Podcasts about hiku

Peta Hiku spoken to press on the Robins' season so far, St  Helens game and settling back in the UK.

PRE-MATCH PRESS: Peta Hiku talks form, Warrington and more!

Listen to Joe Burgess as he talks Hiku Connection, Wigan reunion and new surroundings ahead of Friday's game against Wigan!

Willie Peters discusses the Red Devils, Peta Hiku and more!

Martin Vymětal je spoluzakladatel agentury Boomerang a vášnivý hiker, který zvládl PCT, je vizionářem v oblasti marketingu a komunikace s přes 22 lety zkušeností, jenž se věnuje také podcastingu ve svém pořadu Středověk. Ve věku 46 let, s manželkou Hankou a synem Bártem, se Martin zaměřuje na vytváření značkového obsahu, udržitelnou módu a podporu krásného života, který v sobě harmonicky snoubí tvorbu, vztahy a požitky. Jeho příběh je cestou od obav a úzkostí, přes osobní a profesní úspěchy, až k hledání rovnováhy v přírodě a mezi blízkými, s ambicí inspirovat a vzdělávat další generace v oblasti podnikání a osobního rozvoje. S Martinem jsme probrali, jak hiking ovlivňuje životní styl, včetně jeho výhod, nevýhod a vlivu na ego. Přešli jsme k řešení problémů v krizích, rozdílům mezi pohlavími při hikingu, významu hygieny a kalorického výdeje. Diskutovali jsme také o amerických restauracích, mindfulness, udržování rovnováhy ve vztazích, proměnlivosti naší identity, rozdíly mezi reklamou a skutečným obsahem a mnoho dalšího. Odkazy Martina:

Should the Dodgers be regretting not re-signing Corey Seager after he dominated the World Series and won the MVP award for Texas? Fred has thoughts on Mookie Betts being at the Lakers-Clippers game with sunglasses on. Vic the Brick has a haiku and a story of a personal encounter with Bob Knight.

Hiku, cansado de las reuniones familiares, prefiere alejarse y estar solo, sin embargo los recuerdos con su familia le hacen dudar de su decisión.¿Se dará cuenta Hiku de que es mucho más divertido estar con su familia? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode 25 of Obscure Image Podcast, I sit down with the Overwatch Content creator known as "Hiku" or "The TikTok Genji". In this episode Hiku speaks about how he came up with his name, growing up in Vietnam, moving to Czech Republic, learning English, how he started gaming, potentially wanted to go pro in overwatch, the grind as a content creator, TikTok helping his growth, working a job while being a part time content creator, and advice to fellow content creators. We also talk about his feelings on the current state of overwatch, overwatch potentially dying, hackers, meeting fellow content creator "The Real Kenzo", Hiku's Thoughts on joining a Gaming Organization, his thoughts on ghosts, sleep paralysis and so much more. I really enjoyed speaking to Hiku, this is one of my shorter episodes, but we still managed to speak about a lot. If you like interview-based podcast with guest that range from Content creators, underground artists, Inventors, Game developers, and everything in between please follow me on my socials and wherever you listen to podcast to be notified for when I drop the next interview. Welcome to the most Obscure Podcast in the world. Hiku Socials: HikuAzn - YouTube(4) Hiku (@HikuAzn) / Twitterhiku - TwitchHiku (@hikuazn) • Instagram photos and videosHiku (@hikuazn) | TikTok Obscure Image: Obscureimages | Twitter, Instagram, TikTok | LinktreeMcMakeLove | Twitter, Instagram | Linktree Wanna Support the podcast? Click the link below

Please be aware the stories, theories, re-enactments and language in this podcast are of an adult nature and can be considered disturbing, frightening and in some cases even offensive.  Listener Discretion is therefore advised.  Welcome heathens welcome to the world of the weird and unexplained.  I'm your host, Nicole Delacroix and together, we will be investigating stories about the things that go bump in the night, frighteningly imagined creatures, supernatural beings and even some unsolved mysteries but I promise all sorts of weirdness.  So, sit back, grab your favorite drink, and prepare to be transported to today's dark Enigma....  And on today's Dark enigma well, I got an interesting request, one story from the Islands of Hawaii – now I'll assume it's because I have a terrible time pronouncing Native Hawaiian names and it'll be hilarious, but you know I aim to please, so here's your Hawaii story – one caveat, know I'm going to butcher the names, I'm trying so don't yell at me!  So, with that said, we will still be playing our drinking game and as you know, the drinking game is only for those of us that are at home and have nowhere else to go tonight.  The choice of libation, as always my darlings, is yours, so choose your poison accordingly… Alright, now for the game part how about every time I say Kewalu   that will be a single shot and every time I say world, that will be a double shot.  Now that the business end is out of the way we can jump headfirst into today's dark enigma… so don your grass skirt, best and loudest Hawaiian shirt, coconut bras and brightest leis as we jump into today's offering of The Bride From The Under World – A Legend of the Kalakaua Family Ku, one of the most widely known gods of the Pacific Ocean, was thought by the Hawaiians to have dwelt as a mortal for some time on the western side of the island Hawaii. Here he chose a chiefess by the name of Hina as his wife, and to them were born two children. When he withdrew from his residence among men he left a son on the uplands of the district of North Kona, and a daughter on the seashore of the same district. The son, Hiku-i-kana-hele (Hiku of the forest), lived with his mother. The daughter, Kewalu, dwelt under the care of guardian chiefs and priests by a temple, the ruined walls of which are standing even to the present day. 

We erase last weeks anomaly and look ahead to the Warriors Drinky is out, Hiku is out, Rob is out, but Hendo is in! So with the boss away we dive deep to the Mariana Trench with no topic left off the table  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peta Hiku Interview

Rajan Bala (@im.provising) enjoys being a tech builder - he was a co-founder at retail tech startup Hiku.Rajan joins Ara on this week's episode of #TheTamilCreator to how Carleton University (@carleton_u) is underrated when it comes to engineering talent, how the idea for Hiku was formed along with how they got the idea off the ground, missing out a big exit with Walmart, starting a charity to help transfer knowledge from the Tamil diaspora back to Sri Lanka, financial independence and more.Follow Rajan:- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajanbala/) Timestamps00:19 - Ara introduces this week's guest, Rajan Bala01:25 - Rajan speaks on how he got into building03:49 - Being 1 of 5 kids and all of them having stereotypical Sri Lankan careers04:33 - Is Carleton University underrated when it comes to engineering programs?07:48 - Working for BlackBerry before coming up with Hiku; the idea, the name, using kickstarter12:17 - What Rajan envisioned for Hiku's revenue model; was it a one-time free, ongoing subscription, etc.?15:30 - Why Hiku didn't charge end users during the data collection process17:34 - What was the plan to monetize data?19:40 - How Hiku built relationships with big retails and/or big consumer brands24:01 - Rajan's mindset as Hiku began taking off31:31 - Why Hiku didn't go down the path of ‘leasing hardware to consumers'34:33 - Integrating with Walmart and receiving $2.5M in funding, almost being purchase by Google, and more44:03 - Rajan has no regrets about not getting a ‘lavish exit' - what he's learned45:55 - What the future holds for Rajan; Amazon being an incredible place to learn52:42 - Rajan's interests outside of work; travelling, hiking/walking and simultaneously listening to podcasts53:55 - Co-founding a charity58:36 - What he's insecure about; becoming complacent1:00:12 - The power of consistency; how it has improved Rajan's life1:00:56 - The personal legacy he wants to be remembered for by friends and family1:01:50 - Rajan's view of financial independence for others, and his own view of money1:04:20 - Who he admires from the global Tamil and non-Tamil community1:06:35 - Creator Confessions1:11:33 - The Wrap UpIntro MusicProduced And Mixed By:- The Tamil Creator- YanchanWritten By:- Aravinthan Ehamparam- Yanchan Rajmohan         

The one-liner is the pièce de résistance of any worthy action flick. Need some evidence? Try imagining Air Force One, 300, or Avengers: Endgame without the lines "get off my plane", "this is Sparta", "I am Ironman". As is always the case, the movies of the 1980s set the bar for the intense action Hiku. Today on Buzzn The Tower, we explore our twenty five favorite 80s action movie one-liners. I'm Mo Shapiro and joining me as always the S.O.B. who is dug in like an Alabama tick, Max Sanders. And with that, you got time to duck?

Welcome Back to Blue Moon Vibes! The podcast that makes you laugh a lil' bit, cry a lil' bit, and think a lil' bit! My goal is to be the one that gives you more than you asked! I hope you can find value in these topics, and they become something that you talk amongst your friends and family about! Don't shy away from challenging issues because that is where growth happens! The change you want to see is the change you must create! We are worthy, we are tenacious, we are strong, and we are purposeful! The only way to erase the divide is to unite as a nation and treat each other as people, with respect and courtesy! Fat, Broke, and Unambitious It's Series 12 Episode 4 As we continue our discussion surrounding anime, we land on Hiku. If you haven't heard of Hiku... WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!! Lol, you are missing out on some FANTASTIC motivation. As you will hear in today's show, I am a fan of Hinata! This little guy gives me hope, he doesn't let anything, and I mean ANYTHING, stop him from reaching his goals. He is willing to learn, coachable, hungry, and has a drive that can not be matched. He is who I WANT to be; he doesn't let setbacks stop him from the mission at hand. I believe it is a show for ALL ages because many times as we get older, we can get set in our ways, forget how we got there, forget that someone had to help us, and forget that we don't know everything! These are the principles that Hiku reminds us of! NO ONE is too big to LEARN from someone else, and if you feel as though you are, YOU are a part of the problem! Humble yourself, young grasshopper. Do you remember who you were BEFORE you thought no one could tell you anything?  Moving on now to the ENRAGE portion of the show! Kevin Samuels! in the brief clip, you will hear Mr. Kevin Samuels publicly embarrass and belittle several men on his "Show." Now, I hear ya, honesty is the BEST policy, and you are 100% correct. There is no need to sugarcoat, water down, or pacify the inadequacies of a person's character abilities, mannerisms, attitudes, drives, goals, or lack thereof to satiate their egos! BUT being rude, for a laugh, is downright despicable! You can tell someone they are fat without the sarcastic, nonsensical undertones of mockery. Furthermore, who are YOU to say what a woman won't want in HIM? Because he makes $40,000 at 40 years old, it's a problem; well, excuse me, sir, I didn't know YOU were dating him! The reality is that sometimes you NEED someone to tell you what the problem is, but the truth of the matter is Mr. Samuels is preying on the insecurities of those that call his show. Honesty is ALWAYS best, RUDENESS, MOCKERY, and EMBARRASSMENT, not the way!  Mr. Kevin Samuels has made his millions, and kudos to him on that; shoot, I'm trying to get there, but the reality, in my opinion, is that he gets off on the humiliation and the public ridicule because he is compensating. It seems that men of his caliber need to feel important, wanted, needed, and he has taken those desires morphed them into 1.7 or so million youtube followers and a net worth of approx 2 million! Well, give the people what they want, right?  Social Handles Insta: All. that. Jazz Twitter: ThinkImTweetin Facebook: All Things Jazzie  Youtube: All That Jazz Website: www.allthingsjazzie.com Donations: For All Things Jazzie-https://fundly.com/all-things-jazzie Empower The Youth, With Choices-https://gofund.me/66d3a72c  Music By: Ketsa-Soul Work The New World https://freemusicarchive.org/genre/Soul-RB Keep Shining Loves -

A demi-god Bachelor agrees to marry a partner chosen for him by his relationship expert (which happens to be a ‘sentient' magic arrow). Looking forward to the perfect match, he meets his mate, abandons her, and then swings down to the underworld to get her back. Let's head to the original Love Island, with this Hawaiian tale.

