absence of fear—it's moving forward despite it.Melanie, founder of Mostly Under Control, describes herself as "not a risk-taker at all," yet found herself planning an ambitious in-person event for mothers seeking deeper connection. With a background in early childhood education and having pivoted her business multiple times as her family grew (including the surprise of twins!), she realized her expertise could create something truly meaningful for women beyond standard parenting advice.The journey wasn't smooth. Fears of financial loss, disappointing speakers, poor attendance, and potential embarrassment plagued her planning process. What pushed her through? A combination of mindset shifts, unwavering support from her husband, business coaching, and a simple yet powerful mantra: "Even Amazon started in someone's garage." This perspective transformed her thinking from "I've only sold four tickets" to "I've already sold four tickets!"Most valuable is Melanie's practical advice for anyone contemplating their own leap of faith. She emphasizes surrounding yourself with the right people—those who see possibilities rather than obstacles. Her strategy of finding different types of supporters (cheerleaders, challengers, and implementers) creates a balanced network that propels you forward. As she discovered, "Nobody really knows what they're doing" in business—we're all figuring it out as we go.Ready to take your own leap? Join Insiders with a special 40% discount to access weekly trainings and monthly coaching calls that provide both accountability and practical strategies for growing your online business. Read more HERE.Support the show

In this week's episode, we continue our discuss about how seeking prestige can be dangerous for writers, specifically in the form of traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller list. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: DRAGONSHIELD50 The coupon code is valid through March 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 241 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2025. Today we are continuing our discussion of how to escape the trap of prestige for writers, specifically traditional publishing and The New York Times Bestseller List. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week.   This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book Two in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONSHIELD50. As always, I'll include the coupon code and the link to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through March 21st, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook as we start to head into the spring months, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report I am done with the rough draft of Ghost in the Assembly. I came in at 106,000 words, so it'll definitely be over a hundred thousand words when it's done. I'm about 20% of the way through the first round of edits, so I am confident in saying that if all goes well and nothing unexpected happens, I am on track to have it out in March. I am also 10,000 words into Shield of Battle, which will be the fifth of six books in the Shield War series and I'm hoping to have that out in April, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, recording for both Cloak of Dragonfire and Orc-Hoard is done. I'm just waiting for them to get through the processing on the various stores so they're available. There is also an audiobook edition of Half Elven Thief Omnibus One and Cloak Mage Omnibus Three that hopefully should be coming in March. More news with that to come.   00:01:55 Question of the Week   Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite subgenre of fantasy, high fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, LitRPG, cultivation, or something else? No wrong answers, obviously.   Cindy says: Epic fantasy or those with a good history for that world. The Ghost Series are fantastic at this.   Thanks, Cindy.   Justin says: I enjoy all those sub-genres, if they are done well. In times past I would've said comic fantasy, but that is because Terry Pratchett at his best was just that good.   Mary says: High fantasy.   Surabhi says: I'd honestly read anything fantasy that's written well and has characters I'm attached to, given that it's not too gritty. Bonus points if there's humor! Also, I love your books so much and they're the perfect blend of fantasy, adventure, and characters. Your books were what really got me into Sword and Sorcery.   Thanks, Surabhi.     Matthew says: See, that's difficult. I love my sabers, both light and metal. I would say urban fantasy crosses the boundary the most. If it's a captivating story, it will be read.   John F says: I can't choose one- Lord of the Rings or LWW, The Inheritance Cycle, The Dresden Files, Caina, Ridmark, or Nadia. I think what draws me is great characters who grow. The setting/genre is just the device. That's why I keep coming back to your books. You create great characters.   Thanks, John F.   John K says: I think I'm partial to historical fantasy. I enjoy all genres, but when I think of my favorites, they tend to be derivations of historical settings. Think Guy Gavriel Kay or Miles Cameron. That said, I was weaned on Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Jack Vance, so a strong sword and sorcery second place.   Juana says: High fantasy. Belgariad, Tolkien, dragons, et cetera.   Jonathan says: Sword and sorcery in space! Prehistoric sword and sorcery, sword and sorcery always.   Quint: says Sword and sorcery!   Michael says: Sword and sorcery.   For myself, I think I would agree with our last couple of commenters and it would be sword and sorcery. My ideal fantasy novel has a barbarian hero wandering from corrupt city state to corrupt city state messing up the business of some evil wizards. I'm also very fond of what's called generic fantasy (if a fighter, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard are going into a dungeon and fighting some orcs, I'm happy).   00:04:18 Main Topic of the Week: Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2   Now onto our main topic for the week, Escaping the Prestige Trap, Part 2, and we'll focus on traditional publishing and the New York Times Bestseller List this week. As we talked about last week, much of the idea of success, especially in the United States, is based on hitting certain milestones in a specific order. In the writing world, these measures of success have until fairly recently been getting an MFA, finding an agent, getting traditionally published, and hitting The New York Times Bestseller List. Last week we talked about the risks of an MFA and an agent. This week, we are going to talk about two more of those writing markers of prestige, getting traditionally published and having a book land on The New York Times Bestseller List. Why are they no longer as important? What should you devote your energy and focus to instead?   So let's start with looking at getting traditionally published. Most writers have dreamed of seeing their book for sale and traditional publishing for a long time has been the only route to this path. Until about 15 years ago, traditional publishing was the way that a majority of authors made their living. Now that big name authors like Hugh Howie, Andy Weir, and Colleen Hoover have had success starting as self-published authors (or in the case of authors Sarah J. Maas and Ali Hazelwood, fan fiction authors) and then are getting traditional publishing deals made for them for their self-published works. It's proof that self-publishing is no longer a sign that the author isn't good enough to be published traditionally. Previous to the rise of the Kindle, that was a common belief that if you were self-published, it was because you were not good enough to get traditionally published. That was sort of this pernicious belief that traditional publishing was a meritocracy, when in fact it tended to be based on who you knew. But that was all 15 years ago and now we are well into the age of self-publishing. Why do authors still want to be traditionally published when in my frank opinion, self-publishing is the better path? Well, I think there are three main reasons for that.   One of the main reasons is that the authors say they want to be traditionally published is to have someone else handle the marketing and the advertising. They don't realize how meager marketing budgets and staffing support are, especially for unknown authors. Many traditionally published authors are handling large portions of their own marketing and hiring publicists out of their own pocket because publishers are spending much less on marketing. The new reality is that traditional publishers aren't going to do much for you as a debut author unless you are already a public figure.   Even traditionally published authors are not exempt from having to do their own marketing now. James Patterson set up an entire company himself to handle his marketing. Though, to be fair to James Patterson, his background was in advertising before he came into publishing, so he wasn't exactly a neophyte in the field, but you see more and more traditionally published authors who you think would be successful just discontented with the system and starting to dabble in self-publishing or looking at alternative publishers like Aethon Books and different arrangements of publishing because the traditional system is just so bad for writers. The second main reason authors want to be traditionally published is that they want to avoid the financial burden of publishing. This is an outdated way of thinking. The barrier to publishing these days is not so much financial as it is knowledge. In fact, I published a book entirely using free open source software in 2017 just to prove that it could be done. It was Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, the fourth book in my science fiction series. I wrote it on Ubuntu using Libre Office and I edited it in Libre Office and I did the formatting on Ubuntu and I did the cover in the GIMP, which is a free and open source image editing program. This was all using free software and I didn't have to pay for the program. Obviously I had to pay for the computer I was using and the Internet connection, but in the modern era, having an internet connection is in many ways almost a requirement, so that's the cost you would be paying anyway.   The idea that you must spend tens of thousands of dollars in formatting, editing, cover, and marketing comes from scammy self-publishing services. Self-publishing, much like traditional publishing, has more than its fair share of scams or from people who aren't willing to take the time to learn these skills and just want to cut someone a check to solve the problem. There are many low cost and effective ways to learn these skills and resources designed specifically for authors. People like Joanna Penn have free videos online explaining how to do this, and as I've said, a lot of the software you can use to self-publish is either free or low cost, and you can get some very good programs like Atticus or Vellum or Jutoh for formatting eBooks for very low cost.   The third reason that writers want to be traditionally published is that many believe they will get paid more this way, which is, unless you are in the top 1% of traditionally published authors, very wrong. Every so often, there's a study bemoaning the fact that most publishers will only sell about $600 worth of any individual book, and that is true of a large percentage of traditionally published books. Traditional publishers typically pay a lump sum called advance, and then royalties based on sales. An average advance is about the same as two or three months of salary from an office job and so not a reflection of the amount of time it typically takes most authors to finish a book. Most books do not earn out their advance, which means the advance is likely to be the only money the author receives for the book. Even well-known traditionally published authors are not earning enough to support themselves as full-time authors. So as you can see, all three of these reasons are putting a lot of faith in traditional publishers, faith that seems increasingly unnecessary or downright misplaced. I think it is very healthy to get rid of the idea that good writing comes from traditional publishers and that the prestige of being traditionally published is the only way you'll be accepted as a writer or be able to earn a living as a full-time writer. I strongly recommend that people stop thinking that marketing is beneath you as an author or too difficult to learn. Whether you are indie or tradpub, you are producing a product that you want to sell, thus you are a businessperson. The idea that only indie authors have to sell their work is outdated. The sooner you accept this reality, the more options you will have. Self-publishing and indie publishing are admittedly more work. However, the benefits are significant. Here are five benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.   The first advantage of self-publishing is you have complete creative control. You decide what the content of your book will be; you decide what the cover will be. If you don't want to make the covers yourself or you don't want to learn how to do that, you can very affordably hire someone to do it for you and they will make the cover exactly to your specifications. You also have more freedom to experiment with cross-genre books. As I've mentioned before, publishers really aren't a fan of cross genre books until they make a ton of money, like the new romantasy trend.   Traditional publishing is very trend driven and cautious. Back in the 2000s before I gave up on traditional publishing and discovered self-publishing, I would submit to agents a lot. Agents all had these guidelines for fantasy saying that they didn't want to see stories with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures because they thought that was passe. Well, when I started self-publishing, I thought I'm going to write a traditional fantasy series with elves and orcs and dwarves and other traditional fantasy creatures just because I can and Frostborn has been my bestselling series of all time in the time I've been self-publishing, so you can see the advantages of having creative control.   The second advantage is you can control the marketing. Tradpub authors often sign a contract that they'll get their social media and website content approved by the publisher before posting. They may even be given boilerplate or pre-written things to post. In self-publishing, you have real time data to help you make decisions and adjust ads and overall strategy on the fly to maximize revenue. For example, if one of your books is selling strangely well on Google Play, it's time to adjust BookBub ads to focus on that platform instead of Amazon.   You can also easily change your cover, your blurb, and so forth after release. I've changed covers of some of my books many times trying to optimize them for increased sales and that is nearly impossible to do with traditional publishing. And in fact, Brandon Sanderson gave a recent interview where he talked about how the original cover of his Mistborn book was so unrelated to the content of the book that it almost sunk the book and hence his career.   You also have the ability to run ad campaigns as you see fit, not just an initial launch like tradpub does. For example, in February 2025, I've been heavily advertising my Demonsouled series even though I finished writing that series back in 2013, but I've been able to increase sales and derive a significant profit from those ads.   A third big advantage is that you get a far greater share of the profits. Most of the stores, if you price an ebook between $2.99 (prices are USD) and $9.99, you will get 70% of the sale price, which means if you sell an ebook for $4.99, you're probably going to get about $3.50 per sale (depending on currency fluctuations and so forth). That is vastly more than you would get from any publishing contract.   You also don't have to worry about the publisher trying to cheat you out of royalties. We talked about an agency stealing money last episode. Every platform you publish your book on, whether Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Smashwords and Apple will give you a monthly spreadsheet of your sales and then you can look at it for yourself, see exactly how many books you sold and exactly how much money you're going to get. I have only very rarely seen traditional publishing royalty statements that are as clear and have as much data in them as a spreadsheet from Google Play or Amazon. A fourth advantage is you don't have to worry about publishers abandoning you mid-series. In traditional publishing, there is what's called the Publishing Death Spiral where let's say an author is contracted to write a series of five books. The author writes the first book and it sells well. Then the author publishes the second book and it doesn't sell quite as well, but the publisher is annoyed enough by the decrease in sales that they drop the writer entirely and don't finish the series. This happens quite a bit in the traditional publishing world, and you don't have to worry about that in indie publishing because you can just publish as often as you want. If you're not happy with the sales of the first few books in the series, you can change the covers, try ad campaigns, and other strategies.   Finally, you can publish as often as you want and when you want. In traditional publishing, there is often a rule of thumb that an author should only publish one book a year under their name. Considering that last year I published 10 books under my name, that seems somewhat ridiculous, but that's a function of the fact that traditional publishing has only so much capacity and the pieces of the machine involved there are slow and not very responsive. Whereas with self-publishing, you have much more freedom and everything involved with it is much more responsive. There's no artificial deadlines, so you can take as long as you want to prepare it and if the book is ready, you don't have to wait a year to put it out because it would mess up the publisher's schedule.   So what to do instead of chasing traditional publishing? Learn about self-publishing, especially about scams and bad deals related to it. Publish your own works by a platform such as KDP, Barnes and Noble Press, Kobo Writing Life, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and possibly your own Payhip and/or Shopify store.   Conquer your fear of marketing and advertising. Even traditionally published authors are shouldering more of this work and paying out of their own pocket to hire someone to do it, and if you are paying your own marketing costs, you might as well self-publish and keep a greater share of the profits. The second half of our main topic, another potential risk of prestige, is getting on The New York Times Bestseller List. I should note that I suppose someone could accuse me of sour grapes here saying, oh, Jonathan Moeller, you've never been on The New York Times Bestseller List. You must just be bitter about it. That is not true. I do not want to be on The New York Times Bestseller List. What I would like to be is a number one Amazon bestseller. Admittedly though, that's unlikely, but a number one Amazon bestseller would make a lot more money than a number one New York Times Bestseller List, though because of the way it works, if you are a number one Amazon bestseller, you might be a New York Times Bestseller, but you might not. Let's get into that now.   Many writers have the dream of seeing their name on the New York Times Bestseller List. One self-help guru wrote about “manifesting” this milestone for herself by writing out the words “My book is number one on The New York Times Bestseller List” every day until it happened. Such is the mystique of this milestone that many authors crave it as a necessity. However, this list has seen challenges to its prestige in recent years. The one thing that shocks most people when they dig into the topic is that the list is not an objective list based on the raw number of books sold. The list is “editorial content” and The New York Times can exclude, include, or rank the books on the list however they choose.   What it does not capture is perennial sellers or classics. For example, the Bible and the Quran are obviously some of the bestselling books of all time, but you won't see editions of the Bible or the Quran on the New York Times Bestseller List. Textbooks and classroom materials, I guarantee there are some textbooks that are standards in their field that would be on the bestseller list every year, but they're not because The New York Times doesn't track them. Ebooks available only from a single vendor such as Kindle Unlimited books, ebook sales from not reporting vendors such as Shopify or Payhip. Reference Works including test prep guides (because I guarantee when test season comes around the ACT and SAT prep guides or the GRE prep guides sell a lot of copies) and coloring books or puzzle books.  It would be quite a blow to the authors on the list to realize that if these excluded works were included on the list, they would in all likelihood be consistently below To Kill a Mockingbird, SAT prep books, citation manuals, Bibles/other religious works, and coloring books about The Eras Tour.   Publishers, political figures, religious groups, and anyone with enough money can buy their way into the rank by purchasing their books in enormous quantities. In fact, it's widely acknowledged in the United States that this is essentially a legal form of bribery and a bit of money laundering too, where a publisher will give a truly enormous advance to a public figure or politician that they like, and that advance will essentially be a payment to that public figure in the totally legal form of an enormous book advance that isn't going to pay out. Because this is happening with such frequency, The New York Times gave into the pressure to acknowledge titles suspected of this strategy with a special mark next to it on the list. However, these books remain on the list and can still be called a New York Times Bestseller.   Since the list is not an objective marker of sales and certainly not some guarantee of quality, why focus on making it there? I think trying to get your book on The New York Times Bestseller List would be an enormous waste of time, since the list is fundamentally an artificial construction that doesn't reflect sales reality very well.   So what can you do instead? Focus on raw sales numbers and revenue, not lists. Even Amazon's bestseller category lists have a certain amount of non-quantitative factors. In the indie author community, there's a saying called Bank not Rank, which means you should focus on how much revenue your books are actually generating instead of whatever sales rank they are on whatever platform. I think that's a wiser approach to focus your efforts.   You can use lists like those from Publishers Weekly instead if you're interested in what's selling or trends in the industry, although that too can be manipulated and these use only a fairly small subset of data that favors retail booksellers, but it's still more objective in measuring than The New York Times.   I suppose in the end, you should try and focus on ebook and writing activities that'll bring you actual revenue or satisfaction rather than chasing the hollow prestige of things like traditional publishing, agents, MFAs, and The New York Times Bestseller List.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Listen in as Bradley unpacks the latest twists for Amazon product launch strategies, which may have sent sellers back to the drawing board. Bradley's tale with a bat bath mat launch illustrates the high stakes of this new game, and a PPC-centered approach has risen to the forefront. I'll guide you through the intricacies of setting introductory prices, navigating the minefield of buy box retention, and leveraging tools like Helium 10 to keep a finger on the pulse of your sales trajectory. This is an essential discussion for any seller aiming to crack the code of maintaining those coveted page one rankings in Amazon's ever-evolving marketplace. As we continue, you'll discover the fine art of pricing strategy and the critical role it plays in the aftermath of a product launch. Sharing his personal experience, Bradley reveals how calculated PPC maneuvers, without the reliance on top of search modifiers, propelled this product to the top, only for an unforeseen buy box loss to threaten everything. We'll also discuss the Maldives honeymoon method, a savvy technique to capitalize on Amazon's honeymoon period, and offer advice on how to regain your Buy Box and rankings with swift pricing adjustments. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting out, this conversation is packed with insights on optimizing your Amazon journey. In episode 550 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: 00:00 - Amazon Product Launch Strategy Changes 00:57 - Amazon Product Launch Strategy Insights 07:29 - Amazon Buy Box Pricing Strategy 09:27 - Amazon Honeymoon Method Success  21:00 - Optimizing Amazon Product Launch Strategies 27:42 - Safe Price for Buy Box Competition  29:54 - Tracking Amazon Variant Sales With Cerebro  Transcript   Bradley Sutton: There's something new that Amazon has been testing that could completely change how we do product launches, and I'm going to tell you exactly how I got to page one in my recent product launch but then lost it instantly because of this change. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we go and answer any and all of your Helium 10 questions, or even some general Amazon questions as well, and we usually go into a certain topic at first. Now, this time I didn't mention that I was going to go into a certain topic, but I want to show you guys something that could be happening when we're talking about Amazon product launches. That I think is very important.   Bradley Sutton: I wanted to show you what happened with my recent product launch testing that I did, and this is going to be interesting because it could impact how we launch products, just as a kind of like a recap. What kind of launch strategy do I use and have I been showing other people? Well, it's mainly has to do with PPC. All right, so I'm like hey, you have a product that has no reviews at the beginning. Well, you need to convince people that they're going to buy your product if they see it at the top of search in PPC, and so my strategy has always been, you know, since Amazon turned off the search find, buy that people want, you know you should try and do or two-step URLs is I would create a listing and then I decide at what price point do people or are people going to buy my product even though it has no reviews, or only one or two reviews where they're just like you know what? I have never heard of this brand. I see other products on this page. I have a couple hundred reviews, but dang, at this price point, I've got to go ahead and buy this other product, even though I've never heard of it.   Bradley Sutton: And so for some bath mats that I was selling for me, that price point was $9.99. All right, my list price is going to be $29 and my target price. I was like, hey, I want to start selling this around $24, if I can, right. And then so I was like you know what? At $9.95, I think, or $9.87, whatever I picked, I think that people are going to be like, well, this is a killer deal, I'm going to go ahead and buy it. And so what I've always taught is all right, well, you can either do a big coupon to get to that $9.95 price, like maybe a 50% off coupon if the price was like $19, right. Or the other thing is, do a sale price, because if I were to just change the regular price of the product and then try to raise it up, you guys know what would happen, right, the buy box would disappear after a certain point because Amazon would think that you're price gouging. So the way to get around that is using sale prices only, and the other thing that I was doing was trying to get the strike through pricing and in the past it would work like 80% of the time, where as long as I got one order at the regular price, the list price, then I did a sale price. I would usually like, again, 80% of the time I would get a, a strikethrough price on that list price. Bradley Sutton: So the first thing that I did for this launch, for this bat shaped bath mat say that five times fast was I created it at $9.97, like I said, and I did a sale price. All right, let me actually show you the listing. You guys can see this yourself. So if you type in bat bath mat, you'll probably see it. All right. So originally I put the price the first day I got some sales or I got one sale at the $29.97. You guys see right here, $29.97. You could see right down here. I actually had a sale on February 12th, all right, and then immediately I made a sale price of $9.97 and started getting sales. All right, let me let's actually look at the orders. By the way, maybe you guys didn't know you could do that. You could do it in Helium 10 here, where you look at your orders day by day and I also did the same thing for I tried some Tesla scenes for coffin shelves. So you see, February 22nd, I still have the price at $12.97. So I was like going up in price, but I want to find the first day that I actually had orders here. Here we go. You can see, February 19th. I was selling this for $9.97. Exactly like I said, but I know I got one at a higher price. Let's see if Helium 10 is going to show it for me. There's still $9.97 there. Hold on, what date are we on here? Let's see still 1697 for the coffin shelf. Now I'm at February 14th $9.97. Where was it? February? There it is. Look at that right there. Boom. Thank you, Helium 10 for showing me this right here. February. What is this date? This right here, February, what is this date? Uh, February 14th. I actually got sales at $29.97, but I did not get that strike through pricing. Now, immediately after I got that, look at that same day, I lowered the price as a sale price for $9.97. And, as you can see here, I was selling products left and right.   Bradley Sutton: I did a PPC campaign. All right, I made a special launch campaign inside of Atomic. Where it was, it was specifically to rank for my main keywords and I was getting the orders. I'll show you the actual campaign that I made. Like I started from day one with this special launch campaign where I was targeting top of search, not using the bid algorithm, not using the top of search modifier, but I was just targeting in general the top of search, and let me show you what happened on the keyword. So, like, everything was a success. Like you know, I've launched hundreds of products and it's always I always have success, but it was always the same business as usual. Uh, let me show you the keyword rank so you guys could see how it was going. Let me show you like bat bath mat was one of the main ones, and let's look at my rank history here. I'm going to explain what happened here, but look at this, all right. So right there, remember I launched a product like February 12th, February 13th, I had those orders. See where I was ranking for bat bath mat right away because of my the Title Density on this keyword is low. Without even doing anything. Before I even got that first order, look, I was at position 126, 128, right. And then what I did was I started my PPC campaign on that day. Let me show you where that's at. What I did was I started my PPC campaign on that day.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So I started my PPC. Remember? I got that first order on February 4th. Well, look at that. Why did I get that order? Look at this. On February 14th, I should say look at that. My position was number one, all right. So I was first. I was and this is why I don't use top of search modifiers. I could see from Helium 10 that every single hour almost, I was at the top of search on February 14th and 15th, all right. So now let me go into my Adtomic and see if I can find my original campaign that I did. So here's the exact campaign that I made in Adtomic and I don't think I'm running almost any of these anymore. I had a $40 a day. I had a $40 a day budget. And then the keywords that I was targeting are right here Bat bath mat, gothic bathroom rug, bat rug, bat bathroom rug. You see I just had these are like my main keywords and I did a high bid because I was trying to be top of search. And I didn't have to guess if I was going to be at top of search because I could see that in keyword tracker and even here in Adtomic under the search terms, it's showing me my keyword ranks right here. See, it's showing me my organic rank and my sponsored rank right here in Adtomic. And so, again, everything was business as usual. I started getting sales. Let's go back to my sales here. These are all organic. Organic in the sense that you know, I wasn't paying people to order my product or anything. These were just people seeing it in sponsored results. Look at this February 15th, I got one order, two orders. Let's keep going here. February 16th, I had two, three more or four organic orders, still at $9.97 price point. The February 17th, another two, three orders. So my PPC campaigns were working. How fast was I able to rank because of these one, two, three, four orders? Well, look here Bat bath mat in Helium 10 keyword tracker. Remember I was at position 125. We'll take a look here Within just two days, within one day, the very first day I got orders, I already jumped up to page one.   Bradley Sutton: That's the beauty about the Maldives Honeymoon method, guys, and the honeymoon period on Amazon. You can just do ridiculous things, especially with lower search volume keywords like this. Page one, position 23, from day one of my first sale and then towards the next day, February 15th, page one, position 11, I jumped up after a few more orders. Look at this. February 16th, two days after I got my first order, I'm at page one, position four. And then shortly thereafter I am at the very top of the search right here, page one, position two, three, four, consistently. All right. So everything was great. I'm like, boom, this is so good. And you look at my orders, they started picking up and so, because they were picking up, I started raising the price. Let me see if I can see what day I raised the price I still had on the 19th I was still at $10. Let's take a look here. You guys can see. Still on the 20th I was at $10. When did I raise the price here? And then I started raising, I think to $10.97, first of all and that was on February, let's see or $12.97. I jumped up at $12.97, all right, on February. When was this? February 22nd, and I was still selling really well, I still didn't have any reviews.   Bradley Sutton: So I wanted to keep that price low. But I started bringing that price gradually up and you can see that I did that actually here on the BSR graph, here on Helium 10. You can see that on oh there, it is right there. February 22nd I raised the price to $12.97. On February 28th I raised it to $14.97 because I'm like, hey, sales are still piling in, I don't need to keep that really low price point because I already got to page one for my main keywords. Alright, almost all my main keywords okay. Um, $14.97. I went to $15.97, $17.97. Uh, I did on March. What is this March 1st? But now all of a sudden take a look here, what happened? Where my BSR goes way down, all right here. Uh, at this point my BSR and sales went to almost zero. And look what happened in Keyword Tracker guys, all right, bat bath map, my main keyword, all of my main keywords on March 5th I lost the buy box. That's basically what happened, guys. All right, I lost the buy box. Now it dropped me to position 32. Look at this. It went from position 1 to 32 consistently for almost two weeks. I was doing it. Do you see here, guys, every single one of my keywords dropped to position 32. This is what we call the page 32 or position 32 glitch. But it's not really a glitch. This is like something Amazon has programmed in, where I lost the buy box. Now, why did I lose the buy box? This never happened before.   Bradley Sutton: Basically, it seems like I mean, at least it could be a test. But I literally did this on four different product launches all at the same time, and the same exact thing happened, where Amazon, even though I was using a sale price, is now kind of like considering the sale price, the regular price, and then so if you raise the price too much, you are not going to get the buy box back. All right, because Amazon thinks that you are price gouging. And I was like this is just flabbergasting me. What is going on? So I even went to azrank.com and I was like, hey, I need to have 10 orders, buy 10 orders at this $24.97 price, which is my regular price to send Amazon signals. I was just doing a test. I'm not trying to break Amazon terms of service or anything. It wasn't like search, find, buy or anything like that. But I said AZRank, please have 10 people buy it. And the cool thing about using AZRank is they give you a whole bunch of like customer information on your product. You know, like they say, hey, how's the packaging and how's the search experience and what are the other products on the page that they're clicking on? So it's not just a matter of trying to get quote, unquote, fake orders or anything like that. No, there's a reason. You get customer intelligence from AZRank. But for this particular reason or for this particular case, all I wanted to do was ask, or was try and see, what do I have to do to get the buy box back? And here's the thing 10 orders at 24, it wasn't enough.   Bradley Sutton: So it seems like Amazon has this rolling history now of price where they're going to suppress your buy box if they feel that you're price gouging. It's not like there's another listing somewhere else on Amazon or on another website that was at a certain price. No, so what I've been doing, little by little, I had to find out what price point I could get the buy box back, and that price point was at first, $17.97. All right, so I had to get the. I got the buy box back right here at $17.97. And then I'm like, okay, let me get some orders at $17.97. I did, and then I was like, all right, things are going good, let's go to $18.27. All right, so now I've been raising the price little by little, kind of like if you had to raise your regular price, and now I'm all the way at $20.97. I don't know why Amazon price history is saying is saying $27.97, but $20 and 97 cents, what is it, or no, $20.07.? And I still have, as you can see here, buy box. Even Amazon is throwing a coupon on here. Now I'm still getting sales, but now this means that I've been losing money for a little bit more time because, remember, my target price is $24.97. So what is my next thing that I am going to test here? Well, basically, if this is going to be permanent, if Amazon no longer allows you to do a sale price for too much, and then you're going to get buy box problems, and also, remember, amazon says you cannot run coupons anymore unless you have sales history. So if that's the case, you no longer are going to be able to do these crazy huge, deep discounts for too long to get people to buy your product. So what would be the strategy if this is the new normal? You guys let me know in the comments on the side have anybody been using this strategy in the last month and seen the same thing? Or you were able to discount 60% on a sales price, raise the price all the way up three weeks later and you'd be okay.   Bradley Sutton: But anyways, what my strategy is going to have to be now is I really have to know how many units I want to sell at that price. I send in let's just say it's 60 units. I send in 60 units to a certain SKU and then I make another. I said SKU, I meant ASIN. I need to make another variation of the product with different images, even though it's the same product, and then make it like somehow a variation and then send in maybe 200 or 300 products there and then those 60 units or 100 units at that low price. I do all I can do to get the ranking up and then I keep that other listing closed and then, once I run out of inventory and that's good. I've got my ranking. I've got some reviews from Vine which, by the way, when you do Vine, it's actually good to do Vine when you have the $9 price or the $10 price or $12 price, because then sellers or buyers from the Vine it doesn't count too much to their monthly quota or whatever plus, it just psychologically will tell them even though they're not paying a high or they're not paying anything. They'll be like oh wow, this is such an amazing product for this deal, so you want to do your vine during that time too. But anyways, you have to, you know, have 50 or a hundred units there and then when that unit, when that, turns off, you turn on your other product or your other ASIN, your other variation, which is basically the same product, but it's a separate ASIN and that ASIN you never had at the lower price. Theoretically speaking, again, I haven't tested this out because this is all stuff I've been doing the last two weeks here. Theoretically speaking, now you shouldn't have buy box issues and I can go ahead and have that product be at $24.97, which is what I would do here. I've got like six almost five-star reviews. This would be the time where I'd be like I want to try and sell this at $24.97. But right now, if I sell it at $24.97, it is going to take. You know what guys, let's do this together.   Bradley Sutton: I'm actually going to go ahead and see if I can put, if I can go ahead and um, put the price at 20, even $23.97. And let's see if I'm still getting that uh, still getting that block. So we're doing this together live guys. I am not making this stuff up. It's a live Amazon account. Let's go ahead and edit this listing and let's see in 15 minutes if I lost the buy box or not. All right, so I got my price $20.07. Let's go to, let's just go to $21.97. Maybe it's enough. Maybe I'll still be able to keep buy box at $21.97. So we will go ahead and do save and finish. Remind me, guys in a few minutes to refresh the Amazon page and let's see if I was able to keep the uh, to keep the buy box. But anyways, that's the issue of what's going on with launches right now. Really interesting stuff, in my opinion, how Amazon is changing stuff. But now this is your time for the rest of the show. So go ahead and give me some questions.   Bradley Sutton: Karina says how many days did it take to get the first reviews? Yeah, all those reviews are organic. Like that wasn't any of the Vine reviews I forgot I'm dumb. I forgot to do the Vine thing, like in my first couple of days. So like it took me a week to start the Vine. So those I got my first review like a week and a half in 100% organic from one of my first orders and I did not do follow-up emails for the very first ones. I didn't want to send follow-up email when I had such a big discount price. That's just me. Some people do it, but I'm just trying to be safe.   Bradley Sutton: Jennifer says what do you think is the best way to get reviews for new products? Absolutely Vine. Vine is definitely a good way. And then, of course, just having a good product right, have a good product and make sure that you know you're kind of over-delivering with quality and have a good unboxing experience and that's just going to give you a good chance to do, to do uh, to get a good review. And then, of course, use Follow-up, use Helium 10 Follow-up to do the request review and that'll increase your rate of review, usually at least five to 10%. Karina says I just got a bunch of two and three star reviews lately from the Vine community. Yeah, you gotta be careful If people don't like your product. I mean, if you got two and three stars from the Vine community, you might get two and three stars from regular people too. So that's why it's good to have a low price when they claim the product from Vine, because then it's going to give you a better chance, I should say, to have a good review. If you have a low price at the beginning, let's see if Amazon has updated the price yet.   Bradley Sutton: Oh, that was fast. Look at that, guys. I guess. Look at that. See, look at that. Buy box is gone. That's crazy right. Buy box is gone. That's crazy right. Buy box is gone. Now. I think this one is too fast, but it takes like a day for the search results. I think let's go ahead and look at the search results. If it already put me to position 32, probably take like a few hours. Yeah, I'm still position 3 right there and I still have that first one. But that's the thing, guys, I forgot to tell you when you lose buy box, guess what? No more PPC. Look what happened to my PPC during this time. Look at this, guys. You see it. You see how there's no blue line. That's because I had no buy box. So it's a lot of badness that happens if you had no buy box. So it's a lot of badness that happens if you lose the buy box. All right, so let me go ahead and change that back, cause I want to get my buy box back. So let's go back to $20.07. Let's make it $20.09, $20.06. All right, let's see how long it takes to get my buy box. Uh, get my buy box back on that.   Bradley Sutton: Karina says how do you set up the Follow-up emails for views? I just do the, the Amazon request or review template. All right, don't do the. I know helium 10 allows it and you can go ahead and try it, but to me, Amazon is so finicky these days with like language and saying it's against their terms of service for the Follow-up emails that it's not worth getting that 30-day ban from messaging your customers. I would just use the request to review one there. David says hey, Bradley, thanks for showing us how to keep track with your keywords.   However, when you run your campaigns, how do you compare them or make use of the tracking? So when I'm running a launch, my goal of course is on as many of my main keywords as possible. I want to get um top of search, you know, top five organic positions. So to get top of search, top five organic positions. So to get there I have to first be top of search in sponsored. I need to be in the first five, six sponsored locations. So the very first thing that I'm looking at, from the moment I create my PPC campaign and make it active, I turn boost on in Keyword Tracker, which is that red rocket ship, and then I'm looking at my sponsored rank. Am I showing up in the first five positions? If not, what does that mean? I've got to increase my bid on the keyword. Okay, and then I'm now. I'm at the top, I'm like good, all right. Now what's the next thing I'm looking at in keyword tracker after a couple of days I'm looking at all right, if I'm getting orders, which I can obviously see in Adtomic or Seller Central, if I'm getting orders for that keyword, is it having a positive effect on my organic placement and then, after my organic placement gets pretty strong, you know like I've been maybe top three, top four, top five, whatever I'm aiming for like five or six days. Now it's like, okay, now I don't have to be bidding so crazy. You know I do a down only, or no. I do a fixed bid when I do my launch campaigns in PPC and I do a crazy high amount. So then I start dialing back there. I still want to show up at the top of search and sponsored, but I don't do a fixed bid anymore and I start decreasing that until I know I can stay at the top in both situations.   Bradley Sutton: Well, Janik says what would you consider? A low Title Density number below five? Or zero, yes, below five, anything below five is going to give you a really good chance. If you, if you've got that keyword in your title and less than five people have it on page one, then yeah, you're going to have a lot better or an easier path to page one. Let's do a quick test again, guys. Did I get my buy box back? Did I screw something there It is okay. That scared me. I got my buy box back at $20.06. There, it is right there, all right, thank goodness.   Bradley Sutton: Ali says I see in Cerebro you are ranked for 677 organic keywords. Are you talking about my product? Are you running my product through Cerebro. Let's take a look here. What I just did is I went ahead and hit keywords right here on the page, maybe. Maybe Ali is looking at my product and let's see how many keywords we are ranked for. Yep, Ali is looking at my uh, my listing right here. You can do that with anybody's listing, all right. So it says 677 organic, 167 sponsored. How do we get ranked for so many keywords? Well, basically, yeah, it's through uh, either PPC is the sponsored ones. That's a hundred percent PPC. I've got some auto campaigns going. I don't have a manual campaign for 167 keywords. I can guarantee you that. But those 668 total keywords, that's just me ranking organically, like Amazon is gonna, if I get sales for bat bath mat, for example, right, I'm gonna start getting ranked, probably for bat bath mat for bathroom. I'm not saying that's an actual keyword, but longer tail versions of the keyword, even though I didn't get any sales for that one. It's like a kind of a flywheel effect there, all right, so the more, the more activity you get on your listing, the more keywords you are going to be ranked for.   Bradley Sutton: Hassan says how much funds did you invest in launching this product? That's a great question. I forgot how much I paid. Let me look I think the product was $3.50, that I paid for it and then I bought 1,000. So that's $3,500. Maybe it was like $1,500 to ship to me, another $500 to ship to Amazon, or no, not that much like $200 to ship to Amazon. The little bit that I shipped and then my PPC spend has been about a thousand dollars maybe. So yeah, we're looking at about $6,000 only on this product.   Bradley Sutton: Jennifer says what could be the safe price to increase percentage wise, to not lose the buy box. So it depends. So what I've been doing is just trying like five 10 cents at a time. Um, and you guys saw how fast it was. You'll know if you lose the buy box within like what, four, four minutes, five minutes of changing the price. So it's pretty easy to know what price is going to get you a buy box loss or not.   Bradley Sutton: Andy says in your opinion, how many units need to be sold to finish with launch phase? That's where the CPR number comes in handy with Helium 10. All right, in Helium 10, we have if you go in Keyword Tracker, you'll see a column that says CPR and that's based on how many orders we think you would need over eight days for that keyword. So just add up all your keywords that you're trying to rank for and that's going to be a number that.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's bring Sobi on to the stage here. All right, go ahead. What's your question? You're live.   Sobi: Hi. I was just researching 3PL last night and just comparing with the Amazon warehousing. Do you have any suggestion on which to use just to start a product?   Bradley Sutton: It depends so with the Amazon fees. Like one of the ways to get around those Amazon fees is by using Amazon logistics and Amazon warehousing. But there's also drawbacks too. I don't know the price structure. You know you've also got to trust Amazon about how, if you're fully using their AWD, trust that they're going to drip your inventory into Amazon in the best way that is good for you. So that is another reason why some people don't do it. But is it going to save you fees on a regular three part, a third, a third party warehouse? Uh, if you're only shipping to one, two locations, a hundred percent because there is no fees. Like you get around that Now. That being said, me, um, I have my own warehouse, so I'm like my own three PL. I'm not even thinking about using Amazon because I'm totally fine with using the partner carrier. So if you're, at the end of the day, you know there's different third party carriers out there or third party warehouses, get a quote from them, see what the storage is, see what the per order fee is, then go into Amazon and just see, get a quote from them to kind of see what it would be. And that's the only way that you go. You know what's going to work out better for you, all right.   Bradley Sutton: Next question here Jennifer says if a product is has more than one variant on Amazon, is there a way to know how much each variant is selling through Cerebro? Not Cerebro, I like using the Chrome Extension for that, all right. So in the Chrome Extension, hit review insights and then look at the breakdown of reviews by variation and then look at the estimated sales and then kind of like use that formula. So, if I see a coffin shelf with a black, green and blue version of it and then I look at the review insights with the Helium 10 Chrome Extension on that listing and I see the black one has 90% of the reviews and the green and the blue one have 5% each. I know, then that the black one is selling the best. That's just a. It's not an exact science, but at least gives you a rough estimate.   Bradley Sutton: Andy says what's a good unit session percentage from the sales and traffic report. That's actually in Helium 10 as well, and does it include PPC traffic? That's all the traffic there and um, and it says I had some days zero sessions and still had spent on PPC. Remember the clicks might not be showing up on that exact date per se, uh, but the report also might have had errors. If it says you had zero sessions it was probably a bug, like I would look back at it. Usually, Amazon fixes those bugs. So if you had zero sessions, I highly doubt that you have any day with zero sessions on your listing. So it's probably just a bug on Amazon. Go look back after a few days and it probably is fixed.   Bradley Sutton: Trab says is there a link where we can see Helium 10 live calls like this one? What type of these live calls are there and how are they scheduled? So this particular one is every week inside of Helium 10 Elite and our Serious Sellers Club, but once a month, like today, we open it up to YouTube. So if you guys want to know when we go live on YouTube or Facebook groups, hit subscribe right now in YouTube and then hit the notification button and then if we schedule a live, you'll get notified, if we have a live. But we also send it in our weekly seller update email. We send out a weekly seller update email, uh, and then we give people the links to these events that we're doing.   Bradley Sutton: Karina says do you use AI for product photos or are they done by a professional photographer? I use AMZ OneStep for all those pictures you saw of the bath mat and they did it all for me and a couple of images I did use the Helium 10 AI generated image maker. I see somebody just bought the bath mat. I wonder if it's somebody who was on this call. But I'm looking at my Helium 10 orders here and somebody just bought the bath mat at $20.07. So was that somebody on this call? Let me know. Somebody is helping out the cause here. Karina says how much is about seven photos done by a professional photographer. It can be anywhere between like 500 and a thousand dollars for the whole thing. But you're not just getting seven images. You might be getting images for your A plus content. You might be getting variations of your images that they could send you, um, but a whole photo shoot usually about a thousand bucks, I would say, depending on the photographer, depending if they're using 3D and things like that.   Bradley Sutton: All right, guys, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Uh appreciate, uh appreciate you the attendance and a lot of great questions week. Don't forget that every week we do this in our Helium 10 Elite group and our Serious Sellers Club group and then we also do this once a month on YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook, so make sure to set notifications on there. If you guys want to comment further on it, you can do that on my Instagram for the podcast, which is Serious Sellers Podcast on Instagram. But thank you, guys for joining today and have a great rest of your week. See you guys later. Bye-bye now.

