Podcasts about hey jeremy

In this episode, Optimal Self Coach, Jeremy Herider, talks about how he discovered, and strives toward, the Optimal Self. Today, Jeremy talks about “the Art of Becoming the Best Version of You”, why it's important to you but more important to those who look up to you, and why we should prioritise #GenerationalHabits over #GenerationalWealth. Hear about the moment he started re-evaluating his identity, his three most important values, and his advice to his younger self, all on today's episode of The Healthy, Wealthy & Smart Podcast.   Key Takeaways “If I'm going to have success in any endeavour, it's going to come from what happens when no one's watching.” “Don't get your identity caught up in things that are out of your control.” “Integrity is do what you say you're going to do. Character is ‘be who say you are.'” “You can be what you want to be but, at the same time, not at the expense of someone else.” “If you're lacking motivation today, normally it's not lacking motivation, it's lacking clarity. When you get clear on something, motivation jumps out of you.” “You either give that thing 100% of you, or dont, because 99% wont work.” “You're leaving something behind whether you like it or not.” “Stay the course. It's going to take work. Don't be afraid of the work.”   More about Jeremy Herider Meet Jeremy Herider, life coach, business consultant, professional athlete, podcaster… the list goes on. How can one person even have so many titles? That's just what you get when you're living as your Optimal Self. As a pioneer in two professional sports, Jeremy has spent a lifetime building the elite habits necessary to thrive not only in pro sports, but in every other venture that he's been a part of. Originally from Lancaster, California, Jeremy found his strength as an athlete from an early age. He was a three-sport letterman in high school and an MVP in baseball. He graduated from Gonzaga University where he was an All-Pac10 Infielder. His pro baseball career took off not long after. But his drive didn't stop there and neither did his list of accomplishments. Jeremy was the first contracted player with the Diamondbacks to get a hit in the history of the organization. He was later drafted by the LA Reign, officially making him a two-sport professional athlete. More recently, Jeremy has been named a CrossFit Champion, taking home 1st Place for the Deadlift/Box Jump event. Of course, now Jeremy has shifted his focus once again as a productivity consultant for Fortune 500 companies, private business coach, and motivational speaker. Jeremy's Optimal Self Coaching program and podcast boil down this lifetime of achievement into tangible, attainable habits that anyone can adopt for success. No success story, including Jeremy's, happens by accident. Begin yours with Optimal Self.   Suggested Keywords Motivation, Identity, Improvement, Habits, Wealth, Health, Smart, Success, Achievement, Integrity, Character, Generational Habits, Priorities, Clarity, Empathy, Empowerment, Choices,   To learn more, follow Jeremy at: Website:          https://www.optimalself.today Facebook:       @OptimalSelf1 Instagram:       @optimal_self YouTube:        Optimal Self TikTok:            @optimalself Optimal Self:   Optimal Self linktree   Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: Website:                      https://podcast.healthywealthysmart.com Apple Podcasts:          https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthy-wealthy-smart/id532717264 Spotify:                        https://open.spotify.com/show/6ELmKwE4mSZXBB8TiQvp73 SoundCloud:               https://soundcloud.com/healthywealthysmart Stitcher:                       https://www.stitcher.com/show/healthy-wealthy-smart iHeart Radio:               https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-healthy-wealthy-smart-27628927   Read the Full Transcript:  Speaker 1 (00:01): Hey, Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. So happy to have you on today. Well, Speaker 2 (00:05): Thank you. It's so happy to be here. I know Speaker 1 (00:08): A fellow podcast host, we'll get into your podcast later on in the, in the episode, but I always love to have a fellow podcast host on for a number of reasons. Number one, being good sound. Speaker 2 (00:21): That's so important. That's so true. Speaker 1 (00:24): So important. All right. Now, before we get into the meat of the interview, what I'd love for you to share with the listeners is how your background of being a professional athlete baseball, CrossFit I can Zaga, right? Almost they almost did it. Oh my gosh. Are you just dying? Speaker 2 (00:53): Was except for that game, we didn't really almost get it. We really got crushed by Baylor. So hats off to Baylor. They, they, they did not miss a beat and they crushed us about halftime. I was, I was already turning the channel a little Speaker 1 (01:06): Defeated, but close. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So enough NCAA talk. So let's talk about how your life as a professional athlete kind of shaped your views on your life now and kind of what you're doing now. Speaker 2 (01:25): But I love that question cause it can, it's, it's so many different things in, in regards to, you know, you see what most people see is the end result, right? Is, is you running on a field? In my case, it was baseball. They, they see the end result. They see you on a field with the stadiums packed and the lights are on, you know, and, and, and it's, it's incredible, right? Cause we all watch it. If those of you that are out there that are, that are sports fans, you know, it's just, but we get to see the end result. What we don't see is the work and we don't see the behind the scenes. We don't see it. So as far as is shaping me today is it's still the same way. What I mean by that is this, is that what I, what I loved about athletics was truly not the game. Speaker 2 (02:14): Although the game is the icing on the cake. I enjoyed practice. I, I love getting up and going to practice. My mom tells a story, you know, cause you know, with my girls, I have two girls in, you know, mine were like, they didn't want to go to practice. They were like dad, really again. And my mom tells the story that she's like, no, you'd get done with school and you'd walk in the door and already being your uniform ready to go. And you're like, no, I know you got like two hours and I'm like, no, no, no, let's, let's go now just drop me off. She said, you know, she'd be pulling up and I'd be, the door would be open before the car was even stopped and I'm running. So it's, that's kind of the thing that's been ingrained in me since a kid. Speaker 2 (02:57): And, and so I enjoy that work and, and moving into your adult life. And when that, you know, when that side of my life ended moving into other aspects, which now I'm in a real estate and in starting optimal self and doing what we do now, you know, I just love the work it's so it's, it shaped me the same way. Is that what I know to be true? Is that the true success that actually people see? Cause a lot of times, you know, people see that success and I, let me be clear. I didn't, I didn't reach my goal. My goal was to be a 20 year major leaguer and a hall of Famer. And you know what I mean? And, and be, you know, Canton, Ohio and be putting on that hall of fame jacket and giving a speech and B I was nowhere near that. Speaker 2 (03:43): I didn't get close to that. You know? So my w but when most people see the accolades and they go, oh, wow, you've done this. They, they think of success, right? So again, that is kind of the outsider looking in, but what they, what they never see is, is the work that's put in and that's what you have to love. And, and that happens today is whatever people think is fine. They what they see and what we see of others, that little tip of the iceberg, that's, it's poking out, right? You always see these memes and these things on the internet. It's, what's underneath that water. Well, what I learned is if I'm going to be successful or have success in any endeavor in my adult life, it's going to come from what happens when no one's watching it. What happens when they're not looking with those, those sessions in those days, in those moments. And so that's, that's probably what I learned the most. And it's, it's what I've brought into my adult life from, you know, into these other businesses, from being an athlete. Speaker 1 (04:44): Yeah. And that makes perfect sense. And, you know, I liked practicing too. I like the games. I like the practice. I like the teammates, the camaraderie, that feeling of being on a team is always so great. And that teaches you a lot as well. Just being part of a team and being responsible to someone else for someone else and, and being held accountable as well. Yeah, definitely. Speaker 2 (05:07): I, yeah, you're, you're spot on. Which is interesting because going from, you know, being a baseball player again with 25 guys on the team, nine guys on the field at a time, right. Is, is you are, you're, you're a hundred percent responsible for, for everybody around you. And, but here's what I'll say. And it kind of goes into optimal self as well. Cause it's the optimal self is the art of becoming the best version of you is that one of the things that I think I failed at in those days was not is, is focusing on, on wanting to be the best at my position or in that league or whatever. And what I should have been doing, what I've learned over time is just truly be the best version of me. Like that guy is still, could be the best, but, but if I'm just stopping and always, then I lose sight of just truly who I am and what I can do. Speaker 2 (06:03): And so, and what you're saying is, is very true because going from baseball to where I was accountable to all those guys and coaches and, and, and, and the team, and then when I got into CrossFit and you're all by yourself, you're all by your lonesome, in that a lot of lonely nights at the gym, lonely mornings at the gym training, because nobody has that same goal, right. To, to be a champion or to want those things that a lot of guys would come to the gym and train with me, but I would have to literally put a different guy in at each time, like, oh, we're running, I'll get the good guy, the guy that likes to run, oh, we're lifting the B find the guy that likes to lift. Oh, we're, you know, and so you put, you, you put in all the different people. Cause there was nobody that was just going to be like, yeah, Jeremy, I can't wait to get up at 6:00 AM with, you know, Jeremy, I can't wait to be there until nine o'clock at night with you. So again, I, I, I love what you're saying. Cause that's true. And the truth of life is you do have to have some accountability and the team would definitely show that. So yeah. Speaker 1 (07:03): You're spot on. Yeah. And now you mentioned sort of the art of becoming the best version of you. So mentioned it a little bit. Nice segue into why is that important to you? Speaker 2 (07:16): So it goes back to that same timeframe is when, when baseball ended and for most people in, in an athletic endeavor, it doesn't end on your terms. Very often, there are very few people that, that get that right. They get to Speaker 1 (07:32): Be Derek Jeter, Speaker 2 (07:36): Jeter, Tom Brady's like very viewed people are, are those, those people, right? That get to win the world championships, get to be the MVPs and then get to say CNR when they, when they choose. So, you know, most are on, on, on my side where they, they tell you to you're you come to the stadium and the uniform is not in the locker room anymore. We're not renewing your contract. And thanks for your service. It's no. So, but I mean, that app is everybody. It's, it's nothing, but what I learned and I went through a time and I'll be honest. I didn't know it was this right. Is that I was in a form of depression if you will. Is that because I didn't have an identity, my identity was attached to a hundred percent to baseball. Like I was a baseball player and I knew I was in trouble. Speaker 2 (08:28): It wasn't that the game was over. I was okay with that. Honestly, like I knew that there was more things I had, you know, two little, little girls in those days, they were tiny, right? Like dad got to be around and we got to go to the park and I got to, I get to do stuff that I, that I hadn't been able to do really. So that was wonderful. But what I was, what I failed to, to start to understand was how my identity, how I had attached myself to being a baseball player. And I was in the store one day and I ran into a gentleman that, that knew me. And he was like, yeah, Hey Jeremy. And all his Isley comes over and he's like, how are you? And I say, great, man, how are you? One of those guys that you see their face, you know, but you don't remember their name. Speaker 2 (09:09): Right. And he's like, can you stay here for a second? I want my son. So he calls over. Then here comes his little dude rolling up seven or eight years old. And he goes, Hey, you know, Mason, this is Jeremy, this is the baseball player I was telling you about. And I hadn't played baseball in a few years. Like I hadn't got a paycheck or been on a baseball field in a few years. And it crushed me inside. It was that moment that I realized like, oh shoot, something's wrong. And so I talked to him and we talked baseball and you know, gave him some pointers and you know, you can do this kind of thing. Right. I was the little guy and, you know, we, he was like, he's so small. And I was like, you know, so it was, I, I didn't grow till after. Speaker 2 (09:53): Yeah. And we talked a few stories, but when I left there that day, I knew, I was like, okay, I got it. I gotta get this together. Because that, that it shouldn't feel that way. Right. And I knew at that moment that, because he called me a baseball player and I knew I was not a baseball player anymore. Right. Or in the side of being a physical, getting on the field, practicing, playing, getting a paycheck from the Mino, a major league organization. So that's when I knew, I was like, okay, we got it. We got to work on some stuff. We gotta figure some stuff out. Cause th and again, now it becomes getting away from putting my identity to anything more than just being me. And who is that guy? How does he show up in the world? How does, what is the, what are those fulfilling things that happened that I can do on a daily basis that beat me up. Speaker 2 (10:45): They, they get me excited. So that, and again, when somebody says, Hey, you're not a baseball player. Cause I almost stopped them. Like I almost had to say, Hey, no, I'm not what to mean. It was just like, oh my goodness. And here's this little boy, you know, and you know, try to keep it together on the outside because on the inside I was just dying. But I hope people, what I hope people get out of that is understanding that don't get your identity caught up in things that are out of your control. It was out of my control of being a baseball player. Somebody had to give me a chance. Somebody had to say, yeah, this is this guy's good enough. Here's a contract. We'll take a chance on you. Somebody has to say, Hey, here's a scholarship. We'd love for you to come to play at our university. It's it's, it's not totally in your hands. The practice, the work, the time, the energy, the effort, the desire. Yeah. That's stuff that I can control. That's the stuff I got to work on, but not tying my identity to the actual act. Right. It's what I do. It's not who I am. And that was a big turning point for me. Speaker 1 (11:48): And what advice do you have for someone who maybe is at this crossroads of, you know, maybe they lost their job. Maybe they are came out of a relationship, a long-term relationship where that was part of their identity. So what advice do you have for someone or maybe an exercise or something that you did that helped you pivot that at that moment? Love Speaker 2 (12:13): It. That's such a great question. Perfect. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways to look at this and what I, what I go back to is, is the clarity piece in the sense that, who am I? And so then it becomes, start answering that question of what do I stand for? What's important to me. Right? And you know, there's so many different catch words and I'm just going to give you mine for people. So when I sat down and said, okay, what, what matters? Well, what matters the most to me is, is integrity. And so that is a pillar of my life. One is integrity. And what integrity means to me is simple. It's do what you say you're going to do. If you're going to meet me here at five 30 Pacific standard time, then I'm going to be there and I'm going to be ready and I'm going to be prepared. Speaker 2 (13:01): So, so integrity, just, just living that way. And then the second thing is, is character. And a lot of people associate those two things together, but here's the difference, integrity being, do what you say you're going to do. Well, character is be who you say you are. If you're a dad, then be the dad, right? If you're that, that worker. And I think that character shows up in many ways, especially for people. Like what you're saying right now is, you know, if you, if you had that breakup and it's going tough because, oh my gosh, now who am I without that partner? Or a job or whatever is understanding first, we got to dig inside ourselves. And so, okay. Who, who do you want to be? How do you want to show up in the world? Well, for me, character means be who you say, you're going to be, if you say, you're going to be that, then you be that every step of the way, and that type of clarity will, will, will actually help you make all the decisions in your life. Speaker 2 (13:55): And so, and the third one is empathy for me. So I'll just give you my three integrity, character and empathy. And so I've built it around their empathy. Again, to me was I grew up with women. My mom was a single mom, right? Since she only had sisters, right. Nana and Papa pop was there too. But, but my, my grandparents but, but it was a lot of Nana, right? I was, I was, I was the first born. My mom was 16 when I was born. And so that was not something, you know, no, I don't think there's any 16 year olds in the world that are truly ready to be a parent, right. Or a mother at that at that matter. And so would that being said, right? Like I've been around women that I hear, I get these. And I get blessed with two little girls. Speaker 2 (14:36): And my job for them was to empower them, to know that they can be and do anything they want in this world that, that the gender was not. And so I say this in this regard is that empathy means I need to put myself there. I need to listen to them. I don't have to agree. Right. Even if it was, you know, you can go down, whatever. I don't have to agree with you. We don't have to believe the same things, but it means a lot. If I can, if I can listen in and at least try to understand your point or your view on something, it doesn't mean I have to agree, but it does make it a lot easier. And if that, if that's reciprocal, man, how powerful that can be. So I've always wanted those girls to, to understand that. And to know that yes, you can be what you want to be, but at the same time, not at the expense of someone else, you don't have to put somebody else down for you to be for you to be great. Speaker 2 (15:26): You don't, you can just be great. It's okay. You can be unapologetically. Great. And, and the thing is, is, I mean, as we grow, so to go back to kind of summarize. So in what you asked was how could somebody would just start with yourself, start with who you are. What, what are those words that you have? And I mean, there's so many different things out there. I mean, I'd love to, free to use ours. We have, when you could sign in and get in, put your email address, we send it to you for free. It's an identity creator. It has steps in it and all that kind of stuff. But even so again, it's free, but if you don't want ours, you can, I can Google. There's so many great things out there that can help people. You know, I'm not, I'm not the one to say, this is the only way there's not, there's so many different ways, but I know this. Speaker 2 (16:16): If you're lacking motivation today, it's not, normally it's not lacking motivation, lacking clarity, because when you get clear on something, motivation, jumps off out of you, it will jump out of your skin. Right. And most people can identify with that when they go, oh yeah. When I knew right where I wanted to, where I was going, man, did I take them steps to get there? Right. So, so I think taking it back in that sense for me was all right, who am I? You're not a baseball player anymore. Who