Don't dream, it's over.The Warriors still have a mathematical chance, but their playoff chances are out of their own hands after an agonising 24-22 loss to the Broncos tonight.The Auckland club will need to rely on some improbable results from the teams around them, even if they win both of their remaining games.Although the Warriors have showed great spirit with their late-season revival, this was a massive opportunity lost.They led 14-12 with 25 minutes to play, after burning back from 12-4 down, but were guilty of switching off twice as Albert Kelly and Anthony Milford scored opportunist tries for the Broncos.Still they could have forced extra time, after a 77th-minute Euan Aitken try, but Reece Walsh missed the conversion, then was just wide with an audacious two-point field goal attempt with 30 seconds to play.Goal kicking made the difference on the scoreboard, with Walsh missing four from five attempts, though they were all from out wide.But that's tough on the teenager. As a team the Warriors slipped from the standards set in previous weeks, particularly in the first half.They didn't quite click for long periods, allowing the Broncos to build pressure, and lacked crispness in attack and hunger in defence.Coach Nathan Brown, as he likes to do, shuffled the deck before kick-off, leaving Wayde Egan on the bench and omitting Kodi Nikorima from the 17, which was a brave call.The Warriors dodged a bullet early, with the Broncos nearly forcing the ball under the posts, after a risky play by Dallin Watene-Zelezniak behind his own try line, before Aitken was denied minutes later for a double movement.The Broncos opened the scoring through Xavier Coates, after Walsh completely misjudged an Milford bomb. Some hot footwork from Milford set up Coates soon afterwards, after an unfortunate Watene-Zelezniak error.Walsh had struggled to get involved in the first quarter, but finally made his mark with a sizzling break, beating four defenders from deep inside his own territory. That sparked the Warriors, with Montoya finishing a sweeping backline move.But the Broncos were dominant, and should have extended their lead through Milford, who was everywhere. The Brisbane playmaker was over the line – after a sharp passing move – before a miraculous effort by Peta Hiku to hold him up.Hiku went close at the other end, after some pinball, but the Warriors spent most of the first half on the back foot, forced to make almost 80 more tackles than their opponents, not helped by eight errors.They showed great spirit to keep their line intact, defending a series of sets as the home side benefitted from a couple of charitable calls from the officials in the latter stages.Some instinctive magic from Hiku, who was having a stormer, brought the Warriors closer early in the second half, as the centre nudged the ball between two defenders with his foot, following a Watene-Zelezniak grubber, then showed agility to touch down.There was more to come, as Josh Curran forced his way over following a bumping Bunty Afoa charge.Josh Curran of the Warriors celebrates scoring a try against the Broncos. Photo / GettyThe Warriors had all the momentum but gave some back with a disappointing Broncos try. As a Milford kick bobbled around, Kelly wanted it the most, while his opponents were guilty of ball watching.But Hiku was irrepressible, with a subtle flick putting Watene-Zelezniak across, after pressure from Walsh had forced a line dropout.That levelled the scores, setting up a frantic final 17 minutes. But Milford broke Warriors hearts with an opportunistic try, after following up his own bomb and getting lucky as it was propelled back.Aitken gave some late, late hope – forcing a Walsh grubber – but it wasn't to be.Broncos 24 (Xavier Coates 2, Albert Kelly, Anthony Milford tries; Herbie Farnworth 4 con)Warriors 22 (Marcelo Montoya, Peta Hiku, Josh Curran, Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, Euan Aitken tries; Reece Walsh con)Halftime: 12-4Text by...

All of your news from the last 24 hours in Rugby League! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scope takes a trip up to the NSW's Central Coast to meet the two NRL Warriors boys. Support here: https://menofleague.com/mose-masoe/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scope takes a trip up to the NSW's Central Coast to meet the two NRL Warriors boys. Support here: https://menofleague.com/mose-masoe/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scope takes a trip up to the NSW's Central Coast to meet the two NRL Warriors boys. Support here: https://menofleague.com/mose-masoe/

The Warriors have named three of their new recruits in their starting 13, with another on the interchange for Saturday's NRL opener against Gold Coast.Euan Aitken starts at centre, with prop Addin Fonua-Blake and Bayley Sironen in the second row also starting.Ben Murdoch-Masila has been named on the interchange.Wayde Egan and Eliesa Katoa have both been cleared from injuries to start at hooker and second row respectively.The full team is Tuivasa-Sheck, Fusitua, Aitken, Hiku, Maumalo, Nikorima, Harris-Tavita, Fonua-Blake, Egan, Taunoa-Brown, Katoa, Sironen and Harris.The seven man interchange is Tevaga, Murdoch-Masila, Ah Mau, Afoa, Pompey, O'Sullivan, Ale, Curran.Listen above as coach Nathan Brown talks with Elliott Smith

“It’s super important right now, when we talked about the whole sustainability thing; people care. And that leads back to the whole branding thing, whether it’s clothes, food, whatever, consumers are becoming smarter and when we talked about, ‘does it matter what kind of oils are in a pen’ yeah it all leads back to that, whether it’s your clothes or anything that you’re putting into your body people care more nowadays than they ever have.” – Rae BrownRae Brown is a Brand leadership professional with an entrepreneurial drive. She previously worked as Creative Director for Burb and HIKU where she built the Doja brand, digital environments, and retail experience. Rae is a committed leader with experience inside fragmented start-ups and established public corporations.Rae fell into the design industry while attending Vancouver Film School. Her interests led her to New Zealand, likely the dentist, Fiji, and after getting hitched, on to the Middle East where she found much of the inspiration that flavours her design style. She returned to Canada, and after having a child, launched her new business making baby toys, which came before the well-known online stores of today. It was a great success, selling her products locally and globally, but it got old fairly quickly, autonomy won out and she sold the business to return to design. Today she is leading the design of OCIO and driving an exquisite brand offering and experience. She shares stories, insights, and advice for those in the cannabis space and takes us down the road of what she feels is to come in the land of psychedelics.

On this week's Tama's Island, Tama’s youngest brother, Hiku Leo, joins Tama for an in-depth interview that spans a multitude of subjects, from going through both the Tokyo and LA Dojos, excursion to England, trying out for NJPW in New Zealand, debuting in the Tokyo Dome, his “welcome to New Japan” moment, and so much more. This is an episode you do not want to miss! Buy Tama Tonga Masks (last call!) at cutt.ly/tamamask Keep your junk trimmed and clean and get 20% off and free shipping at Manscaped.com ( http://Manscaped.com ) , using code TAMA Visit To Be The Man Comics at tobethemancomic.com ( http://tobethemancomic.com ) Visit ExpressVPN and get three free months at ExpressVPN.com/Tama ( http://ExpressVPN.com/Tama ) Join us on Patreon at Patreon.com/Tamasisland Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Before the NRL returned to action, rule changes were introduce to help speed up the game. They've done just that, but Warriors hooker Wayde Egan believes the changes will do more to the game in the long run.The introduction of repeat sets in lieu of penalties at ruck infringements has seen the ball stay in play for longer over the past couple of weeks, with very little down time during games.For now, the six-again rule has put the debate around lowering the number of interchanges teams are allowed on the backburner. But should interchanges be lowered in the future, Egan says it could change the game as we know it."Talking to a few of our middles, it's tough as and they're mostly all fit, pretty mobile guys. I can just imagine what it would be like for the 120kg fellas that are all-power athletes," Egan says."It's tough to say at the moment, we've only had a couple of games with the new rules. But I think it's going to get rid of the really big fellas in the long run, especially if they cut down the interchange."It could have a real big effect on how teams are lining up, how big they want their pack and the more mobile players will come into their own."Signs of the shift have already been seen in the NRL. Last weekend, the Melbourne Storm started Brandon Smith at prop. The 94kg hooker held his own in a role historically played by big bodies well over 100kg, running for more than 110m and making 20 tackles in 42 minutes of work.The Penrith Panthers have taken a similar approach since the new rules were introduced, shipping James Fisher-Harris to prop. A standard fixture in the second row or at lock for the Panthers, Fisher-Harris has been running riot up the middle over the past fortnight."Players like Brandon Smith, I think they'll start to shine in this sort of game when it's fast, they're fit, have good offloads and stuff like that, I think those guys will really relish it," Egan says.In the past fortnight, the Warriors forwards have put in big shifts on both sides of the ball. In their loss to the Penrith Panthers, there were only two forward who did not take double-digit carries - Egan and lock Isaiah Papali'i.Heading into Friday night's clash against the North Queensland Cowboys at Central Coast Stadium, the battle up front again looms large. Papali'i, however, looks unlikely to take part after being relegated to the reserves.With prop Lachlan Burr returning to the starting squad after missing last weekend's match due to a head knock, Adam Blair shifts back to lock. The move sees Blair displace Papali'i, who has been overlooked in favour of Poasa Faamausili, King Vuniyayawa and Jack Murchie in the 17. No other changes have been made to the team that were held scoreless by the Panthers, with Adam Pompey and Hayze Perham named in the backline in place the injured Ken Maumalo and Peta Hiku.Hiku has the chance to be a late inclusion in the squad, however, being named in the reserves.Warriors team to play the North Queensland Cowboys: Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Patrick Herbert, Hayze Perham, Gerard Beale, Adam Pompey, Kodi Nikorima, Blake Green, Jamayne Taunoa-Brown, Wayde Egan, Lachlan Burr, Eliesa Katoa, Tohu Harris, Adam Blair. Interchange (from): Karl Lawton, Poasa Faamausili, King Vuniyayawa, Jack Murchie, Agnatius Paasi, Peta Hiku, Isaiah Papali'i, Chanel Harris-Tavita. 

