Podcast appearances and mentions of jeremy what

About Patrick StrzelecPatrick Strzelec is a fullstack developer with a focus on building GraphQL gateways and serverless microservices. He is currently working as a technical lead at NorthOne making banking effortless for small businesses.LinkedIn: Patrick StrzelecNorthOne Careers: www.northone.com/about/careersWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8W6lRc03QNU  This episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo. TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Patrick Strzelec. Hey, Patrick, thanks for joining me.Patrick: Hey, thanks for having me.Jeremy: You are a lead developer at NorthOne. I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and what NorthOne does.Patrick: Yeah, totally. I'm a lead developer here at NorthOne, I've been focusing on building out our GraphQL gateway here, as well as some of our serverless microservices. What NorthOne does, we are a banking experience for small businesses. Effectively, we are a deposit account, with many integrations that act almost like an operating system for small businesses. Basically, we choose the best partners we can to do things like check deposits, just your regular transactions you would do, as well as any insights, and the use cases will grow. I'd like to call us a very tailored banking experience for small businesses.Jeremy: Very nice. The thing that is fascinating, I think about this, is that you have just completely embraced serverless, right?Patrick: Yeah, totally. We started off early on with this vision of being fully event driven, and we started off with a monolith, like a Python Django big monolith, and we've been experimenting with serverless all the way through, and somewhere along the journey, we decided this is the tool for us, and it just totally made sense on the business side, on the tech side. It's been absolutely great.Jeremy: Let's talk about that because this is one of those things where I think you get a business and a business that's a banking platform. You're handling some serious transactions here. You've got a lot of transactions that are going through, and you've totally embraced this. I'd love to have you take the listeners through why you thought it was a good idea, what were the business cases for it? Then we can talk a little bit about the adoption process, and then I know there's a whole bunch of stuff that you did with event driven stuff, which is absolutely fascinating.Then we could probably follow up with maybe a couple of challenges, and some of the issues you face. Why don't we start there. Let's start, like who in your organization, because I am always fascinated to know if somebody in your organization says, “Hey we absolutely need to do serverless," and just starts beating that drum. What was that business and technical case that made your organization swallow that pill?Patrick: Yeah, totally. I think just at a high level we're a user experience company, we want to make sure we offer small businesses the best banking experience possible. We don't want to spend a lot of time on operations, and trying to, and also reliability is incredibly important. If we can offload that burden and move faster, that's what we need to do. When we're talking about who's beating that drum, I would say our VP, Blake, really early on, seemed to see serverless as this amazing fit. I joined about three years ago today, so I guess this is my anniversary at the company. We were just deciding what to build. At the time there was a lot of architecture diagrams, and Blake hypothesized that serverless was a great fit.We had a lot of versions of the world, some with Apache Kafka, and a bunch of microservices going through there. There's other versions with serverless in the mix, and some of the tooling around that, and this other hypothesis that maybe we want GraphQL gateway in the middle of there. It was one of those things that we wanted to test our hypothesis as we go. That ties into this innovation velocity that serverless allows for. It's very cheap to put a new piece of infrastructure up in serverless. Just the other day we wanted to test Kinesis for an event streaming use case, and that was just a half an hour to set up that config, and you could put it live in production and test it out, which is completely awesome.I think that innovation velocity was the hypothesis. We could just try things out really quickly. They don't cost much at all. You only pay for what you use for the most part. We were able to try that out, and as well as reliability. AWS really does a good job of making sure everything's available all the time. Something that maybe a young startup isn't ready to take on. When I joined the company, Blake proposed, “Okay, let's try out GraphQL as a gateway, as a concept. Build me a prototype." In that prototype, there was a really good opportunity to try serverless. They just ... Apollo server launched the serverless package, that was just super easy to deploy.It was a complete no-brainer. We tried it out, we built the case. We just started with this GraphQL gateway running on serverless. AWS Lambda. It's funny because at first, it's like, we're just trying to sell them development. Nobody's going to be hitting our services. It was still a year out from when we were going into production. Once we went into prod, this Lambda's hot all the time, which is interesting. I think the cost case breaks down there because if you're running this thing, think forever, but it was this GraphQL server in front of our Python Django monolift, with this vision of event driven microservices, which has fit well for banking. If you just think about the banking world, everything is pretty much eventually consistent.Just, that's the way the systems are designed. You send out a transaction, it doesn't settle for a while. We were always going to do event driven, but when you're starting out with a team of three developers, you're not going to build this whole microservices environment and everything. We started with that monolith with the GraphQL gateway in front, which scaled pretty nicely, because we were able to sort of, even today we have the same GraphQL gateway. We just changed the services backing it, which was really sweet. The adoption process was like, let's try it out. We tried it out with GraphQL first, and then as we were heading into launch, we had this monolith that we needed to manage. I mean, manually managing AWS resources, it's easier than back in the day when you're managing your own virtual machines and stuff, but it's still not great.We didn't have a lot of time, and there was a lot of last-minute changes we needed to make. A big refactor to our scheduling transactions functions happened right before launch. That was an amazing serverless use case. And there's our second one, where we're like, “Okay, we need to get this live really quickly." We created this work performance pattern really quickly as a test with serverless, and it worked beautifully. We also had another use case come up, which was just a simple phone scheduling service. We just wrapped an API, and just exposed some endpoints, but it was just a lot easier to do with serverless. Just threw it off to two developers, figure out how you do it, and it was ready to be live. And then ...Jeremy: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I want to get to this point, because you're talking about standing up infrastructure, using infrastructure as code, or the tools you're using. How many developers were working on this thing?Patrick: How many, I think at the time, maybe four developers on backend functionality before launch, when we were just starting out.Jeremy: But you're building a banking platform here, so this is pretty sophisticated. I can imagine another business case for serverless is just the sense that we don't have to hire an operations team.Patrick: Yeah, exactly. We were well through launching it. I think it would have been a couple of months where we were live, or where we hired our first dev ops engineer. Which is incredible. Our VP took a lot of that too, I'm sure he had his hands a little more dirty than he did like early on. But it was just amazing. We were able to manage all that infrastructure, and scale was never a concern. In the early stages, maybe it shouldn't be just yet, but it was just really, really easy.Jeremy: Now you started with four, and I think, what are you now? Somewhere around 25 developers? Somewhere in that space now?Patrick: About 25 developers now, we're growing really fast. We doubled this year during COVID, which is just crazy to think about, and somehow have been scaling somewhat smoothly at least, in terms of just being able to output as a dev team promote. We'll probably double again this year. This is maybe where I shamelessly plug that we're hiring, and we always are, and you could visit northone.com and just check out the careers page, or just hit me up for a warm intro. It's been crazy, and that's one of the things that serverless has helped with us too. We haven't had this scaling bottleneck, which is an operations team. We don't need to hire X operations people for a certain number of developers.Onboarding has been easier. There was one example of during a major project, we hired a developer. He was new to serverless, but just very experienced developer, and he had a production-ready serverless service ready in a month, which was just an insane ramp-up time. I haven't seen that very often. He didn't have to talk to any of our operation staff, and we'd already used serverless long enough that we had all of our presets and boilerplates ready, and permissions locked down, so it was just super easy. It's super empowering just for him to be able to just play around with the different services. Because we hit that point where we've invested enough that every developer when they opened a branch, that branch deploys its own stage, which has all of the services, AWS infrastructure deployed.You might have a PR open that launches an instance of Kinesis, and five SQS queues, and 10 Lambdas, and a bunch of other things, and