We're back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10's Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. How Amazon is using AI to ensure authentic customer reviews https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-ensure-authentic-customer-reviews Temu, Shein far lag Amazon as online holiday shopping ramps up https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/temu-shein-far-lag-amazon-online-holiday-shopping-ramps-up-2023-11-22/ Amazon to Launch Live Shopping Deals During Black Friday Football Game on Prime Video https://variety.com/2023/shopping/news/amazon-black-friday-football-game-prime-deals-1235805778/ Hyundai to Sell Vehicles on Amazon Starting in 2024 https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45896102/hyundai-amazon-car-sales-2024/ Stay tuned as we discuss the latest new features from Helium 10 and share some valuable newsletters to keep you in the loop. Later on, we share some game-changing strategies with Mina Elias for auditing your Amazon PPC campaigns. You'll learn how to manage campaigns effectively and monitor and improve campaign performance. Join us for this exciting episode! In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 01:02 - AI Review Police 03:20 - Temu, Shein Lagging 04:53 - Black Friday Football 06:45 - Amazon Posts Videos 08:15 - Hyundai Buy Box 10:00 - Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter 11:00 - Commerce Accelerated 11:35 - Weekly Buzz 12:19 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts 16:20 - ProTraining Tip: How To Audit Your PPC Campaigns with Mina Elias ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos   Transcript Bradley Sutton: Amazon is employing AI to police fraudulent reviews. Timo and Sheen are lagging in holiday sales. This week is the first ever Amazon Black Friday football game. You soon can have videos for Amazon Post. These and much more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Bradley Sutton: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on as far as news goes in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you all the latest new Helium 10 features that have been released this week and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, today is Thursday. Yes, I'm recording this on Thursday. Yes, it's an American holiday, but we at the weekly buzz do not take any time off, guys. We want to make sure you guys know what's going on out there, so let's go ahead and hop right into the news.   Bradley Sutton: The first article of the day is actually a was a press release by Amazon, and it's entitled how Amazon is Using AI to Ensure Authentic Customer Reviews. All right, you know a lot of us worry, sometimes complaining about, you know, a lot of competitors doing some black hat strategies in reviews, right, and so this article goes in to talk about how advanced AI helps publish authentic reviews and weed out the fake ones. You know it mentions how the vast majority of reviews pass this Amazon bar of authenticity and they get posted right away, but that they're using AI to kind of look or try and detect if there's potential review abuse and if that happens, they either delete the review, they take action against the reviewer A lot of interesting things this article talks about. Now, the thing that almost kind of like worried me was that I still see, in 2023, a lot of obviously fraudulent reviews. You know where it's reviews that have to do with, you know products that you know are not even part of. You know the listing and a whole bunch of other things. This article was talking about how, in 2022, amazon observed and blocked more than 200 million fake reviews. So it's like that's kind of crazy if you think about it. Like that's last year and this year I'm still seeing reviews like man. That's a lot of reviews and a lot of you know, fake reviews and bad reviews. So it's funny because you know, we've been talking about that FTC lawsuit and I I've always mentioned how there is like so many other things I think that Amazon sellers are worried about. Uh, as far as Amazon goes, that the things that that FTC thing is and I would say the like, the fake reviews is one of them where all of a sudden, some new competitor comes in and within like three days, there's like a thousand reviews or or all of us, and they, they merge a whole bunch of listings and or resurrect some dead listing, those reviews for a phone case, but you know it's really for a coffin shelf or something. I mean, these are the things that, uh, you know I think a lot of Amazon sellers hope that you know Amazon would crack down more on. Hey, this article might be a move in the right direction If it's utilizing more advanced AI. Obviously, ai in 2023 and 2024 is not what it was in 2022. So maybe there is uh kind of like light at the end of this tunnel.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled T moon Shane lag far behind as online holiday shopping uh ramps up. So you know, like I've been talking about this cause it comes up in the news a lot, how you know they're making a lot of waves, so many people are going to their websites and stuff. But I'm not. I never really was worried, uh, about you know, t moon she like biting into Amazon sales. Even Amazon's not worried. We talked about in the weekly buzz before how Amazon is not even doing price matching on these websites Cause it doesn't even really consider it like on the same level. Now, uh, similar web in this article said that hey, nine out of 10 visitors to T moon and sheen and when I say a lot, you know visitors there's millions of uh, uh visitors coming this holiday season. This article says nine out of 10 are window shoppers, not buyers. All right, sheen's website drew 28.6 million unique visitors in October, which is up from a year before, but visits that resulted in actual transactions, you know, a visit to the website that ended up in a sale went down to 4.1%. How does Amazon compare? 56% of Amazon's 268 million monthly visits in October resulted in sale. So, again, like I don't think Amazon is is scared or we as Amazon sellers need to worry about all this traffic that's going to, like T moon and sheen, people are not really buying on there right now. You know things could, of course, change, but as of now you can. You could see that. You know, buyer intent is really lacking on those other websites.   Bradley Sutton: Uh, speaking of Amazon, uh, this next article is from Variety. The title is Amazon to launch live shopping deals during black Friday football game on prime video. All right, so the very first ever black Friday football game is happening. Usually, you know, thursday, thanksgiving, Thursday, football is kind of a big thing. Now, the first ever Amazon black Friday game and it's going to be broadcast on Amazon and says deals are going to go live during pre game, half time and post game sales. All right, and there will also be one big limited time deal per quarter.   Bradley Sutton: Now there's rumors about what these might be. You know some say it's like. You know, might be some big uh from beats by Dre and Lego and different things. Now you might think, well, you know that it doesn't. That's not me, you know I don't have my deals on there. But again, we've been talking about kind of like a move by Amazon to start having more deals with their prime video and their video assets, and even though this might not have regular third party sellers.   Bradley Sutton: You know we're not going to afford uh, you know, a spot in this once a year. You know, you know football game. But imagine, you know if millions of people are watching football and you know a certain percentage of them are going to go to buy these beats by Dre, or these legals or these other things. Now, all of a sudden guess what? It's a you know, commercial time, or it's a break, it's halftime, they're on the Amazon app and they're buying something else, but now that they might go ahead and browse other other things, you know. So this is good for for Amazon sellers. Even though you might not be taking advantage of this exact kind of advertising, you are advantaged by it because Amazon is sending all of this new traffic directly to Amazon and hopefully you know that they can find their way to one of your listings if they start browsing, you know, while they're waiting for the second half to start, or something like that.   Bradley Sutton: So, interesting, interesting things, how you know, the world of advertising for, for Amazon and the world of sports and entertainment is coming a little bit more together. Next, one article is actually just from you know, from my buddy, jeff Cohen's LinkedIn. I've been seeing this. You know multiple people post about this. I don't have access to this in my account but I wanted to, you know, show Jeff's post here because he was the first one that I saw talk about it. But on LinkedIn he says that Amazon post is going to soon support video. So Amazon post, you know, hopefully you guys are utilizing that. We've talked about how you can use the Amazon AI and the helium 10. I had to create images and captions completely automatically with Amazon or for for Amazon posts, but soon you're now going to be able to upload video. You know I personally have been seeing Amazon posts come up more in search results than in the past. Perhaps you've seen that before. So imagine if now in the search results you can see Amazon posts that have video. All right, so it's going to be pretty cool. Jeff talks about here in his his LinkedIn posts that he says that, hey, shoppers who interact with a post end up performing 45% more branded searches, and brands with 10 plus post have, on average, compared to brands with fewer than 10 posts, two and a half more time store visits and almost four times more followers. And so you know, the thought being that, hey, that's just with static images. How much more could, potentially, having video now increase your branded search and some of your traffic? So if you don't have it in your Amazon post section yet, you know, like me, it's probably going to come in the next few days for you. All right.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is actually from car and driver First time we're quoting car and driver here in the weekly buzz and it's entitled Hyundai to sell vehicles on Amazon starting in 2024. All right, says looking for a 2024 Hyundai, look no further than your Amazon Prime account. Now, again, does this affect third party sellers? You know, maybe, maybe not. I just thought this was an interesting kind of like article here, because that's just kind of crazy If you think about where things are going now. Basically, this article is saying that, hey, you're going to be able to like, pick your color and everything. You're going to use the buy box. There's going to be different dealers that maybe have different offerings. Different dealerships are now playing the game of fighting for the buy box like arbitrage sellers. There's no, there's no haggling here, and I just think it's like kind of like fascinating where the world of online commerce is going to. You know, buying brand new cars online is not new, but Amazon obviously is going to be the biggest website ever to sell new cars. And who knows, you know, maybe I'm just waiting for the first dealership to make a mistake on their coupon and they don't realize there's some coupons or deal of the day stacking and I'll be able to get a new Hyundai Santa Fe for like 50% off or something. My very first ever new car was a 1999 Hyundai Elantra. So yeah, I kind of only drive like he is and things now, but I still love my Korean car. So, who knows, maybe I might be one of the ones to be one of the first ones to buy a brand new car on Amazon.   Bradley Sutton: All right, that's it for the news articles this week. Actually, not that much going on Now. Before we get into the helium 10 new feature alerts, I wanted to call attention to a couple of newsletters. I've never really been one to promote newsletters, never even had my own until a couple of weeks ago, but there's only three newsletters that I subscribe to, or that I actually read out of all the ones out there, and so the first one is actually the billion dollar sellers newsletter. All right, so that's made by, obviously, kevin King from the helium 10 elite program and the AMPM podcast. It's very, very valuable. All right, there's not BS in here. There's actionable strategies. There's not a whole bunch of fluff. A lot of humor in there, though. So if you guys want to get strategies that you can use right away and some no BS newsletter, go ahead and go to h10.me forward slash BDSN. H10.me forward slash BDSN. Completely free to subscribe to that newsletter and a lot of great stuff. That's the first kind of like outside newsletter I ever read in my life, just because it's the only one worth it to me.   Bradley Sutton: Another one that I've been subscribing to for a little while is made by Pacvue's own Melissa. All right, so this is on LinkedIn and this is called commerce accelerated. So if you guys want to subscribe to it, go to h10.m/melissa. Another great newsletter. A lot of advertising in there and a lot of, you know, high level strategies as well as stuff that affects, you know, third party sellers. The last article was a recap on Amazon unboxed that Melissa was at, and so I highly recommend subscribing to that newsletter. And then, of course, you know shameless plug. The last newsletter is the new weekly buzz newsletter that I'm doing. It's not just like a transcript of this weekly buzz. I go break down all of the news articles and have some video on there and some other. You know strategies as well. So if you guys want to subscribe on LinkedIn to my Helium 10 weekly buzz newsletter, just go to h10.me/newsletter. h10.me/newsletter. All right, now let's get into the Helium 10 new feature alerts. Every week, we are launching new tools, new features, new functionality. A lot of it comes from you, the users. So what do we have cooking for this week? Even though it's a short week, we still launching things. The very first one I want to talk about is for Cerebro and Magna, and these are custom filters.   Bradley Sutton: This has been asked for by a lot of you out there and you know you guys all have maybe your own strategy of how you run Cerebro as part of your process, like right, like maybe. Hey, I'm going to analyze, you know, 15 different niches and for everyone, one of my criteria. For example, what do I have? Here I'm showing a search volume of a minimum 400. And then a minimum number of one competitor. Maximum two are ranking between one and 20. And these keywords have a title density of three, like, like. There's like six filters that I'm using right there. Now, if you're having to do this search 10 times a day, right, because you know you're just doing some bulk research, it's probably a hassle for you to have to, one by one, re-enter all of these filters in. So now what we have is, once you enter some filters, at the very bottom of Cerebro, you are going to want to go ahead and hit this button called save as filter preset, right. And once you hit that button, another window will come up allowing you to go ahead and put a preset name and you can say, hey, this is my, you know, keyword research version one or whatever. And now this is going to show up as a one click filter at the very top of Cerebro, so that when you get into Cerebro, you enter the ASINs, you can just hit one button and it automatically populates your filters. Same thing for magnet. All right, let's say I have this process where I'm like hey, I out of all these keywords from what came out from, you know, these thousands of keywords that came out inside of my magnet search show me everything that has 500 search volume, that's at least three words, and that there's only 300 competing products for this keyword. Right, again, it might take a little bit of time to enter all these filters in. Once you do that again, just hit the save as filter preset and what's going to happen is you can just name this filter and then now, when you enter in, go into a magnet search, you are going to be able to just, you know, hit that button and your exact filters are going to come out.   Bradley Sutton: The next and the only other update for the days is for those of you who are on the Helium 10 supercharge. You know, plan our supercharge plans for like eight, nine figure sellers. You guys have some pretty crazy graphs that you're going to be able to do, all right. So on your insights dashboard you're at the very bottom there's a, there's a button that says add a chart, right, you know everybody else has access to this too, but you got supercharged members have access to kind of like a crazy, crazy next level charting system. All right, and this is just the beginning.   Bradley Sutton: So it takes you to a new page and then basically, what you're going to want to see is you can choose any two metrics that you want to compare, like, hey, I'm going to compare my ad click through rate with my unit soul. I want to compare RoAS, ACoS, ad spend and net profit. You know, all in the same chart. I want you know the dates to be preset. At this. I mean, like, pretty much, you're going to be able to now take anything that is in your, you know, helium 10 account, which comes from seller central, obviously all of your data, and then start putting it on graphs and tables and compare different things that you normally wouldn't be able to compare, because a lot of again, why do we have this? A lot of people were saying, hey, I love the data that's in Helium 10, but I end up having to, like, download it into Excel files and make my own power points and reports. No longer you can just compare anything you want, download the graphs and, and you know, make tables, et cetera. So that is for supercharged members. All right, that's it for the Helium 10 new feature alerts for this week.   Bradley Sutton: Last up, we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a PPC training tip, and it's with a guest speaker, mina Elias, who you guys all know and love, and this one is going to be about how you can audit your account. Like, maybe you haven't been paying enough attention to your PPC, well, how can you go in there and give it an audit, mina, let us know how. Mina question that we've gotten from our audience is hey, you know, I've been running PPC for a while. I'm running it on my own for now. How can I run like an audit to know if I'm doing well or not? What are the things that you look at so that somebody can really understand like, hey, I'm doing excellent. Or you know what? I need some improvement here and there?   Mina: Yeah, so I'll walk you through our audits and basically how I do an audit like step by step. Step number one I'm looking at portfolios. Are you organizing your products into portfolios, you know? Do you have like multiple child ASINs that are that have different campaigns, or are you lumping all of your, your child ASINs into the same campaigns? So then I would create the portfolios.   Mina: Next is my campaign naming convention. So are the campaigns named? Easily? For us it's like product code space dash space. You know the type of the ad, like close match, loose match, complements or substitutes, if it's auto, broad phraser, exact, product targeting, expanded ASIN, so what's the type of the ad? Space dash space. And then it's like the purpose of the ad. So if it has a purpose like ranking or you know branded, something like that, if it's like brand, brand name, and then you know space dash space, the source of the keywords, and so that's like if it came from helium 10 or if it came from the search term report or if it's like a main keyword or something like that. And that allows me to sort through campaigns pretty quickly, because whenever I'm looking at like show me all of the performance of my, like exact, you know keyword campaigns, then I can just type in exact in the search and it pops up.   Mina: Next I'm looking at the budgets of the campaigns, especially for campaigns that are either running out of budget or have a good row as. So if your campaign has a low a cost or a good row as, there's no reason that the budget should be low, even if you feel like, okay, my budget's $50 and I'm only spending $25 a day, it doesn't matter. Because what I've noticed is if I go from 50 to 250, I'll go from spending $25 a day to $80 a day, and if the ACOS is good, then you're just going to make more sales with the good ACOS it's definitely worth trying. And then if you're running out of budget, obviously that's also red flag. You should always control your spending based on a bid level. So lower the bids to spend less, as opposed to capping, you know, your spend on a budget level, because that I've seen just kind of effects performance negatively.   Mina: Then from there I'm going to click into the campaigns and I'm going to make sure that each of them have only one ad group. What I've noticed is multiple ad groups cause like, let's say, you have $100 budget, it could be $80 to one ad group and 20 to another ad group Again doesn't make any sense. I don't know why it happens, but it's something I want to avoid, because it could be that the $20 ad group is the one that has the better row, as but Amazon is. Primary objective is to make you sell more. And then, once I'm in the ad groups, the next thing I'm looking for is how many keywords do you have in there? If you have, you know, more than five keywords, I start suspecting that you might have keywords at the bottom not getting enough like budget. So I'll just sort by sales or sort by spend and then I'll see. Okay, you know keyword number one, two, three, four, five, they all have sales. But like six, seven, eight, they have like one sale in the last 30 to 60 days. And then keyword number nine onwards, they don't have any sales. So those keywords are all areas of opportunity. If I pause those keywords in that campaign, move them to, you know, create a new campaign with those keywords, give them another, another chance. With a good budget they could end up spending a lot more money on making sales. So that's the next thing that I look for.   Mina: Then I go into the placements tab. So, you know, do I find any placements like top of search or product pages where the ROAS and the click through rates are significantly better than they are in the rest of search? So, for example, if I look at, you know, in a campaign, I look at the placement tab and I see the top of search has like a 8% click through rate instead of like a 0.4 in rest of search and it has like a 7x ROAS instead of a 3x ROAS. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the bid by placement, you know, by 25% or something like that, just a small number, to what I'm telling Amazon is, if my bid is a dollar, I'm allowing you to spend up to a dollar and 25 cents. If it means that I'm going to show up on the top of page one, because, you know, I've seen, based on the data I'm converting, well, there, then I'm going to go into the targeting tab or the bulk sheet. You know, if you don't know how to use the bulk sheet, just stick to the targeting tab.   Mina: In the targeting tab I'm sorting for keywords that are not profitable, so only exact and product targeting. I'm going to, you know, just do either two types of keywords. One where I'm like orders equals zero and spend is greater than a certain number. So orders equals zero means it didn't make me any sales and I spent money. Let's say I spent more than $15, or like half of my product costs, with no sales.   Mina: I'll tell you how to handle them in a second. So those ones, I'm going to lower the bids or eat or pause them. You know, if it's spent $30 in the last 90 days and it didn't make any sales, just at this point it's not going to make any more sales. It could in the future, once you conversion rate significantly higher, but not right now.   Mina: So, and then the other thing is okay, I'm going to just sort by a cost. So show me everything that's greater than 75% echoes and again all of those. And warning guys, you know, for anything that's greater than 75% echoes, do not touch things that have a really good, like a really high number of sales, because the ACoS could be bad but in reality it could be driving a lot of sales, even on the organic side that it's just not being attributed. So again, ACoS is high. I'm going to lower the bids and then vice versa, I'm going to sort by anything that has like a row as greater than, let's say, 5x, for example, and then I'm going to increase the bids of all of those keywords, meaning I'm willing to show up higher in the search. And you can always do like a cross check with you know cerebral and see where you're ranking organically for those keywords. If you're ranking organically and sponsored high, you don't need to increase the bids, but if your organic and sponsored rank is low and your row as is good, it's worth trying to increase the bids, get more visibility, more clicks and more sales. Then I'm going to go into the search term report. That's the final piece. And in the search term report, again two directions.   Mina: Number one keywords that are not working. This is for auto broad phrase and expanded ASIN. The reason is for a broad keyword, it could be 30 different keywords that are being triggered in the search terms that are, you know, resulting in bad performance. So maybe five of them, 10 of them are bad, like low row as or spending, no sales, and then five or 10 are very good. So you want to keep the good ones and then negative the bad ones. So, again, a filter sales equals zero, spend greater than $15.   Mina: Take all of those keywords and go into the campaigns and add them as negatives, negative, exact, and then you know a cost greater than 85%. Again, be careful for keywords that are generating a lot of sales. But I can take all of those keywords, add them as negatives in the campaigns and then vice versa, I can identify any keywords with like greater than five RoAS. Take all of those keywords, find which match types they're not currently being targeted in. So maybe they're in broad, they got discovered in broad but I'm not actually targeting them in an exact campaign or a broad campaign or whatever. And then I take those keywords and start launching them in new campaigns so I can get more visibility on those keywords. But that's essentially what I'm doing, that, step by step, awesome.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right guys. So if you want to get more tips from Mina about how to you know run PPC, make sure to check out his company and hubhealium10.com. You can look for Trivium. Or if you have a platinum account or higher, make sure to check out PPC Academy. It's in your learning hub on your Helium 10 dashboard. He's got tons of great modules there. Mina, thanks a lot for joining us.   Mina: Thanks for having me All right.   Bradley Sutton: Thanks very much, Mina, for that, and thanks to all of you guys for tuning in. Hope you guys enjoyed this edition and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Join Isaiah as he explains the STAR Method and how you can learn to use it to impress employers during an interview. Here's a quick rundown of this week's episode… From This Week's Show… The STAR Methodology Can Guide You Through The Answer To Tough Interview Questions As a PhD, you have a diverse portfolio […] The post The STAR Method Of Interviewing (Even Amazon Uses It) appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