The Hiku, Eugene Scanlon and Marie McNamara: Hosted by Carol McNamara and Geraldine Colleran remotely  with Jim Collins in studio -00.00 Mary O’Connor talking about the “haiku” which is a short form of Japanes poetry in three phrases typically characterised by three qualities -12.30-Eugene Scanlan originally form the Lane, Scariff and living in London now for the last 35 years talks to Carol about how things are on the ground in the UK and the school that he works in. -35.36-Marie McNamara talks about the Clare based home help agency she works for and how the current situation we find ourselves in has effected the work for carers and the people they look after. Saturday Chronicle is Sponsored by JAMES M NASH AND DERG KITCHEN DESIGN  http://dergkitchendesign.ie

A tale from the book Folktales of Hawaiʻi by Mary Kawena Pukui and Laura C.S. Green The post Ka Hiku O Nā Ahupuaʻa appeared first on E Hoʻoulu Lāhui.

NRL bosses say the referees made a "serious error" by failing to protect Warriors centre Peta Hiku when he was seriously injured against the Knights.Head of football Graham Annesley has told referees and their coaches that the level of mistakes recently is unacceptable.These mistakes included Adam Gee and Gavin Badger failing to stop play immediately when they saw Hiku stagger out of a tackle.Badger had instead told Gee to "watch" Hiku. The game continued until the Knights scored a try."They were aware that he had suffered a head knock, they were aware that he was on the ground and they should have stopped play at that tackle before the play-the-ball. They had time to do that," Annesley said."He said 'watch him', in other words 'keep an eye on him' but that is not good enough."That is saying 'I have identified that there is an issue there so keep an eye on him'. Well, keep an eye on him is not the right answer.""It is a very serious error in that we hold clubs accountable for dealing with suspected head injuries and we hold them accountable to a very high degree. We know from the audio that they (the referees) identified this, they just didn't take the right action at the right time."Annesley also confirmed that the bunker officials had incorrectly denied Warriors wing Ken Maumalo a try.The bunker should have relied on the first camera angle which confirmed the try was scored by a diving Maumalo, who scored two others in the Warriors' victory.And a stripping penalty against Adam Blair had also been incorrect, as it was a loose carry by Mason Lino.There were two errors against the Wests Tigers in their loss against the Roosters, involving a charge down and a foot in touch before a try.Annesley said: "I need to get comfort from the people I have to hold responsible for the performances of match officials," he said."The one thing we can't stop is mistakes but some of mistakes over the last couple of weeks simply aren't good enough and they are mistakes that shouldn't have been made so we need to try to find out why and what they are doing to hopefully ensure it doesn't happen again leading into the finals."That is what coaches do week in and week out, they don't accept errors from their players and they work on strategies and ways to try to make sure those mistakes aren't repeated."But he praised the bunker officials for spotting Cronulla's Kyle Flanagan kneeing Bronco Matt Lodge in the head. Flanagan escaped a suspension with an early plea,

Warriors 24Knights 20The Warriors season is still alive – just.If there was ever a game they had to win it was this one, especially as Newcastle were missing almost half their starting XIII.They did, but made extremely hard work of it, with the result only confirmed by a Sam Lisone try with five minutes to go, to clinch a 24-20 victory.The away-game result will be a massive relief for everyone associated with the Mt Smart club, as a defeat in the circumstances would have been almost terminal.The Warriors were edgy all night, but showed great resolve to fight back after a flat first half, where nothing went right and they were down 12-2.Ken Maumalo capped a superb display with two tries, while the Auckland team were also bereft of luck, with at least two crucial refereeing calls going against them.There is still a lot to work on – and a better team would have punished for their first half display – but the team showed glimpses of their best in the second half with some compelling attack.But we can't forget that the Knights were severly weakened, with five players on State of Origin duty, including David Klemmer, Mitchell Pearce and Daniel Saifiti, while Kalyn Ponga was out injured.The Warriors worked hard in the first half, for no reward, but the biggest problem was the predictable nature of their attack.It's been an issue all year; little variation, change of angles or second phase, just sweeping side to side moves against a set defensive line. It also didn't help that there were the usual range of errors and poor execution.The Warriors spent most of the half camped in the Knights half but rarely came close, while Newcastle scored with their first real opportunity.There was some doubt over the try – and there will probably be an apology from the NRL forthcoming – as the officials seemed to miss a clear Mason Lino knock on.But aside from that, it continued a pattern from this Warriors season; lack of urgency from a fifth tackle rebound, followed by a poor defensive read, as a Lachlan Fitzgibbon offload put Sione Mata'utia over.The Knights soaked up the pressure, their team of greenhorns gaining confidence with every set, which also kept the vocal crowd in the game.David Fusitu'a came close after soaring for a Green bomb, before Fitzgibbon scored for the Knights on the hooter. There was an element of luck – as Fusitu'a failed to ground a Connor Watson grubber – but the Knights were rewarded for chancing their arm.Thankfully, the Warriors snapped out of their slumber after halftime, with three tries in space of 12 minutes.Peta Hiku grabbed the first – after a Blake Green double round – before the centre set up Maumalo with a wonderful no look pass at speed.A Knights penalty – one of several conceded by Jazz Tevaga – briefly stopped the comeback – before Maumalo was over again, following nice work from Kodi Nikorima and Hiku.Maumalo looked to have his hat trick in the 65th minute, with another spectacular diving finish, but the bunker claimed that the 24 year-old had lost the ball, when the end on replay suggested he regained control.That mistake was accentuated moments later when Mata'utia crossed near the posts. That try was also contentious, as the officials ignored the plight of Hiku, who was concussed on the ground, though the try also exposed poor Warriors defence.But Lisone was the late hero, as he showed great poise to scoop up a Green grubber and dive over.Warriors 24 (K Maumalo 2, P Hiku, S Lisone tries; I Luke 3 cons, pen)Knights 20 (S Mata'utia 2, L Fitzgibbon tries; M Lino 2 cons, 2 pens)Halftime: 12-2 

Varhandziwa vayingisete, hoyo hoyo ka xiyenge xinwani xa Magungo ya NoticiAudio. A tilhoko maka ta xiyenge lexi: ▪️Hiku khunguvanheka a vanpswa va tsukula a bandla la Frelimo va vhumba a bandla la linwani livitaniwaka PODEMOS ▪️Murangely wa xifundzankulo Nampula a luza 1 milhão wama TM, hiku hakela a Hotel dzaku kaku tsukula a munte wakwe hikola ka makondlo ▪️Tiko la Moçambique ly vilela 3.2 bilioes wama dolarey akuva ku lulamisiwa a timaka ti vangiweke hi swidzedze Idai na Kenneth

After a month of misery for the Warriors, they found some joy on the NRL's Magic Weekend, with an improbable comeback to beat the Dragons 26-18.The Warriors scored four second-half tries to reel in an 18-6 halftime deficit, producing probably their best 40 minutes of the season with 20 unanswered points.The result will give the Warriors a platform to build on, and relieve the mountain of pressure that was building at Mt Smart.It was far from a perfect performance, but the team showed impressive courage and conviction in the circumstances.The forwards hunted as a pack and the attack was dangerous on both edges, with Roger Tuivasa-Sheck particularly effective in the clutch moments.The focus, of course, was on Kodi Nikorima. After spending more than half of his life aligned with Brisbane – and 86 NRL games for the Broncos behind him – he was back at Suncorp Stadium in the Warriors jersey. He made an impact from the start, and showed what an asset he will be, especially as combinations are built around him.Ligi Sao – making only his second appearance of the season – offered great energy from the bench and has surely done enough to keep his spot.It was the classic game of two halves. The Warriors were all at sea in the first period, as the Dragons dominated territory and constantly found open spaces, and probably lucky to still be in the contest. But they were a transformed outfit in the second half, with committed, precise, football.It was the first time a Warriors home game had been held outside New Zealand, and there was no shortage of support. A whole range of Warriors jerseys – from the 1990s to the present day – could be spotted on Caxton street on Saturday afternoon and around the stadium precinct.The Warriors made an awful start. The Dragons' first try was well worked, but Tyson Frizell had no right to take an uncontested catch of a Ben Hunt bomb, before sending over Zac Lomax. It got worse quickly, as Jai Field scorched across open pasture at Suncorp Stadium to dot down, following a James Graham bust. Like last week, the genesis was ineffective, grabbing tackles.Agnatius Paasi has been probably the most effective Warriors forward over the recent month of discontent, and his close range try exhibited pure grunt and guts. That should have settled the Warriors down, but they still looked jittery. A Hunt bomb was allowed to bounce, before Cameron McInnes burrowed over under the posts for the third Dragons try.There were occasional sparks in the first half – Tuivasa-Sheck was set free with a beautiful offload – but they were generally spoilt by poor decisions. The state of the Warriors current mindset was summed up late in the first half, when no one chased a Blake Green attacking grubber.The Warriors found some verve to start the second half – they seemed to channel their anger from their poor first period and got their eventual reward with Peta Hiku's try, the Kiwis centre showing his deceptive ability to find a gap after Nikorima drew players in.That gave the Auckland team some momentum and belief, as they noticeably grew in confidence. There was variation in the attack, and Nathaniel Roache was finding some space up the middle. A blindside raid paid dividends, as quick hands sent David Fusitu'a over, after smart work from Tuivasa-Sheck and Herbert. Maumalo's try took the Warriors ahead with 11 minutes to play – and after they navigated some nervous moments – Hiku's second sealed a memorable win.Warriors 26 (P Hiku 2, A Paasi, D Fusitu'a, K Maumalo tries; P Herbert 3 goals)Dragons 18 (Z Lomax try, J Field, C McInnes tries; Z Lomax three goals)Halftime: 6-18

Adam Keighran has been named to make his NRL debut in the No.6 jersey alongside halfback Blake Green in the Warriors' season-opener against his former Canterbury-Bankstown club at Mount Smart Stadium on Saturday.The 21-year-old started at standoff in each of the club's NRL trial wins over Melbourne and the Wests Tigers.Head coach Stephen Kearney has given him the chance against a club he played for in the former Intrust Super Premiership (now the Canterbury Cup NSW) in 2017 before switching to Penrith last year.While Keighran will be the only player on first-grade debut for the Warriors on Saturday, another former Bulldog Lachlan Burr will start at loose forward in his first outing for the club and his first NRL appearance in three years after last playing for Gold Coast in 2016.Keighran becomes Warrior number 231 and Burr number 232, with Burr coming into the side for Isaiah Papali'i who has been stood down for a week for a breach of club standards.After two games in 2009, he went on to play 177 games for North Queensland and St George Illawarra before being lured home to rejoin his original club.Ah Mau was a stellar performer for the Dragons last year while Keighran and Burr both excelled in the ISP. Keighran was named in the centres in the ISP team of the year with Burr recognised as the Bulldogs' ISP player of the year.Also returning to the NRL is hooker Nathaniel Roache, who will make his first appearance since 2017. Veteran Issac Luke, who has been recovering from shoulder surgery, hasn't been included.In other selection decisions Warriors head coach Stephen Kearney has given different roles to last year's regular centres Peta Hiku and Solomone Kata. Hiku is set to line up on the left edge combining with second rower Tohu Harris and wing Ken Maumalo while the right edge combination sees Kata linked with David Fusitu'a and second rower Adam Blair.With Dally M interchange player of the year Jazz Tevaga confirmed in his familiar No.14 jersey, Ah Mau and Sam Lisone are named as the bench props with Bunty Afoa handed a starting spot. In jersey No.17 is Blake Ayshford, covering the outside backs and the back row. Also on the extended eight-man bench is Chanael Harris-Tavita, who was competing for the standoff position.Warriors team to face the Bulldogs - Saturday, 5pm, Mt Smart Stadium:1 ROGER TUIVASA-SHECK (c)2 DAVID FUSITU'A3 PETA HIKU4 SOLOMONE KATA5 KEN MAUMALO6 ADAM KEIGHRAN7 BLAKE GREEN8 AGNATIUS PAASI9 NATHANIEL ROACHE10 BUNTY AFOA11 ADAM BLAIR12 TOHU HARRIS13 LACHLAN BURRInterchange:14 JAZZ TEVAGA15 SAM LISONE16 LEESON AH MAU17 BLAKE AYSHFORD18 GERARD BEALE20 LIGI SAO21 KARL LAWTON22 CHANEL HARRIS-TAVITA 