then tear down almost immediately, and the cost isn't something we really worry about. The innovation velocity there has been really, really good. Just being able to try things out. If you're thinking about something like Kinesis, where it's like a Kafka, that's my understanding, and if you think about the organizational buy-in you need for something like Kafka, because you need to support it, come up with opinions, and all this other stuff, you'll spend weeks trying it out, but for one of our developers, it's like this seems great.We're streaming events, we want this to be real-time. Let's just try it out. This was for our analytics use case, and it's live in production now. It seems to be doing the thing, and we're testing out that use case, and there isn't that roadblock. We could always switch off to a different design if you want. The experimentation piece there has been awesome. We've changed, during major projects we've changed the way we've thought about our resources a few times, and in the end it works out, and often it is about resiliency. It's just jamming queues into places we didn't think about in the first place, but that's been awesome.Jeremy: I'm curious with that, though, with 25 developers ... Kinesis for the most part works pretty well, but you do have to watch those iterator ages, and make sure that they're not backing up, or that you're losing events. If they get flooded or whatever, and also sticking queues everywhere, sounds like a really good idea, and I'm a big fan of that, but it also, that means there's a lot of queues you have to manage, and watch, and set alarms and all that kind of stuff. Then you also talked about a pretty, what sounds like a pretty great CI/CD process to spin up new branches and things like that. There's a lot of dev ops-y ops work that is still there. How are you handling that now? Do you have dedicated ops people, or do you just have your developers looking after that piece of it?Patrick: I would say we have a very spirited group of developers who are inspired. We do a lot of our code-sharing via internal packages. A few of our developers just figured out some of our patterns that we need, whether it's like CI, or how we structure our events stores, or how we do our Q subscriptions. We manage these internal packages. This won't scale well, by the way. This is just us being inspired and trying to reduce some of this burden. It is interesting, I've listened to this podcast and a few others, and this idea of infrastructure as code being part of every developer's toolbox, it's starting to really resonate with our team.In our migration, or our swift shift to full, I'd say doing serverless properly, we've learned to really think in it. Think in terms of infrastructure in our creating solutions. Not saying we're doing serverless the right way now, but we certainly did it the wrong way in the past, where we would spin up a bunch of API gateways that would talk to each other. A lot of REST calls going around the spider web of communication. Also, I'll call these monster Lambdas, that have a whole procedure list that they need to get through, and a lot of points of failure. When we were thinking about the way we're going to do Lambda now, we try to keep one Lambda doing one thing, and then there's pieces of infrastructure stitching that together. EventBridge between domain boundaries, SQS for commands where we can, instead of using API gateway. I think that transitions pretty well into our big break. I'm talking about this as our migration to serverless. I want to talk more about that.Jeremy: Before we jump into that, I just want to ask this question about, because again, I call those fat, some people call them fat Lambdas, I call them Lambda lifts. I think there's Lambda lifts, then fat Lambdas, then your single-purpose functions. It's interesting, again, moving towards that direction, and I think it's super important that just admitting that you're like, we were definitely doing this wrong. Because I think so many companies find that adopting serverless is very much so an evolution, and it's a learning thing where the teams have to figure out what works for them, and in some cases discovering best practices on your own. I think that you've gone through that process, I think is great, so definitely kudos to you for that.Before we get into that adoption and the migration or the evolution process that you went through to get to where you are now, one other business or technical case for serverless, especially with something as complex as banking, I think I still don't understand why I can't transfer personal money or money from my personal TD Bank account to my wife's local checking account, why that's so hard to do. But, it seems like there's a lot of steps. Steps that have to work. You can't get halfway through five steps in some transaction, and then be like, oops we can't go any further. You get to roll that back and things like that. I would imagine orchestration is a huge piece of this as well.Patrick: Yeah, 100%. The banking lends itself really well to these workflows, I'll call them. If you're thinking about even just the start of any banking process, there's this whole application process where you put in all your personal information, you send off a request to your bank, and then now there's this whole waterfall of things that needs to happen. All kinds of checks and making sure people aren't on any fraud lists, or money laundering lists, or even just getting a second dive from our compliance department. There's a lot of steps there, and even just keeping our own systems in sync, with our off-provider and other places. We definitely lean on using step functions a lot. I think they work really, really well for our use case. Just the visual, being able to see this is where a customer is in their onboarding journey, is very, very powerful.Being able to restart at any point of their, or even just giving our compliance team a view into that process, or even adding a pause portion. I think that's one of the biggest wins there, is that we could process somebody through any one of our pipelines, and we may need a human eye there at least for this point in time. That's one of the interesting things about the banking industry is. There are still manual processes behind the scenes, and there are, I find this term funny, but there are wire rooms in banks where there are people reviewing things and all that. There are a lot of workflows that just lend themselves well to step functions. That pausing capability and being able to return later with a response, so that allows you to build other internal applications for your compliance teams and other teams, or just behind the scenes calls back, and says, "Okay, resume this waterfall."I think that was the visualization, especially in an events world when you're talking about like sagas, I guess, we're talking about distributed transactions here in a way, where there's a lot of things happening, and a common pattern now is the saga pattern. You probably don't want to be doing two-phase commits and all this other stuff, but when we're looking at sagas, it's the orchestration you could do or the choreography. Choreography gets very messy because there's a lot of simplistic behavior. I'm a service and I know what I need to do when these events come through, and I know which compensating events I need to dump, and all this other stuff. But now there's a very limited view.If a developer is trying to gain context in a certain domain, and understand the chain of events, although you are decoupled, there's still this extra coupling now, having to understand what's going on in your system, and being able to share it with external stakeholders. Using step functions, that's the I guess the serverless way of doing orchestration. Just being able to share that view. We had this process where we needed to move a lot of accounts to, or a lot of user data to a different system. We were able to just use an orchestrator there as well, just to keep an eye on everything that's going on.We might be paused in migrating, but let's say we're moving over contacts, a transaction list, and one other thing, you could visualize which one of those are in the red, and which one we need to come in and fix, and also share that progress with external stakeholders. Also, it makes for fun launch parties I'd say. It's kind of funny because when developers do their job, you press a button, and everything launches, and there's not really anything to share or show.Jeremy: There's no balloons or anything like that.Patrick: Yeah. But it was kind of cool to look at these like, the customer is going through this branch of the logic. I know it's all green. Then I think one of the coolest things was just the retry ability as well. When somebody does fail, or when one of these workflows fails, you could see exactly which step, you can see the logs, and all that. I think one of the challenges we ran into there though, was because we are working in the banking space, we're dealing with sensitive data. Something I almost wish AWS solved out of the box, would be being able to obfuscate some of that data. Maybe you can't, I'm not sure, but we had to think of patterns for tokenization for instance.Stripe does this a lot where certain parts of their platform, you just get it, you put in personal information, you get back a token, and you use that reference everywhere. We do tokenization, as well as we limit the amount of details flowing through steps in our orchestrators. We'll use an event store with identifiers flowing through, and we'll be doing reads back to that event store in between steps, to do what we need to do. You lose some of that debug-ability, you can't see exactly what information is flowing through, but we need to keep user data safe.Jeremy: Because it's the use case for it. I think that you mentioned a good point about orchestration versus choreography, and I'm a big fan of choreography when it makes sense. But I think one of the hardest lessons you learn when you start building distributed systems is knowing when to use choreography, and