As Jeff Bezos waves a caution flag, Abe shares ideas to help “recession proof” your savings. Plus, is it time for “aggressive tax planning.” Connect at RetirementKeyRadio.com.

Amazon can deliver lots of things. But it can't deliver everything. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/a-champions-mind35/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/a-champions-mind35/support

Timestamps: 0:00 Grandma Linus 0:09 Intel's new partnership 1:14 Are our motherboards safe?? 2:17 Even Amazon isn't safe from inflation 3:26 Sponsor - Seasonic 3:57 Quickbits! 4:00 Instagram's giving you videos whether you like it or not 4:30 Shopify faces mass layoffs 5:19 The Quest 2 is going UP in price?! 6:01 Twitter forcing Musk to court over acquirement 6:39 Russia is leaving space 7:23 Outro News Sources: https://lmg.gg/Q4IKu

On today's Lunch With Norm, we are joined by the CGO of Sifted, Caleb Nelson! We are discussing what goes wrong with Amazon FBA fulfillment processes and how to get reimbursements. Find out on today's episode how sellers get reimbursed and what steps can they take? Also we learn how to determine how much certain products cost and if they are even profitable. Caleb is supply chain/final mile delivery expert focused on simplifying the complexities of transportation. He is an experienced entrepreneur with a demonstrated history of success in business startup and growth. This episode is brought to you by Post Purchase Pro Post Purchase PRO specializes in helping Amazon sellers create more sales, ranking, and reviews through post purchase marketing. Finally your email marketing can be actively managed by professionals with over 30 years experience so you can focus on running your business. Increase repeat purchases, drive better organic search term ranking, get more reviews, and build a real asset. For more information visit https://www.postpurchasepro.com/lunch This episode is brought to you by Startup Club Startup Club is the largest club on Clubhouse supporting the Startup ecosystem. Startup Club offers an exciting sense of belonging to established and aspiring entrepreneurs, startup businesses, and companies wanting to Learn, Connect, and Grow. Join us for conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, subject matter experts, and more. For More information visit https://Startup.club In this episode, we are joined by Caleb Nelson, the CGO of Sifted! Today we are discussing what goes wrong with Amazon FBA fulfillment processes and how to get reimbursements. Caleb is supply chain/final mile delivery expert focused on simplifying the complexities of transportation. This episode is brought to you by Startup Club, Post Purchase Pro, and HONU Worldwide.

The whole gang is together once again and the drinks are flowing.. We catch up with what has been going on in their worlds recently.. Work,work,work and bullshit seams to be the way of the walk.. Who likes amazon? What do you buy off amazon? What does the guys think about Amazon? Oh boy we find out... Dust goes over his Amazon purchase list.... Take notes... MEDIA TIME!! The guys discuss the Paramount + series "The Offer" A biographical drama miniseries about the devolpment and production of The Godfather.. This turns into a good Godfather trilogy discussion.. Then we out... BYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Prices are skyrocketing, and everyone is buying less stuff. Even Amazon's sales projections are sinking. Find out if a recession is looming… and whether you should throw money into the market.