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este segundo episodio se llama: Un sueño pinchado. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este tercer episodio se llama: Un sueño en el Verjón. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este cuarto y último episodio se llama: Un sueño libre. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este primer episodio se llama: Un sueño entre libros y un Renault 4. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este cuarto y último episodio se llama: Un sueño libre. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este tercer episodio se llama: Un sueño en el Verjón. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Roger Tuivasa-Sheck has no desire to fill the hole in the Warriors halves left by the departure of Shaun Johnson.After Johnson was released by the club late last month, suggestions have been thrown around about who might replace him.Tuivasa-Sheck's name has come up in the conversation, but the reigning Dally M player of the year told the Radio Sport Breakfast he wasn't a likely option."At this stage I'm playing fullback," Tuivasa-Sheck said. "That's the position I prefer to play. I think a lot of the boys, we like to joke about it and say I'll move into the halves, but I don't see myself there."[I'll] just stay at the back and catch bombs."While the question remains whether or not the side will look to bring in a tested first-grade half, the Warriors have a number of players already on the books that could fill the vacant spot.Talented youngsters Chanel Harris-Tavita and Hayze Perham could make a play for the spot during the pre-season, as could 21-year-old Adam Keighran who joined the club this year from the Penrith Panthers.Of their experienced first-graders, centre Peta Hiku would be the likely choice to fill the role, having played in the halves intermittently throughout his NRL career. However, second-rower Tohu Harris could be considered for a temporary shift to the halves.Tohu Harris has shown his ability as a playmaker and a kicker at the NRL level. Photo / Getty ImagesWhile best utilised in the forwards, Harris' playmaking and kicking ability has been well displayed in the past, and he has playing in the halves during his NRL career as well as on the international stage.So, while Harris-Tavita, Arona and Keighran get up to speed, Hiku or Harris could find themselves lining up alongside Blake Green.However, Tuivasa-Sheck believes there's plenty of time before the season begins for the young players to show they're serious candidates for the vacant position."We've still got quite some time in the preseason, so if they can look to impress the coaches and maybe they'll get that start."Then if the recruitment manager and the coaches believe they need to bring someone in, that's in their hands."

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este segundo episodio se llama: Un sueño pinchado. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Desde pequeña Laura Acero tuvo la costumbre de escribir en su diario todo lo que pasaba en su vida. A medida que fue creciendo, en su diario incluyó su vida en familia con Arco y su hijo Hiku. Ese diario sería la base para el libro que publicó con Laguna Libros sobre su historia y la de su bibliocarrito: un Renault 4 blanco y lleno de libros. Esta segunda temporada de Laguna Podcast, en colaboración con 070 Podcasts, relata el primer año de esa historia: el 2015. Este podcast narra parte del libro, y cuenta lo que no alcanzó a incluir en el diario, pero fundamental para la historia. Este primer episodio se llama: Un sueño entre libros y un Renault 4. Laguna Podcast es un programa de la red de 070 Podcasts. Viajes de Campo y ciudad fue escrito por Laura Acero y esta temporada, basada en el mismo, es narrada por ella. Es una temporada producida entre Laguna Libros, 070 Podcasts, Bibliocarrito R4 y Akorde FD. Cuenta con la colaboración de Pedro Lemus, editor de Laguna Libros. La edición sonora y música son de Gabriela Navas, y la dirección general es de Sebastián Payán.

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move: TSX: $APH.TO, TSX: $WEED.TO, NYSE: $CGC, CSE: $HiKU.C, TSXV: $N.V

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move: TSX: $APH.TO, TSX: $WEED.TO, NYSE: $CGC, CSE: $HiKU.C, TSXV: $N.V

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move: TSX: $APH.TO, TSX: $WEED.TO, NYSE: $CGC, CSE: $HiKU.C, TSXV: $N.V

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move - TSX: WEED, NYSE: CGC, TSX: LEAF, XSE: HIKU, TSXV: WMD, CSE: CRZ

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move - TSX: WEED, NYSE: CGC, TSX: LEAF, XSE: HIKU, TSXV: WMD, CSE: CRZ

Investor Ideas #Potcasts #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move - TSX: WEED, NYSE: CGC, TSX: LEAF, XSE: HIKU, TSXV: WMD, CSE: CRZ

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; CSE: SNN, CSE: HUGE, CSE: PILL, TSXV: OGI, CSE: HIKU, CSE: MYM, OTC: CBIS, CSE: CALI

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; CSE: SNN, CSE: HUGE, CSE: PILL, TSXV: OGI, CSE: HIKU, CSE: MYM, OTC: CBIS, CSE: CALI

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; CSE: SNN, CSE: HUGE, CSE: PILL, TSXV: OGI, CSE: HIKU, CSE: MYM, OTC: CBIS, CSE: CALI

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX: TGOD, CSE: MMEN, TSX: WEED, CSE: HIKU

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX: TGOD, CSE: MMEN, TSX: WEED, CSE: HIKU

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX: TGOD, CSE: MMEN, TSX: WEED, CSE: HIKU

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX:TGOD, CSE:VGW, CSE:MDM, CSE:HIKU, TSXV:WMD

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX:TGOD, CSE:VGW, CSE:MDM, CSE:HIKU, TSXV:WMD

Investor Ideas #Potcasts; #Cannabis News and Stocks on the Move; TSX:TGOD, CSE:VGW, CSE:MDM, CSE:HIKU, TSXV:WMD

His baby is yet to be born, but captain Roger Tuivasa-Sheck has been named for his return to the Warriors.The fullback missed the win over the Parramatta Eels with his fiance due give birth to their first child.While they're still awaiting the baby, Tuivasa-Sheck has still been included in the 21-man squad for Saturday's game against the Rabbitohs.Coach Stephen Kearney told D'Arcy and Goranit's a good chance his skipper will play."Not unless it comes at 7:30 on Saturday night, we've got all bases covered."Kearney says if that changes, centre Pita Hiku is capable of slotting in there again."He's played international footy. He's a pretty solid performer there."In other changes, Gerard Beale shifts back to the extended bench to accommodate Hiku at centre, while Simon Mannering moves from the bench to start at second row.LISTEN TO STEPHEN KEARNEY TALK WITH D'ARCY AND GORAN ABOVE

His baby is yet to be born, but captain Roger Tuivasa-Sheck has been named for his return to the Warriors.The fullback missed the win over the Parramatta Eels with his fiance due give birth to their first child.While they're still awaiting the baby, Tuivasa-Sheck has still been included in the 21-man squad for Saturday's game against the Rabbitohs.Coach Stephen Kearney told D'Arcy and Goranit's a good chance his skipper will play."Not unless it comes at 7:30 on Saturday night, we've got all bases covered."Kearney says if that changes, centre Pita Hiku is capable of slotting in there again."He's played international footy. He's a pretty solid performer there."In other changes, Gerard Beale shifts back to the extended bench to accommodate Hiku at centre, while Simon Mannering moves from the bench to start at second row.LISTEN TO STEPHEN KEARNEY TALK WITH D'ARCY AND GORAN ABOVE

Warriors centre Peta Hiku joins the show, after back to back wins to start the NRL season. He refused to say that it was “the year of the Warriors”, preferring to say that it has been a satisfactory start to the year.LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH D'ARCY ABOVE 

Warriors centre Peta Hiku joins the show, after back to back wins to start the NRL season. He refused to say that it was “the year of the Warriors”, preferring to say that it has been a satisfactory start to the year.LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH D'ARCY ABOVE 

This week it seemed that many of my devices and some other people’s devices were experiencing some troubles. My Nest thermostat decided to roast my family in bed at night and it seemed I wasn’t alone. Kevin and I discussed Nest’s response as well as why switching to the Ecobee might require a little extra … Continue reading Episode 36: A total breakdown in connected gadgets and the Hiku review

This week’s guest Rob Katcher is working with Wal-Mart to take a little of the pain out of grocery shopping with the Hiku connected fridge magnet. I chatted with Katcher to understand how he decided to create an entirely new category of device—a button that sticks to your fridge and lets you scan or tell … Continue reading Episode 31: Walmart gets connected and this is what you want for Christmas