knowing when to use orchestration. Certainly in banking, orchestration is super important. Again, with those saga patterns built-in, that's the kind of thing where you can get to a point in the process and you don't even need to do automated rollbacks. You can get to a failure state, and then from there, that can be a pause, and then you can essentially kick off the unwinding of those things and do some of that.I love that idea that the token pattern and using just rehydrating certain steps where you need to. I think that makes a ton of sense. All right. Let's move on to the adoption and the migration process, because I know this is something that really excites you and it should because it is cool. I always know, as you're building out applications and you start to add more capabilities and more functionality and start really embracing serverless as a methodology, then it can get really exciting. Let's take a step back. You had a champion in your organization that was beating the drum like, "Let's try this. This is going to make a lot of sense." You build an Apollo Lambda or a Lambda running Apollo server on it, and you are using that as a strangler pattern, routing all your stuff through now to your backend. What happens next?Patrick: I would say when we needed to build new features, developers just gravitated towards using serverless, it was just easier. We were using TypeScript instead of Python, which we just tend to like as an organization, so it's just easier to hop into TypeScript land, but I think it was just easier to get something live. Now we had all these Lambdas popping up, and doing their job, but I think the problem that happened was we weren't using them properly. Also, there was a lot of difference between each of our serverless setups. We would learn each time and we'd be like, okay, we'll use this parser function here to simplify some of it, because it is very bare-bones if you're just pulling the Serverless Framework, and it took a little ...Every service looked very different, I would say. Also, we never really took the time to sit back and say, “Okay, how do we think about this? How do we use what serverless gives us to enable us, instead of it just being an easy thing to spin up?" I think that's where it started. It was just easy to start. But we didn't embrace it fully. I remember having a conversation at some point with our VP being like, “Hey, how about we just put Express into one of our Lambdas, and we create this," now I know it's a Lambda lift. I was like, it was just easier. Everybody knows how to use Express, why don't we just do this? Why are we writing our own parsers for all these things? We have 10 versions of a make response helper function that was copy-pasted between repos, and we didn't really have a good pattern for sharing that code yet in private packages.We realized that we liked serverless, but we realized we needed to do it better. We started with having a serverless chapter reading between some of our team members, and we made some moves there. We created a shared boilerplate at some point, so it reduced some of the differences you'd see between some of the repositories, but we needed a step-change difference in our thinking, when I look back, and we got lucky that opportunity came up. At this point, we probably had another six Lambda services, maybe more actually. I want to say around, we'd probably have around 15 services at this point, without a governing body around patterns.At this time, we had this interesting opportunity where we found out we're going to be re-platforming. A big announcement we just made last month was that we moved on to a new bank partner called Bancorp. The bank partner that supports Chime, and they're like, I'll call them an engine boost. We put in a much larger, more efficient engine for our small businesses. If you just look at the capabilities they provide, they're just absolutely amazing. It's what we need to build forward. Their events API is amazing as well as just their base banking capabilities, the unit economics they can offer, the times on there, things were just better. We found out we're doing an engine swap. The people on the business side on our company trusted our technical team to do what we needed to do.Obviously, we need to put together a case, but they trusted us to choose our technology, which was awesome. I think we just had a really good track record of delivering, so we had free reign to decide what do we do. But the timeline was tight, so what we decided to do, and this was COVID times too, was a few of our developers got COVID tested, and we rented a house and we did a bubble situation. How in the NHL or MBA you have a bubble. We had a dev bubble.Jeremy: The all-star team.Patrick: The all-star team, yeah. We decided let's sit down, let's figure out what patterns are going to take us forward. How do we make the step-change at the same time as step-change in our technology stack, at the same time as we're swapping out this bank, this engine essentially for the business. In this house, we watched almost every YouTube video you can imagine on event driven and serverless, and I think leading up. I think just knowing that we were going to be doing this, I think all of us independently started prototyping, and watching videos, and reading a lot of your content, and Alex DeBrie and Yan Cui. We all had a lot of ideas already going in.When we all got to this house, we started off with this exercise, an event storming exercise, just popular in the domain-driven design community, where we just threw down our entire business on a wall with sticky notes, and it would have been better to have every business stakeholder there, but luckily we had two people from our product team there as representatives. That's how invested we were in building this outright, that we have products sitting in the room with us to figure it out.We slapped down our entire business on a wall, this took days, and then drew circles around it and iterated on that for a while. Then started looking at what the technology looks like. What are our domain boundaries, and what prototypes do we need to make? For a few weeks there, we were just prototyping. We built out what I'd called baby's first balance. That was the running joke where, how do we get an account opened with a balance, with the transactions minimally, with some new patterns. We really embraced some of this domain-driven-design thinking, as well as just event driven thinking. When we were rethinking architecture, three concepts became very important for us, not entirely new, but important. Item potency was a big one, dealing with distributed transactions was another one of those, as well as the eventual consistency. The eventual consistency portion is kind of funny because we were already doing it a lot.Our transactions wouldn't always settle very quickly. We didn't know about it, but now our whole system becomes eventually consistent typically if you now divide all of your architecture across domains, and decouple everything. We created some early prototypes, we created our own version of an event store, which is, I would just say an opinionated scheme around DynamoDB, where we keep track of revisions, payload, timestamp, all the things you'd want to be able to do event sourcing. That's another thing we decided on. Event sourcing seemed like the right approach for state, for a lot of our use cases. Banking, if you just think about a banking ledger, it is events or an accounting ledger. You're just adding up rows, add, subtract, add, subtract.We created a lot of prototypes for these things. Our events store pattern became basically just a DynamoDB with opinions around the schema, as well as a package of a shared code package with a simple dispatch function. One dispatch function that really looks at enforcing optimistic concurrency, and one that's a little bit more relaxed. Then we also had some reducer functions built into there. That was one of the packages that we created, as well as another prototype around that was how do we create the actual subscriptions to this event store? We landed on SNS to SQS fan-out, and it seems like fan-out first is the serverless way of doing a lot of things. We learned that along the way, and it makes sense. It was one of those things we read from a lot of these blogs and YouTube videos, and it really made sense in production, when all the data is streaming from one place, and then now you just add subscribers all over the place. Just new queues. Fan-out first, highly recommend. We just landed on there by following best practices.Jeremy: Great. You mentioned a bunch of different things in there, which is awesome, but so you get together in this house, you come up with all the events, you do this event storming session, which is always a great exercise. You get a pretty good visualization of how the business is going to run from an event standpoint. Then you start building out this event driven architecture, and you mentioned some packages that you built, we talked about step functions and the orchestration piece of this. Just give me a quick overview of the actual system itself. You said it's backed by DynamoDB, but then you have a bunch of packages that run in between there, and then there's a whole bunch of queues, and then you're using some custom packages. I think I already said that but you're using ... are you using EventBridge in there? What's some of the architecture behind all that?Patrick: Really, really good question. Once we created these domain boundaries, we needed to figure out how do we communicate between domains and within domains. We landed on really differentiating milestone events and domain events. I guess milestone events in other terms might be called integration events, but this idea that these are key business milestones. An account was open, an application was approved or rejected, things that every domain may need to know about. Then within our domains, or domain boundaries, we had these domain events, which might reduce to a milestone event, and we can maintain those contracts in the future and change