are you? What do you want to stand for? How do you want to show up in the world? And let's go be that guy. And again, it also allows you to make incredible choices because the moment you have that clarity, it's like, wait, does, is, is this who I am? Nope. Okay. That doesn't go in my mouth. Speaker 2 (17:07): Okay. That's not what I do. Okay. That's not what I, I choose to. You know what I mean? Like you can literally go from every single piece of how you move, what you eat, the people you hang around, you can start to see. And what's really crazy. Karen is this is that you start to implement those things in your life. You start to be it not no other way. Not words on a page, not just talking about it. Yeah. You actually start living it. You start to see the people around, you change all of a sudden other, your, your whole, your identity starts to attract that when you're being that. And it's an amazing with, without even, without even purposely doing it, because what you radiate, what people hear, what people see when, when they say, because again, I'll go back to my life. Like those guys that I was hanging out with, even at the end, right? Speaker 2 (17:58): Like it was nothing to go to Monday night football and have, you know, eight or 10 beers on a Monday night and drink a bunch and eat a bunch of wings. It sounds fun. And it's great. But I can tell you this, the moment that, that I, that switch started to happen for me. And I started to pay attention to it. Those weren't the choices that I made anymore because they weren't serving the life that I wanted to live and where I wanted to go. And, and it, and again, it makes things a lot easier for yourself. Cause it's, I call it a hundred or nothing. You either give that thing 100% of you, or don't because 99% won't work because there's always that 1% time that somebody something's going to crack when you leave a crack open, that crack will get used and it will get destroyed and it will be, and it will get bigger. So the more you can give to exactly what you say you are going to give, when you give that a hundred man hundreds easier than 98 or 99, because 98, 99, you haven't really made a full decision yet. And you know, this decision is the, is the key to all of it. Cause the moment you do make that decision, man, how the, how the universe will conspire with you to make it happen. Speaker 1 (19:08): Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like I'm just going to recap quickly that when you're at that sort of crossroads of, of your identity, of, of who you are as a person, you really want to try and get clear on your values, write it down, write down the value, why it's important to you and really like dig deep, you know, it's might be uncomfortable. It might Speaker 2 (19:34): Be uncomfortable making that. You're, you're Speaker 1 (19:37): Really asking yourself the tough questions. And if you don't like doing this on your own, like you said, there are tools out there. You have a tool, there are tools out there, ask your friends, ask your family. If you have good relationships with said people if not, you can hire someone and they'll help you. But really getting deep and asking those questions. It's the same thing that you would do if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out your vision of your business, you know, you just want to figure out that vision of yourself as well, and it'll probably help your business. That's a whole, that's a whole other conversation. We'll be here for hours. Now I love when you were kind of talking about what people can do when they're at that crossroads, and you talked about your mom and your grandparents and your children and, and you know, we're talking about generations of a family, right? And so a question I have for you is why generational habits should be taught versus generational wealth. And if you can even explain what you mean by generational wealth, do you mean wealth of money, knowledge, X, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll hand it over to you. Speaker 2 (20:56): Yeah. So that's, again, what we see in, in, in at least in our country for sure is, you know, we, you know, that there are families that have, you know, through industrial age, in, in, in all the different times that have handed down, then let's talk w in this case, we're talking money, right. Wealth, right? Whether it be real estate, whether it be, you know, the buildings and things like that, whether it be business, the railroads or the steel or, or whatever that is. And what's, what's, what's incredible is that the majority over time gets, it ends up failing by the third, by the second generation or the third generation. And the reason we say that is the person who built it. They might be handing over the wealth side of things, but they haven't handed over the habits that it took for them to get there. Speaker 2 (21:50): And so when you start to get second and third generation away from the actual being that that created it, it starts to dissipate. And so they don't have those same habits, that work habit, that work ethic, that, that mindset that they, that this was built under. So when we talk at optimal self, when we talk about it, we talk about leaving that generation. We start talking about generational habits. And the reason we say that is this is that you're leaving something behind whether you like it or not. You're leaving a legacy, whatever the term is you want to use, you're leaving that now, right now, somewhere, somehow you, because you have interaction with people, whether you have children or not children, you have interaction with people. You're, you're either at a job. Your, you know, if you're in school, right, they're going to know you, somebody, some they're going to be able to describe you and what are they going to describe? Speaker 2 (22:45): What are you leaving behind? So what, what we talk about is, and this goes back to what we started this with, is that the only way I can help and I, and I use my family, I use because that's the direct connect, right? My girls, the only way I can help them is by me being a better me. Because again, how many of you out there right now are telling your kids to go make their bed? And they walk by your room and your bed's not made, what are we really telling them? Right? What are we really teaching them? And so when I talk about generational habits, I'm talking about, listen, be the person, right? You've, you've heard Gandhi. You've heard it for years of, of all kinds of Nelson, Amanda, about we have to be the change. Well, well, truly, all you have to do is you can be the best version of you and you will inspire others to do the same. Speaker 2 (23:35): What are the habits that you want those children or the people around you to have? What do you want them to learn from you? And if you, if we can at least frame it up that way, then the chances of us living to our own standard are much better. Because sometimes that's what it takes. You know? I mean, our world today is built around social media. Let's be clear, right? It is whatever your view is on it. I don't want to go into my own view because it's really doesn't matter. But there is a bit of it that is corrupting all of us in, in ways myself included. And that's what kind of spins us away from it. So let's get back to saying if, if, because you, we do, I like to tell people I don't care what you think, but I do. Of course I do. Speaker 2 (24:20): Like, and I don't mean that I'm going to do something different because of it. If you don't, if I, if I'm living to the best version and you don't like that, then let's have a conversation. Cause, cause I, I, for sure don't want it to hurt somebody, right? That that's, that's not the case, but with generational habits, if we can leave, if we can start to create and be the difference in our own households, that's how we start to create better environments at all times. So we put our kids in better environments. We choose better environments because those environments are, are more conducive to what our habits are. So yeah, we talk about generational wealth as well, because there's nothing greater than that. I mean, if, if my girls can have more than I had, how incredible would that be? That's that's and their kids' kids, right? Speaker 2 (25:09): Like, let's talk, let's, let's make it. But at the same time, what I have to be able to help them and what they need to be able to see from me. Not just words on the page or words out of my mouth, but what they need to be able to see from me is how I live. How do I personally get up every day? What is important? What, you know, my hydration, how we eat, the things that we do, the things that we consume, right? Consumption what, not just what we eat, but what we hear, what we watch, what we say, because those words are very powerful. Every word that we, we say, we say to ourselves, you're your cells are eavesdropping that they're paying attention. That subconscious is paying deep attention to that. So again, generational habits or what are you leaving behind? What habits in art. Speaker 2 (26:01): And again, because you asked that question and you're like, oh man, as I've done it for myself, I'm like, oh my God, I do do not want my kids. When the kids are a little, this is this is some of you out there that our parents can remember the time that you said something, maybe to you, your wife or your husband or whatever, and your kid repeats it. And you're like, oh, you don't even realize it. Right. We're like, oh my goodness. So again, thinking along those lines, just even if you don't have kids, is what are the words that I'm saying, how am I being and can I help? So can I show people better habits that can, that can inspire them to do the same? Speaker 1 (26:43): I love it. That makes so much sense. And, and we'll hopefully be able to instill confidence and allow those next generations to keep building on whatever it is. You're leaving from a wealth, even from a wealth standpoint, from a health standpoint. It's, it's just a great, great way to look at that. Handing down of one generation to the next. I love it. I love it. Okay. So before we start to wrap things up here, where can people find you? How can they get in touch with you? Great. Speaker 2 (27:19): So we are on all the social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook optimal self Facebook is optimal. Self one. Igg is optimal underscore self as well. But our, our webpage is optimal self.today, optimal self.today. And on there our, we do have some courses everything up there that we're even showing, right, right now is, is free. So we can, you can jump in we'll, we'll get you in. We have a private Facebook group that we, we put a ton of stuff in that you can actually, you know, it's getting, it's getting pretty good. There's a lot of really cool people in there doing some really cool things. Because again, it's not about us. It's not about me. It's about building a community of like-minded people that want to pull for each other root for each other. You know what I mean? Like environment matters. And so we're trying to build an environment that, that, that people are, are, are trusting of. But they're also contributing back to, because man, to see some of the things that these people are doing just using some of the principles of optimal self is pretty amazing. So we'd love to have everybody. So if you're interested, please optimal self that today. We'll get you there. Speaker 1 (28:30): Awesome. Thank you so much. And who can want a little more encouragement and support in their life. And now before we end last question that I ask everyone is knowing where you are now in your life and in your career. What advice would you give to your younger self? Speaker 2 (28:48): Man, so much. No, I think that I, I think for myself is the thing that when you, when you ask that the, the, the very first words that came to my head is stay the course and what that means, what I mean by that is a lot of times we, we believe something. We want something we're afraid to talk about it. And I will say this as an athlete. You know, when I was very little, yes, my, the, you asked me what I was doing. And I was like, I'm going to be a baseball player. Like, that's what I was doing, you know? And I wasn't the best. Let's just be very clear. I wasn't your all-star game guy. I wasn't the kid hitting home runs as a kid who was getting tired. I was opposite. I didn't make all star teams. I didn't have all that stuff. Speaker 2 (29:40): And so, you know, it was, it was a turning point. I'll share this really quick because I think it'll help people out. There is I was 13 years old and my best friend's dad was our coach. My best friend was the best player, if not in the league, definitely on our team. And we grew up together. He's still one of my best friends to this day. And he was, it was a bigger kid growing up. You probably, you guys probably remember this. I was not that kid. I was the little munchkin kid, you know, you just hit over at second base or, you know so, and at 13 we won the championship in our league and it was probably the best year I ever had as a, as, as a baseball player at that young age, I thought for sure, man, this is the year I'm going to make the all-star team, right. Speaker 2 (30:23): This is the year and I didn't make it. And our team had won. So we had this, you know, the, the, the, the pizza party after. And, and so I went up to coach who was also, you know, I'd been on vacation with him because I was, you know, got to, you know, he's, his son was my best friend. And I said, you know, he's like, what's the matter? What do you want? And I said how come I didn't make the all-star team? And he looked me dead in the face. Can I can tell you this? I, I can tell you to this day, which is not even know how many 40, 30 years later he, and I said, and he, I could tell you what he was wearing. I could tell you what he smelled. Like, I could tell you everything about it. Speaker 2 (31:02): Every I could tell you what I was wearing. And he said, because you weren't good enough now don't get me wrong. The crushes, any 13 year old boy or girl, probably. But that 13 year old boy in me was crushed. He was, he still is to this day, but I'll tell you this. And I went to the side, you know, and got away from where everybody was. I went up to the lady, the pizza counter, and I asked her if I could use the phone, if she'd call my mom, because her mom wasn't there, she could dial the number for me. I asked her to come get me. She's like, what are you doing? I said, mom, please come get me, please come get me, please, please, please, please swish. She's like, find them on my lap. I didn't even wait. I just went out and sat on the curb, waited for her. Speaker 2 (31:39): She pulled up and she's like, what is going on? And as soon as I got in the car, man, tears just pouring out and she's like, what is going on? I'm like, just go, please. She's like, I'm not leaving, moving this car until you tell me what's going on. So I told her, right. I said, I wasn't good enough. And she was like, ready? Any mom? Right? Like, and here's the thing. She, you know, I said, please, don't go in there. I mean, bears don't please, please, please. Well, what do you want? What do you want Jeremy? And I said, can we go to big five? I don't even know big five as a place anymore, but in California was at sporting goods store. And I said, please take me there. And she said, what do you want? And I walked in, I showed her. Speaker 2 (32:18): I said, can we please buy me a tea? I'll never forget. It was their big yellow sign, $19 and 99 cents. And that tea is still with me today. That was my 13 year old year. And that tea, I went in the backyard and I hit minimum a hundred balls off that tee every single day. No one's watching. I didn't have many balls to start and I'd tear them up. I started using tennis balls or racquetballs and anything I could find to hit off and a hundred swings. I would not. Everyday when I got home, I'd go out and do a hundred swings or now, or I wouldn't let myself do anything else. Right. All the way through, by the time I was 18 years old, I was, I was in all league player. I was the MVP of our team. I got a scholarship and the rest is kind of history. Speaker 2 (33:02): But that, that, that T stays with me as a symbol is because that it wasn't that he was saying, I want people because most people, even when they hear this, they go, what we should have knocked that guy. And what is it? You know, where's he at today? And I'm like, it was the greatest thing that ever happened. And here's why is because he was honest with me. He wasn't saying I wasn't good enough ever. I wasn't good enough in that moment. So again, there was 12, 15 teams in that league. There's, you know, whatever, 15, 16 kids on everything. There's 80 to a hundred kids in that league. It's not like I'm the only kid that didn't make it there. 15 kids and made that all star team. If I was the 16th best kid that year, then I wasn't good enough. Right. But it's not that I'm not good enough forever. Speaker 2 (33:47): It depends on how I, how, how you look at it. But I knew this, no one was ever going to say that to me because I, because of lack of effort, you, weren't going to tell me that because I didn't work hard because I'm not, I'm telling you, I'm still not best of that in my, you know, I wasn't the best player of all time now, but I maximized my ability. I will say that like that, that's something that I want people to understand, but I want what I wanted them to see is there's somebody out there right now that has probably been told they're not good enough. They're not, they're not pretty, they're not smart. You're the dumb sister. You're the dumb brother. You're this, whatever, right. It happens to all of us. There's so many people out there that did that lives with us forever. Speaker 2 (34:26): And I'm here to tell you it lives with me today, but it lives with me in a way that he told me that, because in that moment I wasn't good enough. And I needed to prepare. I needed to get better. That was in my control. That's the thing that was in my control because I didn't make it at 14. I didn't make it a 15. I didn't make it to say let's be clear. Right. And, and I, and you probably heard this, I think it was a bill gates and say, we underestimate, you know, we, we overestimate what we can do in a year. And we underestimate what we can do in five. And again, and when I look back at those years, I think, oh my gosh, because if I would have expected after that, you know, to go out side and hit a hundred balls and then leave and go make the next all-star team. Speaker 2 (35:07): Cause I did it once I would have been, it would be a full, everybody would be like, yeah, you're crazy. Right? It's the same person that goes, oh, I went to the gym once. Like, no, it's not, that's not going to work. Oh, I had us salad. No, that's not going to work. This is about consistency. This is about finding your thing and doing consistency over time will create those results. But, but that story in that, that T is a symbol for me to remember like, Hey, starting a podcast, starting this. You're not good enough. You're not, you have to get better. And that takes the work are you with? And if you're willing to do the work, man, you get to be on cool podcasts like this with Karen. And that's that's, that's what ultimately happens. Right? You get the, you get the plug along and, and cool things happen. So I would just tell myself to understand that, listen, it's going to take work. Don't be afraid of the work. Don't be afraid of putting in the extra hours. Don't be afraid of getting up early. Don't just, just keep going, man, stay the course. Don't be afraid of the work. Cause if you do that, anything's possible. Speaker 1 (36:18): Oh, you went on mute. You're on mute. I was saying excellent advice for anyone and certainly great advice for any youngster out there trying to get better at things I want to get better at. So thank you so much for that advice. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming on today and sharing all this good stuff. We will have all the links to all of your stuff at podcast dot healthy, wealthy, smart.com. One click will take you to social media. We'll take you to the website, everything, to all the free stuff you mentioned. So we will have all of that over at the podcast website. So Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on today and giving us up, giving up some of your time. Speaker 2 (37:07): Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. I really enjoyed it. So looking forward to the next time. Speaker 1 (37:14): Pleasure, pleasure, and everyone. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy and smart.