About AndrewI create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.Links: ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/ PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown TranscriptAndrew: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is… well, he's challenging to describe. He's the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training, Inc. but everyone knows him better as Andrew Brown because he does so many different things in the AWS ecosystem that it's sometimes challenging—at least for me—to wind up keeping track of them all. Andrew, thanks for joining.Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: How do I even begin describing you? You're an AWS Community Hero and have been for almost two years, I believe; you've done a whole bunch of work as far as training videos; you're, I think, responsible for #100daysofcloud; you recently started showing up on my TikTok feed because I'm pretending that I am 20 years younger than I am and hanging out on TikTok with the kids, and now I feel extremely old. And obviously, you're popping up an awful lot of places.Andrew: Oh, yeah. A few other places like PolyWork, which is an alternative to LinkedIn, so that's a space that I'm starting to build up on there as well. Active in Discord, Slack channels. I'm just kind of everywhere. There's some kind of internet obsession here. My wife gets really mad and says, “Hey, maybe tone down the social media.” But I really enjoy it. So.Corey: You're one of those folks where I have this challenge of I wind up having a bunch of different AWS community Slacks and cloud community, Slacks and Discords and the past, and we DM on Twitter sometimes. And I'm constantly trying to figure out where was that conversational thread that I had with you? And tracking it down is an increasingly large search problem. I really wish that—forget the unified messaging platform. I want a unified search platform for all the different messaging channels that I'm using to talk to people.Andrew: Yeah, it's very hard to keep up with all the channels for myself there. But somehow I do seem to manage it, but just with a bit less sleep than most others.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like trying to figure out, like, “All right, he said something really useful. What was that? Was that a Twitter DM? Was it on that Slack channel? Was it that Discord? No, it was on that brick that he threw through my window with a note tied to it. There we go.”That's always the baseline stuff of figuring out where things are. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, you are the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro, which is interesting because unlike most of the community stuff that you do and are known for, you don't generally talk about that an awful lot. What's the deal there?Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of people give me a hard time because they say, Andrew, you should really be promoting yourself more and trying to make more sales, but that's not why I'm out here doing what I'm doing. Of course, I do have a for-profit business called ExamPro, where we create cloud certification study courses for things like AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, but you know, that money just goes to fuel what I really want to do, is just to do community activities to help people change their lives. And I just decided to do that via cloud because that's my domain expertise. At least that's what I say because I've learned up on in the last four or five years. I'm hoping that there's some kind of impact I can make doing that.Corey: I take a somewhat similar approach. I mean, at The Duckbill Group, we fixed the horrifying AWS bill, but I've always found that's not generally a problem that people tend to advertise having. On Twitter, like, “Oh, man, my AWS bill is killing me this month. I've got to do something about it,” and you check where they work, and it's like a Fortune 50. It's, yeah, that moves markets and no one talks about that.So, my approach was always, be out there, be present in the community, talk about this stuff, and the people who genuinely have billing problems will eventually find their way to me. That was always my approach because turning everything I do into a sales pitch doesn't work. It just erodes confidence, it reminds people of the used mattress salesman, and I just don't want to be that person in that community. My approach has always been if I can help someone with a 15-minute call or whatnot, yeah, let's jump on a phone call. I'm not interested in nickel-and-diming folks.Andrew: Yeah. I think that if you're out there doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of it, it becomes undeniable the value you're putting out there, and then people just will want to give you money, right? And for me, I just feel really bad about taking anybody's money, and so even when there's some kind of benefit—like my courses, I could charge for access for them, but I always feel I have to give something in terms of taking somebody's money, but I would never ask anyone to give me their money. So, it's bizarre. [laugh] so.Corey: I had a whole bunch of people a year or so after I started asking, like, “I really find your content helpful. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” And it's, I don't know how to charge people a dollar figure that doesn't have a comma in it because it's easy for me to ask a company for money; that is the currency of effort, work, et cetera, that companies are accustomed to. People view money very differently, and if I ask you personally for money versus your company for money, it's a very different flow. So, my solution to it was to build the annual charity t-shirt drive, where it's, great, spend 35 bucks or whatever on a snarky t-shirt once a year for ten days and all proceeds go to benefit a nonprofit that is, sort of, assuaged that.But one of my business philosophies has always been, “Work for free before you work for cheap.” And dealing with individuals and whatnot, I do not charge them for things. It's, “Oh, can you—I need some advice in my career. Can I pay you to give me some advice?” “No, but you can jump on a Zoom call with me.” Please, the reason I exist at all is because people who didn't have any reason to did me favors, once upon a time, and I feel obligated to pay that forward.Andrew: And I appreciate, you know, there are people out there that you know, do need to charge for their time. Like—Corey: Oh. Oh, yes.Andrew: —I won't judge anybody that wants to. But you know, for me, it's just I can't do it because of the way I was raised. Like, my grandfather was very involved in the community. Like, he was recognized by the city for all of his volunteer work, and doing volunteer work was, like, mandatory for me as a kid. Like, every weekend, and so for me, it's just like, I can't imagine trying to take people's money.Which is not a great thing, but it turns out that the community is very supportive, and they will come beat you down with a stick, to give you money to make sure you keep doing what you're doing. But you know, I could be making lots of money, but it's just not my priority, so I've avoided any kind of funding so like, you know, I don't become a money-driven company, and I will see how long that lasts, but hopefully, a lot longer.Corey: I wish you well. And again, you're right; no shade to anyone who winds up charging for their time to individuals. I get it. I just always had challenges with it, so I decided not to do it. The only time I find myself begrudging people who do that are someone who picked something up six months ago and decided, oh, I'm going to build some video course on how to do this thing. The end. And charge a bunch of money for it and put myself out as an expert in that space.And you look at what the content they're putting out is, and one, it's inaccurate, which just drives me up a wall, and two, there's a lack of awareness that teaching is its own skill. In some areas, I know how to teach certain things, and in other areas, I'm a complete disaster at it. Public speaking is a great example. A lot of what I do on the public speaking stage is something that comes to me somewhat naturally. So, can you teach me to be a good public speaker? Not really, it's like, well, you gave that talk and it was bad. Could you try giving it only make it good? Like, that is not a helpful coaching statement, so I stay out of that mess.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's really challenging to know, if you feel like you're authority enough to put something out there. And there's been a few courses where I didn't feel like I was the most knowledgeable, but I produced those courses, and they had done extremely well. But as I was going through the course, I was just like, “Yeah, I don't know how any this stuff works, but this is my best guess translating from here.” And so you know, at least for my content, people have seen me as, like, the lens of AWS on top of other platforms, right? So, I might not know—I'm not an expert in Azure, but I've made a lot of Azure content, and I just translate that over and I talk about the frustrations around, like, using scale sets compared to AWS auto-scaling groups, and that seems to really help people get through the motions of it.I know if I pass, at least they'll pass, but by no means do I ever feel like an expert. Like, right now I'm doing, like, Kubernetes. Like, I have no idea how I'm doing it, but I have, like, help with three other people. And so I'll just be honest about it and say, “Hey, yeah, I'm learning this as well, but at least I know I passed, so you know, you can pass, too.” Whatever that's worth.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back when I was starting out, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn't know everything about the AWS billing system and how it worked and all the different things people can do with it, and things they can ask. And now, five years later, when the industry basically acknowledges I'm an expert, I feel like a fraud because I couldn't possibly understand everything about the AWS billing system and how it works. It's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize that there is yet to learn. I'm better equipped these days to find the answers to the things I need to know, but I'm still learning things every day. If I ever get to a point of complete and total understanding of a given topic, I'm wrong. You can always go deeper.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, by no means am I even an expert in AWS, though people seem to think that I am just because I have a lot of confidence in there and I produce a lot of content. But that's a lot different from making a course than implementing stuff. And I do implement stuff, but you know, it's just at the scale that I'm doing that. So, just food for thought for people there.Corey: Oh, yeah. Whatever, I implement something. It's great. In my previous engineering life, I would work on large-scale systems, so I know how a thing that works in your test environment is going to blow up in a production scale environment. And I bring those lessons, written on my bones the painful way, through outages, to the way that I build things now.But the stuff that I'm building is mostly to keep my head in the game, as opposed to solving an explicit business need. Could I theoretically build a podcast transcription system on top of Transcribe or something like that for these episodes? Yeah. But I've been paying a person to do this for many years to do it themselves; they know the terms of art, they know how this stuff works, and they're building a glossary as they go, and understanding the nuances of what I say and how I say it. And that is the better business outcome; that's the answer. And if it's production facing, I probably shouldn't be tinkering with it too much, just based upon where the—I don't want to be the bottleneck for the business functioning.Andrew: I've been spending so much time doing the same thing over and over again, but for different cloud providers, and the more I do, the less I want to go deep on these things because I just feel like I'm dumping all this information I'm going to forget, and that I have those broad strokes, and when I need to go deep dive, I have that confidence. So, I'd really prefer people were to build up confidence in saying, “Yes, I think I can do this.” As opposed to being like, “Oh, I have proof that I know every single feature in AWS Systems Manager.” Just because, like, our platform, ExamPro, like, I built it with my co-founder, and it's a quite a system. And so I'm going well, that's all I need to know.And I talk to other CTOs, and there's only so much you need to know. And so I don't know if there's, like, a shift between—or difference between, like, application development where, let's say you're doing React and using Vercel and stuff like that, where you have to have super deep knowledge for that technical stack, whereas cloud is so broad or diverse that maybe just having confidence and hypothesizing the work that you can do and seeing what the outcome is a bit different, right? Not having to prove one hundred percent that you know it inside and out on day one, but have the confidence.Corey: And there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of value to it. It's the magic word I always found in interviewing, on both sides of the interview table, has always been someone who's unsure about something start with, “I'm not sure, but if I had to guess,” and then say whatever it is you were going to say. Because if you get it right, wow, you're really good at figuring this out, and your understanding is pretty decent. If you're wrong, well, you've shown them how you think but you've also called them out because you're allowed to be wrong; you're not allowed to be authoritatively wrong. Because once that happens, I can't trust anything you say.Andrew: Yeah. In terms of, like, how do cloud certifications help you for your career path? I mean, I find that they're really well structured, and they give you a goal to work towards. So, like, passing that exam is your motivation to make sure that you complete it. Do employers care? It depends. I would say mostly no. I mean, for me, like, when I'm hiring, I actually do care about certifications because we make certification courses but—Corey: In your case, you're a very specific expression of this that is not typical.Andrew: Yeah. And there are some, like, cases where, like, if you work for a larger cloud consultancy, you're expected to have a professional certification so that customers feel secure in your ability to execute. But it's not like they were trying to hire you with that requirement, right? And so I hope that people realize that and that they look at showing that practical skills, by building up cloud projects. And so that's usually a strong pairing I'll have, which is like, “Great. Get the certifications to help you just have a structured journey, and then do a Cloud project to prove that you can do what you say you can do.”Corey: One area where I've seen certifications act as an interesting proxy for knowledge is when you have a company that has 5000 folks who work in IT in varying ways, and, “All right. We're doing a big old cloud migration.” The certification program, in many respects, seems to act as a bit of a proxy for gauging where people are on upskilling, how much they have to learn, where they are in that journey. And at that scale, it begins to make some sense to me. Where do you stand on that?Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's hard because it really depends on how those paths are built. So, when you look at the AWS certification roadmap, they have the Certified Cloud Practitioner, they have three associates, two professionals, and a bunch of specialties. And I think that you might think, “Well, oh, solutions architect must be very popular.” But I think that's because AWS decided to make the most popular, the most generic one called that, and so you might think that's what's most popular.But what they probably should have done is renamed that Solution Architect to be a Cloud Engineer because very few people become Solutions Architect. Like that's more… if there's Junior Solutions Architect, I don't know where they are, but Solutions Architect is more of, like, a senior role where you have strong communications, pre-sales, obviously, the role is going to vary based on what companies decide a Solution Architect is—Corey: Oh, absolutely take a solutions architect, give him a crash course in finance, and we call them a cloud economist.Andrew: Sure. You just add modifiers there, and they're something else. And so I really think that they should have named that one as the cloud engineer, and they should have extracted it out as its own tier. So, you'd have the Fundamental, the Certified Cloud Practitioner, then the Cloud Engineer, and then you could say, “Look, now you could do developer or the sysops.” And so you're creating this path where you have a better trajectory to see where people really want to go.But the problem is, a lot of people come in and they just do the solutions architect, and then they don't even touch the other two because they say, well, I got an associate, so I'll move on the next one. So, I think there's some structuring there that comes into play. You look at Azure, they've really, really caught up to AWS, and may I might even say surpass them in terms of the quality and the way they market them and how they construct their certifications. There's things I don't like about them, but they have, like, all these fundamental certifications. Like, you have Azure Fundamentals, Data Fundamentals, AI Fundamentals, there's a Security Fundamentals.And to me, that's a lot more valuable than going over to an associate. And so I did all those, and you know, I still think, like, should I go translate those over for AWS because you have to wait for a specialty before you pick up security. And they say, like, it's intertwined with all the certifications, but, really isn't. Like—and I feel like that would be a lot better for AWS. But that's just my personal opinion. So.Corey: My experience with AWS certifications has been somewhat minimal. I got the Cloud Practitioner a few years ago, under the working theory of I wanted to get into the certified lounge at some of the events because sometimes I needed to charge things and grab a cup of coffee. I viewed it as a lounge pass with a really strange entrance questionnaire. And in my case, yeah, I passed it relatively easily; if not, I would have some questions about how much I actually know about these things. As I recall, I got one question wrong because I was honest, instead of going by the book answer for, “How long does it take to restore an RDS database from a snapshot?”I've had some edge cases there that give the wrong answer, except that's what happened. And then I wound up having that expire and lapse. And okay, now I'll do it—it was in beta at the time, but I got the sysops associate cert to go with it. And that had a whole bunch of trivia thrown into it, like, “Which of these is the proper syntax for this thing?” And that's the kind of question that's always bothered me because when I'm trying to figure things like that out, I have entire internet at my fingertips. Understanding the exact syntax, or command-line option, or flag that needs to do a thing is a five-second Google search away in most cases. But measuring for people's ability to memorize and retain that has always struck me as a relatively poor proxy for knowledge.Andrew: It's hard across the board. Like Azure, AWS, GCP, they all have different approaches—like, Terraform, all of them, they're all different. And you know, when you go to interview process, you have to kind of extract where the value is. And I would think that the majority of the industry, you know, don't have best practices when hiring, there's, like, a superficial—AWS is like, “Oh, if you do well, in STAR program format, you must speak a communicator.” Like, well, I'm dyslexic, so that stuff is not easy for me, and I will never do well in that.So like, a lot of companies hinge on those kinds of components. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't matter; if you have a certain scale, you're going to have attrition. There's no perfect system. But when you look at these certifications, and you say, “Well, how much do they match up with the job?” Well, they don't, right? It's just Jeopardy.But you know, I still think there's value for yourself in terms of being able to internalize it. I still think that does prove that you have done something. But taking the AWS certification is not the same as taking Andrew Brown's course. So, like, my certified cloud practitioner was built after I did GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure Fundamentals, a bunch of other Azure fundamental certifications, cloud-native stuff, and then I brought it over because was missing, right? So like, if you went through my course, and that I had a qualifier, then I could attest to say, like, you are of this skill level, right?But it really depends on what that testament is and whether somebody even cares about what my opinion of, like, your skillset is. But I can't imagine like, when you have a security incident, there's going to be a pop-up that shows you multiple-choice answer to remediate the security incident. Now, we might get there at some point, right, with all the cloud automation, but we're not there yet.Corey: It's been sort of thing we've been chasing and never quite get there. I wish. I hope I live to see it truly I do. My belief is also that the value of a certification changes depending upon what career stage someone is at. Regardless of what level you are at, a hiring manager or a company is looking for more or less a piece of paper that attests that they're to solve the problem that they are hiring to solve.And entry-level, that is often a degree or a certification or something like that in the space that shows you have at least the baseline fundamentals slash know how to learn things. After a few years, I feel like that starts to shift into okay, you've worked in various places solving similar problems on your resume that the type that we have—because the most valuable thing you can hear when you ask someone, “How would we solve this problem?” Is, “Well, the last time I solved it, here's what we learned.” Great. That's experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience? Yes, there is: Hiring people with experience.Then, at some level, you wind up at the very far side of people who are late-career in many cases where the piece of paper that shows that they know what they're doing is have you tried googling their name and looking at the Wikipedia article that spits out, how they built fundamental parts of a system like that. I think that certifications are one of those things that bias for early-career folks. And of course, partners when there are other business reasons to get it. But as people grow in seniority, I feel like the need for those begins to fall off. Do you agree? Disagree? You're much closer to this industry in that aspect of it than I am.Andrew: The more senior you are, and if you have big names under your resume there, no one's going to care if you have certification, right? When I was looking to switch careers—I used to have a consultancy, and I was just tired of building another failed startup for somebody that was willing to pay me. And I'm like—I was not very nice about it. I was like, “Your startup's not going to work out. You really shouldn't be building this.” And they still give me the money and it would fail, and I'd move on to the next one. It was very frustrating.So, closed up shop on that. And I said, “Okay, I got to reenter the market.” I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have big names on my resume, and Toronto is a very competitive market. And so I was feeling friction because people were not valuing my projects. I had, like, full-stack projects, I would show them.And they said, “No, no. Just do these, like, CompSci algorithms and stuff like that.” And so I went, “Okay, well, I really don't want to be doing that. I don't want to spend all my time learning algorithms just so I can get a job to prove that I already have the knowledge I have.” And so I saw a big opportunity in cloud, and I thought certifications would be the proof to say, “I can do these things.”And when I actually ended up going for the interviews, I didn't even have certifications and I was getting those opportunities because the certifications helped me prove it, but nobody cared about the certifications, even then, and that was, like, 2017. But not to say, like, they didn't help me, but it wasn't the fact that people went, “Oh, you have a certification. We'll get you this job.”Corey: Yeah. When I'm talking to consulting clients, I've never once been asked, “Well, do you have the certifications?” Or, “Are you an AWS partner?” In my case, no, neither of those things. The reason that we know what we're doing is because we've done this before. It's the expertise approach.I question whether that would still be true if we were saying, “Oh, yeah, and we're going to drop a dozen engineers on who are going to build things out of your environment.” “Well, are they certified?” is a logical question to ask when you're bringing in an external service provider? Or is this just a bunch of people you found somewhere on Upwork or whatnot, and you're throwing them at it with no quality control? Like, what is the baseline level experience? That's a fair question. People are putting big levels of trust when they bring people in.Andrew: I mean, I could see that as a factor of some clients caring, just because like, when I used to work in startups, I knew customers where it's like their second startup, and they're flush with a lot of money, and they're deciding who they want to partner with, and they're literally looking at what level of SSL certificate they purchased, right? Like now, obviously, they're all free and they're very easy to get to get; there was one point where you had different tiers—as if you would know—and they would look and they would say—Corey: Extended validation certs attend your browser bar green. Remember those?Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like that, and they're like, “We should partner with them because they were able to afford that and we know, like…” whatever, whatever, right? So, you know, there is that kind of thought process for people at an executive level. I'm not saying it's widespread, but I've seen it.When you talk to people that are in cloud consultancy, like solutions architects, they always tell me they're driven to go get those professional certifications [unintelligible 00:22:19] their customers matter. I don't know if the customers care or not, but they seem to think so. So, I don't know if it's just more driven by those people because it's an expectation because everyone else has it, or it's like a package of things, like, you know, like the green bar in the certifications, SOC 2 compliance, things like that, that kind of wrap it up and say, “Okay, as a package, this looks really good.” So, more of an expectation, but not necessarily matters, it's just superficial; I'm not sure.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: You've been building out certifications for multiple cloud providers, so I'm curious to get your take on something that Forrest Brazeal, who's now head of content over at Google Cloud, has been talking about lately, the idea that as an engineer is advised to learn more than one cloud provider; even if you have one as a primary, learning how another one works makes you a better engineer. Now, setting aside entirely the idea that well, yeah, if I worked at Google, I probably be saying something fairly similar.Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Do you think there's validity to the idea that most people should be broad across multiple providers, or do you think specialization on one is the right path?Andrew: Sure. Just to contextualize for our listeners, Google Cloud is highly, highly promoting multi-cloud workloads, and one of their flagship products is—well, they say it's a flagship product—is Anthos. And they put a lot of money—I don't know that was subsidized, but they put a lot of money in it because they really want to push multi-cloud, right? And so when we say Forrest works in Google Cloud, it should be no surprise that he's promoting it.But I don't work for Google, and I can tell you, like, learning multi-cloud is, like, way more valuable than just staying in one vertical. It just opened my eyes. When I went from AWS to Azure, it was just like, “Oh, I'm missing out on so much in the industry.” And it really just made me such a more well-rounded person. And I went over to Google Cloud, and it was just like… because you're learning the same thing in different variations, and then you're also poly-filling for things that you will never touch.Or like, I shouldn't say you never touch, but you would never touch if you just stayed in that vertical when you're learning. So, in the industry, Azure Active Directory is, like, widespread, but if you just stayed in your little AWS box, you're not going to notice it on that learning path, right? And so a lot of times, I tell people, “Go get your CLF-C01 and then go get your AZ-900 or AZ-104.” Again, I don't care if people go and sit the exams. I want them to go learn the content because it is a large eye-opener.A lot of people are against multi-cloud from a learning perspective because say, it's too much to learn all at the same time. But a lot of people I don't think have actually gone across the cloud, right? So, they're sitting from their chair, only staying in one vertical saying, “Well, you can't learn them all at the same time.” And I'm going, “I see a way that you could teach them all at the same time.” And I might be the first person that will do it.Corey: And the principles do convey as well. It's, “Oh, well I know how SNS works on AWS, so I would never be able to understand how Google Pub/Sub works.” Those are functionally identical; I don't know that is actually true. It's just different to interface points and different guarantees, but fine. You at least understand the part that it plays.I've built things out on Google Cloud somewhat recently, and for me, every time I do, it's a refreshing eye-opener to oh, this is what developer experience in the cloud could be. And for a lot of customers, it is. But staying too far within the bounds of one ecosystem does lend itself to a loss of perspective, if you're not careful. I agree with that.Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, just the paint more of a picture of differences, like, Google Cloud has a lot about digital transformation. They just updated their—I'm not happy that they changed it, but I'm fine that they did that, but they updated their Google Digital Cloud Leader Exam Guide this month, and it like is one hundred percent all about digital transformation. So, they love talking about digital transformation, and those kind of concepts there. They are really good at defining migration strategies, like, at a high level.Over to Azure, they have their own cloud adoption framework, and it's so detailed, in terms of, like, execution, where you go over to AWS and they have, like, the worst cloud adoption framework. It's just the laziest thing I've ever seen produced in my life compared to out of all the providers in that space. I didn't know about zero-trust model until I start using Azure because Azure has Active Directory, and you can do risk-based policy procedures over there. So, you know, like, if you don't go over to these places, you're not going to get covered other places, so you're just going to be missing information till you get the job and, you know, that job has that information requiring you to know it.Corey: I would say that for someone early career—and I don't know where this falls on the list of career advice ranging from, “That is genius,” to, “Okay, Boomer,” but I would argue that figuring out what companies in your geographic area, or the companies that you have connections with what they're using for a cloud provider, I would bias for learning one enough to get hired there and from there, letting what you learn next be dictated by the environment you find yourself in. Because especially larger companies, there's always something that lives in a different provider. My default worst practice is multi-cloud. And I don't say that because multi-cloud doesn't exist, and I'm not saying it because it's a bad idea, but this idea of one workload—to me—that runs across multiple providers is generally a challenge. What I see a lot more, done intelligently, is, “Okay, we're going to use this provider for some things, this other provider for other things, and this third provider for yet more things.” And every company does that.If not, there's something very strange going on. Even Amazon uses—if not Office 365, at least exchange to run their email systems instead of Amazon WorkMail because—Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Let's be serious. That tells me a lot. But I don't generally find myself in a scenario where I want to build this application that is anything more than Hello World, where I want it to run seamlessly and flawlessly across two different cloud providers. That's an awful lot of work that I struggle to identify significant value for most workloads.Andrew: I don't want to think about securing, like, multiple workloads, and that's I think a lot of friction for a lot of companies are ingress-egress costs, which I'm sure you might have some knowledge on there about the ingress-egress costs across providers.Corey: Oh, a little bit, yeah.Andrew: A little bit, probably.Corey: Oh, throwing data between clouds is always expensive.Andrew: Sure. So, I mean, like, I call multi-cloud using multiple providers, but not in tandem. Cross-cloud is when you want to use something like Anthos or Azure Arc or something like that where you extend your data plane or control pla—whatever the plane is, whatever plane across all the providers. But you know, in practice, I don't think many people are doing cross-cloud; they're doing multi-cloud, like, “I use AWS to run my primary workloads, and then I use Microsoft Office Suite, and so we happen to use Azure Active Directory, or, you know, run particular VM machines, like Windows machines for our accounting.” You know?So, it's a mixed bag, but I do think that using more than one thing is becoming more popular just because you want to use the best in breed no matter where you are. So like, I love BigQuery. BigQuery is amazing. So, like, I ingest a lot of our data from, you know, third-party services right into that. I could be doing that in Redshift, which is expensive; I could be doing that in Azure Synapse, which is also expensive. I mean, there's a serverless thing. I don't really get serverless. So, I think that, you know, people are doing multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. I tend to do things like that myself, and whenever I see it generally makes sense. This is my general guidance. When I talk to individuals who say, “Well, we're running multi-cloud like this.” And my response is, “Great. You're probably right.”Because I'm talking in the general sense, someone building something out on day one where they don't know, like, “Everyone's saying multi-cloud. Should I do that?” No, I don't believe you should. Now, if your company has done that intentionally, rather than by accident, there's almost certainly a reason and context that I do not have. “Well, we have to run our SaaS application in multiple cloud providers because that's where our customers are.” “Yeah, you should probably do that.” But your marketing, your billing systems, your back-end reconciliation stuff generally does not live across all of those providers. It lives in one. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I think we're in violent agreement here.Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Kubernetes obviously is becoming very popular because people believe that they'll have a lot more mobility, Whereas when you use all the different managed—and I'm still learning Kubernetes myself from the next certification I have coming out, like, study course—but, you know, like, those managed services have all different kind of kinks that are completely different. And so, you know, it's not going to be a smooth process. And you're still leveraging, like, for key things like your database, you're not going to be running that in Kubernetes Cluster. You're going to be using a managed service.And so, those have their own kind of expectations in terms of configuration. So, I don't know, it's tricky to say what to do, but I think that, you know, if you have a need for it, and you don't have a security concern—like, usually it's security or cost, right, for multi-cloud.Corey: For me, at least, the lock-in has always been twofold that people don't talk about. More—less lock-in than buy-in. One is the security model where IAM is super fraught and challenging and tricky, and trying to map a security model to multiple providers is super hard. Then on top of that, you also have the buy-in story of a bunch of engineers who are very good at one cloud provider, and that skill set is not in less demand now than it was a year ago. So okay, you're going to start over and learn a new cloud provider is often something that a lot of engineers won't want to countenance.If your team is dead set against it, there's going to be some friction there and there's going to be a challenge. I mean, for me at least, to say that someone knows a cloud provider is not the naive approach of, “Oh yeah, they know how it works across the board.” They know how it breaks. For me, one of the most valuable reasons to run something on AWS is I know what a failure mode looks like, I know how it degrades, I know how to find out what's going on when I see that degradation. That to me is a very hard barrier to overcome. Alternately, it's entirely possible that I'm just old.Andrew: Oh, I think we're starting to see some wins all over the place in terms of being able to learn one thing and bring it other places, like OpenTelemetry, which I believe is a cloud-native Kubernetes… CNCF. I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Linux Foundation, but for cloud-native. And so OpenTelemetry is just a standardized way of handling your logs, metrics, and traces, right? And so maybe CloudWatch will be the 1.0 of observability in AWS, and then maybe OpenTelemetry will become more of the standard, right, and so maybe we might see more managed services like Prometheus and Grafa—well, obviously, AWS has a managed Prometheus, but other things like that. So, maybe some of those things will melt away. But yeah, it's hard to say what approach to take.Corey: Yeah, I'm wondering, on some level, whether what the things we're talking about today, how well that's going to map forward. Because the industry is constantly changing. The guidance I would give about should you be in cloud five years ago would have been a nuanced, “Mmm, depends. Maybe for yes, maybe for no. Here's the story.” It's a lot less hedge-y and a lot less edge case-y these days when I answer that question. So, I wonder in five years from now when we look back at this podcast episode, how well this discussion about what the future looks like, and certifications, and multi-cloud, how well that's going to reflect?Andrew: Well, when we look at, like, Kubernetes or Web3, we're just seeing kind of like the standardized boilerplate way of doing a bunch of things, right, all over the place. This distributed way of, like, having this generic API across the board. And how well that will take, I have no idea, but we do see a large split between, like, serverless and cloud-natives. So, it's like, what direction? Or we'll just have both? Probably just have both, right?Corey: [Like that 00:33:08]. I hope so. It's been a wild industry ride, and I'm really curious to see what changes as we wind up continuing to grow. But we'll see. That's the nice thing about this is, worst case, if oh, turns out that we were wrong on this whole cloud thing, and everyone starts exodusing back to data centers, well, okay. That's the nice thing about being a small company. It doesn't take either of us that long to address the reality we see in the industry.Andrew: Well, that or these cloud service providers are just going to get better at offering those services within carrier hotels, or data centers, or on your on-premise under your desk, right? So… I don't know, we'll see. It's hard to say what the future will be, but I do believe that cloud is sticking around in one form or another. And it basically is, like, an essential skill or table stakes for anybody that's in the industry. I mean, of course, not everywhere, but like, mostly, I would say. So.Corey: Andrew, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about your opinions, how you view these things, et cetera. Where can they find you?Andrew: You know, I think the best place to find me right now is Twitter. So, if you go to twitter.com/andrewbrown—all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens—you'll find me there. I'm so surprised I was able to get that handle. It's like the only place where I have my handle.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:25]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Andrew: Well, thanks for having me on the show.Corey: Andrew Brown, co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training and so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me that I do not understand certifications at all because you're an accountant, and certifications matter more in that industry.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Even Amazon's new AI-powered machines aren't nearly capable enough to handle the most important fulfillment tasks.

Even Amazon's new AI-powered machines aren't nearly capable enough to handle the most important fulfillment tasks.