those up. We needed to think about how do we message all these things across? How do we communicate? We landed on EventBridge for our milestone events. We have one event bus that we talked to all of our, between domain boundaries basically.EventBridge there, and then each of our services now subscribed to that EventBridge, and maintain their own events store. That's backed by DynamoDB. Each of our services have their own data store. It's usually an event stream or a projection database, but it's almost all Dynamo, which is interesting because our old platform used Postgres, and we did have relational data. It was interesting. I was really scared at first, how are we going to maintain relations and things? It became a non-issue. I don't even know why now that I think about it. Just like every service maintains its nice projection through events, and builds its own view of the world, which brings its own problems. We have DynamoDB in there, and then SNS to SQS fan-out. Then when we're talking about packages ...Jeremy: That's Office Streams?Patrick: Exactly, yeah. We're Dynamo streams to SNS, to SQS. Then we use shared code packages to make those subscriptions very easy. If you're looking at doing that SNS to SQS fan-out, or just creating SQS queues, there is a lot of cloud formation boilerplate that we were creating, and we needed to move really quick on this project. We got pretty opinionated quick, and we created our own subscription function that just generates all this cloud formation with naming conventions, which was nice. I think the opinions were good because early on we weren't opinionated enough, I would say. When you look in your AWS dashboard, the read for these aren't prefixed correctly, and there's all this garbage. You're able to have consistent naming throughout, make it really easy to subscribe to an event.We would publish packages to help with certain things. Our events store package was one of those. We also created a Lambda handlers package, which leverages, there's like a Lambda middlewares compose package out there, which is quite nice, and we basically, all the common functionality we're doing a lot of, like parsing a body from S3, or SQS or API gateway. That's just the middleware that we now publish. Validation in and out. We highly recommend the library Zod, we really embrace the TypeScript first object validation. Really, really cool package. We created all these middlewares now. Then subscription packages. We have a lot of shared code in this internal NPM repository that we install across.I think one challenge we had there was, eventually you extracted away too much from the cloud formation, and it's hard for new developers to ... It's easy for them to create events subscriptions, it's hard for them to evolve our serverless thinking because they're so far removed from it. I still think it was the right call in the end. I think this is the next step of the journey, is figuring out how do we share code effectively while not hiding away too much of serverless, especially because it's changing so fast.Jeremy: It's also interesting though that you take that approach to hide some of that complexity, and bake in some of that boilerplate that, someone's mostly didn't have to write themselves anyways. Like you said, they're copying and pasting between services, is not the best way to do it. I tried the whole shared packages thing one time, and it kind of worked. It's just like when you make a small change to that package and you have 14 services, that then you have to update to get the newest version. Sometimes that's a little frustrating. Lambda layers haven't been a huge help with some of that stuff either. But anyways, it's interesting, because again you've mentioned this a number of times about using queues.You did mention resiliency in there, but I want to touch on that point a little bit because that's one of those things too, where I would assume in a banking platform, you do not want to lose events. You don't want to lose things. and so if something breaks, or something gets throttled or whatever, having to go and retry those events, having the alerts in place to know that a queue is backed up or whatever. Then just, I'm thinking ordering issues and things like that. What kinds of issues did you face, and tell me a little bit more about what you've done for reliability?Patrick: Totally. Queues are definitely ... like SQS is a workhorse for our company right now. We use a lot of it. Dropping messages is one of the scariest things, so you're dead-on there. When we were moving to event driven, that was what scared me the most. What if we drop an event? A good example of that is if you're using EventBridge and you're subscribing Lambdas to it, I was under the impression early on that EventBridge retries forever. But I'm pretty sure it'll retry until it invokes twice. I think that's what we landed on.Jeremy: Interesting.Patrick: I think so, and don't quote me on this. That was an example of where drop message could be a problem. We put a queue in front of there, an SQS queue as the subscription there. That way, if there's any failure to deliver there, it's just going to retry all the time for a number of days. At that point we got to think about DLQs, and that's something we're still thinking about. But yeah, I think the reason we've been using queues everywhere is that now queues are in charge of all your retry abilities. Now that we've decomposed these Lambdas into one Lambda lift, into five Lambdas with queues in between, if anything fails in there, it just pops back into the queue, and it'll retry indefinitely. You can drop messages after a few days, and that's something we learned luckily in the prototyping stage, where there are a few places where we use dead letter queues. But one of the issues there as well was ordering. Ordering didn't play too well with ...Jeremy: Not with DLQs. No, it does not, no.Patrick: I think that's one lesson I'd want to share, is that only use ordering when you absolutely need it. We found ways to design some of our architecture where we didn't need ordering. There's places we were using FIFO SQS, which was something that just launched when we were building this thing. When we were thinking about messaging, we're like, "Oh, well we can't use SQS because they don't respect ordering, or it doesn't respect ordering." Then bam, the next day we see this blog article. We got really hyped on that and used FIFO everywhere, and then realized it's unnecessary in most use cases. So when we were going live, we actually changed those FIFO queues into just regular SQS queues in as many places as we can. Then so, in that use case, you could really easily attach a dead letter queue and you don't have to worry about anything, but with FIFO things get really, really gnarly.Ordering is an interesting one. Another place we got burned I think on dead-letter queues, or a tough thing to do with dead letter queues is when you're using our state machines, we needed to limit the concurrency of our state machines is another wishlist item in AWS. I wish there was just at the top of the file, a limit concurrent executions of your state machine. Maybe it exists. Maybe we just didn't learn to use it properly, but we needed to. There's a few patterns out there. I've seen the [INAUDIBLE] pattern where you can use the actual state machine flow to look back at how many concurrent executions you have, and pause. We landed on setting reserved concurrency in a number of Lambdas, and throwing errors. If we've hit the max concurrency and it'll pause that Lambda, but the problem with DLQs there was, these are all errors. They're coming back as errors.We're like, we're fine with them. This is a throttle error. That's fine. But it's hard to distinguish that from a poison message in your queue, so when do you dump those into DLQ? If it's just a throttling thing, I don't think it matters to us. That was another challenge we had. We're still figuring out dead letter queues and alerting. I think for now we just relied on CloudWatch alarms a lot for our alerting, and there's a lot you could do. Even just in the state machines, you can get pretty granular there. I know once certain things fail, and announced to your Slack channel. We use that Slack integration, it's pretty easy. You just go on a Slack channel, there's an email in there, you plop it into the console in AWS, and you have your very early alerting mechanism there.Jeremy: The thing with Elasticsearch ... not Elasticsearch, I'm sorry. I'm totally off-topic here. The thing with EventBridge and Lambda, these are one of those things that, again, they're nuances, but event bridge, as long as it can deliver to the Lambda service, then the Lambda service kicks off and queues it automatically. Then that will retry at a certain number of times. I think you can control that now. But then eventually if that retries multiple times and eventually fails, then that kicks it over to the DLQ or whatever. There's all different ways that it works like that, but that's why I always liked the idea of putting a queue in between there as well, because I felt you just had a little bit more control over exactly what happens.As long as it gets to the queue, then you know you haven't lost the message, or you hope you haven't lost a message. That's super interesting. Let's move on a little bit about the adoption issues. You mentioned a few of these things, obviously issues with concurrency and ordering, and some of that other stuff. What about some of the other challenges you had? You mentioned this idea of writing all these packages, and it pulls devs away from the CloudFormation a little bit. I do like that in that it, I think, accelerates a lot of things, but what are some of the other maybe challenges that you've been having just getting this thing up and running?Patrick: I would say IAM is an interesting one. Because we are in the banking space, we want to be very careful about what access do you give to what machines or developers, I think machines are important too. There've been cases where ... so we do have a separate developer set up