About Rebecca MarshburnRebecca's interested in the things that interest people—What's important to them? Why? And when did they first discover it to be so? She's also interested in sharing stories, elevating others' experiences, exploring the intersection of physical environments and human behavior, and crafting the perfect pun for every situation. Today, Rebecca is the Head of Content & Community at Common Room. Prior to Common Room, she led the AWS Serverless Heroes program, where she met the singular Jeremy Daly, and guided content and product experiences for fashion magazines, online blogs, AR/VR companies, education companies, and a little travel outfit called Airbnb.Twitter: @beccaodelayLinkedIn: Rebecca MarshburnCompany: www.commonroom.ioPersonal work (all proceeds go to the charity of the buyer's choice): www.letterstomyexlovers.comWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VVEtxgh6GKI This episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.Transcript:Rebecca: What a day today is! It's not every day you turn 100 times old, and on this day we celebrate Serverless Chats 100th episode with the most special of guests. The gentleman whose voice you usually hear on this end of the microphone, doing the asking, but today he's going to be doing the telling, the one and only, Jeremy Daly, and me. I'm Rebecca Marshburn, and your guest host for Serverless Chats 100th episode, because it's quite difficult to interview yourself. Hey Jeremy!Jeremy: Hey Rebecca, thank you very much for doing this.Rebecca: Oh my gosh. I am super excited to be here, couldn't be more honored. I'll give your listeners, our listeners, today, the special day, a little bit of background about us. Jeremy and I met through the AWS Serverless Heroes program, where I used to be a coordinator for quite some time. We support each other in content, conferences, product requests, road mapping, community-building, and most importantly, I think we've supported each other in spirit, and now I'm the head of content and community at Common Room, and Jeremy's leading Serverless Cloud at Serverless, Inc., so it's even sweeter that we're back together to celebrate this Serverless Chats milestone with you all, the most important, important, important, important part of the podcast equation, the serverless community. So without further ado, let's begin.Jeremy: All right, hit me up with whatever questions you have. I'm here to answer anything.Rebecca: Jeremy, I'm going to ask you a few heavy hitters, so I hope you're ready.Jeremy: I'm ready to go.Rebecca: And the first one's going to ask you to step way, way, way, way, way back into your time machine, so if you've got the proper attire on, let's do it. If we're going to step into that time machine, let's peel the layers, before serverless, before containers, before cloud even, what is the origin story of Jeremy Daly, the man who usually asks the questions.Jeremy: That's tough. I don't think time machines go back that far, but it's funny, when I was in high school, I was involved with music, and plays, and all kinds of things like that. I was a very creative person. I loved creating things, that was one of the biggest sort of things, and whether it was music or whatever and I did a lot of work with video actually, back in the day. I was always volunteering at the local public access station. And when I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had used computers at the computer lab at the high school. I mean, this is going back a ways, so it wasn't everyone had their own computer in their house, but I went to college and then, my first, my freshman year in college, I ended up, there's a suite-mate that I had who showed me a website that he built on the university servers.And I saw that and I was immediately like, "Whoa, how do you do that"? Right, just this idea of creating something new and being able to build that out was super exciting to me, so I spent the next couple of weeks figuring out how to do HTML, and this was before, this was like when JavaScript was super, super early and we're talking like 1997, and everything was super early. I was using this, I eventually moved away from using FrontPage and started using this thing called HotDog. It was a software for HTML coding, but I started doing that, and I started building websites, and then after a while, I started figuring out what things like CGI-bins were, and how you could write Perl scripts, and how you could make interactions happen, and how you could capture FormData and serve up different things, and it was a lot of copying and pasting.My major at the time, I think was psychology, because it was like a default thing that I could do. But then I moved into computer science. I did computer science for about a year, and I felt that that was a little bit too narrow for what I was hoping to sort of do. I was starting to become more entrepreneurial. I had started selling websites to people. I had gone to a couple of local businesses and started building websites, so I actually expanded that and ended up doing sort of a major that straddled computer science and management, like business administration. So I ended up graduating with a degree in e-commerce and internet marketing, which is sort of very early, like before any of this stuff seemed to even exist. And then from there, I started a web development company, worked on that for 12 years, and then I ended up selling that off. Did a startup, failed the startup. Then from that startup, went to another startup, worked there for a couple of years, went to another startup, did a lot of consulting in between there, somewhere along the way I found serverless and AWS Cloud, and then now it's sort of led me to advocacy for building things with serverless and now I'm building sort of the, I think what I've been dreaming about building for the last several years in what I'm doing now at Serverless, Inc.Rebecca: Wow. All right. So this love story started in the 90s.Jeremy: The 90s, right.Rebecca: That's an incredible, era and welcome to 2021.Jeremy: Right. It's been a journey.Rebecca: Yeah, truly, that's literally a new millennium. So in a broad way of saying it, you've seen it all. You've started from the very HotDog of the world, to today, which is an incredible name, I'm going to have to look them up later. So then you said serverless came along somewhere in there, but let's go to the middle of your story here, so before Serverless Chats, before its predecessor, which is your weekly Off-by-none newsletter, and before, this is my favorite one, debates around, what the suffix "less" means when appended to server. When did you first hear about Serverless in that moment, or perhaps you don't remember the exact minute, but I do really want to know what struck you about it? What stood out about serverless rather than any of the other types of technologies that you could have been struck by and been having a podcast around?Jeremy: Right. And I think I gave you maybe too much of a surface level of what I've seen, because I talked mostly about software, but if we go back, I mean, hardware was one of those things where hardware, and installing software, and running servers, and doing networking, and all those sort of things, those were part of my early career as well. When I was running my web development company, we started by hosting on some hosting service somewhere, and then we ended up getting a dedicated server, and then we outgrew that, and then we ended up saying, "Well maybe we'll bring stuff in-house". So we did on-prem for quite some time, where we had our own servers in the T1 line, and then we moved to another building that had a T3 line, and if anybody doesn't know what that is, you probably don't need to anymore.But those are the things that we were doing, and then eventually we moved into a co-location facility where we rented space, and we rented electricity, and we rented all the utilities, the bandwidth, and so forth, but we had Blade servers and I was running VMware, and we were doing all this kind of stuff to manage the infrastructure, and then writing software on top of that, so it was a lot of work. I know I posted something on Twitter a few weeks ago, about how, when I was, when we were young, we used to have to carry a server on our back, uphill, both ways, to the data center, in the snow, with no shoes, and that's kind of how it felt, that you were doing a lot of these things.And then 2008, 2009, as I was kind of wrapping up my web development company, we were just in the process of actually saying it's too expensive at the colo. I think we were paying probably between like $5,000 and $7,000 a month between the ... we had leases on some of the servers, you're paying for electricity, you're paying for all these other things, and we were running a fair amount of services in there, so it seemed justifiable. We were making money on it, that wasn't the problem, but it just was a very expensive fixed cost for us, and when the cloud started coming along and I started actually building out the startup that I was working on, we were building all of that in the cloud, and as I was learning more about the cloud and how that works, I'm like, I should just move all this stuff that's in the co-location facility, move that over to the cloud and see what happens.And it took a couple of weeks to get that set up, and now, again, this is early, this is before ELB, this is before RDS, this is before, I mean, this was very, very early cloud. I mean, I think there was S3 and EC2. I think those were the two services that were available, with a few other things. I don't even think there were VPCs yet. But anyways, I moved everything over, took a couple of weeks to get that over, and essentially our bill to host all of our clients' sites and projects went from $5,000 to $7,000 a month, to $750 a month or something like that, and it's funny because had I done that earlier, I may not have sold off my web development company because it could have been much more profitable, so it was just an interesting move there.So we got into the cloud fairly early and started sort of leveraging that, and it was great to see all these things get added and all these specialty services, like RDS, and just taking the responsibility because I literally was installing Microsoft SQL server on an EC2 instance, which is not something that you want to do, you want to use RDS. It's just a much better way to do it, but anyways, so I was working for another startup, this was like startup number 17 or whatever it was I was working for, and we had this incident where we were using ... we had a pretty good setup. I mean, everything was on EC2 instances, but we were using DynamoDB to do some caching layers for certain things. We were using a sharded database, MySQL database, for product information, and so forth.So the system was pretty resilient, it was pretty, it handled all of the load testing we did and things like that, but then we actually got featured on Good Morning America, and they mentioned our app, it was the Power to Mobile app, and so we get mentioned on Good Morning America. I think it was Good Morning America. The Today Show? Good Morning America, I think it was. One of those morning shows, anyways, we got about 10,000 sign-ups in less than a minute, which was amazing, or it was just this huge spike in traffic, which was great. The problem was, is we had this really weak point in our system where we had to basically get a lock on the database in order to get an incremental-ID, and so essentially what happened is the database choked, and then as soon as the database choked, just to create user accounts, other users couldn't sign in and there was all kinds of problems, so we basically lost out on all of this capability.So I spent some time doing a lot of research and trying to figure out how do you scale that? How do you scale something that fast? How do you have that resilience in there? And there's all kinds of ways that we could have done it with traditional hardware, it's not like it wasn't possible to do with a slightly better strategy, but as I was digging around in AWS, I'm looking around at some different things, and we were, I was always in the console cause we were using Dynamo and some of those things, and I came across this thing that said "Lambda," with a little new thing next to it. I'm like, what the heck is this?So I click on that and I start reading about it, and I'm like, this is amazing. We don't have to spin up a server, we don't have to use Chef, or Puppet, or anything like that to spin up these machines. We can basically just say, when X happens, do Y, and it enlightened me, and this was early 2015, so this would have been right after Lambda went GA. Had never heard of Lambda as part of the preview, I mean, I wasn't sort of in that the re:Invent, I don't know, what would you call that? Vortex, maybe, is a good way to describe the event.Rebecca: Vortex sounds about right. That's about how it feels by the end.Jeremy: Right, exactly. So I wasn't really in that, I wasn't in that group yet, I wasn't part of that community, so I hadn't heard about it, and so as I started playing around with it, I immediately saw the value there, because, for me, as someone who again had managed servers, and it had built out really complex networking too. I think some of the things you don't think about when you move to an on-prem where you're managing your stuff, even what the cloud manages for you. I mean, we had firewalls, and we had to do all the firewall rules ourselves, right. I mean, I know you still have to do security groups and things like that in AWS, but just the level of complexity is a lot lower when you're in the cloud, and of course there's so many great services and systems that help you do that now.But just the idea of saying, "wait a minute, so if I have something happen, like a user signup, for example, and I don't have to worry about provisioning all the servers that I need in order to handle that," and again, it wasn't so much the server aspect of it as it was the database aspect of it, but one of the things that was sort of interesting about the idea of Serverless 2 was this asynchronous nature of it, this idea of being more event-driven, and that things don't have to happen immediately necessarily. So that just struck me as something where it seemed like it would reduce a lot, and again, this term has been overused, but the undifferentiated heavy-lifting, we use that term over and over again, but there is not a better term for that, right?Because there were just so many things that you have to do as a developer, as an ops person, somebody who is trying to straddle teams, or just a PM, or whatever you are, so many things that you have to do in order to get an application running, first of all, and then even more you have to do in order to keep it up and running, and then even more, if you start thinking about distributing it, or scaling it, or getting any of those things, disaster recovery. I mean, there's a million things you have to think about, and I saw serverless immediately as this opportunity to say, "Wait a minute, this could reduce a lot of that complexity and manage all of that for you," and then again, literally let you focus on the things that actually matter for your business.Rebecca: Okay. As someone who worked, how should I say this, in metatech, or the technology of technology in the serverless space, when you say that you were starting to build that without ELB even, or RDS, my level of anxiety is like, I really feel like I'm watching a slow horror film. I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't have to do that, did you"?Jeremy: We did.Rebecca: So I applaud you for making it to the end of the film and still being with us.Jeremy: Well, the other thing ...Rebecca: Only one protagonist does that.Jeremy: Well, the other thing that's interesting too, about Serverless, and where it was in 2015, Lambda goes GA, this will give you some anxiety, there was no API gateway. So there was no way to actually trigger a Lambda function from a web request, right. There was no VPC access in Lambda functions, which meant you couldn't connect to a database. The only thing you do is connect via HDP, so you could connect to DynamoDB or things like that, but you could not connect directly to RDS, for example. So if you go back and you look at the timeline of when these things were released, I mean, if just from 2015, I mean, you literally feel like a caveman thinking about what you could do back then again, it's banging two sticks together versus where we are now, and the capabilities that are available to us.Rebecca: Yeah, you're sort of in Plato's cave, right, and you're looking up and you're like, "It's quite dark in here," and Lambda's up there, outside, sowing seeds, being like, "Come on out, it's dark in there". All right, so I imagine you discovering Lambda through the console is not a sentence you hear every day or general console discovery of a new product that will then sort of change the way that you build, and so I'm guessing maybe one of the reasons why you started your Off-by-none newsletter or Serverless Chats, right, is to be like, "How do I help tell others about this without them needing to discover it through the console"? But I'm curious what your why is. Why first the Off-by-none newsletter, which is one of my favorite things to receive every week, thank you for continuing to write such great content, and then why Serverless Chats? Why are we here today? Why are we at number 100? Which I'm so excited about every time I say it.Jeremy: And it's kind of crazy to think about all the people I've gotten a chance to talk to, but so, I think if you go back, I started writing blog posts maybe in 2015, so I haven't been doing it that long, and I certainly wasn't prolific. I wasn't consistent writing a blog post every week or every, two a week, like some people do now, which is kind of crazy. I don't know how that, I mean, it's hard enough writing the newsletter every week, never mind writing original content, but I started writing about Serverless. I think it wasn't until the beginning of 2018, maybe the end of 2017, and there was already a lot of great content out there. I mean, Ben Kehoe was very early into this and a lot of his stuff I read very early.I mean, there's just so many people that were very early in the space, I mean, Paul Johnson, I mean, just so many people, right, and I started reading what they were writing and I was like, "Oh, I've got some ideas too, I've been experimenting with some things, I feel like I've gotten to a point where what I could share could be potentially useful". So I started writing blog posts, and I think one of the earlier blog posts I wrote was, I want to say 2017, maybe it was 2018, early 2018, but was a post about serverless security, and what was great about that post was that actually got me connected with Ory Segal, who had started PureSec, and he and I became friends and that was the other great thing too, is just becoming part of this community was amazing.So many awesome people that I've met, but so I saw all this stuff people were writing and these things people were doing, and I got to maybe August of 2018, and I said to myself, I'm like, "Okay, I don't know if people are interested in what I'm writing". I wasn't writing a lot, but I was writing a little bit, but I wasn't sure people were overly interested in what I was writing, and again, that idea of the imposter syndrome, certainly everything was very early, so I felt a little bit more comfortable. I always felt like, well, maybe nobody knows what they're talking about here, so if I throw something into the fold it won't be too, too bad, but certainly, I was reading other things by other people that I was interested in, and I thought to myself, I'm like, "Okay, if I'm interested in this stuff, other people have to be interested in this stuff," but it wasn't easy to find, right.I mean, there was sort of a serverless Twitter, if you want to use that terminology, where a lot of people tweet about it and so forth, obviously it's gotten very noisy now because of people slapped that term on way too many things, but I don't want to have that discussion, but so I'm reading all this great stuff and I'm like, "I really want to share it," and I'm like, "Well, I guess the best way to do that would just be a newsletter."I had an email list for my own personal site that I had had a couple of hundred people on, and I'm like, "Well, let me just turn it into this thing, and I'll share these stories, and maybe people will find them interesting," and I know this is going to sound a little bit corny, but I have two teenage daughters, so I'm allowed to be sort of this dad-jokey type. I remember when I started writing the first version of this newsletter and I said to myself, I'm like, "I don't want this to be a newsletter." I was toying around with this idea of calling it an un-newsletter. I didn't want it to just be another list of links that you click on, and I know that's interesting to some people, but I felt like there was an opportunity to opine on it, to look at the individual links, and maybe even tell a story as part of all of the links that were shared that week, and I thought that that would be more interesting than just getting a list of links.And I'm sure you've seen over the last 140 issues, or however many we're at now, that there's been changes in the way that we formatted it, and we've tried new things, and things like that, but ultimately, and this goes back to the corny thing, I mean, one of the first things that I wanted to do was, I wanted