This week we talk about the shit fans at Campbelltown, homesick players, the Warriors big offer to Hiku, recaps from round 6, previews for round 7, and much much more.Please note there are sound issues for a few minutes from around 1:08:00. Did our best to clean them up, unfortunately without re-recording that passage there's not much else that can be done!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Support is one important way that you’re understanding how customers are experiencing the product and what you should be doing differently going forward. And at a more human and personal level, I think it’s important for motivating the product work, hearing from individual people about their desires for the product is quite motivating. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam, now you’re a bit into the fatherhood journey. How’s that treating you? 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: Well, I love it. I love being a father. It’s extremely rewarding to care for a small and cute creature who basically depends on you for their every need. Also very hard work, really hard work, but we recently crossed into toddlerhood, so toddler, I think, is defined as one year and up, and actually that was a big transition because the Under one year, essentially the needs of the kid, especially as you get close to the early side of that one year, is completely different from adults, right? They’re drinking milk, maybe from a bottle, maybe from mom, how you bathe them, even when they are eating semi-s solid food, their needs are just utterly different from that of an adult, how they sleep, everything like that. But now that we’re into the toddler age, I’m finding it’s more like a very small and non-capable and gets tired easily and has a limited palate adult, but in a sense, you know, they can eat a lot of the same food, they kind of need to sleep at kind of somewhat similar times, so that’s actually quite nice and you add in the walking. And then you know potentially the talking and now yeah it’s less of a guessing game trying to fulfill the mostly physical needs of this creature and starts to advance into fulfilling their emotional needs and eventually their intellectual needs. So I’m finding that at a minimum sort of easier and less stressful, but also in a lot of ways a lot more fun. So yeah, it’s been really nice and it’s also a place where I think I really appreciate the very flexible work environment we’ve created for you, even though I did take off some parental leave time. I just assumed at some point I would need to take a bigger chunk, but that hasn’t actually really happened because I’ve been able to interleave childcare with my work. Now part of that is a lot of my colleagues are based in the states and so those meetings happen in the evening and So my daughter’s in bed then, but this is a good example I feel of where the flexible working environment that we’ve take quite a bit of effort to craft really starts to pay off. 00:02:42 - Speaker 1: That’s perhaps the most important testament to the flexible schedule we’ve heard yet. It’s awesome. 00:02:48 - Speaker 2: Well we can jump straight into our topic today, which is support. Now, of course, it’s always good to start with a little bit of a definition, and support is something I feel strongly about. I guess I feel strongly about all the pieces of what makes up a good company, or from my perspective, what makes a strong technology company, all these different functions that need to work together, engineering, design, marketing, and so on. But I feel like support is one that maybe doesn’t get its Do or doesn’t quite have the prestige of the others or something like that. Everyone agrees it’s really important, but you don’t think of working for a company in a support role necessarily as cool, maybe as being, I don’t know, a designer or something, and I find that a little bit unfortunate. 00:03:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think support is often underestimated, and I’m glad we’ll be digging into it today. So Adam, what does support mean for you exactly? 00:03:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would define support as getting help with a specific problem you have with the product or maybe getting a question answered, but it’s something where you can’t do that through the sort of more automated means and you need to go to a call it a human interaction, you’re sort of contacting the company and maybe that line gets blurred a little bit with AI chatbot support thingies, but I think it’s you’re in this state where you have a problem to solve, you can’t figure out how to do it, and probably for every person that moment where you Give up and contact support happens at a different point. I’m more of an exhaust every other option, read all the documentation, Google about it, try to figure it out on my own before I usually reach for that, whereas others maybe go a little sooner. But yeah, you have a customer or a potential customer who is in a moment of need, and that’s an opportunity for the company to rise to that challenge and hopefully solve their problem. But I think the tricky thing, as I think through the different support requests that I’ve handled over the years at the many companies I’ve worked at, including our work at Muse, is that you have quite a lot of different categories, right? It might be a request for information. How do I turn the pen from blue to red? And maybe that’s actually in the documentation and they just didn’t find it, so you can essentially just send them the documentation or just copy paste or whatever. It might also be a request for undocumented information. So for example, we added safe mode to Muse, which is sort of protects you against a crash loop, kind of an unusual situation, but that occurs occasionally. But there is a way to manually invoke it and at least initially we didn’t have that documented or maybe outside of just the memo where we released it, so someone writes in needing access to this information and reasonably they haven’t been able to find it. And that’s kind of the simple thing, but then you go from there to, OK, it’s actually a bug report. I’ve had a crash, you know, I’m getting this very unexpected or undefined behavior, but it could also be a feature request and often I think all four of those I’ve named like. I want to learn something about how to use your thing or there’s a bug or I want a new feature. They may actually not even know which one it is as they write in. So the person on the support side, on the company side, you know, me in this kind of hypothetical example is sitting there saying, OK, the pen color blue to red, yes, that exists, here’s how to do it. But it might also be, well, we don’t have that capability yet, but we want to in the future or we don’t have that capability yet, but that’s an interesting idea. Let me put it on the stack or think about that, or maybe that actually you can do it and this person for whatever reason is just like the software is not working properly for them and so this is actually a bug report. So it really could be from their perspective they want to solve this problem they have, which is do a thing that they haven’t been able to figure out to do, but which of those four it is they may actually not know when they’re writing in. 00:06:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and if it’s that I might add here is a service request. This is when someone writes in and requests that you do something basically manually, either because you’ve deliberately not included an automated path for that or just because it’s nothing you thought of before. So for example, sometimes we get requests about deleting all the users' data and that’s not exactly a bug or a feature, but it’s still something you need to handle the support. 00:06:56 - Speaker 2: There’s a couple of related areas I’d love to talk about here today, and one of those is what you might call service or customer service, which I think that does overlap or maybe is even a super set of support if you like, but I think in the software business or with digital products, support and service are not that different. Maybe there’s occasionally things that A human operator working at the company can handle that you can’t handle, so you have to write to request that. But there are a lot of businesses, particularly those that deal in more kind of physical world things, that is to say non software companies that customer service is a huge part of what they do because there’s so many things the customer can’t do, like the service department at a car dealership, it’s like after business. 00:07:37 - Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, and I think some of the best examples of companies that really differentiate on support or kind of a role model for this are companies that have a business more like that. So Zappos. You know, they have their core value of this deliver wow through service idea, and if you kind of dig into that and what that means for them, particularly if you think back to 10 or 12 years ago when they were really pioneering this, they did things like free shipping on returns. So if you don’t like it, you can return it, it doesn’t cost you anything, no questions asked. And maybe nowadays that’s been copied more, you know, you got Amazon and Zalando and others that do the same thing, but at the time that was a really kind of Surprising and impressive bit of customer service. Yeah, so it’s a similar thing with anything where there’s going to be exactly car dealership, travel related things, that sort of stuff. It’s just you have to call in or email or whatever it is to get something done, and that’s just the nature of that business and I think for us, except for those very kind of rare and occasional things, for the most part, if we haven’t made a way to do it in app yet, that’s not quite a gap, I call a gap in the product, I would say. Now, how do we go about handling support at Muse? 00:08:50 - Speaker 1: Well, in preparation for this episode, I was trying to go back and recall our original discussions on setting up support. And the thing that I remember most strongly is what I didn’t want to happen, which is that typical experience where you, first of all, you go to the support page and it’s like this mechanism to prevent them from emailing you. You know, all the FAQs and there’s a little tiny button with email us. So I didn’t want that. And I also didn’t want that feeling that you were being fed into a huge apersonal machine. You know, you fill in the form and it It gives you like ticket number 7,042, and there’s all this like support machinery stuff around it. The experience that I wanted was basically like you’re emailing the founding team and they’re emailing you back. And it literally just looks like a regular email. And that’s pretty similar to what we ended up with. You can email us at hello at and one of the five partners will read and respond and We use a tool Front app, which is great for basically multiplexing the email inbox, which works well for us. 00:09:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I also agree that the impersonal feel like you’re being fed into the machine thing is just to me one of my least favorite parts of contacting support, and one feature that is a default, I think in a lot of these helpdesk pieces of software, maybe like a Zendesk, for example, is that they email you back right away with exactly as you said, the ticket number. Your request is very important to us. You have request number 7000, and to me that actually is. Anti reassuring. Now I guess the downside there is it can happen if you email the muse team and our current set up if you do it on a, I don’t know, Friday afternoon your time, but actually it was a person in Europe that was on duty that day and so they’ve already kind of signed off and we do have someone scanning the request over the weekend, but if it’s non-critical, you know, maybe you go 3 or 4 days in a worst case scenario without getting a reply and maybe that’s not very reassuring. And so the idea is that that sense that like at least they received my email. I have this kind of receipt. But yeah, it just feels like noise and it feels like you’re in a machine. And so, yeah, that was when we did set this up, it was Adam Wulf, who set up front for us, and we’d already kind of had this helloadme app.com catch all kind of the entry point to contacting us, but it kind of went to one person, which I think was me for a while, or maybe it was you, I can’t remember, but then when it became the report requests became too much. or unreasonable for one person to handle and kind of route, well then you want to add other people to the list, but now who’s going to answer each particular one? And that’s where, as you said, the multiplexing part comes in that it comes in and then the way that we end up multiplexing the assignments is essentially just day of the week because we have a number of team members that’s Less than equal to 7, so it’s pretty easy to just have each person take sort of one day, and that may not scale in the longer term, and actually one question for us would be whether we would hire dedicated support people at some point. Do you have a feeling on that, as you said, you feel like you’re emailing the founders versus the benefits of having people who are really good at support because that’s their expertise. 00:11:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s tough. I feel like it varies by support requests type. So there are some things that I think could actually be handled better by a dedicated support person because it would be more responsive and they would have their full attention. Things like these service requests, basic product feedback, ideas, product ideas, questions that are already answerable, like, you know, how do I access something that you can in fact do in the product, it just wasn’t clear to the user how to do that. That stuff I think would all be better served by a dedicated support person. But then there’s a lot of the stuff that we currently get is stuff that actually needs to find its way to the person who’s working on that particular feature. So someone writes in with some weird sync behavior, for example, one of the engineers needs to look at that. And there, if you have a person in the middle can just add an extra step and make it slower and less crisp, and a lot of stuff that we currently get is of that form, so I think it’s kind of tough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually we have a mix. 00:12:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes the way that gets handled is you have the support levels and kind of level one should be focused on really common questions and could be answered quickly, and you use a lot of templates and that sort of thing, and then for things that are not in that category, they can, so to speak, escalate. And hopefully in that kind of a set up it would be something that’s done seamlessly that whoever is on the front lines there, one of the skills they would have would be triage, sometimes it’s the word that’s used, but they would have the ability to triage and really be able to sort out. OK, this is a feature request. We have 100 others just like it. We want to file it in our feature database and maybe we want some aggregate. Reported that, but maybe there isn’t a lot of deep info there or as you said, just a question they want answered that there’s an easy answer to, whereas here is like a really interesting reflection on a use case that we kind of haven’t heard before and how that interacts with the feature that was currently in beta. OK, this seems like worth getting in front of someone for deeper consideration. 