with their own permissions, in development's really easy to spin up all your services within reason. But now when we're going into production, there's times where our CI doesn't have the permissions to delete a queue or create a queue, or certain things, and there's a lot of tweaking you have to do there, and you got to do a lot of thinking about your IAM policies as an organization, especially because now every developer's touching infrastructure.That becomes this shared operational overhead that serverless did introduce. We're still figuring that out. Right now we're functioning on least privilege, so it's better to just not be able to deploy than deploy something you shouldn't or read the logs that you shouldn't, and that's where we're starting. But that's something that, it will be a challenge for a little while I think. There's all kinds of interesting things out there. I think temporary IAM permissions is a really cool one. There are times we're in production and we need to view certain logs, or be able to access a certain queue, and there's tooling out there where you can, or at least so I've heard, you can give temporary permissions. You have this queue permission for 30 minutes, and it expires and it's audited, and I think there's some CloudTrail tie-in you could do there. I'm speaking about my wishlist for our next evolution here. I hope my team is listening ...Jeremy: Your team's listening to you.Patrick: ... will be inspired as well.Jeremy: What about ... because this is something too that I always found to be a challenge, especially when you start having multiple services, and you've talked about these domain events, but then milestone events. You've got different services that need to communicate across services, or across domains, and realize certain things like that. Service discovery in and of itself, and which queue are we mapping to, or which service am I talking to, and which version of the service am I talking to? Things like that. How have you been dealing with that stuff?Patrick: Not well, I would say. Very, very ad hoc. I think like right now, at least we have tight communication between the teams, so we roughly know which service we need to talk to, and we output our URLs in the cloud formation output, so at least you could reference the URLs across services, a little easier. Really, a GraphQL is one of the only service that really talks to a lot of our API gateways. At least there's less of that, knowing which endpoint to hit. Most of our services will read into EventBridge, and then within services, a lot of that's abstracted away, like the queue subscription's a little easier. Service discovery is a bit of a nightmare.Once our services grow, it'll be, I don't know. It'll be a huge challenge to understand. Even which services are using older versions of Node, for instance. I saw that AWS is now deprecating version 10 and we'll have to take a look internally, are we using version 10 anywhere, and how do we make sure that's fine, or even things like just knowing which services now have vulnerabilities in their NPM packages because we're using Node. That's another thing. I don't even know if that falls in service discovery, but it's an overhead of ...Jeremy: It's a service management too. It's a lot there. That actually made me, it brings me to this idea of observability too. You mentioned doing some CloudWatch alerts and some of that stuff, but what about using some observability tool or tracing like x-ray, and things like that? Have you been implementing any of that, and if you have, have you had any success and or problems with it?Patrick: I wish we had a better view of some of the observability tools. I think we were just building so quickly that we never really invested the time into trying them out. We did use X-Ray, so we rolled our own tooling internally to at least do what we know. X-Ray was one of those, but the problem with X-Ray is, we do subscribe all of our services, but X-Ray isn't implemented everywhere internally in AWS, so we lose our trail somewhere in that Dynamo stream to SNS, or SQS. It's not a full trace. Also, just digesting that huge graph of information is just very difficult. I don't use it often, I think it's a really cool graphic to show, “Hey, look, how many services are running, and it's going so fast."It's a really cool thing to look at, but it hasn't been very useful. I think our most useful tool for debugging and observability has been just our logging. We created a JSON logger package, so we get up JSON logs and we can actually filter off of different properties, and we ship those to Elasticsearch. Now you can have a view of all of the functions within a given domain at any point in time. You could really see the story. Because I think early on when we were opening up CloudWatch and you'd have like 10 tabs, and you're trying to understand this flow of information, it was very difficult.We also implemented our own trace ID pattern, and I think we just followed a Lumigo article where we introduced some properties, and in each of our Lambdas at a higher level, and one of our middlewares, and we were able to trace through. It's not ideal. Observability is something that we'll probably have to work on next. It's been tolerable for now, but I can't see the scaling that long.Jeremy: That's the other thing too, is even the shared package issue. It's like when you have an observability tool, they'll just install a layer or something, where you don't necessarily have to worry about updating your own tool. I always find if you are embracing serverless and you want to get rid of all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, observability tools, there's a lot of really good ones out there that are doing some great stuff, and they're specializing in it. It might be worth letting someone else handle that for you than trying to do it yourself internally.Patrick: Yeah, 100%. Do you have any that you've used that are particularly good? I know you work with serverless so-Jeremy: I played around with all of them, because I love this stuff, so it's always fun, but I mean, obviously Lumigo and Epsagon, and Thundra, and New Relic. They're all great. They all do things slightly differently, but they all follow a similar implementation pattern so that it's very easy to install them. We can talk more about some recommendations. I think it's just one of those things where in a modern application not having that insight is really hard. It can be really hard to debug stuff. If you look at some of the tools that AWS offers, I think they're there, it's just, they are maybe a little harder to implement, and not quite as refined and targeted as some of the observability tools. But still, you got to get there. Again, that's why I keep saying it's an evolution, it's a process. Maybe one time you get burned, and you're like, we really needed to have observability, then that's when it becomes more of a priority when you're moving fast like you are.Patrick: Yeah, 100%. I think there's got to be a priority earlier than later. I think I'll do some reading now that you've dropped some of these options. I have seen them floating around, but it's one of those things that when it's too late, it's too late.Jeremy: It's never too late to add observability though, so it should. Actually, a lot of them now, again, it makes it really, really easy. So I'm not trying to pitch any particular company, but take a look at some of them, because they are really great. Just one other challenge that I also find a lot of people run into, especially with serverless because there's all these artificial account limits in place. Even the number of queues you can create, and the number of concurrent Lambda functions in a particular region, and stuff like that. Have you run into any of those account limit issues?Patrick: Yeah. I could give you the easiest way to run into an account on that issue, and that is replay your entire EventBridge archive to every subscriber, and you will find a bottleneck somewhere. That's something ...Jeremy: Somewhere it'll fall over? Nice.Patrick: 100%. It's a good way to do some quick check and development to see where you might need to buffer something, but we have run into that. I think the solution there, and a lot of places was just really playing with concurrency where we needed to, and being thoughtful about where is their main concurrency in places that we absolutely needed to stay functioning. I think the challenge there is that eats into your total account concurrency, which was an interesting learning there. Definitely playing around there, and just being thoughtful about where you are replaying. A couple of things. We use replays a lot. Because we are using these milestone events between service boundaries, now when you launch a new service, you want to replay that whole history all the way through.We've done a lot of replaying, and that was one of the really cool things about EventBridge. It just was so easy. You just set up an archive, and it'll record everything coming through, and then you just press a button in the console, and it'll replay all of them. That was really awesome. But just being very mindful of where you're replaying to. If you replay to all of your subscriptions, you'll hit Lambda concurrency limits real quick. Even just like another case, early on we needed to replace ... we have our own domain events store. We want to replace some of those events, and those are coming off the Dynamo stream, so we were using dynamo to kick those to a stream, to SNS, and fan-out to all of our SQS queues. But there would only be one or two queues you actually needed to subtract to those events, so we created an internal utility just to dump those events directly into the SQS queue we needed. I think it's just about not being wasteful with your resources, because they are cheap. Sure.Jeremy: But if you use them, they start to cost money.Patrick: Yeah. They start to cost some money as well as they could lock down, they can lock you out of other functionality. If you hit your Lambda limits, now our API gateway is tapped.Jeremy: That's a good