to basically thank people for writing this stuff. I wanted to basically say, "Look, this is not just about you writing some content". This is big, this is important, and I appreciate it. I appreciate you for writing that content, and I wanted to make it more of a celebration really of the community and the people that were early contributors to that space, and that's one of the reasons why I did the Serverless Star thing.I thought, if somebody writes a really good article some week, and it's just, it really hits me, or somebody else says, "Hey, this person wrote a great article," or whatever. I wanted to sort of celebrate that person and call them out because that's one of the things too is writing blog posts or posting things on social media without a good following, or without the dopamine hit of people liking it, or re-tweeting it, and things like that, it can be a pretty lonely place. I mean, I know I feel that way sometimes when you put something out there, and you think it's important, or you think people might want to see it, and just not enough people see it.It's even worse, I mean, 240 characters, or whatever it is to write a tweet is one thing, or 280 characters, but if you're spending time putting together a tutorial or you put together a really good thought piece, or story, or use case, or something where you feel like this is worth sharing, because it could inspire somebody else, or it could help somebody else, could get them past a bump, it could make them think about something a different way, or get them over a hump, or whatever. I mean, that's just the kind of thing where I think people need that encouragement, and I think people deserve that encouragement for the work that they're doing, and that's what I wanted to do with Off-by-none, is make sure that I got that out there, and to just try to amplify those voices the best that I could. The other thing where it's sort of progressed, and I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but the other place where it's progressed and I thought was really interesting, was, finding people ...There's the heavy hitters in the serverless space, right? The ones we all know, and you can name them all, and they are great, and they produce amazing content, and they do amazing things, but they have pretty good engines to get their content out, right? I mean, some people who write for the AWS blog, they're on the AWS blog, right, so they're doing pretty well in terms of getting their things out there, right, and they've got pretty good engines.There's some good dev advocates too, that just have good Twitter followings and things like that. Then there's that guy who writes the story. I don't know, he's in India or he's in Poland or something like that. He writes this really good tutorial on how to do this odd edge-case for serverless. And you go and you look at their Medium and they've got two followers on Medium, five followers on Twitter or something like that. And that to me, just seems unfair, right? I mean, they've written a really good piece and it's worth sharing right? And it needs to get out there. I don't have a huge audience. I know that. I mean I've got a good following on Twitter. I feel like a lot of my Twitter followers, we can have good conversations, which is what you want on Twitter.The newsletter has continued to grow. We've got a good listener base for this show here. So, I don't have a huge audience, but if I can share that audience with other people and get other people to the forefront, then that's important to me. And I love finding those people and those ideas that other people might not see because they're not looking for them. So, if I can be part of that and help share that, that to me, it's not only a responsibility, it's just it's incredibly rewarding. So ...Rebecca: Yeah, I have to ... I mean, it is your 100th episode, so hopefully I can give you some kudos, but if celebrating others' work is one of your main tenets, you nail it every time. So ...Jeremy: I appreciate that.Rebecca: Just wanted you to know that. So, that's sort of the Genesis of course, of both of these, right?Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: That underpins the foundational how to share both works or how to share others' work through different channels. I'm wondering how it transformed, there's this newsletter and then of course it also has this other component, which is Serverless Chats. And that moment when you were like, "All right, this newsletter, this narrative that I'm telling behind serverless, highlighting all of these different authors from all these different global spaces, I'm going to start ... You know what else I want to do? I don't have enough to do, I'm going to start a podcast." How did we get here?Jeremy: Well, so the funny thing is now that I think about it, I think it just goes back to this tenet of fairness, this idea where I was fortunate, and I was able to go down to New York City and go to Serverless Days New York in late 2018. I was able to ... Tom McLaughlin actually got me connected with a bunch of great people in Boston. I live just outside of Boston. We got connected with a bunch of great people. And we started the Serverless Days Boston for 2019. And we were on that committee. I started traveling and I was going to conferences and I was meeting people. I went to re:Invent in 2018, which I know a lot of people just don't have the opportunity to do. And the interesting thing was, is that I was pulling aside brilliant people either in the hallway at a conference or more likely for a very long, deep discussion that we would have about something at a pub in Northern Ireland or something like that, right?I mean, these were opportunities that I was getting that I was privileged enough to get. And I'm like, these are amazing conversations. Just things that, for me, I know changed the way I think. And one of the biggest things that I try to do is evolve my thinking. What I thought a year ago is probably not what I think now. Maybe call it flip-flopping, whatever you want to call it. But I think that evolving your thinking is the most progressive thing that you can do and starting to understand as you gain new perspectives. And I was talking to people that I never would have talked to if I was just sitting here in my home office or at the time, I mean, I was at another office, but still, I wasn't getting that context. I wasn't getting that experience. And I wasn't getting those stories that literally changed my mind and made me think about things differently.And so, here I was in this privileged position, being able to talk to these amazing people and in some cases funny, because they're celebrities in their own right, right? I mean, these are the people where other people think of them and it's almost like they're a celebrity. And these people, I think they deserve fame. Don't get me wrong. But like as someone who has been on that side of it as well, it's ... I don't know, it's weird. It's weird to have fans in a sense. I love, again, you can be my friend, you don't have to be my fan. But that's how I felt about ...Rebecca: I'm a fan of my friends.Jeremy: So, a fan and my friend. So, having talked to these other people and having these really deep conversations on serverless and go beyond serverless to me. Actually I had quite a few conversations with some people that have nothing to do with serverless. Actually, Peter Sbarski and I, every time we get together, we only talk about the value of going to college for some reason. I don't know why. It has usually nothing to do with serverless. So, I'm having these great conversations with these people and I'm like, "Wow, I wish I could share these. I wish other people could have this experience," because I can tell you right now, there's people who can't travel, especially a lot of people outside of the United States. They ... it's hard to travel to the United States sometimes.So, these conversations are going on and I thought to myself, I'm like, "Wouldn't it be great if we could just have these conversations and let other people hear them, hopefully without bar glasses clinking in the background. And so I said, "You know what? Let's just try it. Let's see what happens. I'll do a couple of episodes. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. If people are interested, they're interested." But that was the genesis of that, I mean, it just goes back to this idea where I felt a little selfish having conversations and not being able to share them with other people.Rebecca: It's the very Jeremy Daly tenet slogan, right? You got to share it. You got to share it ...Jeremy: Got to share it, right?Rebecca: The more he shares it, it celebrates it. I love that. I think you do ... Yeah, you do a great job giving a megaphone so that more people can hear. So, in case you need a reminder, actually, I'll ask you, I know what the answer is to this, but do you know the answer? What was your very first episode of Serverless Chats? What was the name, and how long did it last?Jeremy: What was the name?Rebecca: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.Jeremy: Oh, well I know ... Oh, I remember now. Well, I know it was Alex DeBrie. I absolutely know that it was Alex DeBrie because ...Rebecca: Correct on that.Jeremy: If nobody, if you do not know Alex DeBrie, not only is he an AWS data hero, as well as the author of The DynamoDB Book, but he's also like the most likable person on the planet too. It is really hard if you've ever met Alex, that you wouldn't remember him. Alex and I started communicating, again, we met through the serverless space. I think actually he was working at Serverless Inc. at the time when we first met. And I think I met him in person, finally met him in person at re:Invent 2018. But he and I have collaborated on a number of things and so forth. So, let me think what the name of it was. "Serverless Purity Versus Practicality" or something like that. Is that close?Rebecca: That's exactly what it was.Jeremy: Oh, all right. I nailed it. Nailed it. Yes!Rebecca: Wow. Well, it's a great title. And I think ...Jeremy: Don't ask me what episode number 27 was though, because no way I could tell you that.Rebecca: And just for fun, it was 34 minutes long and you released it on June 17th, 2019. So, you've come a long way in a year and a half. That's some kind of wildness. So it makes sense, like, "THE," capital, all caps, bold, italic, author for databases, Alex DeBrie. Makes sense why you selected him as your guest. I'm wondering if you remember any of the ... What do you remember most about that episode? What was it like planning it? What was the reception of it? Anything funny happened recording it or releasing it?Jeremy: Yeah, well, I mean, so the funny thing is that I was incredibly nervous. I still am, actually a lot of guests that I have, I'm still incredibly nervous when I'm about to do the actual interview. And I think it's partially because I want to do justice to the content that they're presenting and to their expertise. And I feel like there's a responsibility to them, but I also feel like the guests that I've had on, some of them are just so smart, and the things they say, just I'm in awe of some of the things that come out of these people's mouths. And I'm like, "This is amazing and people need to hear this." And so, I feel like we've had really good episodes and we've had some okay episodes, but I feel like I want to try to keep that level up so that they owe that to my listener to make sure that there is high quality episode that, high quality information that they're going to get out of that.But going back to the planning of the initial episodes, so I actually had six episodes recorded before I even released the first one. And the reason why I did that was because I said, "All right, there's no way that I can record an episode and then wait a week and then record another episode and wait a week." And I thought batching them would be a good idea. And so, very early on, I had Alex and I had Nitzan Shapira and I had Ran Ribenzaft and I had Marcia Villalba and I had Erik Peterson from Cloud Zero. And so, I had a whole bunch of these episodes and I reached out to I think, eight or nine people. And I said, "I'm doing this thing, would you be interested in it?" Whatever, and we did planning sessions, still a thing that I do today, it's still part of the process.So, whenever I have a guest on, if you are listening to an episode and you're like, "Wow, how did they just like keep the thing going ..." It's not scripted. I don't want people to think it's scripted, but it is, we do review the outline and we go through some talking points to make sure that again, the high-quality episode and that the guest says all the things that the guest wants to say. A lot of it is spontaneous, right? I mean, the language is spontaneous, but we do, we do try to plan these episodes ahead of time so that we make sure that again, we get the content out and we talk about all the things we want to talk about. But with Alex, it was funny.He was actually the first of the six episodes that I recorded, though. And I wasn't sure who I was going to do first, but I hadn't quite picked it yet, but I recorded with Alex first. And it was an easy, easy conversation. And the reason why it was an easy conversation was because we had talked a number of times, right? It was that in a pub, talking or whatever, and having that friendly chat. So, that was a pretty easy conversation. And I remember the first several conversations I had, I knew Nitzan very well. I knew Ran very well. I knew Erik very well. Erik helped plan Serverless Days Boston with me. And I had known Marcia very well. Marcia actually had interviewed me when we were in Vegas for re:Invent 2018.So, those were very comfortable conversations. And so, it actually was a lot easier to do, which probably gave me a false sense of security. I was like, "Wow, this was ... These came out pretty well." The conversations worked pretty well. And also it was super easy because I was just doing audio. And once you add the video component into it, it gets a little bit more complex. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's anything funny that happened during it, other than the fact that I mean, I was incredibly nervous when we recorded those, because I just didn't know what to expect. If anybody wants to know, "Hey, how do you just jump right into podcasting?" I didn't. I actually was planning on how can I record my voice? How can I get comfortable behind a microphone? And so, one of the things that I did was I started creating audio versions of my blog posts and posting them on SoundCloud.So, I did that for a couple of ... I'm sorry, a couple of blog posts that I did. And that just helped make me feel a bit more comfortable about being able to record and getting a little bit more comfortable, even though I still can't stand the sound of my own voice, but hopefully that doesn't bother other people.Rebecca: That is an amazing ... I think we so often talk about ideas around you know where you want to go and you have this vision and that's your goal. And it's a constant reminder to be like, "How do I make incremental steps to actually get to that goal?" And I love that as a life hack, like, "Hey, start with something you already know that you wrote and feel comfortable in and say it out loud and say it out loud again and say it out loud again." And you may never love your voice, but you will at least feel comfortable saying things out loud on a podcast.Jeremy: Right, right, right. I'm still working on the, "Ums" and, "Ahs." I still do that. And I don't edit those out. That's another thing too, actually, that one of the things I do want people to know about this podcast is these are authentic conversations, right? I am probably like ... I feel like I'm, I mean, the most authentic person that I know. I just want authenticity. I want that out of the guests. The idea of putting together an outline is just so that we can put together a high quality episode, but everything is authentic. And that's what I want out of people. I just want that authenticity, and one of the things that I felt kept that, was leaving in, "Ums" and, "Ahs," you know what I mean? It's just, it's one of those things where I know a lot of podcasts will edit those out and it sounds really polished and finished.Again, I mean, I figured if we can get the clinking glasses out from the background of a bar and just at least have the conversation that that's what I'm trying to achieve. And we do very little editing. We do cut things out here and there, especially if somebody makes a mistake or they want to start something over again, we will cut that out because we want, again, high quality episodes. But yeah, but authenticity is deeply important to me.Rebecca: Yeah, I think it probably certainly helps that neither of us are robots because robots wouldn't say, "Um" so many times. As I say, "Uh." So, let's talk about, Alex DeBrie was your first guest, but there's been a hundred episodes, right? So, from, I might say the best guest, as a hundredth episode guests, which is our very own Jeremy Daly, but let's go back to ...Jeremy: I appreciate that.Rebecca: Your guests, one to 99. And I mean, you've chatted with some of the most thoughtful, talented, Serverless builders and architects in the industry, and across coincident spaces like ML and Voice Technology, Chaos Engineering, databases. So, you started with Alex DeBrie and databases, and then I'm going to list off some names here, but there's so many more, right? But there's the Gunnar Grosches, and the Alexandria Abbasses, and Ajay Nair, and Angela Timofte, James Beswick, Chris Munns, Forrest Brazeal, Aleksandar Simovic, and Slobodan Stojanovic. Like there are just so many more. And I'm wondering if across those hundred conversations, or 99 plus your own today, if you had to distill those into two or three lessons, what have you learned that sticks with you? If there are emerging patterns or themes across these very divergent and convergent thinkers in the serverless space?Jeremy: Oh, that's a tough question.Rebecca: You're welcome.Jeremy: So, yeah, put me on the spot here. So, yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I've, I've seen, no matter what it's been, whether it's ML or it's Chaos Engineering, or it's any of those other observability and things like that. I think the common thing that threads all of it is trying to solve problems and make people's lives easier. That every one of those solutions is like, and we always talk about abstractions and, and higher-level abstractions, and we no longer have to write ones and zeros on punch cards or whatever. We can write languages that either compile or interpret it or whatever. And then the cloud comes along and there's things we don't have to do anymore, that just get taken care of for us.And you keep building these higher level of abstractions. And I think that's a lot of what ... You've got this underlying concept of letting somebody else handle things for you. And then you've got this whole group of people that are coming at it from a number of different angles and saying, "Well, how will that apply to my use case?" And I think a lot of those, a lot of those things are very, very specific. I think things like the voice technology where it's like the fact that serverless powers voice technology is only interesting in the fact as to say that, the voice technology is probably the more interesting part, the fact that serverless powers it is just the fact that it's a really simple vehicle to do that. And basically removes this whole idea of saying I'm building voice technology, or I'm building a voice app, why do I need to worry about setting up servers and all this kind of stuff?It just takes that away. It takes that out of the equation. And I think that's the perfect idea of saying, "How can you take your use case, fit serverless in there and apply it in a way that gets rid of all that extra overhead that you shouldn't have to worry about." And the same thing is true of machine learning. And I mean, and SageMaker, and things like that. Yeah, you're still running instances of it, or you still have to do some of these things, but now there's like SageMaker endpoints and some other things that are happening. So, it's moving in that direction as well. But then you have those really high level services like NLU API from IBM, which is the Watson Natural Language Processing.You've got AP recognition, you've got the vision API, you've got sentiment analysis through all these different things. So, you've got a lot of different services that are very specific to machine learning and solving a discrete problem there. But then basically relying on serverless or at least presenting it in a way that's serverless, where you don't have to worry about it, right? You don't have to run all of these Jupiter notebooks and things like that, to do machine learning for a lot of cases. This is one of the things I talk about with Alexandra Abbas, was that these higher level APIs are just taking a lot of that responsibility or a lot of that heavy lifting off of your plate and allowing you to really come down and focus on the things that you're doing.So, going back to that, I do think that serverless, that the common theme that I see is that this idea of worrying about servers and worrying about patching things and worrying about networking, all that stuff. For so many people now, that's just not even a concern. They didn't even think about it. And that's amazing to think of, compute ... Or data, or networking as a utility that is now just available to