00:13:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and to be clear, going back to our motivation for setting up support this way, there’s some value perhaps that you have as a user if you are communicating directly with the founder, but I think a lot of the value is just having a very clear, simple line of communication. We don’t feel like you’re getting bounced around, you’re getting shuffled around. And so this triage could be totally transparent. It’s like you send an email and it’s magically answered by the exact right person to do so directly. And I think that’s a property that we can still maintain. 00:14:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the handoff element I’ve certainly run into that with maybe like banks or something where I already know because I’ve done this exact thing, like I don’t know, an international wire transfer or something. I’ve done this 20 times before. I know there’s a department that handles it. That department does not or refuses to give me the direct phone number. You got to call the main customer service, explain what you want to do. Then they say, Oh, we have another department that handles that. Would it be all right if I transferred you there and trying to head off their playbook, I have found if I say hello. I need to make an international wire transfer. Your international wires department handles that. Please transfer me. And they say, Oh, hello, Mr. Wiggins. OK, you want to make a wire transfer? Well, what kind is that inside the United States or international? And I’ll see if I can help you with it. And I’m like, yes, can we fast forward, please? That sort of handoff experience is not what you want, but rather you want your message to get to the right person to read it. Since we’re talking about sort of examples of unpleasant support or support that we on the say the user experience side don’t like, two of the things I think that we, or at least I had in my mind when we were designing our support setup is one is where you go to that contact us page, and yeah, they’re trying to kind of divert you away from contacting them in some ways. But I always find it funny when you’re logged into a website where they have your full account information. Again, a bank would be a canonical example, but any software is a service, and if I click that, get support button, I’m surprised how often it takes me to a form where I fill out my contact information because it’s like, wait a minute, you know exactly who I am. I’m in my account and in fact it’s useful to you, you here being the service that I’m trying to write to. That you know you have all my account information, that context might be really important. So it feels very weird and impersonal. Why am I filling out this form like I’m a stranger that you’ve never heard from before. And that’s one of the reasons we created the in-app feedback from Muse, which actually feeds right into the same channel as if you email hollo at museapp.com. So from our perspective answering, there’s no difference, but for the user, they can do it right in the app. They don’t need to identify themselves. They’re already logged into the app, so of course we know who they are. And indeed in front it has some pretty good features for surfacing past conversations, and we wrote a little plugin that gives us just some information like how long they’ve been a new user and stuff like that, because that could be really important context. Are they brand new or they’ve been a user for or a customer for 2 years? They’re probably looking for a different kind of support in that case. 00:16:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s a couple points I want to elaborate on there. One is this ina feedback form. So we had the intuition that the amount of feedback that you get is mechanically related to how troublesome it is to submit the feedback, and places like banks take advantage of this by making it as hard as possible to, you know, contact us and therefore they get less calls, which is their goal. So we wanted to do the opposite of that, which is make it as easy and quick as possible with the thinking that that would give us more feedback, which, especially at the very beginning of the company and the product, we wanted to get as much feedback as possible. So that’s why we have this in-app form where it’s literally just a box that you open up and you type stuff into and you hit send. And by the way, we got some good meta feedback on that. People are like, oh, that’s such a, you know, easy and nice and pleasant way to submit feedback. More people should do that. The other was this idea of like the whole customer experience. So as a customer of a product and company, you have a notion of what your entire universe of interactions with that company has been. You know, I’ve bought this and this, I’ve said these things, I’ve given them this information, this is the nature of my account. And whenever you’re talking with someone on the other side who doesn’t have that full context, it feels jarring and incompetent. And so another thing we’ve tried to do is Make sure that we have all the context that you have when we’re giving you support. So that again is why we have all that stuff in front. 00:18:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s especially notable, the context stuff when you have, let’s say a kind of an open incident or an open thing you’re dealing with. I don’t know, I think of like some of the car insurance, you’re filing a claim because you’re in an accident or whatever, you need to call back several times because there’s several things to do, and the good ones. They see right on your file that you have this open case and you don’t need to re-explain the whole story again every time you call, you’re calling back to say, OK, you know, you told me 3 days ago I should call when the repairs were complete, they’re now complete, tell me what to do next, for example. But very often, yeah, you do get this like, OK, well, Mr. Wiggins, what can I help you with today? And, you know, I’m thinking you don’t have on your screen in front of you that there’s this thing going on. 00:18:52 - Speaker 1: This is an aside, but I feel like there’s an opportunity in software products to productize this notion more, like, give customers the sense that you in fact have a handle on their full history. So this is like the Amazon orders page, but for everything, but for your support requests and all this other stuff. I think some companies sort of do this, and I just feel like there’s something more there and if people really leaned into it, there’d be a payoff in terms of the customer satisfaction. 00:19:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and hopefully that would be, let’s say the pertinent to relevant things. There is a version of that that might feel creepy, which often the extreme degree of data that the Google and Amazons of the world have about us can be, but they should have the same context that me as a user does. Like I’ve placed a lot of orders or my account is brand new, or there’s an error with the billing and my, you know, it told me to log in because my credit card expired, but then when I tried to type it in, I got an error. So maybe they can see that I have an expired card and that’s like an open problem that I’m trying to solve, for example. Yeah, I do wonder if there’s some kind of product opportunity for a support help desk that does encode a lot of these ideas, but I think it’s tricky because it would need such deep integration with the rest of your systems and would be fairly specific to your business. But yeah, I wonder if there’s something that could capture some of that. Now we’ve been talking about bad support examples kind of from the user side, Mark, do you have examples of companies that you think do well or where you’ve had good experiences as the end user? 00:20:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I definitely had my own Zappos wow experience. I forget what the original trigger was. I think they like sent me the wrong size shoe or something. I don’t know. Anyways, like, I called them up, you know, they answered right away. It was a person who spoke perfect English, and I told them my problem, and they’re like, oh yeah, no problem. We’re giving you free shoes. You’re now a VIP customer for life, you know, we’re shipping it out overnight. It’s like, oh, OK, that’s awesome. 00:20:50 - Speaker 2: And I went on to buy like dozens and dozens of shoes from them over the years almost like overreacting to a customer problem as at least I’ve heard that that was a strategy that IBM used back in their powerhouse days. A customer would call in with a problem, and they would send, you know, 12 technicians out to the site, you know, ready to not only fix the immediate problem but improve everything in its immediate vicinity in a way that the customer was just left thinking this is amazing, and they would use that as an opportunity to turn someone into a customer for life. That’s exactly right. 00:21:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Another one that I always talk about is First Republic Bank. So this is the rare example of a bank that actually gives good customer service. So when I first moved to San Francisco, I needed a bank in the area and I googled banks and stuff and I found First Republic on the maps, and so I walked over to the office, and the ratio of service people to customers was so high. I thought I’d like walked into the corporate office or something, like there’s no customers here, there’s no line, there’s no big thick glass in front of all the counters, like all the other places that I’ve been to. Nope, they’re just very responsive. And again, that’s a company where I’ve referred many, many people over the years to. 00:21:50 - Speaker 2: Mhm. One that I’ll give an honorable mention to, but sadly is no longer in existence in a meaningful way as an ISP actually based out of the Muse headquarters city of Seattle called Speakeasy. Do you know these guys? 00:22:03 - Speaker 1: It sounds familiar. 00:22:05 - Speaker 2: I feel like they were kind of late 90s till I don’t know, mid 2010s and then got acquired and kind of just disappeared in the belly of larger companies, which maybe means that their whole approach wasn’t really viable. I don’t know what the story was there. But for me, they were so stand out because, I mean, ISPs are one of those ones that are like banks just famous for giving you miserable customer service like Comcast and the Comcast cares thing is almost like an internet meme joke that people have such bad experiences with that company, and I think that’s common for these sort of natural monopoly, telecom provider thing and driven to keep costs low, but then there’s complicated systems that break all the time. I don’t know. But in any case, Speakeasy was a rare case of a really good ISP. They charged a little bit of a premium, but importantly, they didn’t treat Linux and other kind of open source operating systems and software as well, they supported them. I actually ran into that with ISPs that I had over the years where I’d get a cable modem or something and the only one that was available in my area, and they basically would just tell me straight up that they couldn’t let me use it because I didn’t have a Windows machine. And of course, it totally worked fine, and I would just kind of say, oh no, I’ve got windows, kind of like hedge a little bit and shoot them out the door, and then I would like set it up myself because it of course it works fine. But then I was always in a little bit of this fight with their their service reps about setup, and if you do call in with a problem, you know, there’s a problem in the line, which happened a lot back in those. Days, particularly with DSLs, and then they want you to click on this and this thing in the Windows whatever, but I don’t have that exact thing, so I’m trying to simulate it. Anyway, Speakeasy got through all that. They were for more power users and people who are a little more knowledgeable about networks and their customer service was basically a joy to call into. They would quickly assess your level of knowledge about networks and whatever. We could really be quickly talking in the form of, I say, look, I’ve already tested on the local network, that works fine to the router, but it’s the router to the here, you know, the trace route’s breaking, and they would say, OK, great, I’m going to run a line test on this and that. You push this button on the router. OK, it looks like there is a fault in the line. We’ll see if we can reset it from there. OK, yes, that did the job, or no, it didn’t, we need to send someone out, but it was always this kind of interaction and It’s a weird thing to be impressed by, but there were many cases where their line would have a status update when you first dialed in, where it would say our service is currently operational in all areas except for downtown Redwood City, where we are experiencing some outages and we’ll have more information at a future time. Now if you want, you can stay on the line and you could talk to someone about it. For me, more often than not, I’d be like, oh great, they know about it, it’s affecting my area. I just hang up. Because that’s all the information I wanted to know, versus that it’s just affecting me, they don’t know about it, I need to like kind of poke them to get something to change. So that was a case where the automated system giving me the information I wanted was exactly perfect. Maybe that’s an example of the support meets service, which is service doesn’t have to be, you talk to a human, it has to be like give me information or solve my problem or put me at ease that this problem is being handled. 00:25:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it also speaks to the whole specialty subfield of support and customer service for like operational businesses. So ISPs, Hiroku would go in this bucket, which was an application, a hosting company. Airlines also, and there you have all the standard support stuff, but there’s also this operational element where people need this thing to be able to like get online or run their business or travel to see their parents or whatever. 00:25:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and very emotional, right? You’re in this moment where you can’t get on the plane, you need the money in your bank account. I had an experience like that with my very first business, which was a payment gateway called Trust commerce. I learned pretty quickly there how bugs in your software in the payment world has a, you know, higher stakes than other realms that I’ve been involved in before then, but we had a case where we essentially kind of double authorized someone’s credit card. So, you know, now we’re getting into payment industry jargon, but an authorization. It is basically a reservation of money on a credit card, but by default it just gets released after some number of days unless you come and capture the result. In this case, it was literally like a race condition or bug in our software. We charge someone’s card twice, but it turned out that it was a debit card, so it actually holds that money out of their bank account, and there isn’t really a good way in the system, at least back then, maybe this has changed to free that authorization. You’re just supposed to let it expire. Eventually, the merchant who was our customer gave our phone number to one of their customers who had encountered this bug and basically a woman called me on the phone sobbing because she couldn’t buy food and turkey for the big Thanksgiving. The meal that she was having at her house with her whole family in 2 days and you know, that was like a very visceral thing to be exposed to. It wasn’t just this bug and this minor inconvenience, it’s something that really had a big emotional impact on a person’s life. 00:27:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we should come back to this topic of like customer connection and motivating product development. I think we have a lot to say about that. But just quickly on the operational front, I think our experience has been that there’s a huge amount of appreciation for just clearly communicating to customers what’s going on. So you gave the example of the ISP outage. You’re not like calling to like complain or be mad, just wanna know what’s going on, and if the company is aware of it, and you know the company is aware of it, that addresses like 90% of your concerns because yeah, I think they’re gonna fix it in a few hours and we’ll be back in business. 