About CourtneyCourtney Nash is a researcher focused on system safety and failures in complex sociotechnical systems. An erstwhile cognitive neuroscientist, she has always been fascinated by how people learn, and the ways memory influences how they solve problems. Over the past two decades, she's held a variety of editorial, program management, research, and management roles at Holloway, Fastly, O'Reilly Media, Microsoft, and Amazon. She lives in the mountains where she skis, rides bikes, and herds dogs and kids.Links: Verica: https://www.verica.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/courtneynash Email: courtney@verica.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimizeapplications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Periodically, websites like to fall into the sea and explode. And it's sort of a thing that we've accepted happens. Well, most of us have. My guest today is Courtney Nash, Internet Incident Librarian at Verica. Courtney, thank you for joining me.Courtney: Hi, Corey. Thanks so much for having me.Corey: So, I'm going to assume that my intro is somewhat accurate, that we've sort of accepted that sites will crash into the sea, the internet will break, and then everyone tears their hair out and complains on Twitter, assuming that's not the thing that fell over this time—Courtney: [laugh].Corey: —but what does an Internet Incident Librarian do?Courtney: Yeah, I'll come back to the first part about how—some people have accepted it and some people haven't, I think is the interesting part. So technically, I think my official real title is, like, research analyst or something really boring, but I have a background in the cognitive sciences and also in technology, and I'm really—have always been fascinated by how these socio-technical systems work. And so as an Internet Incident Librarian, I am doing a number of things to try to better understand—both for myself and, obviously, the company I work for, but for the industry as a whole—what do we really know about how incidents happen, why they happen, when they happen, and what do we do when they happen? And how do we learn from that? So, one of the first things that I'm doing along those lines is actually collecting a database of all of the public write-ups of incidents that happened at companies that are software-related.So, there's already bodies of work of people who collect airline incidents and other kinds of things. And we don't have that [laugh] as an industry, which I think is—I want to solve that problem because I think other industries that have spent some time introspecting about why things fall down, or when things fall down and how they fall down. Take the airline industry for example; planes don't really fall out of the sky very often.Corey: No. When it does, it makes news and everyone's scared about flying, but at the same time, it's yeah, do you have any idea how many people die in car crashes in a given hour?Courtney: Yeah, yeah. And we'll come back to how the media covers things in a minute because that is definitely something I have opinions about. But, I'm not trying to say I want to create the NTSB of the internet; I don't think that's quite the same thing, and I really want something in the spirit of software, and the internet, and open-source that's more collaborative and it's very open to all of us. So, the first step is to just get them in one place. There is no single place where you could go and say, “Oh, where all of the X incident reports? Where all the ones that Microsoft's written, and also Amazon, or Google, or, you know, whoever.”Corey: They have them, but they hide them so thoroughly. It turns out that they don't really put that in big letters on their corporate blog with links to it. And when you look at one incident report, they don't say, “Here, look at our previous incident reports.” They really—Courtney: Yeah.Corey: —should but no one does.Courtney: And I think that's fascinating because there's a precedent. So, there's two precedents, and I just gave you basically one side of the two, which is, the airline industry has done this and it's not like people don't fly, right? So, a lot of internet companies, a lot of software-based companies, seem to be afraid of what their customers, or what the stock market, or what folks will think. Mind you, these are publicly traded [laugh] airline companies. People aren't going to stop using Amazon just because you give more of this information out.And so I think that piece is—I would love to see that stop being the case. Because the flip side of the coin is that this is a rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing, which granted, not all companies agree on, especially really big ones because their boats already mowing all the little ones out of the ocean. But that's another story.Corey: Sure, but also, it's easy to hide an outage. “Our site is down for you can say three days. Great, if a customer didn't try to access the site at all during those three days, was the site really down in the first place?”Courtney: Oh, the tree in the forest of internet outages. Yes, it's true, although I think that companies are—they know that people go complain on social media, right? I think there's more and more of that happening now. It's not like you can hide it as easily as you could have before Twitter or Instagram or—Corey: Right. Whereas a plane falls out of the sky, generally it's one of those things that people notice.Courtney: Yeah. Even if you weren't interested in that flight at all.Corey: Right. When it lands in your garden, you sort of have a comment on this.Courtney: [laugh]. Yeah. Pieces fall out of the sky. That has happened. But I think the other flip side of the coin I already mentioned is the safety of airline industry has increased so significantly over the past, you know, whatever, 30, 40 years because of this concerted effort.And the other piece of it, then, as an industry, as technologists, as people who use software to run their businesses, some of those things are now safety-critical. And this comes back to the whole software is running the world now. Planes now actually could fall out of the sky because of software, not just because of hardware failures. And nuclear power plants are [laugh] run by software, and your electronic grid, and your health care systems, heart rate monitors, insulin pumps. There are a lot of really critical things, and now our phone services and our internet stuff is so entwined in our lives, that people can't be on their Zoom calls, people can't run their businesses. So, this stuff has a massive impact on people's lives. It's no longer just pictures of cats on the internet, which admittedly, we've really honed the machine for that.Corey: No, but now when software goes down, the biggest arguments people make, the stories people tell is, “Oh, well, it meant that the company lost this much money during that timeframe.” And great, maybe. We can argue about is that really true or is it not? It depends entirely on the company's business model, but I don't like to tend to accept those things at face value. But yeah, that's the small-scale thing, especially when you start getting to these massive platform providers. There are a lot of second and third-order effects that are a lot more interesting slash important to people's lives, than, well, we couldn't show ads to people for an hour and a half.Courtney: Right. Yes. Absolutely. So, T-Mobile had this outage, what is it, how is time—time is still not working very well, for me. I'm trying to remember if it was earlier this year, or if it was in—it was last year. I think it was 2020. And you're like, T-Mobile, oh okay, whatever. You know, like, cell phones, yadda, yadda. 911 stopped working. [laugh].And it was a fascinating outage because these are now actually regulated industries that are heavily software-backed. There was a government investigation into that the same way we have NTSB investigations into airline accidents, and they looked at all of those, kind of, second or third-order effects of people who—you know, a grandma who was stranded on the road, people who couldn't call 911, those kinds of things that are really significant impacts on people's lives. And the second-order effect is, oh, yeah, AWS goes down—like you said—and Amazon or people like to say, Jeff Bezos—I guess, now, are they going to complain about how much money Andy loses? I guess so—but [laugh] what lives on AWS, that's crazy to think about, right?Corey: Yeah, the more I learn the answer to that question, the more disturbed I become.Courtney: Well, you'd probably know a better answer to that question [laugh] than a lot of people.Corey: They have the big companies they can talk about. What's really interesting is the companies that they don't and can't. An easy example: financial services is an industry that is notorious for never granting logo rights. Like, at some point, they'll begrudgingly admit, “Yes, our multinational bank does use computers.” But it's always like pulling teeth, and I get it on some level; the entire philosophy of a lot of these companies is risk-mitigation, rather than growth and advancing the current awareness of knowledge. But it does become a problem.Courtney: Yeah. It's interesting, I need more data, which we'll get to—help me, people—but I am able to start seeing some of those interesting graphs of, kind of these cascading effects of these kinds of outages. And so I strongly believe that we need to talk about them more, that more companies need to write them up, and publish them, and be a lot more transparent about it. And I think there's a number of companies that are showing the way there that—and it has to do with your first question which is, we've all sort of accepted this, right? But I disagree with that.I think those of us who are super close to these kinds of complex, dynamic distributed systems totally know that they're going to fail, and that's not shocking, nor the case of incompetence. We are building systems that are so big and so complex, no one person, no 10X engineer out there could possibly model or hold the whole thing in their head. Especially because it's not even just your systems… we were just talking about, right? Your stuff's on GitHub; it's on AWS; there's, like, three other upstream providers; there's this API from over there. These systems are too intricate, too complex; they're going to fail.Corey: So, we're back to why all these things failed simultaneously and it comes out it's a Northern woods, middle of nowhere backhoe incident. That's right, if we look at the natural food chain of things, fiber optic cable has a natural predator in the form of a backhoe. To the point where if I'm ever lost in the woods, I will drop a length of fiber, kick some dirt over it, wait a few minutes; a backhoe will be along to sever it. Then I can follow the backhoe back to civilization. They don't teach that one and the boy scout manual, but they really should.Courtney: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. There was a beaver outage in Canada, which is the—[laugh] God, that's the most Canadian thing ever.Corey: Can you come up with a more Canadian—Courtney: No.Corey: —story than that? I would posit you could not, but give it a shot.Courtney: No, probably not. Anyhoo. So, I think, like I was saying, those of us close to it accept that, understand it, and are trying to now think about, okay, well, how do we change our approach and our philosophy about this, knowing that things will fall down? But I think if you look at a lot of the rest of the world, people are still like, “What are those idiots doing over there? Why did their site fall down?”Corey: Oh, my God—Courtney: Right?Corey: —the general population is the worst on stuff like this. The absolute worst.Courtney: The media is the worst. [laugh].Corey: It's, “How did they wind up to going down?” “Yeah, because this stuff is complicated.” Back when I was getting started in tech, I thought the whole thing worked on magic, so I started figuring out different pieces of it worked. And now I'm convinced; it runs on magic. The most amazing thing is this all works together. Because—Courtney: Yeah.Corey: —spit and duct tape and baling wire holding this stuff together would be an upgrade from a lot of the stuff that currently exists in the real world. And it's amazing.Courtney: I know the secret, Corey. You know what holds it all together?Corey: Hit me with it. Hope? Tears?Courtney: People.Corey: Mmm.Courtney: Technology is Soylent Green, Corey. It's Soylent Green. It's made of people.Corey: And that's the thing that always bugs me on Twitter. The whole HugOps movement has it right. When you see a big provider taking an outage, all their competitors are immediately there with, “Man, hope things get back together soon. Best of luck. Let us know if we can help.” And that's super reassuring because today is their outage; tomorrow it's yours.Courtney: Yep.Corey: And once in a blue moon, you see someone who's relatively new to the industry starting trying to market their stuff based on someone else's outage, and they basically get their butts fed to them, just because it's this—it's not what you do, and it's not how we operate. And it's one of the few moments where I look at this and realize that maybe people's inherent nature isn't all terrible.Courtney: [laugh]. Oh. Oh, I would hope that would be something that comes out of all of this.Corey: Yeah.Courtney: No one goes to work at their day job doing what we do, to suck. [laugh]. Right? To do a bad job.Corey: Right. Unless you're in Facebook's ethics department, I completely agree with you.Courtney: Okay. Yes. All right. There are a few caveats to that, probably. But you know, we all want to show up and do good stuff. So, nobody's going in trying to take the site down, barring bad actor stuff that's not relevant.Corey: When Azure takes an outage, AWS is not sitting there going, “Ah, we're going to win more cloud deals because of this,” because they're smarter than that. It's, no, people are going to look at this and say, “Ah, see. Told you the cloud was dangerous.” It sets the entire industry back.Courtney: Yeah. That's why we need to talk about it more, and we need to just normalize that these things happen and that we can all level up as an industry if we get a lot smarter about how we, A) think about that, and B) how we react to them. And we will develop much more useful models of our safety boundaries, right? That's really it. You don't know—no one at any of these companies hardly knows if you're five steps from the cliff, five feet, driving a Ferrari 90 miles an hour towards the edge of it.Like, we don't know, it's amazing to me just how much in the dark we are as an industry and how much of the world we're running. So, I think this is one tiny, first little step in what could be sort of a sea change about how all of this works. So, that's a big part of why I'm doing what I'm doing.Corey: Well, let's talk about something else you're doing. So, tell me a little bit about VOID?Courtney: Yeah. So, that's the first iteration of this. So, it's the [Verica Open Incident Database 00:14:10]. I feel like I have to say this almost every time John Allspaw would like me to say that it's the Verica Open Incident Report Database, but VOID is way cooler than—Corey: VOIRD?Courtney: VOIRD.Corey: Yeah, that sounds like you're trying to make fun of someone ineffectively.Courtney: Yeah. And there's a reason why he's not in marketing. But what this is is a collection of all of the publicly available incident reports in one place, easily searchable. You can search by company, you can search by technology, you can filter things by the types of, sort of, kinds of failure modes that we're seeing. And it's, I hope, valuable to a wide swath of folks, both technologists and otherwise: researchers, media and press types, analysts, and whatnot.And my biggest desire is that people will look at it, realize how incomplete it is, and then help me fill it. [laugh]. Help me fill the VOID, people. I think I have right now, at the time we're talking, about 1700, maybe 1800 of these. And they run the gamut. And I know some people who like to quibble about language—and I am one of those people having been an editor in various flavors of my life—not all of these are what a lot of people directly related to these, sort of, incident management and whatnot would call ‘incident reports.'I wanted to collect a corpus that reflects all of the public information about software-related incidents. So, it's anything from tweets—either from a company or just from people—to a status page, to a media article, a news article, an online article, to a full-blown deep-dive retrospective or post-mortem from a company that really does go into detail. It's the whole gamut. It's all of those things. I have no opinionated take on that.I want that all to be available to people. And we've collected some metadata on all of the incidents as well. So, we're collecting the obvious things like when did it happen? What date was it, if we can figure it out, or if it's explicit—how long was it? And those kinds of things and then we collect some metadata, like I said. We add some tags: was this a complete production outage, was it a partial outage? Those kinds of things.And this is all directly just taken from the language of the report. And we're not trying—like I said—we're trying not to have any sort of really subjective takes on any of that, but a bit of metadata that helps people spelunk some of this stuff. So, if it is the kind of report—these are usually from a status page, or a company post about it—what kinds of things were involved in this outage? So, sometimes you'll get lucky and the company will tell you, “It was DNS,” because, you know, it's always DNS.Corey: On some level, it always is. That's why—Courtney: It always is.Corey: —DNS is my database. It's a database problem.Courtney: It's a database problem. And sometimes you get even more detail. And so we will put as much of that that's in the report into a set of metadata about these things. So, I think there's some fascinating, really easy things that I've already seen from some of these data, and we kind of hit on one of these, which is the way that companies themselves talk about these outages versus the way that press and media and other types of organizations talk about these things. So, I think there's a whole bunch of really fascinating analysis that's going to be available to nerdy research-minded type folks like myself.I think it's a place, though, where technologists can also go and spelunk things that they're interested in, looking for patterns, anything that's really—there's an opportunity for experts in the field to add insights to what we can discern from these public incident reports. They are, like, two orders abstracted from what happened internally, but I think there's still a lot that we can learn from those. So, the first iteration of the VOID will allow people to get a first look at some of the data and to help me, hopefully, add to it, grow that corpus over time, and we'll see where that goes.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I love the idea of having a centralized place where outages, post-mortems, root cause analyses—I'll let you tear into that in a minute—and other things that are all tied to where can I find a list of outages. Because companies list these on their websites, they put them in blog posts, and it's always very begrudging; they don't link them from any other place, you have to know the magic incantation to find the buried link on their site. Having something that is easily searchable for outages is really something that's kind of valuable.Courtney: Yeah. And I mean, some of them are like—I'm looking at you, Microsoft—I like you for a lot of reasons, but hey, I have to scroll your status page. I can't link directly to their write-ups, and—this is Azure—and it [laugh] please stop. Make it easier. [laugh]. You're driving me crazy; I don't even have a data model to figure out how to make this work for people, other than, like, taking screenshots of them.So yeah, so there's shades of grey and black in how much they'll share, or how easy it is to find these things. So, it'll be interesting to see if there's any less-than-positive [laugh] reactions to all of this being available in one place. I'm anticipating at least a little bit of that.There is one other type of metadata that we collect for the VOID. And that is the type of analysis that is conducted if it is clear what that type of analysis is. And there, some companies explicitly say, or call it an RCA, “We did a Root Cause Analysis.” There's a few other types; some people talk about having a Contributing Factors Analysis. Most people don't consider a formal analysis type, but I am trying to collect and categorize these because I do think there are some fascinating implications buried therein, and I would like to see if I can keep track of whether or not those change over time. And yes, you've hit on one of my favorite hot-take soapbox things, which is root cause.Corey: Please, take it away.Courtney: Yeah. Well, and anyone who's close to these systems and has watched these things fall down has the inherent sense that there is no root cause. Like—[laugh]—let's—great. One of my favorite ones: human error. We don't have enough hours for this, Corey. I'm sorry. That's one of my favorite other ones. But let's say somebody fat-fingers a config change. Which happens—Corey: That was fundamentally the S3 service disruption back in—Courtney: Yes.Corey: —2017 that took down S3 for hours on end.Courtney: And took down so many other people that relied on S3.Corey: Everything was tied to that. And that's an interesting question; when something like that hits, does that mean that everything it takes down get its own entry in VOID?Courtney: I hope so. If everybody writes them up, then yes. [laugh]. So, if S3 goes down, and you go down, and you write it up, and you put it in the VOID, then we can see those things, which would be so cool. But let's go back to the fat-fingered config file—which if you haven't ever done, you're lying, first of all—Corey: Or you haven't been allowed to touch anything large and breakable yet, which, either way, you're lying on some level. So, please—Courtney: Yeah. I mean, I took down [Halloway's 00:20:53] homepage when it was on Hacker News because of YAML. So, anywho. Even if you fat-finger a config change, that's not the root cause because you have this system wherein a fat-fingered configure change can take down S3. That is a very big, complex, and I might add, socio-technical system.There are decisions that were made long ago about why it was structured that way, or why this happens that way, or what kinds of checks and balances you have. It's just, get over it people. There is no root cause. These are complex, highly dynamic systems that when they fail, they fail in unpredictable and weird ways because we've built them that way. They're complex because you're successful at pushing the envelope and your safety boundaries.So, if we could get past the root cause thing as an industry, I mean, I could probably just retire happy, honestly. [laugh]. I'm a simple woman; could we just get one thing, people? [laugh]. First of all, then it gives non-technologists, people outside of our bubble, the media, you can't hang it on these things anymore. We all have to then grapple with the complexity, which admittedly humans, not big fans of, but—Corey: People want simple stories, simple narratives. When people say, “Oh, remember the S3 outage?” They don't want to sit there and have to recount 50,000 different details. They want to say, “Oh, yeah. It took down a few big sites like Instagram, United Airlines, and it was a real mess.” The end. They want something that fits in a tweet, not something that fits in a thesis.Courtney: Well, and if you have a single root cause, then you can fix the root cause and it will never happen again. Right?Corey: That's the theory. If we're just a little bit more careful, we're never going to have outages anymore.Courtney: Yeah, if we could just train those humans to not try to make the best possible high-quality decision they could possibly make in that situation given the information they have at the time, then we'll do better. But I mean, that's why your system stay up most of the time, if you think about it. It's shocking how well these things actually work the vast majority of the time. And that's what we could learn from this, too. We could, you know—oh if we would write near-misses up, please.I mean, if I could have one more wish, I think one of the coolest things the airline industry and the government side of that did was start writing up near-misses. It's, wow, what do we learn from when we're successful, versus trying to, like, spelunk and nitpick the failures.Corey: Most of us aren't so good at the whole introspection part. We need failures, we need painful outages to really force us to make difficult, introspective, soul-searching decisions and learn from them.Courtney: Yeah. And I don't disagree with that. I just wish one of the things we would learn is that we should study our successes, too. There's more to be mined from our successes, if we can figure out how to do that, then there is from our failures. So, I have a metadata category in the VOID called ‘near-miss.'And oh man, I really wish people would write those up more. I mean, I think there's, like, five things in there that I've found so far. Because the humans hold these systems together. We make these things work the vast majority of the time. That's why there is no root cause, and even when we're involved in these things, we're also involved in preventing them, or solving them, or remediating them. So, yeah, there's no root cause. Humans aren't the problem. Those are my big hot button ones.Corey: I really wish more places would embrace that. Even Amazon uses the ‘root cause' terminology internally, and I'm not going to sit here and tell them how to run large things at scale; that's what I pay them to figure out for me. But I can't shake the feeling that by using that somewhat reductive terminology that they're glossing over an awful lot of things the rest of us could really benefit from.Courtney: Well, so the question then—one of the other things that I look at is, personally when I read and analyze these incident reports, these public ones a lot, I always ask myself, “Who's the audience for this?” And there are different audiences for different types of incident reports and different things. The vast majority of them are for customers, partners, investors.Corey: The stock market. Yes. Yes.Courtney: They're not actually for the organization. There's usually an internal one that we don't get to see—maybe—that's for the organization. But a lot of places feel that if you have a process, and a template, and a checklist, and a list of action items at the end, then you've done the right thing. You've had your incident, you've talked about it, you've got your action items. Move on.Corey: Right, and it always seems with companies, that as you get further into the company, the more honest and transparent the actual analysis is. Like, at some point, you wind up with the, like, they're very public and very cagey, and under NDA, they open up a little bit more, and a little bit more, and finally, when you work there, their executive team, it turns out, the actual thing was, “Well, Dewey was carrying arm full of boxes in the data center, tripped, went cascading face-first into the EPO cutoff switch that cut power to the entire facility.” The cagier they get, the—I guess, not to be unkind here—but the more ridiculous whatever the actual answer is. It's one of those things where, “Really? Someone tripped and hit a button. You didn't have a plan for that?” “Well, not really. We sort of assumed that people would”—Courtney: Why would you have a plan for that, right?Corey: Right.Courtney: I mean like—[laugh].Corey: Why would you have a plan for that, the first time?Courtney: Yeah. I mean, so imagine this exercise: sitting down in a room with a bunch of people and going, “What are all the things that could go wrong?” I mean, [laugh] ain't nobody got time for that? That's not how it works. You all have other jobs to do, too, and systems to build, and pressures, and customers, and partners, and features to build, so admit and acknowledge that you just won't know all of the antecedents and how do you respond when things happen?Which is a whole other, you know—I know you told me you recorded an episode with Dr. Christina Maslach on burnout, which I'm so happy you did, and there's a whole ‘nother piece of incidents and incident response, and burning people out, and blaming people, and all that stuff that's a whole ‘nother pod—it sounds like you might—you know, probably not incidents with her. But still, these things take a toll on people. And people who, like I said, show up every day really hoping to do their best job, and go up a ladder, and get a promotion, and whatever. So, I think not just treating those things as checklists has broader implications as well, just for the wellbeing of your organization.Corey: On some level, the biggest problem that I think we've run into is that, as you said, it all comes down to people. Unfortunately, legally, we can't patch those. Yet.Courtney: No, [laugh]. No, no. Not most kinds of patches, no. And that's messy. And I know some people are like, “Everyone should learn to code.” And I'm like, “Actually, everyone should get a liberal arts degree.” Come on, help me out people. Because there's so much of these socio-technical systems where the socio part of it is more relevant than the actual technical part.Corey: I believe you're right, for better or worse; there's no way around it. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you? And we will, of course, throw a link to VOID in the [show notes 00:28:06].Courtney: Yeah, I also like to talk on Twitter, like you do. I'm not as good at it as you are, but I try. So yeah, I'm @courtneynash on Twitter. And at Verica, you can find me at Verica as well, courtney@verica.io. And those are the best ways to find me, I would say. And yeah, please people, write up your incidents, send them to the VOID and let's all learn and get better together, please.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Courtney: Thank you for having me on. I know—do people say this: I'm like, “Yeah, big fan,” but I am. I'm a [laugh] big fan [laugh] of the podcast.Corey: Oh, dear Lord, find better things to listen to. My God.Courtney: [laugh]. But it's been a treat. Thank you.Corey: Courtney Nash, Internet Incident Librarian at Verica. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment making it very clear that for whatever reason the website is down, it is most certainly not your fault.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