point.Patrick: You could take down your whole system if you just aren't mindful about those limits, and now you could call up AWS in a panic and be like, “Hey, can you update our limits?" Luckily we haven't had to do that yet, but it's definitely something in your back pocket if you need it, if you can make the case to AWS, that maybe you do need bigger limits than the default. I think just not being wasteful, being mindful of where you're replaying. I think another interesting thing there is dealing with partners too. It's really easy to scale in the Lambda world, but not every partner could handle that volume really quickly. If you're not buffering any event coming through EventBridge to your new service that hits a partner every time, you're going to hit their API rate limit really quickly, because they're just going to just go right through it.You might be doing thousands of API calls when you're instantiating a new service. That's one of those interesting things that we have to deal with, and particularly in our orchestrators, because they are talking to different partners, that's why we need to really make sure we could limit the concurrent executions of the state machines themselves. In a way, some of our architecture is too fast to scale.Jeremy: It's too good.Patrick: You still have to consider downstream. That, and even just, if you are using relational databases or anything else in your system, now you have to worry about connection limits and ...Jeremy: I have a whole talk I gave on that.Patrick: ... spikes in traffic.Jeremy: Yes, absolutely.Patrick: Really cool.Jeremy: I know all about it. Any final advice for companies like you that are trying to bite off a piece of the serverless apple, I guess, That's really bad. Anyways, any advice for people looking to get into this?Patrick: Yeah, totally. I would say start small. I think we were wise to just try it out. It might not land with your development team. If you don't really buy in, it's one of those things that could just end up unnecessarily messy, so start small, see if you like it in-shop, and then reevaluate, once you hit a certain point. That, and I would say shared boilerplate packages sooner than later. I know shared code is a problem, but it is nice to have an un-opinionated starter pack, that you're at least not doing anything really crazy. Even just things like having opinions around logging. In our industry, it's really important that you're not logging sensitive details.For us doing things like wrapping our HTTP clients to make sure we're not logging sensitive details, or having short Lambda packages that make sure out-of-the-box you're opinionated about not doing something terribly awful. I would say those two things. Start small and a boiler package, and maybe the third thing is just pay attention to the code smell of a growing Lambda. If you are doing three API calls in one Lambda, chances are you could probably break that up, and think about it in a more resilient way. If any one of those pieces fail, now you could have retry ability in each one of those. Those are the three things I would say. I could probably talk forever about the rest of our journey.Jeremy: I think that was great advice, and I love hearing about how companies are going through this process, what that process looks like, and I hope, I hope, I hope that companies listen to this and can skip a lot of these mistakes. I don't want to call them all mistakes, and I think it's just evolution. The stuff that you've done, we've all made them, we've all gone through that process, and the more we can solidify these practices and stuff like that, I think that more companies will benefit from hearing stories like these. Thank you very much for sharing that. Again, thank you so much for spending the time to do this and sharing all of this knowledge, and this journey that you've been on, and are continuing to be on. It would great to continue to get updates from you. If people want to contact you, I know you're not on Twitter, but what's the best way to reach out to you?Patrick: I almost wish I had a Twitter. It's the developer thing to have, so maybe in the future. Just on LinkedIn would be great. LinkedIn would be great, as well as if anybody's interested in working with our team, and just figuring out how to take serverless to the next level, just hit me up on LinkedIn or look at our careers page at northone.com, and I could give you a warm intro.Jeremy: That's great. Just your last name is spelled S-T-R-Z-E-L-E-C. How do you say that again? Say it in Polish, because I know I said it wrong in the beginning.Patrick: I guess for most people it would just be Strzelec, but if there are any Slavs in the audience, it's "Strzelec." Very intense four consonants last name.Jeremy: That is a lot of consonants. Anyways again, Patrick, thanks again. This was great.Patrick: Yeah, thank you so much, Jeremy. This has been awesome.

About Patrick McFadinPatrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of Apache Cassandra successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.Twitter: @PatrickMcFadinLinkedIn: Patrick McFadin DataStax website: datastax.comK8ssandra: k8ssandra.ioStargate: stargate.ioDataStax Astra: Cassandra-as-a-ServiceWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-BcIL3VlrjEThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Fauna.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Patrick McFadin. Hey Patrick, thanks for joining me.Patrick: Hi Jeremy. How are you doing today?Jeremy: I am doing really well. So you are the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what DataStax is all about.Patrick: Sure. Well, I mean mostly I'm just a nerd with a cool job. I get to talk about technology a lot and work with technology. So DataStax, we're a company that was founded around Apache Cassandra, just supporting and making it awesome. And that's really where I came to the company. I've been working with Apache Cassandra for about 10 years now. I've been a part of the project as a contributor.But yeah, I mean mostly data infrastructure has been my life for most of my career. I did this in the dotcom era, back when it was really crazy when we had dozens of users. And when that washed out, I'm like, oh, then real scale started and during that period of time I worked a lot in just trying to scale infrastructure. It seems like that's been what I've been doing for like 30 years it seems like, 20 years, 20 years, I'm not that old. Yeah. But yeah, right now, I spend a lot of my time just working with developers on what's next in Kubernetes and I'm part of CNCF now, so yeah. I just can't to seem to stay in one place.Jeremy: Well, so I'm super interested in the work that DataStax is doing because I have had the pleasure/misfortune of managing a Cassandra ring for a start-up that I was at. And it was a very painful process, but once it was set up and it was running, it wasn't too, too bad. I mean, we always had some issues here and there, but this idea of taking a really good database, because Cassandra's great, it's an excellent data store, but managing it is a nightmare and finding people who can manage it is sort of a nightmare, and all that kind of stuff. And so this idea of taking these services and DataStax isn't the only one to do this, but to take these open-source services and turn them into these hosted solutions is pretty fantastic. So can you tell me a little bit more, though? What this shift is about? This moving away from hosting your own databases to using databases as a service?Patrick: Yeah. Well, you touched on something important. You want to take that power, I mean Cassandra was a database that was built in the scale world. It was built to solve a problem, but it was also built by engineers who really loved distributed computing, like myself, and it's funny you say like, "Oh, once I got it running, it was great," well, that's kind of the experience with most distributed databases, is it's hard to reason around having, "Oh, I have 100 mouths to feed now. And if one of them goes nuts, then I have to figure it out."But it's the power, that power, it's like stealing fire from the gods, right? It's like, "Oh, we could take the technology that Netflix and Apple and Facebook use and use it in our own stuff." But you got to pay the price, the gods demand their payment. And that's something that we've been really trying to tackle at DataStax for a couple of years now, actually three, which is how ... Because the era of running your own database is coming to an end. You should not run your own database. And my philosophy as a technologist is that proper, really important technology like your data layer should just fade into the background and it's just something you use, it's not something you have to reason through very much.There's lots of technology that's like that today. How many times have you ... When was the last time you managed your own memory in your code?Jeremy: Right. Right. Good point. I know.Patrick: Thank god, huh?Jeremy: Exactly.Patrick: Whew.Jeremy: But I think that you make a really good point, because you do have these larger companies like Facebook or whatever that are using these technologies and you mentioned data layers, which I don't think I've worked for a single company, I don't think I actually ... I founded a start-up one time and we built a data layer as well, because it's like, the complexity of understanding the transaction models and the routing, especially if you're doing things like sharding and all kinds of crazy stuff like that, hiding that complexity from your developers so that they can just say, "I need to get this piece of information," or, "I need to set this piece of information," is really powerful.But then you get stuck with these data layers that are bespoke and they're generally fragile and things like that, so how is that you can take data as a service and maybe get rid of some of that, I don't know, some of that liability I guess?Patrick: Yeah. It's funny because you were talking about sharding and things like that. These are things that we force on developers to reason through, and it's just cognitive load. I have an app to get out, and I have some business desire to get this application online, the last thing I need to worry about is my sharding algorithm. Jeremy, friends don't let friends shard.Jeremy: Right. That's right. That's a good point.Patrick: But yeah, I mean I think we actually have all the parts that we need and it's just about, this is closer than you think. Look at where we've already started going, and that is with APIs, using REST. Now GraphQL, which I think is deserving its hotness, is starting to bring together some things that are really important for this kind of world we want to live in. GraphQL is uni-fettering data and collecting and actual queries, it's a QL, and why they call it Graph, I have no idea. But it gives you this ability to have this more abstract layer.I think GraphQL will, here's a prediction is that it's going to be like the SQL of working with data services on the internet and for cloud-native applications. And so what does that mean? Well, that means I just have to know, well, I need some data and I don't really care what's underneath it. I don't care if I have this field indexed or anything like that. And that's pretty exciting to me because then we're writing apps at that point.