00:27:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ll go for an early lunch, and it’s too bad because I really wanted to get this thing I was working on done and but I need an internet connection for that. OK, fine, I’ll take an early lunch and I’ll work on it later. 00:27:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was almost surprised to the extent that this was true in a business like Hiroku where, yes, people don’t like if there’s something wrong or if the platform is down for a little bit. What they really, really, really don’t like is if you don’t communicate clearly about it, and they especially double dislike if you ever give something that’s like wrong or contradictory. And so to bring it back to the airline example, the classic cases where they tell you the flight is like right on time, right up until the scheduled departure, they’re like oops, it’s 3 hours late. Well, you knew that, didn’t you? You were just lying to us. That’s what people really don’t like. 00:28:29 - Speaker 2: And that’s where increasingly because a lot of this flight information is public or there’s public APIs or whatever, you have apps like Flighty, for example, which gives you the exact location of the plane that you’re going to be on at the moment and you can see it’s still on the way. Or it’s parked at the gate where it’s supposed to have departed or what have you, and yet the airline is strongly incentivized to not tell you until the last minute because they want you to get there and be ready and not delay because if they do manage to get the plane there on time, they want you to be ready for that, but then you don’t have the information you need to work with. Yeah, I even remember a case where I had a flight straight up canceled. I think it was just a weather thing, but they sent me an email. I can’t remember what it was like 4 hours before, and I was going to leave for the airport 2 hours before. So it was already all packed and everything, but I get this email and I go, Well, that’s really inconvenient, and it cuts my trip a little short and it’ll make the conference I’m going to a little tighter. But hey, at least they told me. I don’t need to leave my home. I don’t need to even convenience myself. I’ll just unpack, stay home for another day and then fly the next day on the flight they offered me. So that was a case where It was a huge inconvenience in some ways, but because they communicated clearly and at the right time, in the end, I just wasn’t that upset about it. You’d certainly imagine cases where you did really need to be there that day, but that just didn’t happen to be the case there. Yep. Yeah, that’s a really great point. It’s the difference between the infrastructure operations aspects and I don’t know what we call this other kind of sport. So at Hiroku there was this thing of, I tried to load up my app, but I’m getting this error or I would like to be able to use this feature or I’d like to upgrade this one, have more scale or something like that, you know, they want the problem solved, but it’s not an immediate outage. And once we did get into running people’s apps which were business dependent on it, that sort of thing really quickly we had to get very serious about incident response and designing a status page that could try to communicate all the subtleties of what things may or may not be working, especially when you have limited information in the first place and how our pager rotations worked. There was a huge Certainly in the last year or two that I was at Haruku, I think way more of my time went into that sort of operational stuff as compared to what I would consider like the core product or what someone externally might consider the core product, and I think that’s kind of the nature of. Structure business, but indeed that was, I think I mentioned this in our podcast with Martin, but that was honestly one of my motivations for local first was wanting to make software where my servers are not in the critical path for basic operation. And certainly we’ve tried to set new up that way. We’ll see what happens as time goes on, you know, if there’s a serious sync server outage and someone can’t sync their devices, you can obviously still work, totally fine, you just can’t move between them. Uh that’s an inconvenience, but it feels different from, for example, when something like Notion has an outage, you just can’t use it or access any of your data at all. All right, so, Mark, from the company’s perspective, we started out by saying it’s important. Why is that so? 00:31:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think there’s a customer perspective on this, and then there’s a company perspective on this, and we’ve been getting into the customer side a little bit. For example, we said that when a customer is writing in to support, often it’s something that’s important to them, it’s high stakes, it’s critical. So you’re already in an important situation. What I think people don’t realize unless you sort of do the math, is that your support function is often where people have the most or indeed the only human to human contact with the company. So it has the opportunity to leave a huge impression either for good or for worse. And also on the customer side, there’s this whole like support to sales process, perhaps we can talk more about it, but again, we’re thinking about support as part of a longer customer flow, a broader customer life cycle, and there it’s basically the first touch point on them eventually becoming a happily paying customer down the road. So we could talk more about those customer side things and on the company side. I think support is very important for getting information and motivation. Support is one important way that you’re understanding how customers are experiencing the product and what you should be doing differently going forward. And at a more human and personal level, I think it’s important for motivating the product work in a sense that you’re a person too, you need motivation to do hard work and hearing from individual people about their desires for the product is quite motivating. 00:33:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that to me is huge. The reason I build products is, of course we have ideas we want to express. We are making products that we want to use ourselves, hopefully, but I am doing it to help other people to serve their needs, to help them in their creation process, their creative process, and hopefully building a tool that fits into their life in some way that improves things for them. And so that includes both the call it positive or negative feedback. Of course you tend to get less of this through your support channels, but I do always deeply appreciate it when someone writes in to say, you know, I don’t have any complaint. I just think what you’re doing is great and it’s really a great tool in my pipeline and you know, keep it up, or sometimes it comes along with, hey, I’ve got some small thing I wanted to report a bug or something, but also by the way, I just want to say I’ve been you know a new customer for a year and a half and You know, it’s really made a big difference in, I don’t know, writing my master thesis. So of course it’s great to hear the positive stuff and that’s very motivating. But the negative stuff can also be both motivating in its own way, but also focusing, right, which is you kind of always have, here’s your backlog of 500 bugs to fix and 200 features that you know you want to build and what have you, but having someone write in and say very specifically, here’s who I am, what I do, here’s why I need this feature, or here’s why this bug is causing me a problem, and that just really brings it home in a way that Yeah, just the abstractness of here’s a ticket in my ticket tracker and my general, you know, we all have the general sense of craftspersonship. We want to make a good product and fix bugs and, you know, improve things, but it’s totally different to hear someone’s story about how it’s causing friction or creating problems for them and the tool they otherwise love to use. 00:34:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it really does have an outsized impact. I think people underestimate this, it feels like it shouldn’t, you know, we have all these statistics and road maps and metrics and whatever about what we should be doing. But then you talk to one human being. Ideally you look them in the eyes, but the next best thing would be you’re on an individual email exchange with them, and for some reason, I guess this is what humans are, you know, it’s so much more motivating than any number of stats or declarations from the product manager or whatever would be. So I think it’s super valuable. 00:35:24 - Speaker 2: Another piece of that being in touch with customer needs, is the fresh perspective. So, we have been in this world of how this product works and all the context that goes around it, greater tools for thought history, design thinking, and so on. And then someone new comes in, especially if they have very little context, you know, maybe Apple featured us under, you know, some productivity category, someone just clicked on it or tapped on it and like, yeah, cool, they install it, try it for 3 seconds and then they have a question and they write support, and they just don’t have a lot of. Context and all the context, but in some ways we have almost too much context, and I’ll give you a concrete example of where we applied that somewhat recently was realizing that we really need to explain the concept of nested boards better and that in the kind of news 1.0 era website. We talk about it, spatial canvas, and you can nest your boards and there’s a little video, but what does that actually mean? because you see the zooming thing, but of course a lot of, I don’t know, modern mobile software allows you to just zoom in like a map or a photo, and it’s really not that, it is really about this nesting. The zoom is an interaction that achieves the nesting. And so folks write in and they might say something like, my board is full, is there a way I can clear it? And then kind of wait, what do you mean full? Like, can you make it and you realize, oh, the home board, they don’t really realize that you can nest other boards within that. And so then you need to explain that. And having run across that a whole bunch of times, we realized that we really just need a whole page on our website. That basically explains the concept of nested boards, and that will seem to a long time user customer pretty basic, but for people who are new to it, that actually is a really core concept that it’s important to get or you’re not going to be successful at evaluating whether the apps are fit for you or not. 00:37:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and speaking of frequent feedback items, my experience is that a large chunk of support traffic is assignable to a small handful of areas at any given time. So, just to pick one example, right now I feel like I’m getting a lot of support requests about how can I recover a car that I accidentally threw off the edge of a board, cause people weren’t aware yet of the undue last deletion feature. And what it is kind of varies over time. At one point we were getting a lot of requests for discounts from college students, I think because we were on some college student YouTube channel, maybe. I don’t know. But anyways, at any one time, there’s like 5 or 6 things that are basically on top of the collective minds of our users. And a coral area of that is that you don’t need to go through that many support tickets to understand what the 5 things are. If you do 20 or 30 tickets, you basically know what they are and they start coming up again and again. And it’s really valuable to know those things. It’s actually kind of inexcusable not to. And so that’s an example of where you can just a little bit of support work, get a really important bit of data from our customers. 00:38:26 - Speaker 2: And this could be a place where the qualitative and the quantitative can reinforce each other a bit. Another fun story from the early days of Hiroku was one of our early team members was a fellow named Orn Teich, who I’d say I learned just about everything I know about product management as a call it formal discipline, let’s say something like that. He was a great teacher for me. But his pilot project to potentially join our team, which of course he eventually did, was to basically send a survey to all of our customers asking them what was important to them, and then present us a bar chart of the results. And of course that sounds kind of basic, but we were pretty surprised and actually it showed that. We kind of compared our roadmap of things we were working on, and then we compared that to, you know, there were 2 or 3 things that were far and away the most important thing that people were asking for. I’m trying to remember what it was, probably back then it was something like SSL capability. But we had it on our list, but we kind of thought it was like, ah yeah, it’s like number 15, we’ll get to it there. But when you looked at this, it was just like most people, you know, the things we were working on as our top priority items were way down the list that people were interested in. And of course support and what customers want now is just one input to your product process. You have a bigger vision. There’s a lot of reasons why you don’t just prioritize exactly what you work on based on that, but I think oftentimes product oriented companies with product oriented founders or CEOs or whatever do tend to lean so heavily on the vision side that they basically forget to listen to customers and. Seeing that aggregated, not just the individual requests, which of course you start to get a feel for it if you’re doing it every day or every week, but actually putting that together whether it’s in a survey form or for example, we often tag stuff in our support tool where every time someone asks for the Mac app we tag that or every time someone asks for a dark mode we tag that, and then you can go and kind of have an aggregate sense of that over time. Now another piece of the be in touch with customers, look them in the eyes, metaphorically speaking, is what I would probably call ad hoc user interviews or sort of just understanding who are these folks, right? And of course it’s part of our values that we don’t. Ask you to give anything, you don’t have to give a name or we don’t record a location or anything like that, even something like, I don’t know, FIMA for example, when you log in, they ask you what’s your first and last name, what’s your title, how many people are at your company? 