This podcast involves two live demos, you can catch up on the YouTube verison here: https://youtu.be/T3K_DrgLPXMLinks Builder.io https://www.builder.io/ PartyTown https://github.com/BuilderIO/partytown Qwik https://github.com/builderio/qwik https://dev.to/mhevery/a-first-look-at-qwik-the-html-first-framework-af Timestamps [00:01:53] Misko Intro  [00:03:50] Builder.io  [00:08:31] PartyTown  [00:11:41] Web Workers vs Service Workers vs Atomics  [00:15:02] PartyTown Demo  [00:21:46] Qwik and Resumable vs Replayable Frameworks  [00:25:40] Qwik vs React - the curse of Closures  [00:27:32] Qwik Demo  [00:42:40] Qwik Compiler Optimizations  [00:53:00] Qwik Questions  [01:00:05] Qwik vs Islands Architecture  [01:02:59] Qwik Event Pooling  [01:05:57] Qwik Conclusions  [01:13:40] Qwik vs Angular Ivy  [01:16:58] TED Talk: Metabolic Health  Transcript [00:00:00] Misko Hevery: So the thing that I've learned from Angular.js days is make it really palatable, right. And solve a problem that nobody else has. Doing yet another framework in this state of our world would be complete suicide cause like it's just a different syntax for the same thing, right? So you need to be solving a problem that the other ones cannot solve. [00:00:22] swyx: The following is my conversation with Misko Hevery, former creator of Angular.js, and now CTO of Builder.io and creator of the Qwik framework. I often find that people with this level of seniority and accomplishment become jaded and imagine themselves above getting their hands dirty in code.  [00:00:39] Misko is the furthest you could possibly get, having left Google and immediately starting work on the biggest problem he sees with the state of web development today, which is that most apps or most sites don't get a hundred out of a hundred on their lighthouse scores. We talked about how Builder.io gives users far more flexibility than any other headless CMS and then we go into the two main ways that Misko wants to change web performance forever: offloading third-party scripts with PartyTown, and then creating a resumable framework with Qwik. Finally, we close off with a Ted Talk from Mishko on metabolic health. Overall I'm incredibly inspired by Misko's mission, where he wants to see a world with lighter websites and lighter bodies. [00:01:23] I hope you enjoy these long form conversations. I'm trying to produce with amazing developers. I don't have a name for it, and I don't know what the plan is. I just know that I really enjoy it. And the feedback has been really great. I'm still figuring out the production process and trying to balance it with my other commitments so any tips are welcome. If you liked this, share it with a friend. If you have requests for other guests, pack them on social media. I'd like to basically make this a space where passionate builders and doers can talk about their craft and where things are going. So here's the interview.  [00:01:53] Misko Intro  [00:01:53] swyx: Basically I try to start cold, [00:01:55] assuming that people already know who you are. Essentially you and I met at Zadar and, I've heard of you for the longest time. I've heard you on a couple of podcasts, but I haven't been in the Angular world. And now you're no longer in the Angular world.  [00:02:11] Misko Hevery: The child has graduated out of college. It's at a time.  [00:02:15] swyx: My favorite discovery about you actually is that you have non-stop dad jokes. Um, we were walking home from like one of the dinners and that you're just like going, oh, that's amazing. [00:02:27] Yes. Yeah.  [00:02:28] Misko Hevery: Yes. Um, most people cringe. I find it that it helps break that. It does and you know, the Dad jokes, so they're completely innocent. So you don't have to worry. I also have a good collection of, uh, computer jokes that only computer programmers get.  [00:02:47] swyx: Okay. Hit me with one.  [00:02:48] Misko Hevery: Um, "How do you measure functions?" [00:02:51] swyx: How do I measure functions? And the boring answer is arity,  [00:02:55] Misko Hevery: and that's a good one! "In Para-Meters." Uh, [00:03:03] swyx: yeah. So for anyone listening like our entire journey back was like that it just like the whole group just groaning. No, that's really good. Okay. Well, it's really good to connect. I'm interested in what you're doing at Builder. You left Google to be CTO of Builder. I assumed that I knew what it was, from the name, it actually is a headless CMS and we can talk about that because I used to work at Netlify and we used to be very good friends with all the headless CMSes. And then we can talk about Qwik. How's that ? [00:03:34] Misko Hevery: I can jump into that. Sorry. My voice is a little raspy. I just got over a regular cold, like the regular cold ceilings  [00:03:42] swyx: conference call, right. I dunno, I, I had it for a week and I only just got over it. [00:03:46] Misko Hevery: It was from the conference. Maybe it wasn't from the other trip I made anyways.  [00:03:50] Builder.io  [00:03:50] Misko Hevery: So let's talk about Builder. So Builder is what we call a headless visual CMS. Uh, I did not know any of that stuff. Would've meant. So I'm going to break it down because I assume that the audience might not know either. [00:04:01] So CMS means it's a content management system. What it means is that non-developers, uh, like typically a marketing department think like Gap. Gap needs to update .... If you're showing stuff on the screen, you can go to Everlane. Everlane is one of our customers. Okay. And so in Everlane case, the marketing department wants to change the content all the time. [00:04:22] Right? They want to change the sales, what things are on the top, what product that they want to feature, et cetera. And, um, this is typically done through a content management system. And the way this is typically done is that it's like a glorified spreadsheet where the engineering department makes a content. [00:04:39] And then it gives essentially key value pairs to the marketing. So the marketing person can change the text, maybe the image, but if the developer didn't think that the marketing person might want to change the color or font size, then there is no hook for it, and the marketing person can't do that. [00:04:54] Certainly marketing person won't be able to add new columns, decide that this is better shown in three columns versus two column mode or show a button or add additional text. None of that stuff is really possible in traditional content management systems. So, this is where the visual part comes in. So Builder.io is fully visual, right? [00:05:13] Drag and drop. You can add it, whatever you want in the page. And the last bit is headless, meaning that it's running on the customer's infrastructure and we don't host the website. If you are, if we are hosted CMS, then it's relatively easy to make a drag and drop editor. [00:05:28] But because we don't host it, it's not on our infrastructure. It's actually quite a head-scratcher. And the way we do this, which I think is pretty cool, is, we have this open source technology called Mitosis, which allows us to give one input to Mitosis and it can produced any output in terms of like, whether you use Angular, React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, it doesn't matter what you use on the backend. [00:05:50] We will generate a component for you. And because we're generating an actual component, it drops into the customer's backend infrastructure, right. And everything just works there. Server-side rendering works. Everything that, that the customer might have on a backend, it just worked because it's a full-on regular component, whether it's Angular, React, or whatever the company might use. [00:06:13] So that's the unique bit that nobody knows how to do. And it's also the bit that attracted me to Builder.io and joining them. And the reason for that is because it is really easy for them to create new technology. So one of the things we're going to talk about later is this thing called Qwik. [00:06:30] What's super easy with Builder.io is that they can easily produce new output. So if you have a customer that already has their content, let's say on react or Angular, and they decided they want to move over to something different, like Qwik, and I will talk about why that might be a reason, it is super easy because with a push of a button, because we generate the content, we can generate the components in a different framework. [00:06:55] swyx: Got it. It's interesting. Have you seen Tailwind?  [00:06:57] Misko Hevery: So Tailwind is more of a CSS framework with my understanding is correct for  [00:07:01] swyx: building, but they had to build something for doing this essentially like having different outputs, uh, we have one central template format that outputs all these different  [00:07:11] Misko Hevery: things.  [00:07:12] So this is what Mitosis would do. Right. But Mitosis can do this across all of them, not just Vue and React, right? Every single one. Like, I don't even know what the list is, but there's a huge list of possible outputs that uh, Mitosis  [00:07:25] swyx: can do. Yeah. You have, Liquid and JSON.  [00:07:30] Misko Hevery: There's more, I mean, this for ones that you see over here. [00:07:33] Yeah. You can see pretty much everything's analyst here. We can import from Figma, given some constraints. Cause it's not a one-to-one thing kind of a thing, but we can import from Figma. So the idea is that people can design their site in Figma provided that they follow a certain set of guidelines. [00:07:49] We can actually import them and to turn it into HTML and then serve it up, whether it's React or whatever. One of the things is that's actually important. For example, for us is Liquid, right? Liquid is a templating system on Shopify. But it's a server side templating system and it cannot be done on the client side. [00:08:05] So if you pre-render on Liquid, how do you get a component to bind to it on the client? Because you would need to have the same component. Right? One of the things we can do is we can present it on a liquid and then produce an, a equivalent react component on the client and they automatically bind to it on a client. [00:08:21] Right. So we can do these kinds of tricks which are normally quite difficult.  [00:08:25] swyx: So you went from building one framework to building all the frameworks.  [00:08:29] Misko Hevery: You can think of it that way.  [00:08:31] PartyTown  [00:08:31] Misko Hevery: But my real thing, the real passion is that I want to get all sides to be 100/100. Yeah. Okay. Uh, on mobile, not on this stop, you know, a lot of people claim on desktop that they can do 100 out of a hundred mobile, that's the bar. [00:08:46] So I want to figure out how to do this. And in order to do that, you really have to get super, super good at rendering these things. And it turns out that if you just make a blank page and blank, white page with nothing on it, and you add a Google tag manager, that alone puts you essentially on the cusp of a hundred, out of a hundred on mobile. [00:09:08] So that alone, that, that act alone, right, he's kind of uses up all your time that you have for rendering. And so the question becomes like, how do we make this as fast as possible? So you can get a hundred out of a hundred on mobile. And it's very little processing time that you get to have and still get to have a hundred. [00:09:25] And so we do two things. One is be introducing a new framework called Qwik. little later. But the other thing we're talking about is introducing this thing called PartyTown okay. And I absolutely love PartyTown. So the person behind PartyTown is Adam Bradley, who you might know him from, making the Ionic framework.  [00:09:43] The guy is absolutely genius. And this is a perfect example of the cleverness of it. All right? So you have, something like a Google tag manager that you want to install on your website. And that thing alone is going to eat up all of your CPU time. So you really would like to put it on a WebWorker, but the problem is you can't because the WebWorker doesn't have DOM API. [00:10:02] It doesn't have a URL bar. It doesn't have just about everything that the Google tag manager wants to do. Right? Google tag manager wants to insert a tracking pixel on your screen. It wants to register a listener to the, to the, uh, URL changes. It wants to set up listeners for your mouse movements, for the clicks, all kinds of stuff. [00:10:21] So running it on a Web Worker becomes a problem. And so the clever bit of geniuses that Adam came up with is that, well, what you really want is you want to proxy the APIs on the main thread into the web worker thread, and you can proxy them through, you know, we have these, these objects called proxies. [00:10:39] The problem is that the code on a Web Worker expects everything to be synchronous. And our communication channel between the main thread and the web worker thread is async. And so the question becomes like, well, how do you solve this particular problem? And it turns out there is a solution to this problem. [00:10:56] And the solution is that you can make a XML HTTP request, which is synchronous, on a Web worker. And then you can intercept that the request using a service worker and then service worker can talk to the main thread. Figure out what exactly did you want to do? So for example, let's say you want to set up a, uh, you want to know the bounding rectangles of some div, the Web Worker thread can make that request, encode that request inside of a XML HTTP request, which goes to the service worker. Service worker calls the main thread, the main thread figures out what the rectangle boxes, and then sends the information back to the web worker thread, which then doesn't notice anything special. As far as it's concerned, it's just executing stuff, synchronously. It's like, you're laughing, right? Because this is hilarious. [00:11:41] Web Workers vs Service Workers vs Atomics  [00:11:41] swyx: So I'm one of those. Okay. You're, you're a little bit ahead of me now. I'm one of those people I've never used web workers or service workers. Right. Um, can we talk a little about, a little bit about the difference and like, are they supposed to be used like that? Like,  [00:11:54] Misko Hevery: uh, so we did these two because they are supported under the most browsers. [00:11:59] There's a different way of making synchronous call and that is through something called Atomics, but Atomics is not available on all browsers yet.  [00:12:07] So web worker is basically just another thread that you have in the browser. [00:12:12] However, that thread doesn't have access to the DOM. So all DOM APIs are kind of gone from there. So you can do a lot of CPU intensive things over there, but, , with limited abilities and this is what PartyTown solves is it proxies all of the API from the main thread into the Web Worker thread. Yeah.  [00:12:32] Now service worker is kind of a safe thing, but the difference is that a service worker can watch HTTP requests go by and it can intercept them. And so think of it as almost like a mini web server in your browser. And so what the service worker does over here is intercepts the request that the web worker makes, because that's the only way we know how to make it blocking call. [00:12:56] swyx: Uh, this is the one that we use for caching and Create React App and stuff like that. [00:13:00] Misko Hevery: Yeah. And then, because we can make a blocking call out of a web worker, the service worker who can use the blockiness of it to make an asynchronous call to the main thread and get all the information that you need.  [00:13:12] swyx: that's pretty smart. Is there any relation to, uh, I know that I think either Jason Miller or Surma did a worker library that was supposed to make it easier to integrate, um, are you aware of, I think  [00:13:25] Misko Hevery: all of these worker rivalries are in heart they're asynchronous, right. And that's what prevents us from using it, right. [00:13:31] Because the code as written assumes full asynchronicity, and that is the bit that's. Different. Right. That's the thing that allows us to take code as is, and just execute it in a, Web Worker. And so by doing that, we can take all of these expensive APIs, whether it's, Google tag manager, Analytics, Service Hub, I think that mispronouncing it, I think, all of these libraries can now go to the main thread and they have zero impact on your Google page speed score. And we actually talked to Chrome and we said like, Hey, we can do this. Do you think this is cheating? Right? Like, do you think that somehow we're just gaming the system and the message was no, no, because this actually makes the experience better for the user, right? [00:14:17] Like the user will come to the website. And because now the main thread is the thing that is running faster and none of this stuff is blocking. You actually have a better experience for the user. The other thing we can do is we can actually throttle how fast the Web Worker will run because when the Web Worker makes a request back to the main thread to say, like, I want the bounding box, or I'm going to set up a tracking pixel or anything like that, we don't have to process it immediately. [00:14:43] We can just say, well, process this at the next idle time. And so the end result is that you get a really high priority for the main thread and then the analytics loads when there's nothing else to do. Which is exactly what you want, right? You want these secondary things to load at a low priority and only be done when there's nothing else to do on the main thread. [00:15:02] PartyTown Demo  [00:15:02] swyx: That's amazing. Okay. All right. We have some demos here if we want to  [00:15:05] Misko Hevery: So if you, let's pick out the simple one, the element, right. And what you see in the console log is this is just a simple test, which performs, uh, synchronous operations. But what you see on the console log is that all of these operations are intercepted by the service worker. [00:15:22] Right. And we can see what particular API on the web worker is trying to do and what the result is, what the return code is, you know, how do we respond and so on and so forth. And so through this,you can kind of observe what your third party code does. By the way. The nice thing about this is also that, because you can observe, you can see is ECP. [00:15:43] If you're a third-party code, because we essentially trust them, right. Fully trust this third party code on your website and who knows what this third party code is doing. Right? So with this, you can see it and you can sandbox it and you can, for example, say like, yeah, I know you're trying to read the cookie, but I'm not going to let you, I'm just going to return an empty cookie because I don't think it's your business to do that. [00:16:04] You know, or any of those things we can do. So you can create a security sandbox around your third party code. That is kind of, as of right now is just implicitly trusted and you can, you have a better control over it.  [00:16:18] swyx: I could filter for it, I'm basically, I need HTTP calls and then I need any cookies. [00:16:23] Right. So,  [00:16:25] Misko Hevery: yeah. So in this case, there will be nothing because this is just showing off element API, but I think you go to previous page  [00:16:33] swyx: Before we go there. is there anything significant and? It says startup 254 milliseconds?  [00:16:38] Misko Hevery: Yeah. So the thing to understand is that it is slower, right? We are making the Google tag manager slower to start up. [00:16:46] Right. So it's definitely not going to be as fast as if it was on a main thread, but it's a, trade-off, we're doing intention. To say like, Hey, we want to give the CPU time to a user so that the user has a better experience rather than eagerly try to load analytics at the very, very beginning and then ruining it for the user. [00:17:04] So while in theory, you could run a react application and the web worker, I wouldn't be recommended because it will be running significantly slower. Okay. Um, because you know, all of these HTP requests, all these calls across the boundary, uh, would slow down. So it is a trade-off.  [00:17:23] swyx: So this is really for the kind of people who are working on, sites that are, have a lot of third-party scripts for,  [00:17:30] Misko Hevery: well, all the sides have third party scripts, right? [00:17:32] Like any kind of a site will have some kind of third-party whether it's analytics ads or just something that keeps track of what kind of exceptions happen on the client and send them back to the server, right. Standard standard things that people have on a website. And instead of the standard things that are making, preventing you from getting a hundred out of a hundred on your score. [00:17:52] Right. Okay, amazing. So this is a way of unloading stuff from the main thread Got  [00:17:58] swyx: What's the API? I haven't seen the actual code that, Party Town. Okay. There's a, there's a adapter thingy and then  [00:18:05] Misko Hevery: you stick it. So we, those are just for react components. There is also vanilla. Just go a little over. [00:18:14] So do   [00:18:16] swyx: you see how we have to prioritize, React above Vanilla? [00:18:20] Misko Hevery: Even lower? This just shows you how you get the PartyTown going. Oh, here we go. Text to pay. We go right there. [00:18:25] You're looking at it right there. So notice what. We asked you to take your third party script, which, you know, if you go to Google on an exit, it tells you like, oh, take this script tag and just drop it inside of your head. Right. Or something like that. So what we do is we say like, do the same exact thing, except change the type to text/partytown. [00:18:43] And that basically tells the browser don't execute it. Instead, PartyTown will come later, read the stuff, ship it over to the web worker and then do it over there.  [00:18:54] swyx: So the only API is you, you just change this, that's it? Yes. Yes.  [00:18:58] Misko Hevery: So you drop a party down script into, uh, into, which is about six kilobytes. And then you go to all of the third-party places and just add, type text/partytown, and that ships them off to the other place. [00:19:10] swyx: So, um, it feels like Chrome should just build this in like script, script type third party. Right. And then just do it.  [00:19:20] Misko Hevery: Yeah. I mean, we're having chats with them. You never know. Maybe if this shows up to be very useful technique. It might be something that Chrome could consider. Well, certainly we need a better way of making synchronous calls from the web worker thread to the main thread, not from the main ones of the web, right. [00:19:37] That's clearly a bad idea, but from the web worker, the main, it would be really nice to have a proper way of doing synchronous calls.  [00:19:44] Atomics  [00:19:44] Misko Hevery: Atomics might be the answer. And so it might be just as simple as getting all the browsers to adopt Atomics because the standard already exists.  [00:19:51] swyx: And I see what, what is this thing I've never heard of it? [00:19:55] Misko Hevery: Atomics is basically a shared memory array buffer between two threads and you can do, atomic operations like locking and incrementing and things of that sort on it. And they can be done in a blocking way. So you can, for example, say, increment this to one and wait until whatever result is three or something like that. [00:20:14] So then you're giving a chance for the other thread to do its work. I  [00:20:18] swyx: mean, this is like, so I'm writing assembly, like,  [00:20:22] Misko Hevery: It's not assembly it's more, you know, semaphore synchronization.  [00:20:26] swyx: Um, okay. Yeah. I see the, I see the locks and stuff, but this is, I can't just like throw in a third party script here. [00:20:33] Misko Hevery: No, no, no. This is something that the PartyTown would use to get synchronous messaging across. Right. Because currently it is kind of a hack that we create an XML HTTP request that is blocking that stuff with a service worker. Like this is craziness, right. So Atomics would definitely be a nicer way to do this. [00:20:51] swyx: I think the goal is definitely very worthwhile that the underlying, how you do it is a bit ugly, but who cares?  [00:20:57] Misko Hevery: Yeah. So the goal is very simple, right? The goal is, for us, we think we can have the best CMS, if we can produce websites that are a hundred out of a hundred on mobile, right? [00:21:07] That's the goal. And if you look at the current state of the world, and if you go to e-commerce websites, it's pretty dismal. Like everybody gets like 20 something on their scores for their sites, right? Even Amazon that has all the resources to spend, will only get 60 out of a hundred on their score. [00:21:24] Even Google website themselves gets it only about 70, out of a hundred. Right? So the state of the world is not very good. And I feel like we are in this cold war in a sense that like everybody's website is equally bad, so nobody cares. Right. But I'm hoping that if you can build a couple of websites that are just amazingly fast, then the world's going to be like, well, now I have to care. [00:21:46] Qwik and Resumable vs Replayable Frameworks  [00:21:46] Misko Hevery: Right? Because now it is different. And so now we're getting into the discussion of Qwik. So what is clicking and why do we need this? So, um, the basic idea behind Qwik, or rather than, let me back up a second of why existing websites are slow.  [00:22:04] And so there's two reasons, right? One is third party scripts, and we just discussed how we can solve this through PartyTown right? I mean, we can move all of their party scripts off.  [00:22:12] However, even if you move all the third party scripts off, your problem is still going to be that, uh, the startup time of your website is going to be pretty slow. And the reason for that is because all websites ship everything twice. First it's a server side rendered HTML, right. [00:22:30] And the page comes up quickly and then it's static. So we need to register listeners. Well, how do we adjust your listeners? Well, we download the whole site again, this time they came to in a form of TypeScript or JavaScript, and then we execute the whole site again, which is by the way, the server just did that. [00:22:49] Right? Yup. Yup. And then we know where to put up listeners and, that causes, you know, this is a perfect graphic for it, right. That causes double loading of everything. So we, we download everything once as HTML and then we load everything again, as JavaScript and then the execute the whole thing again. [00:23:07] So really we're doing everything twice. So what I'm saying is that the current set of framework are replayable, meaning that in order for them to have the bootstrap on the client, they have to replay everything that the server, literally just did, not even a second ago. And so Qwik is different in a sense, because it is resumable. [00:23:27] The big difference with Qwik is that the Qwik can send HTML across, and that's all. That's all it needs to send across. There's a little tiny bootstrapper, which is about one kilobyte and about one millisecond run, which just sets up a global listener and alert for the system. And no other code needs to be downloaded and it can resume exactly where the server left off. [00:23:48] So you need to have some formal way of serializing, the state, getting the state to the client, having a way of deserializing the state. More importantly, there's an importance to be able to render components independently from each other, right? And this is a problem with a lot of frameworks, which is - even if you could delay the startup time of a, uh, of an application, the moment you click on something react has to rerender the whole world right now, not rerender, that might be the wrong term, but it has to re execute its diffing algorithm from the root, right. It has to build up the vDOM. It has to reconcile the vDOM, has to do all these things, starting at the root. [00:24:26] There's no real way to not make it from the root. And so that means that it has to download all the code. And so the big thing about Qwik is, how can we have individual components be woken up individually from each other in any order? Right? I mean, people tend to talk about this in form of micro components or microservices on the client, right? [00:24:46] This is what we want, but at like the ultimate scale, where every component can act independently from everybody else.  [00:24:54] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. I think, we should talk a little bit about that because basically every single component is its own module and separately downloaded. So you're really using the multiplexing or whatever you call it of HTTP/2, right? [00:25:05] Like you can parallelize all those downloading. Right. The main joke I made, because I saw this opportunity and I was like, immediately, like, I know this will be the most controversial part, which is essentially. Uh, the way you serialize is you put everything in HTML, right? Like, like that. [00:25:23] So, so I, I immediately feel that, and it will stir up some controversy, but like also, like, I think the, the interesting, I mean, we should talk a bit about this. Like, obviously this is not handwritten by, by, by people. So people should not be that worried. Um, but also like there are some legitimate concerns, right. [00:25:40] Qwik vs React - the curse of Closures  [00:25:40] swyx: About how I think basically Dan Abramov was, was also the, the, you, you responded to Dan. Um, so Dan said something like this, okay. So it wasn't a direct response to Qwik but Qwik serializes all state in HTML, and that's something that we considered for React Suspense. And he says, basically the question was, have you considered allowing server components to have serializable state using equivalent? [00:26:03] it's been proposed somewhere earlier. This doesn't work generally state is in reaction arbitrary. Payloads would get huge essentially, like, "does it scale?" Is the question. Uh, and he said that this was done before and I went and looked it up and he was like, yeah. And it's actually what we used to do for ASP .NET WebForms. Right.  [00:26:18] Misko Hevery: So if you will look at react the way to React does things. And so I want to pull this up on one of the dev, uh, dogs. I actually talk about it and it might be useful to kind of pull it out. Yeah, the one you are on right now, the answer adoptable fine-grained lazy loaded. The point is that if you have a react component, react components take heavily, closures, right? Closure is the bread and butter of react components and they rely on closures everywhere and it's beautiful. I it's absolutely nice. I really like the mental model. However, it doesn't serialize, right? [00:26:50] You can't take a closure and serialize it into HTML. So what Qwik is trying to do is it's trying to break this up into individual functions. Clearly functions cannot be serialized, but functions can get a URL , a globally known URL, uh, which can load this. So if you scroll a little lower, you will see a, uh, Qwik component , and the difference is, in a Qwik component, we'll have these declaration template, which is which points to a location to where this particular thing can be loaded, if you scroll even further, it talks about how this particular thing can be served up in pieces to the client, if you do this thing. Right. So while it's maybe true that like, oh, it's been tried before and we didn't do it right. [00:27:32] Qwik Demo  [00:27:32] Misko Hevery: Have people really tried to solve every single one of these problems. Right. And there's a huge myriad of them that Qwik is trying to solve and kind of get over. And so maybe I can show it to you as a demo of what I kind of have a to-do app working. So let's let me, let's talk about this. [00:27:50] One of the things. So by the way, the screenshot you have on your Twitter account, that is the old version of Qwik, I've been chatting with you and bunch of other people at the conference, I really got inspired by lots of cool things. And this is a kind of a new version I'm working on, which has many of the issues fixed up and improved. So the thing I'm going to show you is standard todo example, right? I mean, you've seen this millions of times before. [00:28:15] swyx: By the way. I did not know that, uh, I think Addy Osmani made this original to do yes, he did. He did. And it's like the classic example. That was a classic example,  [00:28:24] Misko Hevery: right?  [00:28:27] So remember the goal for us is to serialize everything and send to the client in a form that the client can resume where the silver left off. Right. And then everything can be downloaded in pieces. So there's a lot of things to talk about. So let's start with, with how this works first, and then we can talk about how different pieces actually fit together. [00:28:46] So, you know, first thing you need to do, is, standard, define your interface for an item and define your interface for Todos, which is the collection of items, which contains , number of items completed in the current filter state, and just a list of items like so far, nothing. [00:29:02] Now the special thing comes in that when you declaring a object that you want to serialize, you will run it through this special function called Q object. And it's a marker function and does a couple of things to an object. But you're just basically passing all the stuff in and notice the individual items on Q objects as well. [00:29:20] The reason I did it this way is because I want to serialize individual line items separately, because I know that I'm going to be passing the individual items into separate components individually. Right? So what this basically says to the system is like, there is a top level object. Which is this guy right here and it can have rich state, but remember it has to be JSON serializable. [00:29:43] Therefore it cannot have cyclical things inside of it. It has to be a tree, but inside of it, it can have other objects and those can form cyclical things. So using the combination of those two, you can actually get cyclical graphs going inside of your application. But individually, each Q objects doesn't have that. [00:30:02] So that's a bit of a magic. If I scroll over to the actual running application, what you will notice is these Q objects get serialized like right here. So for example, this one has some ID and you notice it says completed zero and the inside of it has individual items. And notice these items are actually IDs to other locations. [00:30:22] So this ID ending in Zab is actually pointing to this object right here, which has other things. So the whole thing gets serialized. And unlike the demo I showed in Zadar, I have moved all the serialized content at the end, because I don't want to slow down the rendering of the top part. And so if you go, let's go back to our application. [00:30:41] So if you have Todo app, the Todo app is declared in a slightly more verbose way than the way the one would be declared in React. But if we do it this way, then we can serialize the closures, right? The closures don't have the issue with non serialized. By the way, the regular React way of doing things still works here and you can do that is just, they become permanently bound to their parents. [00:31:05] They cannot be lazy loaded. So you can think of it as having two mental models here. You can have lightweight components, which are essentially the same as react components, or you could have Q components, which are slightly more heavyweight, but they get the benefit of having the whole thing, be composable and get lazy a little bit so on and so forth. [00:31:24] So in this particular case, we're saying that there is a Todo app component and the QRL is this magical marker function that tells the system that this content here needs to be lazy. Or rather let me phrase it differently, it says the content here can be lazy loaded. The beauty of Qwik is that it allows you to put a lazy load of boundaries all throughout the system. [00:31:48] And then an optimization phase later decides whether or not we should take advantage of these lazy loaded motor boundaries, right in normal world, the developer has to put dynamic imports and that imports that asynchronous and a pain in the butt to work with, it's not simple. Right? So instead, what Qwik wants to do is say like, no, let's put dynamic imports everywhere, but do it in a way where the developer doesn't have to worry about it and then let the tooling figure out later whether or not we should actually have a dynamic import at this location or not. [00:32:18] Yeah. So even though this file, this there's two applications is in a single file in the tooling. We'll be able to break this file up into lots of small files and then decide in which order the things should be shipped to the client in order to get the best experience. You know, if there's a piece of code that never runs in the client will then put it at the bottom of the, of the chunks, right? [00:32:38] If there's a piece of code that is going to be most likely, you're going to click on it and put it up to the top. So, anyway, so that's kind of a diatribe here with a little bit of an off the rails here, but what this produces is a to-do and it turns the code, right? This QRL function, it says on render, it gets turned into a URL. [00:32:58] And this is what allows the build system to rearrange the code. And so this URL basically says, if you determine that Todo needs to be re re rendered, uh, then you can go download this piece of code. And that will tell you how do we render the Todo, right.  [00:33:14] You know, you're using a header and we're using main, notice we're binding Todos in there. So it looks like a regular binding, but the system has to do more work. So in this particular case, the main has to see if it has Todos, it has to refer to a object. So notice this, this ID here matches the ID here. And this is basically how the system knows that this component here, because if you look over here, the main and foot are, both of them want to know that you do this right? [00:33:42] So both of these components need to have the same object. And so, yeah, exactly. So this main here, as well as the footer, they both have a same ID passed in here. And that's how the system knows like, all right, if I wake you up, I have to make sure to provide you with the same exact ID. Now, not only that there is also this particular thing, which is just a copy of it, but, but in this particular. [00:34:08] What it does is, is the list, all of the objects that could potentially affect the state of this component. And when you go and you modify one of these, state objects, the state, these objects actually keep track of each other and they know which components need to be woken up and affected. So I think there's an example of it somewhere here later, uh, like right here, right in here, it says, Hey, if you, uh, you know, do a key up on the input right here, if I type here over here, something, then the key up runs and then eat, enter runs, you know, add a new item, which is just the function that the function right here, which just pushes an item and new item into the list. [00:34:54] And it sets my current state to text me. And so the system knows that in this political case, in a header, this input right here, Has its own state right here. So let me refresh this again. Um, this header has its own state one eight, whatever, right? Which if you look over here is right here. It's text blank, right? [00:35:16] So we find typing here. I'm going to change the state over here. And then if I set the state to blank, then the system knows, oh, that's object 1 8, 7 1, or whatever. I can run a query. I can run document DOM, querySelectorAll. And I can say, give me, uh, all the queue objects, remember how the selector for this start something like this. [00:35:44] Anyways, there's a way to run a selector that will allow me to whatever, whatever the code is, right? I'll run the selector and this selector will then return this header back to me saying this is the object or rather, this is the component that is, has interests registered into this object, which means. [00:36:04] Because I've selected this thing. I have to find the Q render message and send the Q render message to download its template and we render the object. And so what this allows you to do is have a completely distributed set of components that can be awoken only when a relative, you know, appropriate data is changed rather than having this world of like, well, the state has changed and I don't know who has a reference to what? [00:36:30] So the only thing I can do is we learn that the whole page. Well, that's kind of a, it doesn't help you, right? Cause if you run the, the whole page, then there's the whole, the code has to come in here. Right. So that's not helpful. We want to make sure that we only download the code is actually needed. And so you need to have some mechanism by which, you know, like if I change this piece of code, if I change this object, which component needs to be awoken, right. [00:36:54] And normally like if you have Svelte, Svelte does through subscription, this particular trick, the problem is subscriptions cannot be serialized into the DOM. And so we need a mechanism where the subscription information is actually DOM serializable, right? And this is what the Q object is, or the subscriptions that the individual components have to undo to other things. [00:37:18] And so the other thing I kinda want to point out is that we can then bind a complex object. Like in this case, it's a complicated state that'd be assigned to reduce yet. It turned into a binding that's serializable into the bottom, right? So if I go back here, see I'm jumping around. So we have our footer. [00:37:38] If we have our main, the main is declared over here, you know, standard, uh, JSX in here where you, you want to iterate over a bunch of items. There's a host. Okay. So one of the things we need to do is, um, in react, when you have a component, the component is essentially hostless, or I would say it's life component in the sense that it doesn't have a parent, right. [00:38:02] Uh, and that is wonderful in many, many situations, but sometimes it isn't. The problem we have is that we need to have a component. We need to have a DOM element for each component that can be queried using querySelectorAll so that we can determine if there is a listener on it, or if there is a subscription on a particular object or a single back. [00:38:24] So we have this concept of a host element, and this is one way in which the Qwik Q component is more heavyweight than the react component. You can still use react components if you want, you just don't get the benefits we talked about. And, and so a host element is, is a way of referring to the, the host element and adding an attribute to it. [00:38:47] Right. And saying like, oh, I want the host, I'm going to have a classmate. And so if you go into, let's see Maine, uh, right. So it's supposed to be a classmate, right. So it's the component that, that adamant. So normally, uh, the way you do this normally in react is that the main would be a object that the JSX of the re. [00:39:07] The child react component, right? In this particular case for a variety of reasons, we need to eagerly create this particular thing. So then it's a placeholder for other things to go in. And so we need to do an eagerly and then we need a way of like referring to it. So that's what host is, sorry for the, uh, diatribe anyways, but this is how you create your items, right? [00:39:31] And notice the way you got your items is you just got it from your prompts and you can iterate over them. Right? You can reiterate and run the map and produce individual items. And for each item you will pass. And the key. So if you look at the item here, it's prompt says like, I am going to get an item in here. [00:39:50] And my internal state is whether an I am not, I am an editable state. So these are you, basically your props. And this is the components state in here. And, uh, you know, on mound, we create a component states that we're not, we're not an editable state. And then when the rendering runs, uh, it has both the information about the item as well as about whether or not you are currently editing. [00:40:13] Uh, and if you look at the UL, so here's our, one of our items that got generated, notice that the item that passed in as a ID here, right? So if you go to the script at the bottom and see this one ends in PT six, so we should be able to find, here we go, this is what actually is being passed in to that particular component. [00:40:34] But notice there's a second object. Not only is there a, um, a PT six objects, there's also the secondary option. That's the state of the components. So if the state of the component, we're basically saying here is like, if this object changes or this object changes, I want to know about it and I need to be. [00:40:52] So these objects form a graph, right? The presents, the state of your system. And then the Qwik provides a mechanism to serialize all this information into the DOM in such a way that we know which component is to be woken at what time. So if I start typing in one of the things you're going to see is that on the first interaction, this script that will disappear, because what actually happens is that when you interact with the system, it says like "I need to rehydrate myself". Right? And so it goes to the script tag and, uh, reads it. Let me give it back over here, read it leads to the script tag and figures out. You know, these utilizes all these objects because takes this object, puts them inside of this object to build up the graph and then goes back into the DOM tree and say like, okay, so I need to put this one over here. [00:41:40] I need to put this one over here, this one over here and so on and so forth and puts all these objects back. What are they supposed to be? And now you are, your state is back in a, in these components, but the components aren't present yet. They're not awoken, right? Because none of their, uh, Mount or their render functions actually got called. [00:41:59] And because the functions didn't get called, uh, the code didn't have to get downloaded. So everything is super lazy. Right. So when I go and I hit a key over here, the state gets de-centralized, but the only piece of code that gets downloaded is right. It is, it is right. This thing right here. [00:42:18] Nothing else.  [00:42:19] swyx: Can we show that the network actually, ah,  [00:42:22] Misko Hevery: I would love to, but that part is mocked out right now in the old demo, in the demo that I have, that I did for the conference, that one actually had it properly working. But the feedback was that the D as a developer, there was a lot of things I had to do. [00:42:40] Qwik Compiler Optimizations  [00:42:40] Misko Hevery: And so I wanted to simplify it. So one of the things I did is I figured out a way, or rather I spoke with Adam, uh, the same Adam that did PartyTown. And we figured out how to make it, make the tooling smarter so that the developer doesn't have to do this. So what actually happens is that when you have the QRO over here, what actually happens is you, the, the code automatically gets refactored. [00:43:06] And you will get a new function with factor like this. The system will put an expert on it. And what gets placed in this location is a string that says something like, you know, ABC. Uh, hash you local, right. Or something like that. Right? So by doing this transformation and that piece of code is not working in this transformation, um, the, uh, the system can then, uh, lazy load, just the spirit physical code, nothing else. [00:43:39] But in order to do this transformation, we have to make sure that this code here doesn't have any closures. Right? I cannot, it cannot close over something and keep that variable because if it does the whole thing doesn't work. And so the nice thing is that we can still write it in a natural form, but one of the constraints here here is that you can't close over any variables. [00:44:01] Now there's no variables to close over them. The system is designed in such a way that it doesn't need it. Instead of things like props and state are explicitly passed into you, as well as to the thing of the child, whether they're halo as well. So you don't have a needs to create these kinds of closures, but it is a constraint. [00:44:19] And this is what allows the optimizer to go in and rearrange your code base in a way where we can then determine what things are used. So, so in this particular case, we can, for example, determined that you're likely to go and interact with the input box, but you are very unlikely to actually call this on render, because this is the kind of the Chrome, the shell of the application, and wants to show them the applications loaded you will never, ever interacted. [00:44:46] Right? So what you can do is you can take all these imports and you can sort them not alphabetically. You can sort them by the probability of usage. And then once you haven't sorted by the probability of usage, you can tell the optimizer like, okay, take the first N ones so that I have a chunk that's about 20 kilobytes because we think 20 kilobyte chunks. [00:45:08] And then the system can be like, okay, let me add a whole bunch of them until I have 20 kilobytes. Let me add a nice chunk, then underline about 20 clubs. And I kind of do these chunking all the way on the end. And then the last chunk we'll probably end up with a bunch of stuff that never ever gets loaded. [00:45:22] Right. But the problem is the current way we design applications. You can't do that. You just can't right. And so we have this mentality of like, we have frameworks that have amazing developer experience, but they set up the overall experience down the path of monolithic code base and any kind of, um, lazy loading that the Builder can add after the fact. [00:45:50] It's just like kind of a kloogey workaround. Right? And that's the thing that the Qwik solves it says like, no, no, no, let me help you design an application that has still nice developer experience, but let me structure things in a way so that I can later rearrange things, right? Let me keep you on this guide rails of like, make sure you do it in these ways. [00:46:12] And so everything is in the quickest set up in a way where it keeps you in this guide rails. And the result is, is a piece of code that the optimizer, then the Qwik can rearrange, right? It can go and pull out this function. It can pull out this function. It can pull out all of these functions and turn them into a top level functions that are exportable. [00:46:31] And it can then, um, tree shake the stuff that's not needed and produce chunks that can then be lazy loaded into your application.  [00:46:41] swyx: Like four or five years ago, I think there was some, uh, I think even at the Chrome dev summit or something like that, there was a effort to use Guess.js to basically use Google analytics, to optimize all this, intelligent pre-loading or loading predictions. [00:46:58] Um, is that how I think I missed the part about how, like, how you pull in the statistics for, for optimizing.  [00:47:05] Misko Hevery: So the first thing to talk about, I think is important to understand is that unless you can take your application and break it up into lots and lots and lots of chunks, I do that. Yeah. There's nothing to talk about. [00:47:15] Right? If your application is one big chunk, there's nothing to talk about. You would have to load the chunk end of discussion.  [00:47:21] swyx: Well, so the chunk goes page level, and now you're doing component level, right? So they were, they were saying we split it by page and we can predict the next page. So,  [00:47:30] Misko Hevery: so look at Amazon, right? [00:47:34] Most of this stuff, you will, I mean, you can click on stuff and there's a menu system up here and let's pick a random component here. How do I, let me just go to something. Oh, come on. Just give me a detail view of something every day. Uh, you know, most things here never have to be rendered. Like, for example, there's a component here. [00:47:52] This component never, ever changes. Nothing here. We're render nothing. We'll run it there, here. Uh, yes, these are components and I can click on them and they update the UI over here. But if I'm interacting here, why am I downloading the menu system? Right. And so the point is, if you have a page like this, there is huge number of components in here, but most of them either never update, or in my current path of interaction, I just don't need to update them. Right. If I'm using the menu system, then I don't need to download this thing here. And if I'm interacting with my item then I don't need the menu system, and I'm not, unless they put something out to car, do I have to worry about my shopping cart? [00:48:33] Right? And, and this is the problem is that we currently bundle the whole thing up as one giant monolithic chunk. And yes, there are ways to break this out, but they are not easy. And everybody knows how to do route level break up. But like even on rough level, it's, it's not, it's not fine grain enough. [00:48:53] Right. And so the magic of Qwik is the magic of writing the code in this particular style. Is that for a typical size application, I can break up the application in literally thousands of chunks. Now that's too much. We've gone way too far. I do. These, these chunks are too small and we don't want that. [00:49:13] Right. But when I can break things up, it's easy for me to assemble bigger chunks out of it. But the opposite isn't true, right? If I have a big chunk and I want to break it, well, good luck. You know, no amount of tooling is going to do this. As a matter of fact, the best AI system we have, which is right here in our brains. [00:49:31] Right. Even if you give it to the developer and say, go break this thing up, it's a head-scratcher that takes like weeks of work. Right? And so we are in this upside down world of like build a humongous thing and then have this attitude of like, somehow tooling will solve it. Tooling can solve this problem. [00:49:52] Right. You have to do it the other way around. You have to design a system which breaks into thousands of little chunks. And then the tooling can say, yeah, but that's too much. It's too fine-grained. And let me glue things together and put them together into bigger chunks because. Through experience. We know that an optimal chunk size is about 20 kilobytes, right? [00:50:11] And so now the thing you want is to get a list, the order of which the chunks are used, and that's easy, right? If you're running your application, you can just keep statistics on what, how users interact with your application and that's that the sticks can be sent back to the server. And so once you can get back on a server is just a ordered list of the probability by which you're going to need individual chunks. [00:50:35] And that sort of lists that sorted list is all you need to tell the optimizer, like start at the top of the list, keep adding items until you get to a correct chunk size, they'll start a new job, right. And you keep doing this over and over. Okay. Now the reason I get excited about this, the reason I talk about it is because we completely ignored this problem. [00:50:57] Right. We, we have these amazing frameworks, whether it's Angular, React, Svelte or whatever that allow you to build these amazing sites. But on the end of the day, we all have horrible page speed scores, because we're not thinking about it from the correct way. And the attitude for the longest time has been, the tooling will solve it later. [00:51:18] And my argument here is no, the tooling will not solve it later. If you make a mess of this code base, there's nothing that tooling can do. Yeah.  [00:51:27] swyx: Um, there's so many directions. I could take that in. So first of all, uh, the React term for this is a sufficiently smart compiler, which has been in the docs for like four or five years. [00:51:36] Yeah. That's an exhibit,  [00:51:39] Misko Hevery: but that's my point. Like you cannot make a sufficiently smart compiler [00:51:43] swyx: so is, I mean, is there a compile step for this because of the QRL section.  [00:51:47] Misko Hevery: So right now it's actually running without compilation whatsoever. So one of the things I want to make sure that it runs both in a compiled and uncompiled state, and that's why it comes up with these bogus things like mock modules, et cetera. [00:52:01] Uh, and I think if you go to the network stab, it loads the mock module, and it just re-exports it. I can't really show you, but basically all of these things are kind of just in there. So currently this thing runs as a single monolithic application, but the, the way this thing would work is that as I pointed out everything, every place that you see QRL is a hint to the compiler to go and extract this. [00:52:26] The compiler, literally, we would just think. Ctrl+Shift+R extract here and then gives it a name which will be a header pull on a key up. Right. And then it repeats the same exact thing over here. So Ctrl+Shift+R extract. This is a header onMount. I mistyped it. It's okay. I get it right. And the same thing here, controls have to go Ctrl+Shift+R [00:53:00] Qwik Questions  [00:53:00] swyx: what if I need to do like conditional loading because the competitor doesn't know which branch I need to go down.  [00:53:09] Misko Hevery: So I'll answer the question in a second, did you want to point out, so notice what ends up here? The header is super, super lightweight. There's nothing in here. Cause these things, these two things will get converted into these URLs, right? Yeah. And because of that, this header is permanently bound to the onRender of the to-do app. [00:53:28] Right? If you load a to-do app you're also loading the header and of Main and a footer, but the thing we've done over here is we made this super lightweight, and this is what allows the lazy loading to happen.  [00:53:41] Now you're asking what about other components? Uh, easy. I mean, uh, if you want it to conditionally include the header, you know, standard stuff. [00:53:51] Uh, true. Right now the, the header itself will always be permanently bound into the, on render of the to-do app. Right. However, because we did the trick when we extracted everything out of it had already super, super lightweight. It doesn't contain anything. Right? So the only thing the header really contains if you go in here is the what to do on this URL was the only thing that's in there and also this vendor, right? [00:54:18] So these two URLs are the only thing that is contained inside of the header by itself. Okay. It's only when we decide to render the header, do we go into the header? And we say, okay, we're doing a rendering. So what's your URL. And we look at this URL right here, we download the code. And so now the rendering pipeline has to be a synchronous. [00:54:38] We download the code and then we go and execute the content. And we basically fill in the content the better now in the process, we also realize, oh, we also have to download this piece of code. And this is where statistics would come together. And we basically tell us that this URL and this URL always get downloaded together. [00:54:57] And therefore the optimizer will be smart enough to always put them together in the same file in the same chunk. And, uh, you know, we rented the content. Got it.  [00:55:09] swyx: Okay. So, uh, one small piece of, uh, API feedback slash questions. Uh, yeah, you have, the tag name is optional there. I guess that's a hint to what to store, right. [00:55:18] Misko Hevery: So right now it says to-do right here. If I have a  [00:55:22] swyx: out,   [00:55:24] Misko Hevery: it becomes, uh, just the div. Um, so the system doesn't care. What the thing is, it means eight element. Um, it could be any element they will do just fine. It's easier to kind of on the eyes if it actually says to do right. So that's the only reason for okay. [00:55:42] Got it.  [00:55:43] swyx: the bigger piece is okay. It's like a lot of HTTP requests. Every time I basically, like every time I make a request, every time I interact with the app, I essentially need to do a whole new handshake, a whole new network transfer. There's some baseline weight for that. [00:56:00] Right. Chunking links that helps, um, is there a preload essentially? Is there a less programmatically say like, okay. And by the way, uh, this is important for offline capable apps. So I like, let's say like, I'm going offline. Like it's five things. I know I don't need it right now, but like as an app developer and  [00:56:18] Misko Hevery: I know.  [00:56:19] Yes. So, uh, we can totally do that. Um, we, uh, there is a level worker that will be set up and the web worker will get a list of all the chunks in the woodwork who will try to go and download them and set up the caching for you, uh, in these chunks of time. So that Y when you interact, the only thing that the browser has to do is execute the code now, because these chunks are small, the execution code, if we don't, we're not worried about it, right. [00:56:46] In the case of like on typical framework, that's replaceable. The problem is that the first time you interact with this thing, you have this huge amount of code to download parts and execute. But this isn't the case here because every interaction really only brings in the code that's strictly necessary for this interaction. [00:57:04] So again, we go to like Amazon, right? If I hover over here over these things, and it changes the image on the right side, the only code that gets downloaded and executed is the code for this. Now it's already pre downloaded because their web worker would go and pre fetch it for you. So the only thing that the browser has to do is parse the code and execute the code for the on hover, a callback that goes and updates this components URL. [00:57:27] Right. That's it? No other code needs to be downloaded in a presence. Yep.  [00:57:31] swyx: Got it. anything else that we should cover real Qwik?  [00:57:35] Misko Hevery: I feel like I have talked your ear off and you have been such a good and gracious host. Uh, happy to answer questions. I don't want to overwhelm people, but I am super excited as you can talk. [00:57:46] I'm super excited about this. I think it's a fundamental shift about how you think about a framework. So like, if you look at all the existing frameworks, they're all arguing about, like, I have a better index, I can do this better or that better and et cetera. Right. But fundamentally they're not the same, like essentially the same buckets they can all do about the same thing Qwik. [00:58:05] I think it's a whole new ballgame because the Qwik thing is not about like, oh, I can render a component just like, you know, 50 other frameworks can do as well. The thing that Qwik has is I can do it. I can give you microservices for free. I can give you this micro component architecture for free and I can produce a bundling. I am the sufficiently advanced compiler. Okay. Let's put it this way. This thing that you thought you could have and solve for you, doesn't exist unless you have the current guidelines. Right? So the thing with Qwik is that it is the thing that allows you to have a sufficiently smart compiler to give you this amazing times to interactivity, right? [00:58:48] At the end of the day, is the, there's nothing faster than downloading HTML for your website. I mean, that's the cake, right? Yep. So the reason why Qwik is fast is not because Qwik is clever in the way it runs JavaScript or anything like that. So no Qwik as fast because they don't have to do anything. [00:59:04] Right. When you, when you come to a Qwik website, there is literally nothing to do, right. We're fast because we don't do anything. And that's  [00:59:13] swyx: your baseline is like a one kilobyte bike loader, right?  [00:59:16] Misko Hevery: One come on loader with all the loader, does it sets up a global list? Right. So let me, let me go back. Sorry, let me share one more thing. [00:59:22] So here's your input, right? So if you go to a header, here's the input, right? The reason we know how to do something on it is because we serialize this thing called on:keyup, and there is a URL, right? So when this thing is first executed, nothing is done. Like this content shows up and it said we're done. [00:59:41] And the only reason why we know to do something next is because when I do a key up here, the event, bubbl