us, right? And I mean, again, going back to my roots, taking it for granted is something that I think a lot of people do, but I think that's also maybe a good thing, right? Just don't think about it. I mean, there are people who, they're still going to be engineers and people who are sitting in the data center somewhere and racking servers and doing it, that's going to be forever, right?But for the things that you're trying to build, that's unimportant to you. That is the furthest from your concern. You want to focus on the problem that you're trying to solve. And so I think that, that's a lot of what I've seen from talking to people is that they are literally trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I take what I'm doing, my use case, my problem, how do I take that to the next level, by being able to spend my cycles thinking about that as opposed to how I'm going to serve it up to people?"Rebecca: Yeah, I think it's the mantra, right, of simplify, simplify, simplify, or maybe even to credit Bruce Lee, be like water. You're like, "How do I be like water in this instance?" Well, it's not to be setting up servers, it's to be doing what I like to be doing. So, you've interviewed these incredible folks. Is there anyone left on your list? I'm sure there ... I mean, I know that you have a large list. Is there a few key folks where you're like, "If this is the moment I'm going to ask them, I'm going to say on the hundredth episode, 'Dear so-and-so, I would love to interview you for Serverless Chats.'" Who are you asking?Jeremy: So, this is something that, again, we have a stretch list of guests that we attempt to reach out to every once in a while just to say, "Hey, if we get them, we get them." But so, I have a long list of people that I would absolutely love to talk to. I think number one on my list is certainly Werner Vogels. I mean, I would love to talk to Dr. Vogels about a number of things, and maybe even beyond serverless, I'm just really interested. More so from a curiosity standpoint of like, "Just how do you keep that in your head?" That vision of where it's going. And I'd love to drill down more into the vision because I do feel like there's a marketing aspect of it, that's pushing on him of like, "Here's what we have to focus on because of market adoption and so forth. And even though the technology, you want to move into a certain way," I'd be really interesting to talk to him about that.And I'd love to talk to him more too about developer experience and so forth, because one of the things that I love about AWS is that it gives you so many primitives, but at the same time, the thing I hate about AWS is it gives you so many primitives. So, you have to think about 800 services, I know it's not that many, but like, what is it? 200 services, something like that, that all need to kind of connect together. And I love that there's that diversity in those capabilities, it's just from a developer standpoint, it's really hard to choose which ones you're supposed to use, especially when several services overlap. So, I'm just curious. I mean, I'd love to talk to him about that and see what the vision is in terms of, is that the idea, just to be a salad bar, to be the Golden Corral of cloud services, I guess, right?Where you can choose whatever you want and probably take too much and then not use a lot of it. But I don't know if that's part of the strategy, but I think there's some interesting questions, could dig in there. Another person from AWS that I actually want to talk to, and I haven't reached out to her yet just because, I don't know, I just haven't reached out to her yet, but is Brigid Johnson. She is like an IAM expert. And I saw her speak at re:Inforce 2019, it must have been 2019 in Boston. And it was like she was speaking a different language, but she knew IAM so well, and I am not a fan of IAM. I mean, I'm a fan of it in the sense that it's necessary and it's great, but I can't wrap my head around so many different things about it. It's such a ...It's an ongoing learning process and when it comes to things like being able to use tags to elevate permissions. Just crazy things like that. Anyways, I would love to have a conversation with her because I'd really like to dig down into sort of, what is the essence of IAM? What are the things that you really have to think about with least permission? Especially applying it to serverless services and so forth. And maybe have her help me figure out how to do some of the cross role IAM things that I'm trying to do. Certainly would love to speak to Jeff Barr. I did meet Jeff briefly. We talked for a minute, but I would love to chat with him.I think he sets a shining example of what a developer advocate is. Just the way that ... First of all, he's probably the only person alive who knows every service at AWS and has actually tried it because he writes all those blog posts about it. So that would just be great to pick his brain on that stuff. Also, Adrian Cockcroft would be another great person to talk to. Just this idea of what he's done with microservices and thinking about the role, his role with Netflix and some of those other things and how all that kind of came together, I think would be a really interesting conversation. I know I've seen this in so many of his presentations where he's talked about the objections, what were the objections of Lambda and how have you solved those objections? And here's the things that we've done.And again, the methodology of that would be really interesting to know. There's a couple of other people too. Oh, Sam Newman who wrote Building Microservices, that was my Bible for quite some time. I had it on my iPad and had a whole bunch of bookmarks and things like that. And if anybody wants to know, one of my most popular posts that I've ever written was the ... I think it was ... What is it? 16, 17 architectural patterns for serverless or serverless microservice patterns on AWS. Can't even remember the name of my own posts. But that post was very, very popular. And that even was ... I know Matt Coulter who did the CDK. He's done the whole CDK ... What the heck was that? The CDKpatterns.com. That was one of the things where he said that that was instrumental for him in seeing those patterns and being able to use those patterns and so forth.If anybody wants to know, a lot of those patterns and those ideas and those ... The sort of the confidence that I had with presenting those patterns, a lot of that came from Sam Newman's work in his Building Microservices book. So again, credit where credit is due. And I think that that would be a really fascinating conversation. And then Simon Wardley, I would love to talk to. I'd actually love to ... I actually talked to ... I met Lin Clark in Vegas as well. She was instrumental with the WebAssembly stuff, and I'd love to talk to her. Merritt Baer. There's just so many people. I'm probably just naming too many people now. But there are a lot of people that I would love to have a chat with and just pick their brain.And also, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot on the show as well, is the term "serverless." Good or bad for some people. Some of the conversations we have go outside of serverless a little bit, right? There's sort of peripheral to it. I think that a lot of things are peripheral to serverless now. And there are a lot of conversations to be had. People who were building with serverless. Actually real-world examples.One of the things I love hearing was Yan Cui's "Real World Serverless" podcast where he actually talks to people who are building serverless things and building them in their organizations. That is super interesting to me. And I would actually love to have some of those conversations here as well. So if anyone's listening and you have a really interesting story to tell about serverless or something peripheral to serverless please reach out and send me a message and I'd be happy to talk to you.Rebecca: Well, good news is, it sounds like A, we have at least ... You've got at least another a hundred episodes planned out already.Jeremy: Most likely. Yeah.Rebecca: And B, what a testament to Sam Newman. That's pretty great when your work is referred to as the Bible by someone. As far as in terms of a tome, a treasure trove of perhaps learnings or parables or teachings. I ... And wow, what a list of other folks, especially AWS power ... Actually, not AWS powerhouses. Powerhouses who happened to work at AWS. And I think have paved the way for a ton of ways of thinking and even communicating. Right? So I think Jeff Barr, as far as setting the bar, raising the bar if you will. For how to teach others and not be so high-level, or high-level enough where you can follow along with him, right? Not so high-level where it feels like you can't achieve what he's showing other people how to do.Jeremy: Right. And I just want to comment on the Jeff Barr thing. Yeah.Rebecca: Of course.Jeremy: Because again, I actually ... That's my point. That's one of the reasons why I love what he does and he's so perfect for that position because he's relatable and he presents things in a way that isn't like, "Oh, well, yeah, of course, this is how you do this." I mean, it's not that way. It's always presented in a way to make it accessible. And even for services that I'm not interested in, that I know that I probably will never use, I generally will read Jeff's post because I feel it gives me a good overview, right?Rebecca: Right.Jeremy: It just gives me a good overview to understand whether or not that service is even worth looking at. And that's certainly something I don't get from reading the documentation.Rebecca: Right. He's inviting you to come with him and understanding this, which is so neat. So I think ... I bet we should ... I know that we can find all these twitter handles for these folks and put them in the show notes. And I'm especially ... I'm just going to say here that Werner Vogels's twitter handle is @Werner. So maybe for your hundredth, all the listeners, everyone listening to this, we can say, "Hey, @Werner, I heard that you're the number one guest that Jeremy Daly would like to interview." And I think if we get enough folks saying that to @Werner ... Did I say that @Werner, just @Werner?Jeremy: I think you did.Rebecca: Anyone if you can hear it.Jeremy: Now listen, he did retweet my serverless musical that I did. So ...Rebecca: That's right.Jeremy: I'm sort of on his radar maybe.Rebecca: Yeah. And honestly, he loves serverless, especially with the number of customers and the types of customers and ... that are doing incredible things with it. So I think we've got a chance, Jeremy. I really do. That's what I'm trying to say.Jeremy: That's good to know. You're welcome anytime. He's welcome anytime.Rebecca: Do we say that @Werner, you are welcome anytime. Right. So let's go back to the genesis, not necessarily the genesis of the concept, right? But the genesis of the technology that spurred all of these other technologies, which is AWS Lambda. And so what ... I don't think we'd be having these conversations, right, if AWS Lambda was not released in late 2014, and then when GA I believe in 2015.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: And so subsequently the serverless paradigm was thrust into the spotlight. And that seems like eons ago, but also three minutes ago.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: And so I'm wondering ... Let's talk about its evolution a bit and a bit of how if you've been following it for this long and building it for this long, you've covered topics from serverless CI/CD pipelines, observability. We already talked about how it's impacted voice technologies or how it's made it easy. You can build voice technology without having to care about what that technology is running on.Jeremy: Right.Rebecca: You've even talked about things like the future and climate change and how it relates to serverless. So some of those sort of related conversations that you were just talking about wanting to have or having had with previous guests. So as a host who thinks about these topics every day, I'm wondering if there's a topic that serverless hasn't touched yet or one that you hope it will soon. Those types of themes, those threads that you want to pull in the next 100 episodes.Jeremy: That's another tough question. Wow. You got good questions.Rebecca: That's what I said. Heavy hitters. I told you I'd be bringing it.Jeremy: All right. Well, I appreciate that. So that's actually a really good question. I think the evolution of serverless has seen its ups and downs. I think one of the nice things is you look at something like serverless that was so constrained when it first started. And it still has constraints, which are good. But it ... Those constraints get lifted. We just talked about Adrian's talks about how it's like, "Well, I can't do this, or I can't do that." And then like, "Okay, we'll add some feature that you can do that and you can do that." And I think that for the most part, and I won't call it anything specific, but I think for the most part that the evolution of serverless and the evolution of Lambda and what it can do has been thoughtful. And by that I mean that it was sort of like, how do we evolve this into a way that doesn't create too much complexity and still sort of holds true to the serverless ethos of sort of being fairly easy or just writing code.And then, but still evolve it to open up these other use cases and edge cases. And I think that for the most part, that it has held true to that, that it has been mostly, I guess, a smooth ride. There are several examples though, where it didn't. And I said I wasn't going to call anything out, but I'm going to call this out. I think RDS proxy wasn't great. I think it works really well, but I don't think that's the solution to the problem. And it's a band-aid. And it works really well, and congrats to the engineers who did it. I think there's a story about how two different teams were trying to build it at the same time actually. But either way, I look at that and I say, "That's a good solution to the problem, but it's not the solution to the problem."And so I think serverless has stumbled in a number of ways to do that. I also feel EFS integration is super helpful, but I'm not sure that's the ultimate goal to share ... The best way to share state. But regardless, there are a whole bunch of things that we still need to do with serverless. And a whole bunch of things that we still need to add and we need to build, and we need to figure out better ways to do maybe. But I think in terms of something that doesn't get talked about a lot, is the developer experience of serverless. And that is, again I'm not trying to pitch anything here. But that's literally what I'm trying to work on right now in my current role, is just that that developer experience of serverless, even though there was this thoughtful approach to adding things, to try to check those things off the list, to say that it can't do this, so we're going to make it be able to do that by adding X, Y, and Z.As amazing as that has been, that has added layers and layers of complexity. And I'll go back way, way back to 1997 in my dorm room. CGI-bins, if people are not familiar with those, essentially just running on a Linux server, it was a way that it would essentially run a Perl script or other types of scripts. And it was essentially like you're running PHP or you're running Node, or you're running Ruby or whatever it was. So it would run a programming language for you, run a script and then serve that information back. And of course, you had to actually know ins and outs, inputs and outputs. It was more complex than it is now.But anyways, the point is that back then though, once you had the script written. All you had to do is ... There's a thing called FTP, which I'm sure some people don't even know what that is anymore. File transfer protocol, where you would basically say, take this file from my local machine and put it on this server, which is a remote machine. And you would do that. And the second you did that, magically it was updated and you had this thing happening. And I remember there were a lot of jokes way back in the early, probably 2017, 2018, that serverless was like the new CGI-bin or something like that. But more as a criticism of it, right? Or it's just CGI-bins reborn, whatever. And I actually liked that comparison. I felt, you know what? I remember the days where I just wrote code and I just put it to some other server where somebody was dealing with it, and I didn't even have to think about that stuff.We're a long way from that now. But that's how serverless felt to me, one of the first times that I started interacting with it. And I felt there was something there, that was something special about it. And I also felt the constraints of serverless, especially the idea of not having state. People rely on things because they're there. But when you don't have something and you're forced to think differently and to make a change or find a way to work around it. Sometimes workarounds, turn into best practices. And that's one of the things that I saw with serverless. Where people were figuring out pretty quickly, how to build applications without state. And then I think the problem is that you had a lot of people who came along, who were maybe big customers of AWS. I don't know.I'm not going to say that you might be influenced by large customers. I know lots of places are. That said, "We need this." And maybe your ... The will gets bent, right. Because you just... you can only fight gravity for so long. And so those are the kinds of things where I feel some of the stuff has been patchwork and those patchwork things haven't ruined serverless. It's still amazing. It's still awesome what you can do within the course. We're still really just focusing on fast here, with everything else that's built. With all the APIs and so forth and everything else that's serverless in the full-service ecosystem. There's still a lot of amazing things there. But I do feel we've become so complex with building serverless applications, that you can't ... the Hello World is super easy, but if you're trying to build an actual application, it's a whole new mindset.You've got to learn a whole bunch of new things. And not only that, but you have to learn the cloud. You have to learn all the details of the cloud, right? You need to know all these different things. You need to know cloud formation or serverless framework or SAM or something like that, in order to get the stuff into the cloud. You need to understand the infrastructure that you're working with. You may not need to manage it, but you still have to understand it. You need to know what its limitations are. You need to know how it connects. You need to know what the failover states are like.There's so many things that you need to know. And to me, that's a burden. And that's adding new types of undifferentiated heavy-lifting that shouldn't be there. And that's the conversation that I would like to have continuing to move forward is, how do you go back to a developer experience where you're saying you're taking away all this stuff. And again, to call out Werner again, he constantly says serverless is about writing code, but ask anybody who builds serverless applications. You're doing a lot more than writing code right now. And I would love to see us bring the conversation back to how do we get back there?Rebecca: Yeah. I think it kind of goes back to ... You and I have talked about this notion of an ode to simplicity. And it's sort of what you want to write into your ode, right? If we're going to have an ode to simplicity, how do we make sure that we keep the simplicity inside of the ode?Jeremy: Right.Rebecca:So I've got ... I don't know if you've seen these.Jeremy: I don't know.Rebecca: But before I get to some wrap-up questions more from the brainwaves of Jeremy Daly, I don't want to forget to call out some long-time listener questions. And they wrote in a via Twitter and they wanted to perhaps pick your brain on a few things.Jeremy: Okay.Rebecca: So I don't know if you're ready for this.Jeremy: A-M-A. A-M-A.Rebecca: I don't know if you've seen these. Yeah, these are going to put you in the ...Jeremy: A-M-A-M. Wait, A-M-A-A? Asked me almost anything? No, go ahead. Ask me anything.Rebecca: A-M-A-A. A-M-J. No. Anyway, we got it. Ask Jeremy almost anything.Jeremy: There you go.Rebecca: So there's just three to tackle for today's episode that I'm going to lob at you. One is from Ken Collins. "What will it take to get you back to a relational database of Lambda?"Jeremy: Ooh, I'm going to tell you right now. And without a doubt, Aurora Serverless v2. I played around with that right after re:Invent 2000. What was it? 20. Yeah. Just came out, right? I'm trying to remember what year it is at this point.Rebecca: Yes. Indeed.Jeremy: When that just ... Right when that came out. And I had spent a lot of time with Aurora Serverless v1, I guess if you want to call it that. I spent a lot of time with it. I used it on a couple of different projects. I had a lot of really good success with it. I had the same pains as everybody else did when it came to scaling and just the slowness of the scaling and then ... And some of the step-downs and some of those things. There were certainly problems with it. But v2 just the early, early preview version of v2 was ... It was just a marvel of engineering. And the way that it worked was just ... It was absolutely fascinating.And I know it's getting ready or it's getting close, I think, to being GA. And when that becomes GA, I think I will have a new outlook on whether or not I can fit RDS into my applications. I will say though. Okay. I will say, I don't think that transactional applications should be using relational databases though. One of the things that was sort of a nice thing about moving to serverless, speak