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And actually, that's one of the things I really like about GraphQL too is just this idea that it's almost like a universal data access layer in a sense because it does, you still have to know it, you have to know what you're requesting if you're an end developer, but it makes it easier to request the things that you need and have those mutations set and have some of those other things standardized across the company, but in a common format because isn't that another problem? Where it's like, I'm working with company A and I move to company B maybe and now company B is using a different technology and a different bespoke data layer and some of these other things.So, I think data as a service for one, maybe with GraphQL in front of it is a great way to have this alignment across companies, or I guess, just makes it easier for developers to switch and start developing right away when they move into a new company.Patrick: Yeah, and this is a concept I've been trying to push pretty hard and it's driven by some conversations I've had with some friends that they're engineering leaders and they have this common desire. We want to have a zero day dev, which is the first day that someone starts, they should be producing production code. And I don't think that's crazy talk, we can do this, but there's a lot of things that are in front of it. And the database is one of them. I think that's one of the first things you do when you show up at company X is like, "Okay, what database are you using? What flavor of SQL or GRPC or CQL, Cassandra query language? What's the data model? Quick, where's that big diagram on the wall with my ERD? I got to go look at that for a while."Jeremy: How poorly did you structure your Git repositories? Yeah.Patrick: Yeah, exactly. It's like all these things. And no, I would love to see a world where the most troublesome part of your first day is figuring out where the coffee and the bathroom are, and then the rest of it is just total, "Hey, I can do this. This is what I get paid to do."Jeremy: Right. Yeah. So that idea of zero day developer, I love that idea and I know other companies are trying to do that, but what enables that? Is it getting the idea of having to understand something bespoke? Is it getting that off of the table? Or not having to deal with the low-level database aspect of things? I mean because APIs, I had this conversation with Rob Sutter, actually, a couple weeks ago. And we were talking about the API economy and how everything is moving towards APIs. And even data, it was around data as well.So, is that the interface, you think, of the future that just says, "Look, trying to interface directly with a database or trying to work with some other layer of abstraction just doesn't make sense, let's just go straight from code right to the data, with a very simple API interface?"Patrick: Yeah, I think so. And it's this idea of data services because if you think of if you're doing React, or something like a front-end code, I don't want to have a driver. Drivers are a total impediment. It's like, driver hell can be difficult at large organizations, getting the matching right. Oh, we're using this database so you have to use this driver. And if you don't, you are now rejected at the gate. So it's using HTTP protocols, but it's also things like when you're using React or Angular, View, whatever you're using on the front-end, you have direct access.But most times what you're needing is just a collection or an object. And so just do a get, "I need this thing right now. I'm doing a pick list. I need your collection." I don't need a complicated setup and spend the first three days figuring out which driver I'm using and make sure my Gradle file is just perfect. Yeah. So, I think that's it.Jeremy: Yeah. No, I'd be curious how you feel about ORMs, or O-R-Ms, certainly for relational databases, I know a lot of people love them. I can't stand them. I think it adds a layer of abstraction and just more complexity where I just want access to the database. I want to write the query myself, and as soon as you start adding in all this extra stuff on top of it to try to make it easier, I don't know, it just seems to mess it up for me.Patrick: All right. So yeah, I think we have an accord. I am really not a fan of ORMs at all. And I mean this goes back to Hibernate. Everyone's like, "Oh, Hibernate's going to be the end of databases." No, it's not. Oh yeah, it was the end of the database at the other side because it would create these ridiculous queries. It's like, why is every query a full table scan?Jeremy: Exactly.Patrick: Because that's the way Hibernate wanted it. Yeah. I actually banned Hibernate at one company I was working at. I was Chief Architect there and I just said, "Don't ever put Hibernate in our production." Because I had more meetings about what it was doing wrong than what it was doing right.Jeremy: Right. Right. Yeah. No, that's sounds, yeah.Patrick: Is that a long answer? Like, no.Jeremy: No, I've had the same experience where certain ORMs you're just like, no. Certain things, you can't do this because it's going to one, I think it locks you in in a sense, I mean there's all kind of lock-in in the cloud, and if you're using a data service or an API or you're using something native in AWS, or IBM Cloud, you're still going to be locked in in some way, but I do feel like whenever you start going down that path of building custom things, or forcing developers to get really low level, that just builds up all kinds of tech debt, right? That you eventually are going to have to work down.Patrick: Well, it's organizational inertia. When you start getting into this, when you start using annotations in Hibernate where you're just cutting through all the layers and now you're way down in the weeds, try to move that. There's a couple of companies that I've worked with now that are looking at the true reality of portability in their data stores. Like, "Oh, we want to move from one to a different, from a key value to a document without developers knowing." Well, how do you get to that point?Jeremy: Right. Yeah.Patrick: And it's just, that's not giving access to those things, first of all, but this is that tech debt that's going to get in your way. We're really good, technologists, we're really good at just wracking up the charges on our tech debt credit card, especially whenever we're trying to get things out the door quickly. And I think that's actually one of the problems that we all face. I mean, I don't think I've ever talked to a developer who was ahead of schedule and didn't have somebody breathing down their neck.Jeremy: Very true.Patrick: You take shortcuts. You're like, "We've got to shift this code this week. Skip the annotations and go straight into the database and get the data you need." Or something. You start making trade-offs real fast.Jeremy: What can we hard code that will just get us past.Patrick: Yeah. Is it green? Shift it. Yeah.Jeremy: Yeah, no, I totally, totally agree. All right. So let's talk a little bit more about, I guess, skillsets and things like that. Because there are so many different databases out there. Cassandra is just one and if you're a developer working just at the driver level, I guess, with something like Cassandra, it's not horrible to work with. It's relatively easy once a lot of these things are set up for you.Same is true of MongoBD, or I mean, DynamoDB, or any of these other ones where the interface to it isn't overly difficult, but there's always some sort of something you want to build on top of it to make it a little bit easier. But I'm just curious, in terms of learning these different things and switching between organizations and so forth, there is a cognitive load going from saying, "I'm working on Cassandra," to going to saying, "I'm working on DynamoDB," or something like that. There's going to be a shift in understanding of how the data can be brought back, what the limitations are, just a whole bunch of things that you kind of have to think about. And that's not even including managing the actual thing. That's a whole other thing.So, hiring people, I guess, or hiring developers, how much do we want developers to know? Are you on board with me where it's like, I mean I like understanding how Cassandra works and I like understanding how DynamoDB works, and I like knowing the limits, but I also don't want to think about them when I'm writing code.Patrick: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because Cassandra, one of the things I really loved about Cassandra initially was just how it works. As a computer scientist, I was like, "This is really neat." I mean, my degree field is in distributed computing, so of course, I'm going to nerd out.Jeremy: There you go.Patrick: But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have