Good morning everybody!  I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and started this morning talking about some interesting developments that happened involving one of Jupiter's moons.  Then we discussed how Gen Z is sharing so much on Social Media and how it is being used against them in some cases by law enforcement. Then we talked about secure communications. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Ganymede my gosh. I've been watching this space opera, but I absolutely love it. They've done such a good job that was actually written. These books were written by a group of people who got together and they have a pseudo gnome that they're calling themselves, but it's just, it's amazing. Anyway, when I saw Ganymede in the news and this is probably why it made it to the news, frankly. But when I saw Ganymede in the news, which is one of the moons of Jupiter and FM radio signals coming from it, it blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind. So I talked to Matt about that because I'm a bit of a space geek, and of course we got into what's the problem right now. What's going on in technology-wise with this internet shutdown on conservative voices and being able to track people who were down in the Capitol. What are they doing? What's the FBI and everybody else up to? So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Speaking of things that are usually done on Wednesdays, how about Craig Peterson? Our tech guru who joins us now as he always does. Of course, you can hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock, as well, for his show where he goes into greater depth on all of these questions that we're about to ask him right now on the show. Craig, how are you this morning? Craig Peterson: [00:01:21] I'm doing well. We're on Newsradio 98.5 FM as well as am 560. I don't know if you heard this one or not. This just absolutely amazed me. I'm a science buff. You may not know it, but I was actually one of the contractors or subcontractors to the RCA Astro space people and help design parts of the subsystems for the space shuttle back in the day. So a bit of a space fan. But you know what Ganymede is? Matt Gagnon: [00:01:51] Yeah Ganymede is a Moon of Jupiter, right? Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] You're do know who you're talking to don't you? Craig Peterson: [00:01:55] That's true too. We can talk about the show. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:57] We can nerd out all. If you don't want to talk about technology, we can talk about space and just have everybody turn off the dial. That's fine. Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] We have a satellite that is circling Jupiter right now and it picked up an FM radio transmission from Ganymede. It was about a five-second burst. It was frequency modulating. And they're saying it probably wasn't ET. It was probably just the clouds in Ganymede and the electrons creating the cyclotron thing, but anyway. Totally geeked out. I loved it. I wasn't sure if you heard, Matt Gagnon: [00:02:35] Are you kidding? I knew the moment you said, Ganymede. I knew exactly what you were talking about. I did see it. I did see a news article was written on it that said that scientists are explaining it as probably a natural phenomenon, but they have absolutely no idea what it is, basically. Craig Peterson: [00:02:48] So cool. Anyway. Matt Gagnon: [00:02:50] That could in fact be an alien base on Ganymede and they were about to invade us. That's, 2021, right? 2021. All right. Craig Peterson certainly while that is a technological topic, we have earthbound technological topics to get to, and we can't get away from the fact that the big story of last week was of course what happened on Capitol Hill. One of the interesting stories that you and I were chatting about before that I'd like to ask you about a little bit more here is about the stupidity of some of these people because the social media feeds for many of the people that participated in this is giving all the police, the feds, everybody who's investigating this just tons and tons of evidence to go after them. I'm thinking of the picture of the guy who had the podium walking away Hey, look, there's my face just waving at the camera. The Viking guy, everybody else, all seemed to gleefully and happily share all the information about all the laws they were breaking on social media, making the law enforcement job pretty easy. Isn't it? Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] Yeah, it's really easy. We talked about some of the alternative social media sites out there as well, like Parler, Gab, and Mastodon and some of these others. Did you also see that this one lady a programmer? She wrote a piece of code that was 400 lines long now, for those of us, that aren't total geeks. That means it's a very simple, very small program and she was able to pull down everything off of Parler.  That includes, this is before Parler went offline, the videos, the photos with all of the GPS information still embedded in them. Apparently, this is just a treasure trove of even more information. Like you were just talking about people that we're sharing it over there on Parler, and it wasn't stripped of any of the identifying information. You're right. This is just making it so easy for law enforcement to find all of these people and that's where it's going to get really interesting. Obviously, these people were among the more extreme out there. Matt Gagnon: [00:04:52] So speaking of Parler, I do have to ask a little bit about what's been going on this, and frankly, we could probably take up an entire segment or two or three on this topic alone here, but Google, Apple, Amazon, and others. All banning Parler. It's only one of many recent moves that have had greatly concerned me about what's going on with the tech giants and how they're essentially sensor censoring an entire ideology away from their app stores and their social media feeds and everything else. Talk to me a little bit about this move and what you think the ultimate implications of it are. Craig Peterson: [00:05:23] I'm sitting down, which is good because it's absolutely incredible. I call myself an internet originalist, right? You've heard of constitutional originalists. We believe in why it was created and the internet. Remember, I've been on the internet since about 81, 82. Before it was, frankly, the internet, and back then it was exciting because finally, we had a way to communicate. We had free speech online. We didn't have to buy a $200,000 printing press in order to share stuff, including silly little poems that we add back then. We were into Monty Python. It was a different world. It was really evolving, nicely. Although the internet was designed to resist a nuclear attack, so we could lose an entire city, major city, you name it doesn't matter. We could still continue to communicate because it was designed for these research institutions primarily, at the time universities, to be able to communicate with each other. And also with the military for all of the research they were doing. It was just a beautiful design, amazing what was done with it. Now the problem that we're seeing. Is that we have companies like Amazon that are in literal control of a good 60% of the internet. Part of the reason the internet was just so resilient is it is by definition interconnected networks. It was, I've got my network of computers and I might be a small company, I might be a big company and we all get together and we pass each other's data. That's how it works. It's not like there's one big pipe somewhere that nobody's paying for because it's all free and the internet should be free, all of these crazy ideas. It's you name your local internet provider these cellular providers, all of these different companies, they all connect to the networks together and they then route data for other companies through their networks. That's been part of the problem with Netflix, for instance, that at times is consumed more than half of the internet bandwidth. People got upset because, Hey, listen, I'm just a small rural internet service provider and I'm pulling all of this data through my network not even for people who are paying me. For other people's customers and it's been back and forth and we'll have those discussions again in the future I'm sure with the new Biden administration. But where we've now run into the problem, that we're seeing, is what happens when Amazon has 60% of the internet, based in Amazon? Now I'm not talking about people buying and stuff for Amazon. Matt Gagnon: [00:08:27] Are you talking about their cloud servers and stuff? Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Exactly. Exactly. Then with those cloud servers, they built their own extra services. So again, let's pick on Parler. Parler was not only using Amazon to host computers, which is what a lot of companies do. They were using Amazon to host their name service so people could find them. They were using Amazon to do queuing for people's posts. Completely using the queuing services. They were using. Amazon's database services. They were using Amazon storage services. So now when Amazon kicks them off, all of a sudden they're out of business because they were a hundred percent dependent on Amazon services. Specifically, Amazon. Twitter's in the same boat. Twitter is almost entirely inside the Amazon services. So you now have these huge companies and GoDaddy's other example, right? Who pulled many conservative sites DNS, domain name service, but these huge companies control so much of the internet. They can say, no, we're deplatforming you. If enough of them get together, and frankly, sometimes all it takes is Amazon. Even Amazon saying we're not going to allow your data to pass through our networks can put you out of business.  It's great that some small internet service provider up in Idaho said forget about it. We're not carrying Facebook's traffic or Twitter or some of these other sites anymore. But they really aren't going to impact anyone except for their customers. We're in big trouble. Matt Gagnon: [00:10:12] All right. That's Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday, as he always does to go over the world of technology, including technology in space. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, as always. Make sure you tune in and listen to that here on WGAN one o'clock and we'll talk again next week, sir. Craig Peterson: [00:10:27] Take care, Matt. Matt Gagnon: [00:10:28] All right. Thanks. Craig Peterson: [00:10:29] Can't believe it's been another week. Man, time is just flying now. It seemed like the election was years ago. As well as of course, all of these things that have been going on, it was dragging for so long, because of the lockdown. Now things are just flying. It's just, wow, incredible. Have a great day. We are finishing up on what we're now calling our Introduction to Windows Security course. That will be out very soon. Keep an eye out for that. Take care, Everybody. We'll be back. Bye-bye. ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

3PL fulfillment for Amazon (using a 3rd party logistics warehouse to store products and send them to end consumers) has never been the preferred method for Amazon sellers. With some odd exceptions in the USA in Q4, Amazon's FBA system has been fast, reliable, and affordable.  Until 2020 and the hit of COVID.   The huge increases in demand for eCommerce products in 2020 have been a boost for Amazon sellers.  Equally, it has caused major issues for the fulfillment of orders. Even Amazon's mighty FBA infrastructure has, quite simply, been overwhelmed by the sheer demands on it.  Many Amazon/eCommerce business owners have taken 3PL fulfillment seriously for the first time this year. And rightly so. Done right, it makes sure you get the goods into the hands of your customers quickly and avoid losing out on sales by going out of stock. But done wrong, it can be a threat to your very ability to sell on Amazon. That's a situation where expert advice is called for. Lifelong freight expert, Amit Rosenthal, talks us through the options and the downfalls in FBM.   You can also learn about: Can Amazon FBA services be considered as third-party logistics (3PL) fulfillment prep sellers?  You'll Learn: Reasons for doing FBM Risks of FBM How to handle order management and linking FBM warehouse to Amazon How to keep an accurate inventory in 3PL When should you use Long and short-term storage  

3PL fulfillment for Amazon (using a 3rd party logistics warehouse to store products and send them to end consumers) has never been the preferred method for Amazon sellers. With some odd exceptions in the USA in Q4, Amazon's FBA system has been fast, reliable, and affordable.  Until 2020 and the hit of COVID.   The huge increases in demand for eCommerce products in 2020 have been a boost for Amazon sellers.  Equally, it has caused major issues for the fulfillment of orders. Even Amazon's mighty FBA infrastructure has, quite simply, been overwhelmed by the sheer demands on it.  Many Amazon/eCommerce business owners have taken 3PL fulfillment seriously for the first time this year. And rightly so. Done right, it makes sure you get the goods into the hands of your customers quickly and avoid losing out on sales by going out of stock. But done wrong, it can be a threat to your very ability to sell on Amazon. That's a situation where expert advice is called for. Lifelong freight expert, Amit Rosenthal, talks us through the options and the downfalls in FBM.   You'll Learn: Reasons for doing FBM Risks of FBM How to handle order management and linking FBM warehouse to Amazon How to keep an accurate inventory in 3PL When should you use Long and short-term storage  

We talk about the delay for Amazon Prime Day and CEO Jeff Bezos’ upcoming appearance before Congress just days ahead of his massive gain in net worth.    Story: https://cnet.co/2D2dgRN Bezos net worth: https://cnet.co/3jForRw Leave a voicemail: 862-250-8573 Follow us: twitter.com/thedailycharge Homepage: cnet.com/daily-charge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to learn how to design your offer page in your sales funnel for maximum conversions? This video will show you the THREE super simple sections that are part of EVERY successful sales page. Even Amazon is using #3 extensively these days on their sales pages!

As Jason Bradshaw describes in his book, It’s all about CEX! The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience, in 1994 customer service was the differentiator. In the early 2000s it was engagement. Today is all about customer experience management. Sounds good.  Here’s the problem.  Customer experience is one of those terms that sounds good, everyone knows it’s important, but no one really knows how to define it. It’s too vague.In his book, Jason gives us an excellent framework for measuring customer experience that I understand. And that I can use to design a strategy that I could execute.  Maybe CX is not so vague after all.  A framework for measuring customer experienceHere’s what I learned from Jason about customer experience. You can measure it with three things:  Success: You have to deliver on your promise. If your customer ordered something, the delivery needs to happen on time. If a customer requests to turn on the new module in your software, the new model has to be turned on. You have to deliver. Simple. Of course no company is perfect. Even Amazon deliveries get delayed on occasion. But most of us trust that when we order something on Amazon, it turns up. Effort/Ease: Working with you has to be easy. Navigating your website, signing up, attending QBRs, paying your invoice, etc. Whatever it is, it needs to be as easy for the customer as possible. Think of your QBRs? What much work to you give your customers to get ready for your QBRs? Do you make your customer pull data and create slides? Some people do. Ugh.  Human connection: Make a personal connection with people. Small companies might not be able to compete with the big companies on scale and technology and automation and recommendation engines, but, as Jason describes, small companies can differentiate themselves on human connection.  From my experience as a customer, this works. I’ve shifted much of my purchasing to small, local businesses and re-engaged with running stores and ski shops and the neighborhood cafe. Jason said to me the local ski shop might not be able to compete with the massive sports retailer on price or automation, but they can call you in the fall and say, “Bill, I remember last year you saying you were developing a sore spot on your right foot…let’s get your boots adjusted before the snow falls.”I have received that call from the running store, “You must be running out of trail butter, Bill. I can send you some if you like.” Human connection built in to your business modelIf I may make a connection to another business concept: The Business Model Canvas. Do you work for a software company that has a high touch relationship with customers or is it low touch? It might be both. It also might be intentional.  On the business model canvas, there is a box called “customer relationship.” This section of the canvas is about what type of relationship do you want to have with your customers? You could decide, quite deliberately, to have a “high touch” relationship with customers. This is fine. It is more costly to deliver than a low touch, “Go to our help center” if you want help approach.  But you can do it. Zappos chose that model. You can design that high touch customer relationship into your business model and, in Jason’s words, differentiate yourself on the human connection. More about JasonJason wants to give you two free chapters of his book. It’s a great book. And I learned a lot reading it and discussing it with him. Go to his website here and get your two free chapters: jasonsbradshaw.com/thankyouDo you know who else likes Jason’s book? Jeanne Bliss (Ep 76). She’s been on Helping Sells Radio. She also gave Jason an excellent endorsement about his book: It’s simple: customer experience matters now, more than ever, and in this book, Jason will help you accelerate improvements. Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