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UbnQrRDTuZQ Jeremy BodenhamerCo-founder & CEO of ShipHawk Show Notes: 5 API of the ApocalypseAmazonWalmartAlibabaJDShopifyThe Power of HabitGrove CollaborativeParker Clay - Leather ProductsAll BirdsBoneless Knee Pads Sponsors: PriceSyncSpark Shipping Links: Jeremy BodenhamerShip HawkAdapt or Die: Your Survival Guide to Modern Warehouse AutomationJeremy Bodenhamer LinkedInJeremy Bodenhamer Twitter Transcript: Charles (00:00): In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk with Jeremy Bodenhamer, about about how independent retailers can compete with the giants. This is the business of eCommerce episode 154. Charles (00:20): Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I'm your host Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today with Jeremy Bodenhamer. Jeremy is the co-founder and CEO of Ship Hawk, and also the bestselling author of adapt or die, a leading expert at the intersection of shipping. And e-commerce I asked Jeremy on the show today, talk about how in 2021, an independent retailer can compete with some of the largest e-commerce companies out there like Walmart, Amazon, and how you can not just compete, but also win. Jeremy has a lot of insights on both the logistics side, but also how you can attract more customers by talking about your brand. And I think it's super interesting. So let's get into the show and I think you're going to enjoy this. Hey Jeremy, how are you doing today? Doing well. Charles (01:09): How are you doing Charles? Doing good. Awesome. To have you on the show. I love the topic and want to kind of get into us. I've been seeing, kind of been following the the Shopify guys for a while, and I love the whole concept of, you know, arming the rebels, right? Where, how can you know, how can the smaller retailers compete against some of the big guys? And it's something where I think the world is going to very different ways, right? Where you have these like marketplaces kind of Amazon, like the big ones everyone knows about, but then you have these new brands that are kind of just popping up and becoming almost household names. In some cases you see this with, you know, some of like the big companies, like some of the, some of these, there's just so many retailers now that all of a sudden you, they can just build a brand name. So you're are okay. So you've been around with ship for, you said about seven, eight years now, you guys started that for about eight years. Okay. And you recently came out with a book on also basically competing with the giants, right? Adapt to die. Jeremy (02:11): Yeah. Adapter die came out a few weeks ago and is a survival guide for the independent merchants and how to compete against the giants. Charles (02:21): I love the cover also with the, the dinosaur on there. Very cool. Yeah. It's sorta my voice. Speaker 2 (02:30): So Charles (02:30): If you're talking to a small retailer, if someone's starting, you know, 20, 21, right. And they're, I want to get into e-commerce, you know, I have some products, but they're looking at all the expectations of what you need to do nowadays. How would you start kind of guiding someone to say, okay, you have to compete. You want to come up with a product X also sold on Amazon and tons of other marketplaces. How would you start kind of guiding someone through that process of competing? Jeremy (02:57): Yeah, good question. I would start by challenging them to understand the state of the current marketplace. The fact that these marketplaces by and larger, not friends but competitors. In the book, I talk about the five APIs of the apocalypse. Those five API APIs are Amazon Walmart Alibaba, jd.com and Shopify. And I predict a, a future that I think is a very real scenario where those five companies own global commerce, every transaction, every dollar spent,

A couple times a week I get emails begging me for direct coaching. They DON’T say, "Hey Jeremy, you're a world leader in freedom business education, how much would it be if you were to coach me a couple hours a month while I'm starting my freedom business?" Nope, what I usually get from people is something else. "Can you tell me specifically how to start and run my freedom business? I know you're a nice guy and you should totally help me out cause... (enter entitled reason here)" These would be people that had never bought anything from me, just freeloaders looking to sucker me. When I was new, I fell for this a lot. I wanted to help anyone and everyone and I'd fall for every entitled reason that came my way. But, I found something out. Freebie seekers don't do the work. Freebie seekers don't take the advice. Freebie seekers want to have someone to blame when they don't do what it takes to succeed. Freebie seeker is just one part of a Loser Mindset, get rid of it now. I was fueling their fire of being a loser by not allowing them to take part in the Value Cycle. I talk about that in the Freedom Club, a lot. Know your value and demand it. If a freebie seeker gets mad when you demand your value, good. You taught them what it is to value yourself. Giving people your best stuff for free only hurts them and keeps them in a pattern of a Loser Mindset and, even worse, it wastes your time. Demand the best, even from your audience. You know you're ready to get started, do it now: http://ibmamain.wpengine.com/freedomclub/ Jeremy Frandsen World Leader in Freedom Business Education

Not long ago I asked what was in the way of you joining the Freedom Club and here is just one of the answers I received. This one is a general excuse about time. Here are a couple replies, then I'll comment after each one. "Too much to do! Every time I do one thing I, I need to do 5 other things to figure out how to do the first thing right..." ~Sarah --Look, saying you're too business isn't a time problem, it's a priority problem. What you're really saying is that you've not made making a freedom business a priority yet. When I got started I had a mortgage, 12 hour days at work including drive time, a wife and 2 young kids, and two dogs. I understand the excuse, but during that time I also watched a lot of movies and TV shows and even somehow had time to play some video games. I had no time, until I made escaping the rat race the highest priority I could. With that in mind, the Freedom Club is designed to get through with just 30 minutes a day. If that's too much for you in the start, just do 15 minutes a day. Change your priorities to change your life. "Hah, honestly it seems like it's just laziness! I keep coming up with excuses for why I'm "too busy" to do anything etc. etc., when in reality I'M NOT THAT BUSY!! Got any advice for not being lazy/making excuses?? Thanks! James" --I really like that the second person was at least honest about it! My answer to you is simply to start. 1- Sign up for the Freedom club, it only takes a couple minutes. 2- Go inside and open the first course, the Freedom Formula. 3- The first thing to do is listen to an audio. Put a timer on and do 5 minutes, that's it. 4- Then you can go back to being lazy. Put an alarm on your phone and set it for the same time tomorrow. When the alarm goes off, do 5 more minutes. It'll be easy to do it this way as the Freedom Club is step by step. You don't have to waste time trying to figure out what comes next, just go to the next item. Laziness is overcome by taking small, easy steps. Stop looking at the big picture, which just overwhelms most people. Just see what the step is in front of you and take JUST that step. In a few days you'll be so excited about the journey you have started you won't be able to stop even if you wanted to. You've got this, just take step #1 right now here: http://www.FreedomClubVIP.com Jeremy Frandsen World Leader in Freedom Business Education P.S. Here's a reply I got that I really love to see: "Hey Jeremy! I signed up, thanks for the kick in the pants. Stathis" --I got quite a few of these, too. Smart dude, welcome to the club! Go right into the Freedom Club Facebook Mastermind group, we're waiting for you! You can go right in too, just sign up here: http://www.FreedomClubVIP.com Jeremy Frandsen World Leader in Freedom Business Education

If you’re worried about finding the right home while you’re selling your current one, today’s message may help. There are three ways you can navigate this common scenario. “Hey Jeremy, I heard the St. George real estate market is fantastic!” It is. It has been. Washington County home values are up over $120,000 on average since 2013 and growth appears to be happening everywhere! And this is great…unless your home sells so quickly that you may find yourself homeless before you find the next one! One of the biggest challenges our St. George real estate clients are facing in a fast- market is the delicate balancing act of lining up a buyer to close on their home, while simultaneously trying to close on their next home purchase. What happens if you sell your home TOO fast? Say 1-31 days fast? First, to give you some perspective, let’s consider the example of a listing our team recently sold. Within three days of going on the market, we’d received eight offers, and our seller ultimately earned $20,000 more than their list price. This kind of scenario is exciting, but it is exactly the sort of situation that might elicit the concern we mentioned earlier. Thankfully, there are several ways you can protect yourself from ending up without a home after you sell. Here are three of the best (and most common) solutions: 1. Purchase a home before you sell. If you have the means to do this, this is the ideal solution. This of course requires either: a. A bunch of cash ($300k on average) in the bank, or; b. Financing and income to carry two house payments for a short period of time. 2. Get a bridge loan. Though less preferable than our first option, this financing solution allows you to literally “bridge the gap” as you sell one home to purchase the next. 3. Submit an offer “subject to” the sale of your current residence. Although the third-best of these options, this solution has become very common. Submitting a contingent offer essentially means that when you write offers as a buyer, you include a contingency stating that your purchase is subject to the success of your own home sale. However, sellers are sometimes skeptical of this kind of offer. “Our team has the systems and resources to find your next home, even if it isn’t on the MLS.” This type of issue is exactly why a good real estate professional is worth their weight in salt, especially in a “hot market.” Whichever option you choose, our team would be happy to guide you to the perfect home. We have the systems and resources to find your next property, even if it isn’t on the MLS. If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give us a call at 435-215-4533 or email us at sales@gostgeorge.com.

In today's episode we dig into the mind of Melinda Chen. Melinda is a MASTER of high-ticket selling... whether you're selling products, services, or anything else! We discuss how to get in front of your perfect target audience, how to make yourself stand out and get the attention of the "higher ups", and how to then close the deal! Plus she even critiques one of MY promotions I'm about to launch to get in front of high-level clients. Enjoy!   Resources Mentioned womenmakingbigsales.com Want To Work With Me? Visit http://www.JeremyReeves.com or email me at Jeremy@JeremyReeves.com Enjoy! Transcript Jeremy Reeves: Hey everyone, this is Jeremy Reeves with another episode of the sales funnel master podcast and today I am interviewing Melinda Chen and we are going to be talking about how to kind of reach and make sales to really, really high-ticket clients and I think it is going to be a fascinating interview and you know, basically, Melinda has -- she is a founder of Women Making Big Sales so to just give you a little bit of background about her. She has 15 years of background in corporate sales, and in the past 5 years, she has actually reached 8 figures in terms of her sales track record which is unbelievably impressive. That is a lot of stuff to sell in 5 years. Now she actually helps entrepreneurs. She specializes in helping entrepreneur’s sell and get in front of hard to reach or hard to access decision makers and to find those big you know, kind of whale clients that we all want to get in front of and not only get in front of, but actually have the you know, the authority and positioning to actually make a sale to because -- we will get in to all the reasons why we should be doing that, there are about a billion all of them which we will go through, but Melinda, how are you. Melinda Chen: Yes, hi Jeremy, I am very good. Jeremy Reeves: Sounds good. Sounds good. So I did a really quick you know, intro of you, just to kind of give everybody a quick little background, but tell us a little bit about your story you know, who you are, who you help, what you do, all that kind of good stuff. Melinda Chen: Yeah. Sure. Sure. I really started selling. I go into trade show since I was age 15. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family and my parents they have got their business. So by the time I started knowing how to speak English because I was an Asian descent, so by the time I was speaking English relatively well, my dad figured, oh perfect, she will be the perfect translator for business meetings and go into trade shows. So he take me to trade shows and I loved it. I love the energy. I love all the creativity that came with it. So that is when I decided to keep doing -- keep staying in business and keep doing sales. Then I graduated from the university. I got my first job as international sales manager and that was really my official sales job, selling educational products to agents around the world, Brazil, Korea, Europe, and I have really realized that wow, there is a logical (inaudible 2:29.4) about sales especially when you are dealing with people who has got a 20 years of experience in sales and I just graduated from university. So I was like, 22 like fresh meat to these sales agents, right. And then I started really reading lots of books about sales and I did a lot of cold calls. I did about you know, throughout my whole sales career, I have done about 5,000 cold calls. So really, just to refine those sales skills and eventually master my own art of selling and most importantly is that I really felt -- I love the challenge of getting the really hard to reach big clients and the decision makers. So right now, I help entrepreneurs reach those client and sell to big client. Jeremy Reeves: Awesome. Yeah, that is really cool. It is a very unique background. You get started really early. That is awesome. So you know, what start with because you know, everybody, anybody listening to this and I also want to say, a lot of this is going to apply most of it is going to be the most relevant to anybody in the service industry, but if you are selling any kind of product, this is also very, very, very relevant. For example, you know, I have been thinking a lot of my clients that you know, they are selling whatever, a couple $100 products, but then one of the things that I helped them with is implementing something like you know, somebody’s -- their highest sales is like just a $500. One of the fastest ways to grow your business is putting in -- I called it a freedom offer you know, because you only have to sell a couple of them to give yourself freedom. So I always look and say, okay, what can we -- can we take your highest priced even if it is a product or service whatever it is and 10 times it gives something you know, so if you are selling your highest price is $500 what can we sell for $5,000 you know and so if you are in that position or if you want to be in that position I also want to make sure that you are paying really close attention to this because what we are going to go over covers all that to. It is not just that you are in the service industry. Melinda Chen: Oh yes, definitely. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. I want to give that a really quick kind of disclaimer just so people are not saying well I am not a service provider, so therefore, you know, this is not going to be relevant to me and even if you are selling products you should be have some kind of service anyway so you know, it should be relevant to everybody. So the first thing I would like to start with is the advantages you know, what are the reasons in your mind for going after these you know, these big high-ticket clients versus going after you know, going after the lower quantity buy higher quality clients versus higher quantity and lower or you know, lower price but more clients. Melinda Chen: Yeah, I like to tell people that -- I understand if a lot of people when they started out and they want to go for that, those low hanging fruit, but you should always target big clients because especially if you have a product, and there is a lot of things about I mean it depends on whether you have online product or actual physical products, but the (inaudible 5:33.9) scale is very important especially when you have physical product, you said, oh, I am just going to sell things cheap and sell a lot of quantity, but you get to work with big clients. The cost to acquire small client is actually a lot higher than cost you acquire big clients because the cost to acquire big clients takes a lot of relation building. Yeah, it does take a lot of time to build that relationship, but they tend to be more stable. There is a lot of -- if you can shape your business the right way then you get a lot of repeat business, but if you are working with small business, a lot of times, you know, they tend to be a little bit more unstable, so depending on the clients or the business industry you are in, but you would reach a (inaudible 6:18.9) after small clients. So how do (inaudible 6:21.7) after small client. A lot of times, either you do advertising, the marketing. So you are basically giving a lot of money to Facebook, Twitter, and linkedin. They love that. I mean social medial platform, they love this you know. They love small entrepreneurs keep doing advertising with them. (inaudible 6:40.0) the cost to acquire small client proportionally actually a lot higher than getting big clients. So a lot of small clients I understand that or small entrepreneurs I understand that they might say, oh, I want to start off you know going after smaller clients, but you should always keep in mind that you have to go for big clients for you to actually make that significant freedom if we were talking about or profit because eventually you have to stop wasting your money on small clients, your money and time on small clients. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, and you know, that actually comes back -- I have been talking, actually the last couple episodes. I cannot even remember off the top of my head if they are live or not. I remember recording them. I forgot if they are live or not, but one of the things that I have been talking about recently is, how much more valuable a repeat customer is, like a higher value customer, because you know, the first time you sell a product or service, you have all that cost that goes into acquiring that you know, the client or the customer and then, but then the second time, you do not have that cost you know, so all of your marketing cost is only in that first kind of you know, the acquiring of them, but not the second time or the third time or the tenth time. So you know, your profit margin is going way, way up as you work with them longer and I think bigger clients are much more in the position to you know, you are going to get not only bigger first time projects, but repeat projects because they have more going on you know what I mean. Would you agree with that? Melinda Chen: Yes, definitely. I mean we can talk more about big clients and how the psychology of big clients, but definitely you know, it is the repeatable business is one huge advantage to working with big client and they tend to have very small circle of the people they work with. So most likely you can get referrals to other big clients. So just think about your business, do you want to keep having small client and they refer you more small client or would you like to have one big client and they are happy with you and they refer you to other big clients, and you know, I tell a lot of small entrepreneurs is that if you do not do it right now, 6 months from now on or a year from now on you still be chasing after small clients. You still be working 10 hours a day trying to go after those small clients if you do not go after big clients right now. Jeremy Reeves: Definitely, definitely. So you know, what are the things like I can hear people listening to this and say, yeah, but you know, Melinda, it is really you know, it is really scary going after these big clients, you know, I am -- maybe you know, maybe they do not have the experience or they have the experience, but they do not have the confidence you know, in themselves, in the results that they produced to go after these big clients you know, so what are -- you know, how do you overcome that like, that fear you know, to going after these big clients. I remember you know, when I, I mean this is years and years ago, but when I first started going out to bigger clients you know myself, I remember having that kind of trepidation you know that nervousness of oh my God, what if one of them actually says yes, you know what I mean. How do you help your clients overcome that fear of actually kind of getting started. Melinda Chen: Yeah, well, I called it a big client muscle. I see myself a little bit like the fitness coach. What we are teaching a lot of times is, it is not necessary revolutionary, but it is like trying to get fit you know, you have a step-by-step process of how to get fit. The same thing with (inaudible 10:22.3) training is that we have a step-by-step process. So you know what to expect. You know that okay, today, we are trying to get a leads and (inaudible 10:30.5) are the few activities we are doing to get a lead and we focus on the activities themselves and also we start by doing it. So we take baby step you know, today, yes, we understand. We are not trying to call the biggest client today and then ask for a business, but we are going to (inaudible 10:48.7) with some really influential people today and that just go by talking to them, propose your value proposition and share your ideas with them. So slowly -- I think it is almost like when people step into a dark room, they do not know what to expect, they do not know what is in it, spiders or you know, mouse, whatever. People naturally get scared, but you know, if you turn on the light and just show people that you know, there is a step-by-step process and also you know, just take baby step, the fear to selling to big clients will naturally reduce, but I also like to share with you is that I being a corporate sales for 15 years and the reality is that I sell every single day and when I send an email to a client, before I send it like I am excited they have like he is so going to love it. This is a great offer why would he like it, but the moment I press that send, I am like, no, he is never going to write me back. Jeremy Reeves: I have had an exact experience. Melinda Chen: Oh, it is like you are so excited like, oh I have got great idea, he is so going to love it, but then you pressed it and there is the doubt of fear, but the reality we all have it and the difference is like I still do it, I still have that, no I said, when I (inaudible 12:08.0) to see oh, I am like, why the heck is the CEO going to reply to me, but now, I recognize it. I said, well, it is only natural. Melinda, you always have this kind of thing. You always think about it, go walk around, call your coach or call your -- the people you work with and you know that you are going to feel better 2 days from now. Just you know, let it sit and so I think that fear is only natural because it is (inaudible 12:33.6) and I am not going to sugar coat it and say listen you know, you are not going to have fear selling to big clients, the most realistic way is that you will have that fear but the difference is that you are going to now you realize that everybody has that kind of fear one way or another and it is just simply recognize it and then just let it sit and say, okay, let us wait for 2 days and let us see what happens and at the same time you know what to do in terms of the next step. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, and you know what, in my career with the people that know all the things that I do, I am just kind of known as someone who sees the fear, faces the fear, and then does it anyway. My mom, every time I tell her like things that I am doing that are like you know, semi-crazy, she is always like, Jer, I do not understand how you can actually get pass the fear you know, and for me, it is kind of trained because I just always done it. I am someone who you know, I just do not care, you know what I mean. I have a very thick skin I guess, but you know, but I was not always like that. I remember starting off in my career and I mean it was nerve racking you know, it is horrible, but the more you do it and you realized, hey, things did not go so bad you know, even in the case like this, it is like you know, you are afraid of what they are going to say, how they are going to react you know, they are going to tell you that you are worthless or you know, whatever it is that you are afraid of, it never happens you know what I mean. It never does and it is just that sense of being able to feel it and do it anyway you know, and then just sit on and see what happens you know. Melinda Chen: See what happens and then you know, I think especially when approaching big clients you need to build a relationship and then the referrals, the introduction. So basically, you need to get in the circle and the fact that you know, you have already build that preparation, you have already had the preparation and you got introduced and then it is a softer contact then you know, we are not talking about just cold calling the CEO. So to really have you know, just slowly getting to this entourage it also ease up the fear of selling to this person because eventually you will start to feel that oh you know, I think I kind of know this person because I have done so much preparation trying to work with this person. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, definitely. You know what, I can tell you from personal experience that, in fact, actually this just happened today, somebody emailed me requesting to be I guess on the podcast and I can actually tell I was so impressed because she started off the conversation by, hey, I just read this value and then I read this and I love how you talked about this and this and this and I listened to a podcast, I loved how you brought up this topic and blah, blah and I could tell I mean it seemed like she (inaudible 15:35.7) 3 hours of research and I was so impressed because normally it is dear sir/madam, you know, blah, blah it is like really, you know, they get deleted instantly. So I think a lot of is just about doing research and even if I think that overcomes a lot of anxiety that you have like when even if they can tell you are a little bit nervous when you first get in touch it is like hey you know what, they actually did the research and it almost, it almost creates like sort of like a (inaudible 16:08.1) like you almost -- if somebody you know, get in touch with you and you can tell they researched you and spent a lot of their time really putting a thought and effort into whatever it is a call or an email or direct mail, whatever you are doing, you almost feel obligated to at least give them you know, a couple of minutes to hear their you know, their elevator speech. Do you agree with that? Do you think that is you know, kind of part of what happens is how people react to that. Melinda Chen: Oh yeah, definitely. I agree with that 100%. The one of the best strategy that I always used is show do not tell, and show by I mean we are constantly doing this communication, a lot of people asked me so how do you show without telling. I mean when you are emailing then you automatically telling something, but this example when you mentioned about the person trying to pitch getting to your podcast is a very good example. In fact, they are showing that they are the person who would do the hard work. They would do the research. So when approaching the client, I would tell people you know, I mean, there are a lot of different ways and process, but one of really great way to talk about it is talk about their competitor. If you know the name, the decision maker of you know, obviously, you are trying to work with this person, but you (inaudible 17:22.1) in the email conversation you not casually mention the decision maker of their direct competitor then it is showing, very quickly showing that you know that you (inaudible 17:33.6) you know that inside out of the industry. So (inaudible 17:36.4) that kind of basically doing the research, a lot of research before the call to show that you know, you have done research about this company and about this client and you understand their business priorities. That is worth a lot more than telling them oh here is my valid preposition. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, I love that, I love that. Actually, we are going to talk about a campaign that I am putting together right now, it is actually on my list this week to finalize. I have like 6 giant boxes of things I am going to be sending out to people. Yeah, we will talk about that in a couple of minutes, but yeah, I mean it really goes right along and actually, I actually so -- let me bring it back to an actual thing that I did, this was, maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and there was -- yeah, I think it was about 2010 or 2011 something like that, give or take. And there was a really kind of heavy hitter in my industry that was looking for a copywriter, so my thought was, alright, this guy, I know that a lot of other copywriters are going to see this so how do I standout you know. How do I make myself so he gets my message and it is like oh my God, I have to talk to this person. So what I did was I got to know his business. I actually made him a personal video to him, it was not like, oh I made you a personal video and then it is the same thing to everybody, it was actually like, I actually address them by name. I talked about his website and it was a video. I put it on a page and then I send him a big giant like 3 foot 2 mail and then you pull that out, a big piece sheet of paper and it was like a message on there with the URL and then he went to the you know, to URL and it was a video of me talking to him. And that client ended up being worth, I think it was about $120,000 over 2ish year period. And I think you know, I remember he told me he was like I was so impressed you know, you made a video for me specifically and he actually showed his entire office and he said, guys, this is the stuff we need to be doing you know what I mean. Yeah, I agree with the you know, the more you talk about like just not sending out you know, blank you know, kind of just general messages. I mean, it is really, just a marketing principle you know. We are heading you know, in terms of personalization you know, I have so many tests that I have been doing in my clients with segmentation, personalization, and the more you can talk specifically to that person, whether it is a high value or not, the higher your sales go and I think it is especially important with you know, with these really high techie clients when you are going after you know, the really like the decision makers you know in the companies. Melinda Chen: Yeah, yeah. I think especially the decision makers and that is why there is you know, there is, right now a lot of well going back to a lot of people talking about social selling and how you -- you know, it is going to replay selling itself. I think it presents an opportunity because there are more and more people. They are trying to automate everything but if you can really prove or you can contact these big client and using a lot of personal touch and then a lot of research, I mean we are in this age that there is so much information just right out there publicly for us to grab, you get to pick up important information and show it to this big client, it is so easy to stand out because everybody is trying to automate and everybody is just trying to just do the easy way and there are a couple of you know, so many things that we can do just simply stand out. Jeremy Reeves: Definitely, definitely. So let us talk about how you actually get in front of clients, so you know, you did the research, maybe you actually you know, maybe I do not know, you make like a spreadsheet or something like that of the clients that you want to reach out to whatever your kind of prep work is, and then you did. You have your list of let us just say it is 100 people you want to reach out to or 50 or 10 or whatever it is, let us just say 50, just so it is a manageable number. So you go, you do your research on all of them and then it is time to actually get in front of them. So what do you recommend. What are some of the things that you have done either yourself or your clients or whatever to actually get in front of the client. Do you -- you know, do you send cold emails. Do you just call them. Do you do direct mail, you know, what are some of the things that you guys do. Melinda Chen: Yeah, well the first thing I like to highlight is that there are 2 different role, and today we are targeting with the entrepreneurs. I think it is very different if somebody is a sales person like a B to B sales person or you know, or just general sales person, all they have to do is sell you know, I can say, you know pick 100 names, 200 names and she was your sale target, let us call it, let us you know, use softwares, Twitter, Facebook whatever to connect with your big clients, but I think you know, with your podcast, I think we are addressing those people who are entrepreneurs and who do not have you know 7 hour a day to just sell. I mean we have other things to do you know, it is not just selling although it (inaudible 22:45.8) the most important aspect of business, but you got to do the operational side, the (inaudible 22:50.4) existing clients. So what I would recommend the first most important thing, the absolutely most important thing for an entrepreneur or solo entrepreneur is that should be very target at in terms who you want to sell and the reality is that you cannot target a 100 big clients at one time because then there is no way that you are going to provide personal -- I mean, then it is a give and take, I mean you will be able to provide some kind of personal, but it is never really that personal kind of attention to those big clients. So that is one thing I really cautioned is that do not target 100 clients. If you have like a list of 100 then try to narrow it down and then usually if you have that list, what we build is, we called it 2 x 5 formula. So the two, the first two is the prep work, the prep (inaudible 23:45.2) work as absolutely especially with the big clients, use your 100% of your energy to bind the introduction into this client. So in fact, I would recommend -- personally, I would recommend the first 1 or 2 months focus on building relationship with their entourage and then also we create you know, connection map, it is like a mind map, except it is a connection map, whose connected to whom because regardless of what industry you are in I mean I have sold around the world as I mentioned before South America, North America, Asia, Europe whatever industry (inaudible 24:19.2) different industries. Once you are talking to the big, big clients they all know each other. It is a very, very small world. So go dig into the linkedin profiles. Look to you know, first of all, obviously, the first thing is you have to make sure what target, either you are targeting you know big time speakers or you know, big buyers with certain industries then really dig into their linkedin and Twitter. See who they are connected to. Most likely is that those people they always use similar service providers. For example, you know, if you are social manager (inaudible 24:55.4) try to find who are the big PR managers they are working with, because most likely they are working with the -- I mean you are already working with some of the big clients (inaudible 25:04.7) that everybody kind of just what you know, especially big guys, they like to keep their (inaudible 25:10.8) and they like to keep working with similar people or thing, same group of people. Big clients are extremely (inaudible 25:18.3) so what I would recommend is that build that connection or relationship map. So just take the -- take linkedin and use any mind map or other kind of mind map on the website, there is one I loved and then start drafting this relationship map and figure out what kind of a (inaudible 25:39.4) always go to. Who do they should work with. The service provider (inaudible 25:44.8) always work with then start building relationship with the service provider first. If you want to focus on startup companies, incubators, is there any big name incubators in (inaudible 25:56.5) you know somehow you could provide value to and those are usually what I would really recommend is to connect with these people who are the (inaudible 26:06.8) of influence with people you want to target because the moment that you build trust with them then I mean this is what happened now when I went to get another client is they close on the people I know really well and interest you. I give them a call and say you know, here is what I am thinking you know, here is a few ideas I have for the upcoming project, what do you think and then we start talking about industry. And what do you mean by talking about industry, basically, you know, we are going to share (inaudible 26:31.7) who might be interested in this, who would this project be useful to. So this is extremely you know, extremely important thing is fill that relationship map and then start to provide you know building values. So that is it. We are back to 2-5 formula so that you would be creating at least 2 soft contact with the decision maker and then we do the 5 official contacts and why do I -- instead of saying, oh, do we cold email this decision maker or do we send a cold call or things like that. I want you to tell people try to (inaudible 27:12.4) at least 5 different contacts. So it could be a simple I mean you know, we all know this you know, simple like on Facebook or you know providing some kind of value or maybe meet with the person in the networking or bands and things like that, but the moment you build that 5 then you know that you are -- you know, your whole sales relationship is not going to rely on one simple sales phone call. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, got you. I love that. Melinda Chen: You know, so keep you know, (inaudible 27:38.8) formulate that and focus on the first they know you, like you, and then trust you and then slowly build -- you know fill that before you even talk to the person and maybe I am pessimist but I say most likely the first time you contact this person he is not going to say yes to your offer no matter how great your valued proposition is or your elevator speech is. So plan 5 different contacts so that you slowly bring the client to the final sale speech and it is a very simple way but also just simply have that plan out will ease people’s mind about selling, about you know, oh, you know, he is definitely going to say no, but you are not asking him whether he would need to (inaudible 28:24.3) have this officials sales meeting yet, you are simply saying, hey, you know, here is the quick information about me or I thought this would be interesting and that will be it. So no pressure and once you have the process you are not going to continue focus on this one specific client, but you do this with other clients and then slowly build that relationship. Jeremy Reeves: Nice, yeah, I love that. So as you are building, as you are providing these people value, you are getting to know them, they are not going to -- there is no resistance, there is no sales resistance because there is no sales you know at this point. So they are starting to trust you. They are starting to kind of understand you, you know, you are familiar to them. When and I know this is kind of a generic thing because there is no like oh you know, you do it 4 days after the first or whatever, but if like in general, when is the good time to start then transitioning from okay you know, we kind of built the relationship to you know, transitioning into the you know sales mode you know so to speak. Melinda Chen: I think when -- this happens actually this sales mode or this transitional mode, we would be planning it right at the beginning. When people are trying to figure out you know, what kind of client they wanted to focus and what their value proposition is, I always tell people it is not just the value proposition, in fact, trigger events that is a lot more important than the value proposition. I am not saying that you are not providing value. I am hoping that you are providing a legitimate value to this client because if you are not, you know, that is never going to work from my experience. You got to be providing some real benefits to big clients, but also, the trigger events. What it means that right before at the beginning is that every industry is seasonal. So you have to plan what seasonal about the industry you are targeting. My favorite example would be the product base companies, Christmas shopping season, it is a hectic season and even big clients there is always something late about their planning you know, either there are 2 PR. I have worked with PR companies that PR agent they were able to get big clients because they just simply target the fashion company that did not get into the Christmas shopping list on magazines. Jeremy Reeves: Got you, okay. Melinda Chen: So if the trigger events, what are the trigger events that really impact the industry and if you can really focus on that then when you are building (inaudible 30:57.9) like and things like that once the trigger events hit and you have already planned it ahead of time you know what are the important things, a lot of times you know, incubators you know, startup companies there is time to apply for incubating program. There is speaker, the speaker seasons. Coaches, there is always sales season. So you have to know your trigger events. So once you build that relationship now you got your benefit and you got a trigger event, then you find the people who needs help during those hectic season who are late doing the things that you can offer then it becomes a very natural we are not even selling, you are just calling you know, and say, Hey Jeremy, I know the important day is coming up and I have not seen your information, your product on any social media what is going on. Jeremy Reeves: Nice. Yeah, and I actually use that approach in a similar way, but slightly different way and that I am really good at taking what people already have and finding the holes in their marketing and then filling those holes. You know, for example, one of my clients, I reached out to him and he had like a monthly you know membership program and I just reached out to him and I said, hey, his name is Mark and I said, Hey Mark, I have never seen you know, anything on your website like trying to take people from your monthly program to a yearly. I am like you know, what would you say, what if we you know, what if I do a promotion for you and just simply taking people on your monthly you know program and offering them a yearly plan and you know, I would not charge anything and blah, blah, just be percentage of the people that upgrade you know, and it works you know, and he was like okay you know, there is no risk in it for me, you are doing all the work, I never thought of that idea and it sounds like a good idea because it was actually good timing because he need it like a patch infusion to reinvest back into his product. He is very like techie kind of thing, say he buy a whole bunch of equipment, stuff like that. You know, and we did it and it was a huge, huge success you know, he made a ton of money. I made a ton of money and it was awesome. So it is a similar thing like it was -- it was not really a seasonal thing, but it was a like a weakness I guess you know you can call it in his business you know, but yeah, I love that you know, there really is, there is a lot of -- you know, most businesses have something like that even if you know, could be seasonal, a lot of businesses are seasonal or it could be if it is not seasonal, it could be something like that where it is more of like a weakness and you just kind of fill that gap you know. Melinda Chen: Yeah, I love -- I mean there is nothing more than calling a client and say that and listen, do you know what your competitors are doing right now. You know and then that is just a very simple and again you know, it (inaudible 33:53.1) it does not feel like you are selling the person, but you know, you are really trying to first of all provide the value and have this in cycle conversation and people at this point the big clients are going to figure out that you know, you are not just trying to always repeat it your value proposition and then just go through the same thing. You are really providing insightful information about the industry they are interested in and let us face it, big clients are very competitive. They love to know what happens with their competitors, so it is a great conversation breaker. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, definitely. So let me ask you this. Have you ever tried and this goes back to my promotion that I am about to test out probably next week I would say, because I am going to finalize it this week, but then I still to do all the research and all that stuff beforehand. Have you ever tried anything with direct mail to reach out big clients? Melinda Chen: Direct mail, I have never -- I mean I have done a lot of cold calls. I have done direct mails, I do not know how many (inaudible 34:57.6) out but probably in a smallest scales, I have, I would not say I have the most success with, but yeah, I have done it. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. So what I am doing basically is I am putting the other list a very you know, a very targeted list, I know the market really well, all that kind of stuff. I mean I could probably list off you know 30 people off on top of my head then (inaudible 35:26.1) send it out to. I got to do like 10 weeks, but basically -- yeah, yeah you know, just kind of you know, put it into our current you know, kind of marketing plan that we are doing every week. So what I am doing is I am doing a thing called lump email and I have this -- I came up with -- I bought these treasure chests right and they are like 5 inches long I do not roughly 3 inches high something like that, I like to have fun with Mark. Those are all the boxes that we got by the way, I bought 100 of them and you know so they came in like -- Melinda Chen: You must have a pretty good warehouse. Jeremy Reeves: Well, it is actually in my basement. Yeah, so there are all down there and I actually gave 1 each to each of my boys, I have 2 and a 4 year old, so they each got a treasure chest you know, and so basically, what I am doing is building a list of people in a very specific you know target audience that I have already gotten results before you know, a lot of people in that industry already know me that kind of thing and I am sending it to them. Now, my audience is going to be a little bit different than like really high like super high-end corporate you know, where there is like you know, the hierarchies like 85,000 people you know, mine are typically you know somewhere between -- yeah like between like 5 to 20 employees you know, in that range because a lot of -- you know, this industry, they do not need tons of employees to you know, to go up into like that. You know my target is mostly in 7 figure range you know, that is kind of -- even like once you hit like $10m it starts getting a little bit too high because then they are starting to get like full-time copywriters and stuff like that. So what I am doing is you send in the treasure chest you know, in the mail with a letter from me inside the chest and then there is a little lock on it with a key and everything and then we made this whole like story, awesome story and the value proposition are the you know, the offer is basically you know, instead of like, hey you know, call and let’s do a project. It is essentially like, Hey, you know, we are tying in the whole treasure chest thing to you know, you have revenue that is kind of buried beneath the sand and I am like you know, let us get on to quick 30-minute call, I ask you some questions and I will help find some of that revenue for you without mentioning like doing projects together anything like that. What do you think of that approach? Do you think I am missing anything? Do you think I should add anything else and you know, it is a little bit outside of what you normally do. Melinda Chen: Well I first of all, I do not really know your business but who are those treasure chest addressed to? Are they directly addressed to the founder or the marketing managers, the founders. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, the founders, yep. Melinda Chen: And the value you are providing you basically just asking them that you know, you would like to set up a 30-minute call with them right. Did you write any case studies or what competitive did and then what I meant is that big clients or I mean we are not talking about just corporate clients but the successful people, they are very money driven and I do not know in your letter or inside the treasure chest if you have some kind of thing to you know, you can talk about case study and just very quick you know. Did you know that after speaking with somebody and we uncovered because the whole point is about uncovering right and convert a specific amount of missing profit. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, so what I am doing, I actually guarantee them that I am going to show them how to increase by a certain amount and then also the weather itself is going to be like you know, like who I am and why I am getting in touch and all that is 2 pages and then I am going to have a another 4 pages just of case studies, just 4 like straight pages of all case studies, more for just like kind of overwhelming proof you know what I mean. Melinda Chen: I mean, obviously, they know you personally already. Are these people, they already know you? Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, they either they know me, a lot of them have probably heard of me. Most of the clients that I worked with in this industry, when they get in touch, they have heard about me from usually one of their competitors because like you said, you know, a lot of the people in the same industry know each other, they talk to each other, they masterminds together you know, that kind of thing. So they have either heard of me somewhere. A lot of them read the same blogs and podcast things like that and so they have heard me on air and so they have -- most of them will have if not all, will have at least some kind of recollection of me you know. Melinda Chen: And how do you plan out that following up. Do you plan on sending a quick email or just a -- Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, and that is one question I actually did not even think of that until you were talking about linkedin before. That idea, if you heard me typing before, I was actually writing down the idea. So that was, I kind of just (inaudible 40:54.2) as you were talking was send that out and then a couple of days after I send it follow over them on linkedin and say, hey you know, I send you package a couple of days hope you got it you know, if you have any question let me know you know, whatever. I have not quite thought through the linkedin message yet, but yeah, probably on linkedin, a lot of the people I am probably already connected with you know, that kind of thing. Melinda Chen: Okay, and then do you -- I am assuming that you want to make this. So this is -- you really want to have as dramatic impact as possible right for this. I mean it would not hurt that you know, for me, I mean it is already a very unique idea, but if -- because I do not know the kind of service you will be providing, but if you really want to build that kind of expectation, I would assume that you are going to send this out to the founder. If you are sending this addressing directly to the founder, it does not hurt to really start on if who else will be involved in this decision making. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, that is a good idea. So most of them, I would say probably 90 I mean easily 90% plus of the time, when I am talking to these clients on the phone it is the founder themselves because again you know, again, it is not my kind of sweet spot is like you know, the one the $10M range you know, but it is not like a big you know, like I just did a project for $300m company, but that was a very rare you know, project. So most of them are somewhere the range between like $500,000 or like $10M or so you know and then yeah, so it is you know, it probably will go to the founder, there might be some exceptions to that like for example, the client that I got a couple of years ago that I mentioned earlier that ended up like the secretary got it but then she passed it to him you know what I mean. Melinda Chen: Well, I mean, what I would do because and you still want to a lot of them I assumed that they kind of still know you and then you want to really bring forth that like I mean the trust would probably go into the case study and the letter you are writing and especially your online presence and your website, but at the same time, you want to really bring forth that like and know you kind of factor. So it would not be a bad idea to really figure out who might being bought in this decision making. I mean, it does not mean that they will make that final decision, but for example, if they have a couple marketing people, they really work with social medial, people they work with, send a quick email, right before you send this and say by the way, I am about to send really cool stuff to so and so. Just want to let you know it is going to be pretty cool look forward to hearing from you and you know, just get people talking to make sure that it is not going to be something that is going to be dismissed or what is even more -- I mean we can talk more after the call. If you really want to get even stronger impact is that you cannot even say that and listen, I am about to (inaudible 43:53.6) it is going to be a limited time offer because I only have not much time, but I am sending this not only to you (inaudible 43:59.4) also to the competitors. That really boost your authority because you are really doing this something big. He wants people to start talking loud. Jeremy is -- he is launching his marketing campaign rather than just get it, okay, I mean it is a great idea, do not get me wrong. It is really much better idea than sending email, but if you really I mean, since you have already spent so much time you know, creating this marketing thing does not hurt to start. Also, send quick message or linkedin to anybody who might be working with them or to them just say, hey, listen, I will be sending you know largely my marketing campaign. I look forward to see how you -- you make it casual and say, hey, (inaudible 44:41.8) to everybody listen, everybody is going to get and feel free to laugh at me or you know make it you know, make it so that we still (inaudible 44:51.1) you build that like and trust. I mean you have already come out with somebody who is a bit daredevil. You said you will always love to try something new. Make sure they know you and then all of the sudden that is really personal because everybody is like I do not know what Jeremy is coming up with, but he is coming with something and we will see what it is and then most likely we (inaudible 45:11.0) Facebook or linkedin response you know, have fun with it and then you can talk business. Jeremy Reeves: Nice, yeah I like that. I like the, I think that is very good advise because it is you know, it is kind of the same thing you know, a lot of times I used things like text messaging you know for like automated text messaging. So for example you know, one of the things we do with webinars are -- let us just say that the webinar starting at I do not know at 2:00. You can send people a text message or like 130 and then it is like, Hey, quick reminder, you know, the webinar starts in half hour and that boost response rate you know because you are kind of just getting their attention and it is a similar kind of concept with that. It is different but it is you know, it is kind of similar project. I like that. I actually -- Melinda Chen: Yeah, and then I mean mostly especially if you really have to (inaudible 46:02.4) with it, you probably get a couple (inaudible 46:05.3) of you trying to fit anyway. Did you see (inaudible 46:07.1). Hopefully, you get a couple of short messages back and say (inaudible 46:13.3) and people always love to have a little bit of humor, I hope, some (inaudible 46:18.1) and then yeah. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, and especially my clients, I have a lot of fun with my Mark. I mean I you know I go out drinking with a lot of them and so I really have a lot of fun with my clients and I have actually turned down clients because I did not like their personalities. You know, -- Melinda Chen: No, I get it, I get it (inaudible 46:37.4) if you do not have the right vibe it is just never going to be a long lasting relationship. Jeremy Reeves: Definitely, definitely. I like that and I can definitely because you know, a lot of them (inaudible 46:45.3) I am going to know their business is and that kind of thing so I can make it send them a really personal message even before they get it and then they are like what the hell is he going to send me now you know. You know, I can even put it like if they have kids you know, something you know make sure you give it to your kids after you are done looking at (inaudible 46:59.9) or something like that. Melinda Chen: Yeah, exactly I mean then they really build that expectation and they might be asking their receptionist for that package of, making sure that the reception does not just burn it by (inaudible 47:12.7) or something. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah. I should put that on the package, like do not open in front of your children, something like that. That message may be interpreted in different ways and -- but yeah so thanks for that. I hope everybody enjoyed -- I did that not only because I am curious myself to see how would you take your concepts because the way you approach is totally different and I always like we are talking about before the call, I always like to take different concepts and different ways of doing business and they kind of meld in together you know and I think that is really hopefully everybody got a lot out of that me and you just kind of going back and forth and brainstorming on that. I know I got a lot out of it. Melinda Chen: I have a lot of fun so, I mean I am going to try this you know, treasure chest thing not on my kids but on my clients. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah. It is a really, really good kind of fun way to get in touch, get in front of people you know, it definitely gets their attention you know what I mean. Alright, so with that said, you know, is there anything else that I did not ask about you know, I feel like I let you down if I did not ask you a question you know, something that you want to make sure that people really understand you know before we hop off. Melinda Chen: I think one thing is that there is -- we are back to have this process is really for entrepreneurs and I think it is important to recognize that focus -- a lot of times theory and what we could do is one thing, but really to have your daily habit and then creating the sales routine is a lot more important than how you want to approach it. I mean it is one thing to have one interesting marketing idea, but as you know, you are going to follow up and you are going to continue following up. So I think that is a lot more important and challenging for entrepreneurs when we are managing so many things. Yeah, that is basically it and if people want to reach me, they can visit my website womenmakingbigsales.com. I do not just work with women, but I am a woman. Yeah, and they can also visit my Facebook page, Women Making Big Sales. Jeremy Reeves: Sounds good. Yeah, and I will make sure all those links are in the show notes. So yeah, if anybody is interested in reaching out to Melinda you know, to get in touch, work with her you know, kind of you know, start a relationship, then you know, just kind of click if you are listening in your phone or whatever, just look through the show notes and they will be in there. Yeah, that is it. Melinda, I really appreciate you coming on. It was a fantastic call. I know I learned a lot. I actually took a whole bunch of notes. If people heard me typing that is what I was doing. Yeah, I really appreciate it. I think it is a very -- it is a very important topic because it is something that anybody and you know, most people listening to this should be doing and if you are not, I mean, you are -- you know, I can tell you from personal experience you are missing out on a lot of money and also not even just you know, I know we have talked a lot about like the money aspect of this, but it is also stress to I mean -- yeah, I mean I do not know if you have this experience, but I know like in my business the more money somebody pays me, the less of the hassle they are you know what I mean, because it is you know, a lot of people and you know, it make sense because like if you are really struggling for money and you give somebody whatever it is, a couple thousand dollars, whatever it is and that is a lot of money to you then you are going to be really nervous and anxious about it and that is you know, I mean it is totally normal, but if you are you know, if you are a bigger client if you, you know, if you are doing you know, $50M in sales and then you ask that person for whatever it is, a $10,000 sale or $20,000 even that you know, the difference between what you are asking and their you know how much cash flow they have available so much bigger that they do not -- they trust you more you know and it is just you know, I have known in my business I mean the project show so much more (inaudible 51:32.3) you know what I mean. Melinda Chen: Yeah, they did not know what they want and there is always very clear vision of how things need to be done instead of oh, I do not know, I am thinking of changing this, oh I might change this you know, I am going to -- and then suddenly decided they are not going to work continue with this project and then you have that stress out, oh no now I have to look for another client. So you constantly chasing that to small clients and again, paying advertising money to Facebook, Twitter, and linkedin and again, they obviously still very happy about this so. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, you are making (inaudible 52:01.8) Alright well hey, I really appreciate coming on. Everybody make sure that you go to womenmakingbigsales.com again that link will be in the show notes and yeah, thanks again, we will hopefully see you soon. Melinda Chen: Thank you Jeremy. Let me know how it goes, the treasure chest, bye. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, I will, bye.

In this podcast episode I’m going to be going through a real flip that I’ve done step by step. And, as always I’ll also be answering a few questions sent in by you the listeners like “Hey Jeremy, what types of cars should I buy for car flipping?” and “What… The post Inside a Real Car Flip appeared first on 3 Hour Car Flip.