00:40:55 - Speaker 1: I don’t know if FIMA does that, but a lot of people do it annoys me. 00:40:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s annoying, but of course it’s also valuable from their side. They can both for sales reasons it’s beneficial to the company, but probably also for support reasons as well. They can understand context about their customers, which is fair enough, but yeah, I’m also annoyed. Buy it, especially since I usually don’t cleanly fit into any category that they’re offering when I’m first trying out a tool, I’m usually not doing it for my work anyways. I’m just kicking the tires to have in my mind whether I might use it in the future. Anyhow, so we basically have no information about you other than your email. So then when someone writes in and they may either volunteer some information about themselves, Hey, I’m a professor of industrial design at this such university, or I’m a software engineer and I find that your product is useful for me in this way, that’s really nice to have. But the other thing we do is essentially turn support interactions into customer interviews at times, which can sometimes come from the form of someone writes in. I see something in their footer, you know, their email signature, and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting, and I just kind of end up asking them about it. Maybe they email in, Hey, I’ve got a bug, this thing didn’t duplicate, and they send a screenshot of their board and I’m looking at this board and I’m like, wow, this is awesome. What is this? And they’re like, oh, you know, I’m an amateur board game designer and this is like a game I’m working on for Kickstarter, blah blah blah. You get into that kind of conversation. So the chance to draw out. What the context is, what kind of people are using this product, what are they using it for, and certainly when it’s in the context of a feature request where someone writes in and says, hey, I want to be able to do X, and I say, OK, well, that’s interesting, you know, it’s kind of a thing we want to do, but not really explicitly on a roadmap right now, can you tell me more? And the motivation of Why they want it, what they’re trying to do with it, what’s interesting about that is another piece of this, I guess, coming back to the motivation for the team and for development, having that story behind it, here’s how this would help this person is, again, a really powerful thing for motivating development work. 00:42:56 - Speaker 1: For sure, and I think in the same way that you want to have a pulse on the top 5 or 6 common like feature level issues, I think you want a sense of what are people tending to use the product for. Now, often it won’t be surprising. I would say that the users and the use cases that we have from use aren’t super surprising and the whole like the micro of it is really interesting, you know, like someone is a board game designer or they’re a restaurant consultant or whatever, you know, all kinds of interesting stuff, but the sort of Type or class of user isn’t super surprising, but my experience is that sometimes you have a customer base and you develop this really weird pocket that you need to inquire further about, you know, as some niche type of user or someone who’s using the product in a sort of surprising way, and you need to kind of look into that further. 00:43:43 - Speaker 2: I like that in the process of talking here, we’ve naturally drawn on our experiences, my payment gateway, Hiroku, we talked about Muse. I’m sure a lot of folks would love to hear about what your experience at Stripe was like, whether you were exposed to that and kind of what the company culture was from the inside. 00:44:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I had some exposure to that that I can speak to. The first thing I would say is, I think people underestimate the extent to which Stripe was initially uh like support slash customer service focused business. I think people tend to associate Stripe with product and engineering, you know, there’s a lot of good stuff there. But the original premise of the company, as I understood it, was fixing the support slash customer service problem that people. Had with payment processors, which was as follows. If you were an online business, and you wanted to get started with accepting credit cards, it was basically a complete mess. Like you had to fill up this application, you had to wait a bunch of time, and then every week with some probability, the company would just confiscate all your money, you know, like the classic PayPal move of, you know, sorry, you can’t get it anymore. And then you would write in and they want to answer and whatever. And Stripe did a lot of product and engineering things to address that, but the core premise, again, as I understood it, was to fix that experience and frustration that people had from the support side on payment processing. And I think it’s actually the straight folks where I got this insight slash idea that support is often one of if not the most substantial point of contact that people have with your company. As someone inside the company, support looks like a relatively small piece of the business. You have all this product and engineering and sales and whatever. But in terms of the time that people spend interacting with humans at your company, it’s mostly sales and then support. And so if you want people to have a good connotation with your company to have a good experience, the support needs to be very good. We’re also very lucky at Stripe as we were, I would say at Hiku with having just an incredible support team. It’s a really tough job, I think, especially at a company like Stripe, because in addition to all the standard support challenges, it’s an incredibly adversarial environment because basically some portion of the people who are writing support tickets are trying to steal an enormous amount of money from you, and you don’t know up front who they are, so you’re constantly dealing with that. I learned, especially at Stripe, it’s a very tough job and one of the reasons is because you’re often stuck between a customer who has a very valid and legitimate issue or complaint or feature request and not having a ton that you can do about that personally to fix it. So customer writes in and says, oh man, our business is really stuck. We need feature XYZ without it, we’re kind of out in the cold here. And as support you guys say like, I hear you, you know, we’re looking into it or it’s tough. Whereas if you are an engineer who’s just founded a software company, for example, and enough of those customers right in, you can just go in and build the feature and fix it. He has a lot more ability, I think, and degrees of freedom. It’s one of the reasons why I think it’s such a tough job. 00:46:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s an interesting sub side of things. The far extreme to now gigantic company like Stripe would be something like the solo founder kind of company like you see with a lot of these calm fund companies or something where an individual or maybe two people are building a piece of sass, and they’re selling it. And they’re basically doing all their own support and very often, especially because their customers, you know, the B2B, so they’re often high ticket value, you know, you got your $10,000 a year customer, they write in and say this feature would really help us out. You may be willing and able and motivated to essentially just build it and deploy. The following week and then be able to follow up with like, here it is, check it out. And that’s like a really cool experience on both sides of that. I even remember doing some of that in the Hiroku days, maybe not features, but certainly more like fixes, which is someone write in, kind of see right away that they’re having the problem. And yeah, we’re a small team, and I don’t know, I was young, so I probably worked too much, but, you know, just like make a late night of it and fix their problem and deploy that and say, you know, here, go and try it again, maybe it’ll work now. Talk about a wow moment, getting that kind of a turnaround. I think that’s a way that a small company can differentiate from a larger, more impersonal one. Yeah, and speaking of the Peruki support team, definitely give a big shout out to those folks. They had a really difficult job, maybe less the stripe thing of the the adversarial element, but the problem of an incredibly complex product. And people write in with a problem, and it’s really hard, or I should say it’s as much an art as a science, to differentiate between something that’s genuinely a problem or a challenge with the platform, the product, that is, say, Hirokyo versus just helping them debug their app. And where to draw the line there and where to say, OK, well, you know, now you need to go on stack overflow and Google a bit and I really can’t help you further, but it can be hard to tell, and it can be hard to tell for people on both sides, so that means that the support person And in their expertise, which, you know, they may or may not be right, but they know what they’re doing, be able to say, look, this is kind of beyond the scope of how we can help you. Here’s some resources, good luck, and the person on the other end could feel like, no way, you’re blowing me off, this is a problem in your product, and that’s just a tough, tough, tight rope to walk. 00:49:09 - Speaker 1: A fun aside here is that for these developer focused products like Kuroku and Stripe, it was the case that the people who best understood how the product actually works is the senior technical support staff. It’s not the founders and it’s not the engineers who are building it. It’s the people who have to deal every day with customers running into the platform and all the complexities that that entails. It was kind of amazing actually the degree of encyclopedic knowledge that the senior technical support staff had about the platform. They knew every bug, every quirk, you know, every weird gated behavior, they had it all down cold it was, it’s pretty incredible. 00:49:51 - Speaker 2: And one thing that comes to mind for me in the balancing of the customers' needs or desires, what’s a good experience for them when it comes to support and let’s say what the business needs is just cost, right? Like human time is expensive. Part of what makes software what it is is that it’s very scalable. You write one piece of software that many, many people can use, but that 30 minutes that the support rep spends on your case, that’s just 30 minutes of human time that they need to be paid for, and certainly it’s skilled work and the more you get into something like a Hiokku or a stripe, you know, Hiroku employs developers, pretty skilled developers in their support role, they have to, like, that’s the only people who can reasonably help you, but then that’s turns out, developers command a lot of earning power. So here, you know, there’s obviously a relationship between maybe go with like uh ARPU, which is the jargon for average revenue per user, but basically how much you make for each person that’s a customer or user and what kind of support they can reasonably give you and the reason why I don’t know, Google search or social media or something like that can’t give much support is. Each user just isn’t worth very much, right? So if the ARPU for Google search is $20 a year per user or something, you can imagine a support rep that’s paid $20 an hour, for example, you only have to burn one hour of support time and then instantly you’ve essentially are neutral or have lost money on that user. So and that actually came to mind with your First Republic was the name of the. The bank you mentioned with the reps standing around it so like I think my first reaction would actually be, oh no, is the bank going to go out of business because they’re sort of overstaffed and for all I know that could be connected to why Speakeasy failed. They had these really skilled people answering the phone at kind of level one support, which I loved, but then as it turned out, you know, maybe that cost more than people were willing to pay for their DSL. I’m not sure. 00:51:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, in the case of banks, I think it’s that sweet 0% deposit funding that they’re after, but I could see it being an issue for something like an ISP for sure. Yeah, the cost thing is interesting, by the way, you can look at the public financial disclosures of these companies, and I think people often don’t realize how much of the cost comes from sales and support, especially people who have been around startups and early stage companies, we think like all the expenses basically engineering. And that is true in the very early days of a company, but if you look at matureas companies like engineering or so-called research and development is a relatively small piece of the total expense, a lot of it is sales, support operations. 00:52:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, other challenges that come to mind for me here is, especially being in the position of being the one to give support, which is, you can’t solve everyone’s problem, at least not immediately, maybe in the long run, you hope you can, people write with feature requests, and in most cases, you know, we might ask for more information or that sort of thing, but in the end it’s sort of, you log that in your system, however, you’re tracking those things, and then you say thanks, and that’s kind of the end of it. Now I do differentiate a bit between someone has a problem like something happened and I lost some data or I’m locked out or something like that, that we take as a more critical happily we haven’t had a ton of those uses, but we have had some. For example, we created safe mode precisely in response to the crash loop problem, which is that ends up locking you out of your data and we dealt with some pretty frustrated and recently Irate customers as a result of that and so we’re building. And these safeguards to try to handle that situation a little bit, which of course is different from, hey, there’s this bug and it’s really annoying me that every time I do this, this panel pops up in the wrong way and you know, we’ll try to fix it as soon as we can, but we don’t see it necessarily as a critical blocker. It’s an annoyance. We try to have bug hunting days or weeks where we crank through as many of them as we can. 00:53:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and on the feature requests and product suggestions front, I’ve had pretty good results with just taking the approach of being honest and transparent. Like someone writes in and says, can you add infinity pen colors, and we say, yeah, well, you know, we’re probably actually not gonna do that, at least in the short term, but my experience has been that you can use it as an opportunity to like message test or do some lightweight product management. So someone will write in and say, you know, I love the boards, but I wish there was a way to just kind of put a bunch of stuff together in a pile or a box or something. And they often don’t even know exactly what they want. They’re just trying to describe an issue that they have. And I might take the opportunity to do some lightweight product testing and say, oh, yeah, that’s interesting. We’re actually thinking about doing collections and they’re gonna have these properties and this is roughly how it would work and would that solve your problem. And it might say, oh, not really, because of XYZ or like, oh that sounds great actually. When’s it gonna be ready? Well, not yet, but you know, keep an eye out. And you do that enough over the course of weeks and months, and you build up a little reserve of customer knowledge and product testing. And I think customers appreciate that. It makes it feel more human and that they’re actually being listened to, because if you just reply and say your request has been noted, that sounds suspiciously like you just put it directly into the shredder. Whereas if you actually engage with them, ther