It’s Episode 190, which means it’s time for another solo episode! When I was thinking about what I wanted to do for this episode, I was talking to my husband about how surreal this time is that we’re in right now while we’re social distancing all over the world. I’ve been taking social media Sabbaths on the weekends from Friday night until Monday morning, and it has been so good for my soul. Limiting my news intake has been life-giving for my mental health and my family’s mental health. I realize that there is a privilege to be able to do that, and it may not be the reality for so many people, so I want to be very intentional about using it to bring glory God and to uplift others. While I realize we could have whole podcast series about to support people during this time, I am in a unique position to speak to you about the specific challenges these brands are facing and highlighting ways to collectively support them. While I will be speaking on topics that require a certain amount of monetary investment, I also realize that money is tight for a lot of people right now, and I’ve also included ways to support that are completely free. 5:01 - It might feel like you can wait to support these small businesses when things get back to normal. But truly, right now is the time to support these businesses so that they are still here and thriving when we make it through this season. Just a few of the things that they’re facing right now are that all conferences, expos, markets, and speaking engagements have been canceled or postponed. That means these ethical businesses are experiencing less exposure and fewer sales. Small shops are closed, so wholesale has come to a halt, and trips to visit artisan partners have been canceled, which means there are no new products to offer or promote. Additionally, artisan partners have had to cut back on production, but the businesses here are still trying to pay them so that they can continue to eat and provide for their families. 6:25 - There’s such a hard balance for feeling guilty for trying to sale products, but that’s exactly what they rely on in order to continue supporting their artisan partners. The entire country of India, and many don’t have money in savings or credit cards to continue buying food and supplies for their most basic needs. It’s a life or death situation for so many people, completely unrelated to the fear of catching the virus. 7:42 - There is hope, especially when we come together to support each other and continue to make big change happen to help these businesses not only continue in this season, but continue to thrive in this season.  7:56 - I’m going to start by sharing six ways you can support ethical, fair trade, and small businesses during COVID-19 that are completely free: Follow them on social media Engage with their content. Every engagement is the opportunity to get more eyes on their products that are changing the world: Sign up for their newsletter Like their posts Comment on their posts Share their posts If you already own products from a small, fair trade, or ethical business that you love, post pictures of yourself using or wearing those products and tag them online. Think of a friend who might also like that product and might have the funds to buy it right now. Recommend small businesses, ethical, or fair-trade businesses to friends when they’re looking for suggestions for certain things.  Get involved with Fashion Revolution Week (happening this week)! Fashion Revolution Week 2020 is from April 20th – April 26th. You can go to http://fashionrevolution.org/to learn more. You’ll hear conversations from people all over the world about who makes our clothes, how to help the ethical fashion industry, how to stop things like fast fashion, environmental sustainability and more. You can also get involved with Fashion Revolution throughout the year! Be patient. Patience is key, as is grace. There’s a lot that’s delayed with backorder delays, shipping delays, and shipping pauses. Everyone is experiencing these challenges, so please give businesses some grace and understanding, they’re doing their best to fulfill orders and there is so much that is out of their control. 11:32 - If you have the means to purchase products to support ethical fashion, fair trade, and small businesses, be thoughtful about it. Is this item that you want or need something you can buy from a small or ethical business right now? Even Amazon is behind, so being able to wait a few more days for something from a small, ethical business makes a huge difference. As an example, do you need shampoo? Instead of going to Target, Walmart, or Ulta, try getting it from Missio Hair, Be Pure Beauty, or Plane Products. What about household products or toilet paper? You can check out a hilariously named company called Who Gives A Crap, or talk to Rachel at Simple Switch who was on the podcast just a few weeks ago! Need some new shoes or a handbag? There’s The Root Collective, Malia Deigns, Seeko Designs, or ABLE! If you need gifts, The Flourish Market has fantastic $30 gift bundles for anyone you need a gift for: kids, Mother’s Day, teachers, friends, etc. 13:11 – You can also reach out to some of your favorite brands to see what they have in stock. Buying what’s already in stock helps them sell current inventory. 13:30 – Gift Cards: If it’s a company you know you love to buy from, but they may not have something that you want right now, buy a gift cards. Not all businesses are receiving small business loans or stimulus packages. 14:17 - Shop small and local as much as you can during this season because every single sale means the world to them. Even if it’s just $10.00. It could mean a day’s wage for an artisan overseas or an hour for a worker in the US. Your purchases really do make an impact. 15:13 - As a small business owner, there are ways I’d appreciate your free support as well! You can share this podcast, rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, is a free way to support me at this time. Since I’m a Sseko Fellow, you can also shop with me at Sseko Designs! Every email, comment, review, likes, shares are each so special to me. Your support and this community mean more than I could ever put in words. 16:22 - Please reach out if there is something specifically that I can be in prayer about for you. If you’re a business or organization that has a specific need, I’d love to help connect you with so many communities that would love to rally around you at this time. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. I want to love and support you at this time too. 17:13 - I know each week I usually sign off by saying, “Go do something good with purpose on purpose”, and I still want you to do that, but I’m going to borrow a line from my sweet friend Chidimma Ozor who has been signing off her social media posts with the following: “Stay well, wash your hands, and may we take care of ourselves and one another.” Memorable Quotes 5:21 - “Right now is the time, if you’re able to, to support these businesses.” 7:42 - ”There is hope, especially when we come together to support each other and continue to make big change happen to help these businesses not only continue in this season, but continue to thrive in this season.” 6:30 - “There’s this extremely difficult balance between feeling guilty for trying to sell products, but also recognizing that it’s important that they do their best to continue supporting their artisans partners during this time.”

Rarely do we get a chance to witness the birth of something truly remarkable. Even Amazon, Netflix and Google were only appreciated for what they are, many, many years after their hard earned work paid off. But today’s co host is someone special, someone truly living her life’s purpose in helping the world to awaken so that the Healing process can truly get started. Rarely does someone get my attention quite the way this incredible woman has, and rarely do people put their money where their mouth is, in such a profound and selfless way. This week I welcome Amanda Masters, the cofounder of the Awake TV Network. Dubbed the Spiritual Netflix, the Awake TV Network brings together over 70 of the worlds best teachers, to not only raise the frequency of consciousness for the whole planet, but to give you exclusive, intimate access for your own personal growth and development. All the excuses you have ever had, are now gone, because for the first time in history, you can access whatever you want, from any device you have, anywhere in the world.Awake TV is already taking the world by storm, changing the lives of so many people each and every day. Grab yourself a hot cuppa and a comfy spot, because you ain't going to want to miss this week’s episode of the illimitable living podcast.Remember, if you want to live without limits you need to do something today, so you can thank yourself tomorrow. Go to https://andrewhackett.com.au/audio and grab a copy of my latest Audio Programs and https://andrewhackett.com.au/books to order any of my Books.Go to https://andrewhackett.com.au/masterclass/order/now/oto to grab my special discount for Podcast listeners to my Fear to Freedom Master Class

36 year old lady calls the cop because her parents took her off the cellphone plan and Jeffy tries to understand why did she call 911. Democratic Debate happen last night and Jeffy is here to not talk about it other than nobody cares. Amazon runs out of a product that Jeffy needs and things get weird. Royal News that include a mistaken porn site that was linked to them and Harry/Meghan must re-brand because they can't use the word 'royal' or 'Sussex.' Pigeons once again appear to have hats and Trump hair, but this time someone takes the credit. Subscribe on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Simplr studios in San Francisco, this is your daily briefing.  IntroductionThis is Today in Five, for today, Thursday, January 2nd. Today we’ll take a look back at the biggest trends and headlines of 2019 as we start the new year.2019 was a big year for the retail and e-commerce industries. Between record-breaking holiday sales, tariff concerns, CEO departures, and more, there’s a lot to cover. So here are a few of the things we thought were noteworthy in 2019.  Black Friday / Cyber Monday Smash Online Shopping RecordsIn 2019, Black Friday and Cyber Monday broke records. Digital sales were up 20 percent this latest Black Friday, reaching $7.4 billion dollars across 4,500 retail websites that Adobe Analytics tracked. It became the second-largest online shopping day in history. If you thought that was a lot, Cyber Monday 2019 blew it out of the water, reaching a whopping $9.4 billion dollars in online spending. Not only does this indicate the growing importance of retailer’s digital strategies, but it’s a sign of the changing times for the consumer. The convenience of online shopping and the world of Amazon has had a radical effect on the retail landscape and we can’t wait to see how that further develops in 2020.Bezos' Statement Highlights Sustainability DriveSpeaking of Amazon, they made headlines numerous times in 2019. Notably, Jeff Bezos made steep claims to achieve the terms of the Paris Climate Agreement a decade earlier. His statement marks a deeper cause, one that many retailers are working hard on. Sustainability and being aware of environmental impact has taken over global headlines and retailers are feeling the effects. More consumers are looking for brands that create sustainable products and find ways to offset their environmental impact. As a result, businesses like Allbirds have seen incredible success because of their mission to focus on sustainably and ethically-made products in the industry.  Demand for Sustainability Drove Resale IndustryConsumer demand for sustainability has created a boom in the resale industry. Once thought of as taboo, secondhand clothing and resale businesses like ThredUp, The RealReal, Poshmark, and even rental companies like Rent the Runway, are at the top of the pack in a market that’s expected to hit $51 billion dollars by 2023. 2019 saw a lot of new players try to break into this market, even the Kardashians are taking a swing with Kardashian Kloset. Brands like H&M, Urban Outfitters, and Banana Republic are introducing clothing rentals to their strategy to reach the mindful consumer.Amazon and Walmart Led Way in Same-day Grocery Delivery WarsSame-day grocery delivery wars waged on in 2019. Amazon and Walmart led the pack, but Walmart still has the upper hand. The retailer has even been testing autonomous delivery in certain markets. But as Amazon continues to work on its own grocery chain separate from it’s already owned Whole Foods, it will be interesting to see how this continues to develop in 2020.Amazon's Free Shipping Driving Consumer DemandAmazon has also put many retailers in a bind by driving consumer demand for fast and free shipping. Their rollout of same-day delivery drew a line in the sand that not many could cross over because of the margin-cutting impact it would have. Even Amazon saw their profits take a hit after making the transition. Target, after acquiring Shipt, was able to answer the same-day delivery call through the delivery service. Buy-online pick-up in-store services have also risen as a viable option for retailers and it’s one consumers seem to have embraced, driving a 43 percent uptick in buy-online pick-up in-store orders on Black Friday alone. 2020 will force a lot of retailers to look at their logistics and find creative ways to deliver on fast shipping.ClosingFind out how Simplr can cut your customer service response time through cutting-edge technology and on-demand talent at simplr.ai. That’s S-I-M-P-L-R.ai.  Thanks for listening to this latest episode of Today In Five. We’ll see you tomorrow.

The game awards are here, and the year is almost most over! What are the categories this year, and is your game listed? Let's dive in and discuss.   Geek News   Mandalorian is Still Awesome We are a few episodes in the series, and we are excited were Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau continue to take the series. The relationship between the Mandalorian the child is a compelling story full a mystery and intrigue. We can't wait for the coming episodes.   Kathleen Kennedy Contract Ends in 2021 Kathleen Kennedy, the president at Lucasfilm, will have her contract end in 2021. Now, before some become excited, this does not mean that she won't resume her role at Lucasfilm. However, Disney has not come out public state the Kathleen Kennedy will continue her position, and Kathleen has been vague about what the future holds for her. We hope that people like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau with maybe a little Kevin Feige threw in there will hopefully be the next leaders for Lucasfilm.   Video Game News   PS5 Announced for 2020 Holiday The PS5 has been announced, and the console race between PlayStation and Xbox has begone. The big question is, what games and services will the PS5 be able to offer over the Xbox. It is shaping up to be a fantastic struggle for the consumer.    Stadia Disaster  Google Stadia is here, and, to the surprise of none, the service is laggy, limited, and underwhelming. We have voiced heavy skepticism and cation when it comes to this service. Especially when there are better services such as xCloud around the corner. Even Amazon is looking to enter the video game streaming space. It will be a competitive market that will allow little room for error. It is our feeling that Stadia has made to many mistakes to correct the course promptly.    Showstopper   The Game Awards 2019 The Game Awards are here, and we are excited to list the categories here in the show notes! These are the following categories for the 2019 Game Awards: Game of the Year, Action Game, Action/Adventure Game, Art Direction, Audio Design, Community Support, Content Creator of the Year, Esports Coach, Esports Event, Esports Game of the Year, Esports Host, Esports Player, Esports Team, Family Game, Fighting Game, Fresh Indie Game, Game Direction, Game for Impact, Independent Game, Mobile Game, Multiplayer Game, Narrative, Ongoing Game, Performance, Role-Playing Game, Score & Music, Sports/Racing Game, Strategy Game, and VR/AR Game.    If you are interested in voting, then go to the Game Awards website! Let us know in the comments the games you think will win, and what you hope will win.   Thank You For Listening!   If you have an idea for an episode or a person of note in the video game industry, i.e., a developer, influencer, illustrator, etc. then let us know! Email us at: contactus.armstrongsmusings@gmail.com   If you love the content and want to support us, then join us on Patreon! We love to have you part of the Inner Circle!   Connect with us on social media: Facebook Twitter Instagram   Visit us on our website: https://armstrongsmusings.com  We appreciate you listening and hope to hear from you. Stay Strong! 

From the Simplr studios in San Francisco, this is your daily briefing.  IntroductionWith your Retail E-Commerce Briefing for today, Wednesday, November 13th, I'm Vincent Phamvan.Disney Plus officially launched yesterday. While the new streaming service garnered excitement, the much-anticipated debut was marred by technical glitches.  First, here are some retail headlines.  Alibaba's Singles Day Breaks RecordAlibaba’s Singles Day generated a record $38.4 billion dollars in sales, a 26 percent jump from last year. More than 200,000 brands participated in the event, and a company statement noted that almost 300 of those brands earned more than $14 million dollars. Per the statement, Alibaba’s logistics network processed over 1 billion delivery orders, and 1 million new products were launched for the holiday. The company also said it had made $1 billion dollars in the first minute and eight seconds of its 2019 Singles Day.Walgreens Boots Alliance Receives Buyout Offer$70 billion dollar drugstore chain, Walgreens Boots Alliance, has received a buyout proposal from the private equity group, KKR. The deal would be the largest private equity transaction on record. The approach, just three years after KKR sold its remaining shares in Walgreens, was outlined in a document shared with the company’s board. A buyout by KKR could make sense for the drugstore chain. The private equity firm has done a deal with the top investor of Walgreens when it took UK-based drugstore chain, Alliance Boots, private in 2007 for $22 billion. However, those briefed on the discussions have cautioned that no final decision had been taken and that either side could walk away.Juul Cutting 650 JobsJuul is cutting 650 jobs, or 16 percent, of its total workforce according to a company official. The Wall Street Journal reported later last month that the e-cigarette company planned to eliminate between 10 to 15 percent of its workforce by year’s end. Besides the job cuts, Juul plans to trim its company spending by $1 billion dollars, including significant cuts in marketing and government affairs, the Juul official said. The cuts come at a time when Juul is facing scrutiny as vaping-related illnesses are on the rise.Disney+ Struggles With Outages On Launch Day As Demand Swamps ServiceThe much-anticipated Disney Plus launch was marred by technical glitches for some users yesterday, but the new streaming service still stirred excitement. Disney said the consumer demand for the service had exceeded its highest expectations. In a statement, a spokeswoman said, “While we are pleased by this incredible response, we are aware of the current user issues and are working to swiftly resolve them.” Many users yesterday reported issues that ranged from service not available to select shows being the wrong aspect ratio. The glitches ramped up from about one hundred outages reported to seven thousand within the span of an hour.  Disney isn’t the first company that’s been hit with technical streaming errors. In 2014, HBO’s streaming service crashed during a season premiere of Game of Thrones. Even Amazon and YouTube have experienced issues while broadcasting live sports online. Dan Rayburn, the principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said that streaming services often struggle when large amounts of people try to watch at the same time, saying, “It’s hard because of the complexity of the workflow and doing it at scale.” Disney’s debut of Disney Plus puts it in a competitive streaming market with heavy-hitters like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, and competitors like AT&T and Comcast are also diving in next year. But the company thinks it can seize the day with a product packed with the company’s best movies and TV shows, including Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar movies. Chief executive officer, Bob Iger, said, “I feel great about what we’ve done...I love the app. It’s rich in content. It’s rich in brands. It’s rich in library.”.  ClosingFind out how Simplr can cut your customer service response time through cutting-edge technology and on-demand talent at simplr.ai. That’s S-I-M-P-L-R.ai.  Thanks for listening to this latest episode of the Retail E-Commerce Briefing. See you tomorrow.  

#1 - Top Fifty WP: New Website Ranks Plugins by Downloads per Day. https://wptavern.com/top-fifty-wp-new-website-ranks-plugins-by-downloads-per-day #2 - Even Amazon’s own products are getting hijacked by imposter sellers https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fake-sellers-imposters-third-party-marketplace #3 - Chrome 76 Adds Native Lazy-Loading, WordPress Contributors Continue Discussion Regarding Core Support https://wptavern.com/chrome-76-adds-native-lazy-loading-wordpress-contributors-continue-discussion-regarding-core-support #4 - Apple was a little behind on Siri privacy, now it’s way ahead https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837077/apple-siri-privacy-opt-out-voice-human-grading-review   #5 - Steve Wozniak says he didn’t mean Apple should be broken up — but it shouldn’t be a castle https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20837692/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-have-broken-up-years-ago #6 - Amazon's doorbell camera Ring is working with police – and controlling what they say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/29/ring-amazon-police-partnership-social-media-neighbor

#1 - Top Fifty WP: New Website Ranks Plugins by Downloads per Day. https://wptavern.com/top-fifty-wp-new-website-ranks-plugins-by-downloads-per-day #2 - Even Amazon’s own products are getting hijacked by imposter sellers https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837359/amazon-basics-fake-sellers-imposters-third-party-marketplace #3 - Chrome 76 Adds Native Lazy-Loading, WordPress Contributors Continue Discussion Regarding Core Support https://wptavern.com/chrome-76-adds-native-lazy-loading-wordpress-contributors-continue-discussion-regarding-core-support #4 - Apple was a little behind on Siri privacy, now it’s way ahead https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20837077/apple-siri-privacy-opt-out-voice-human-grading-review   #5 - Steve Wozniak says he didn’t mean Apple should be broken up — but it shouldn’t be a castle https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20837692/steve-wozniak-says-apple-should-have-broken-up-years-ago #6 - Amazon's doorbell camera Ring is working with police – and controlling what they say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/29/ring-amazon-police-partnership-social-media-neighbor

Isn't Amazon going to kill Shopping Centers? Michael Flight has an extensive background in commercial real estate investing and is principal of Concordia Realty. Concordia Realty specializes in shopping plazas and retail properties. They prefer to purchase operational commercial projects with existing income. They concentrate on strip shopping centers and they occasionally renovate or restructure existing commercial properties. They have over a million square feet of retail space located in the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan markets. Increasingly they are interested in Ohio and Wisconsin. They continually look for good opportunities and are working to expand into new areas. Michael became involved in real estate shortly after college where he worked as a broker and then began working with a syndicator that owned shopping malls. In 1990, he started out on his own by founding Concordia. Take us back to Pre-1990, how did you get into Real Estate Investing? What does Value add mean in shopping centers? Finding better tenants, upgrading and renovating buildings, and increasing rents. Isn't Amazon going to kill Shopping Centers? He says, “A lot of negative press about retail real estate has been generated by companies like Amazon competing online. This has driven down prices and opened up opportunities for Concordia. It’s hard to get goods delivered that last mile to parts of rural America. Even Amazon has invested in companies like Whole Foods as they recognize the need for retail outlets.” They are examining different merchandising strategies and like to see that their tenants have an online component to their businesses. What types of Shopping Centers do bad? He discusses the types of retail stores that will likely do well in the current environment and those that may fail. How are Cap Rates in Shopping centers compare with other asset classes? Institutional investors? What are you personally investing in as a LP? What is something that I (apartment refugee) should do? Go to a boot camp?

Isn't Amazon going to kill Shopping Centers? Michael Flight has an extensive background in commercial real estate investing and is principal of Concordia Realty.Concordia Realty specializes in shopping plazas and retail properties. They prefer to purchase operational commercial projects with existing income. They concentrate on strip shopping centers and they occasionally renovate or restructure existing commercial properties.They have over a million square feet of retail space located in the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan markets. Increasingly they are interested in Ohio and Wisconsin. They continually look for good opportunities and are working to expand into new areas.Michael became involved in real estate shortly after college where he worked as a broker and then began working with a syndicator that owned shopping malls. In 1990, he started out on his own by founding Concordia. Take us back to Pre-1990, how did you get into Real Estate Investing? What does Value add mean in shopping centers? Finding better tenants, upgrading and renovating buildings, and increasing rents. Isn't Amazon going to kill Shopping Centers?He says, “A lot of negative press about retail real estate has been generated by companies like Amazon competing online. This has driven down prices and opened up opportunities for Concordia. It’s hard to get goods delivered that last mile to parts of rural America. Even Amazon has invested in companies like Whole Foods as they recognize the need for retail outlets.” They are examining different merchandising strategies and like to see that their tenants have an online component to their businesses. What types of Shopping Centers do bad? He discusses the types of retail stores that will likely do well in the current environment and those that may fail. How are Cap Rates in Shopping centers compare with other asset classes? Institutional investors?What are you personally investing in as a LP? What is something that I (apartment refugee) should do? Go to a boot camp? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talks about how to balance your marketing holistically. They also go over how you should approach the end of the year season in preparation for 2019 and why retention may be the most important strategy you implement in your business. Main Questions Asked: Did you feel like you were being sold most of the time? What should contractors do right now? Key Lessons Learned: Marketing Hudsons Ink coaches against spending a ton of marketing dollars near the end of the year. People are spending money, but it’s mainly allocated for Christmas. The smarter contractors are using this time of year to figure out what they should be focusing on and getting organized for next year. A lot of contractors look back at what didn’t work over the past year and tend to want to cut those activities out completely. You should try to balance out your marketing so that when one thing doesn’t work, another effort picks up the slack. Don’t scrap one thing entirely but don’t go all in on one tactic either. You have to be willing to skip over a large portion of your prospective customer base if you go all in on one direction. Having a balanced approach makes it easier to adapt when things do change. Every marketing trend will eventually change. At one time email was very effective and exciting but is now extremely crowded. Even Amazon is circling back with direct mail and print marketing materials. When a customer is ready to buy, the first place they go to is the business that communicates with them the most. Target your message and use a bunch of different mediums to reach them. New customers are not the only way to grow. Your current customer base is a gold mine. Past customers want to work with people they know and trust, as long as they know you’re there and ready to go you should be their first choice. There are three ways to grow your business: you can grow your customer base, increase the frequency that customers buy, or increase the average amount of money your customers spend. When it comes to marketing, you need to have an offense and a defense. Without making sure your customers know who you are and staying top of mind, your competitors will take your customers away. Be careful with your judgements of what worked. Not every message you send out will get a response. It’s hard to measure the ROI of a retention strategy, but if you have a good retention strategy in place you will notice the benefits. When you look at your customer base you probably think of them as ‘your’ customers, but do they think of you as their contractor? Provide value in your marketing efforts. If every time your customer hears from you and you’re trying to sell them something, they will eventually turn away. Even a small extra step can set you apart from your competition. Marketing is about momentum and setting up a smart plan and sticking to it. Sales The sales people that China remembers most were the ones that took the time to get to know what she truly needed. As the marketing coordinator, you are responsible for establishing the ROI from all marketing activities. Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes! Links to Resources Mentioned justin@hudsonink.com china@hudsonink.com  

Ten years ago, everyone know that e-commence would drive most retail stores, especially specially stores out of business, and with the Amazon juggernaut plowing ahead, there were very few dissenters. But something very interesting is going on right now. Many e-commerce companies are opening physical stores. Even Amazon, going against all economies of scale, is opening up brick and mortar bookstores in expensive locations with full-time staff. And there a good reason for this trend. There is something very reassuring about holding a product in your own hands. And it’s something that can’t really be replaced with high- resolution photos and customer reviews. Tomohiro Hagiwara of Aquabit Spirals has committed both his company and a large part of his adult life to bridging this gap between the physical and the digital world and is helping online retailers jump into the physical world. Of course, Aquabit Spirals’ technology does much more than this, and Tomo tells an interesting story of how it took his company more than six years of work before they closed their first deal and became an overnight success. It’s an fascinating discussion and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What is SmartPlate, and why is it important? Why e-commerce offline needs to come offline How to close global deals as a small startup The difference between going global and being global Why Tomo abandoned his first business to follow his dream The value of accelerators in Japan Why founders can't work at big companies Links from the Founder Learn about SmartPlate Follow Tomo on twitter @hagi_w Friend him on Facebook SmartPlate pitch-deck SmartPlate explainer video Coverage on VentureBeat [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan   Disrupting Japan - Episode 54 Welcome to Disrupting Japan - straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Ten years ago, it was a common knowledge that e-commerce would drive most retail shops especially small specialty shops out of business. With the Amazon juggling up, moving it full speed, there's no reason to really doubt that opinion. But something very interesting is going on right now, many e-commerce companies are opening physical stores at expensive locations with actual products and full-time staff. Even Amazon is opening up Brick and Morter bookstores across the United States The truth is, there's something reassuring about holding a product in your own hands. It's something that can't really be replaced by high-res photos and online reviews. Tomo Hiro Hagiwara of Aquabit Spirals has committed his company, in fact, committed a large part of his adult life to bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds. But before I'll introduce you to Tomo, let me introduce you to someone else. Now, Tomo once had a thriving, profitable app development business that employed over 30 people, but he was committed enough to his vision of connecting the physical and digital that he turned down work and laid off most of his staff so he could focus on it. After working on it in obscurity for 6 years, he's now becoming an overnight success. But, Tomo tells the story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Tomo:          Okay, cheers! Tim:            Thank you. Tomo:         Thank you. I'm very glad to see that you're here Tim:                     I'm sitting here with Tomo Hagiwara, CEO of Aquabit Spirals, and thanks for sitting down with me. Tomo:                  Yes, thank you. Nice to meet you here, and I'm very glad to meet you today. Tim:                     Great! Now, Aquabit Spirals makes the smart play which is a physical device that allows bookmarking physical objects with your phone,

“There has been a big boom in e-commerce and what we call the online-offline arena. But in the past half-year there has also been talk about whether the winter’s coming; a lot of companies haven’t been able to sustain their cash flows or financing and they’ve had to close their business. But there are good companies, and one of the ones I like a lot is Jing Dong (JD.com). They have been doing very well in terms of their strategic investment and commitment and have found a very unique way to compete against incumbents like Alibaba or Taobao. I think in the future whether it’s e-commerce, online or offline, it has to be the efficiency and viability of the business models. Amazon can do very well because they are extremely efficient in their operations. If you go to Amazon’s warehouses, you will see that the number of people is much fewer than in the typical Chinese e-commerce company warehouse. A lot of the work is done by the Kiva warehouse robots. Amazon is building huge warehouses in the US. These are about 10 or 20 stadiums in size. Once they reach scale they can use their own truck fleet, they’re starting to buy or lease their own air cargo fleet as well, so it’s all about efficiency, scale, scope. And that’s something that every company, whether it’s Chinese or American, has to think about. At the end of the day it’s about how efficiently you can compete in the market. It’s an efficiency driven business. On the other hand, there can be multiple types of business models. Amazon is just one successful model but not necessarily the model everyone should use. If everyone does what Amazon does, then there’s no differentiation. Even Amazon is now starting to look at whether they should have physical stores. That’s because other than efficiency, low cost and low price, retail consumers want something else – they want the real shopping experience. Online shoppers cannot replicate the traditional shopping experience. So in that sense I think in the future there will be different kinds of business models co-existing for e-commerce”. ~ Yu Zhang, CEIBS Prof. of Management