mass appeal because it's doing the thing that people want. And I think that's going to be the challenge of any properly built service layer. I think I've mentioned to you before we started this, I work on a project called Stargate. And Stargate is a project that is meant to build a data layer on top of databases. And right now it's with Cassandra. And it's abstracting away some of the harder to understand or reason things.For instance, with distributed computing, we're trying to reduce the reliance on coordination. There is a great article about this by Pat Helland about how coordination is the last really expensive thing that we have in development. Memory, CPU, super cheap. I can rent that all day long. Coordination is really, really hard, and I don't expect a new programmer to understand, to reason through coordination problems. "Oh, yeah, the just in time race conditions," and things like that.And I think that's where distributed computing, it's super powerful, but then whenever people see what eventual consistency are, they freak out and they're like, "I just want my SQL Lite on my laptop. It's very safe." But that's not going to get you there. That's not a global database, it's not going to be able to take you to a billion users. Come on, don't cut ...Jeremy: Maybe you don't need to be.Patrick: ... your apps short Jeremy. You're going to have a billion users.Jeremy: You should strive for it, at least, is how I feel about it. So that's, I guess, the point I was trying to get to is that if the developers are the ones that you don't want learning some of this stuff, and there's ways to abstract it away again, going like we talked about data as a service and APIs and so forth. And I think that's where I would love to see things shifting. And as you said earlier, that's probably where things are going.But if you did want to run your own database cluster, and you wanted to do this on your own, I mean you have to hire people that know how to do this stuff. And the more I see the market heating up for this type of person, there is very, very few specialists out there that are probably available. So how would you even hire somebody to run your Cassandra ring? They probably all work at DataStax.Patrick: No, not all of them. There's a few that work at Target and FedEx, Apple, the biggest Cassandra users in the world. Huawei. We just found out lately that Huawei now has the biggest cluster on the planet. Yeah. They just showed up at ApacheCon and said, "Oh yeah, hold my beer." But I mean, you're right, it's a specialized skillset and one of the things we're doing at DataStax, we feel, yeah, you should just rent that. And so we have Astra, which is our database as a service.It's fully compatible with open-source Cassandra. If you don't like it, you can just take it over and use open-source. But we agree and we actually can run Cassandra cheaper than you can, and it's just because we can do it at scale. And right now Astra, the way we run it is truly serverless, you only pay for what you need, and that's something that we're bringing to the open-source side of Cassandra as well, but we're getting Cassandra closer to Kubernetes internally.So if you don't want to think about Kubernetes, if you don't want to think about all that stuff, you can just rent it from us, or you could just go use it in open-source, either way. But you're right. I mean, it should not be a 2020s skillset is, "Get better at running Cassandra." I think those days should be, leave it to, if you want to go work at DataStax and run Cassandra, great, we're hiring right now, you will love it. You don't have to. Yeah.Jeremy: So the idea of it being open-source, so again, I'm not a huge fan of this idea of vendor lock-in. I think if you want to run on AWS Lambda, yeah, most of what you can do can only run on AWS Lambda, but changing the compute, switching that over to Azure or switching that over to GCP or something like that, the compute itself is probably not that hard to move, right? I think especially depending on what you're doing, setting up an entire Kubernetes cluster just to run a few functions is probably not worth it. I mean, obviously, if you've got a much bigger implementation, that's a little different.But with data, data is just locked in. No matter where you go, it is very hard to move a lot of data. So even with the open-source flair that you have there, do you still see a worry about lock in from a data side?Patrick: Yeah. And it's becoming more of a concern with larger companies too, because options, #options. There was a pretty famous story a few years ago where the CEO of Target said, "I am not paying Amazon any more money," and they just picked up shop and moved from AWS to Google Cloud. And the CEO made a technical decision. It was like everybody downstream had to deal with that. And I think that luckily Target's a huge Cassandra shop and they were just like, "Okay, we'll just move it over there."But the thing is that you're right, I mean, and I love talking about this because back when cloud was first starting and I was talking about it and thinking about it, just what do the clouds promise you? Oh, you get commodity scale of CPU and network and storage. And that's what they want to sell you because that what they're building. Those big buildings in north Virginia, they are full of compute network and storage, but the thing they know they need to hook you in and the way that they're hooking you in, there's some services that are really handy, they're great, but really the hook is the data.Once you get into the database, the bespoke database for the cloud, one of the features of that database is it will not connect to any other database outside of that cloud, and they know that. I mean, and this is why I really strongly am starting to advocate this idea of this move towards data on Kubernetes is a way where open-source gets to take back the cloud. Because now we're deploying these virtual data centers and using open-source technology to create this portability. So we can use the compute network and storage, a Google, Amazon, Azure, OnPrem wherever, doesn't matter.But you need to think of like, "All right. How is that going to work?" And that's why we're like, "If you rent your Cassandra from DataStax with Astra, you can also use the open-source Cassandra as well." And if we aren't keeping you happy, you should feel totally fine with moving it to an open-source workload. And we're good with that. One way or the other, we would love for you to use a database that works for you.Jeremy: Right. And so this Stargate project that you're working on, is that the one that allows you to basically route to multiple databases?Patrick: That's the dream. Right now it just does Cassandra, but there's been some really interesting ... There's some folks coming out of the woodwork that really want to bring their database technology to Stargate. And that's what I'm encouraged by. It's an open-source project, Stargate.io, and you can contribute any of the connectors for underlying data store, but if we're using GraphQL, if you're using GRPC, if you're using REST, the underlying data store is really somewhat irrelevant in that case. You're just doing gets and puts, or gets and sets. Gets and puts, yeah, that's right. Gets, sets, puts, it's a lot of words.Jeremy: Whatever words. Yeah. Exactly.Patrick: That's what I love about standard, Jeremy, there's so many to pick from.Jeremy: Right, because there are ... Exactly, which standard do you choose? Yeah. So, because that's an interesting thing for me too, is just this idea of, I mean, it would be great to live in a perfect little cloud where you could say like, "Oh, well AWS has all the services I need. And I can just keep all my stuff there, whatever." But best of breed services, or again, the cost of hosting something in AWS maybe if you're hosting a Cassandra cluster there, versus maybe hosting it in GCP or maybe hosting it with you, you said you could host it cheaper than those could, or that we could host it ourselves.And so I do think that there is ... and again, we've had this conversation about multi-cloud and things like that where it's not about agnostic, it's not about being cloud agnostic, it's about using the best of breed for any service that you want to use. And APIs seem to be the way to get you there. So I love this idea of the Stargate project because it just seems like that's the way where it could be that standard across all these different clouds and onto all these different databases, well I mean, right now Cassandra, but eventually these other ones. I don't know, that seems like a pretty powerful project to me.Patrick: Well, the time has come. It's cloud native ... I work a lot with CNCF and cloud-native data is a kind of emerging topic. It's so emerging that I'm actually in the middle of writing a book, an O'Reilly book on it. So, yeah. Surprise. I just dropped it. This just in.Yeah, because I can see that this is going to be the future, but when we build cloud-native, cloud applications, cloud-native applications, we want scale, we want elasticity, and we want self-healing. Those are the three cloud-native things that we want. And that doesn't give us a whole lot ... So if I want to crank out a quick REACT app, that's what I'm going to use. And Netlify's a great example, or Vercel, they're creating this abstraction layer. But Netlify and Vercel are both working, they've been partnering with us on the Stargate project, because they're seeing like, "Okay, we want to have that very light touch, developers just come in and use it," in building cloud-native applications.And whenever you're building your application, you're just paying for what you use. And I think that's really key, not spinning up a bunch of infrastructure that you get a monthly bill for. And that bill can be expensive.Jeremy: It seems crazy. Doesn't it seem crazy nowadays? Actually provisioning an EC2 instance and paying for it to run even if it does nothing. That seems crazy to me.Patrick: There are start-ups around the idea of finding the instance that's running that's causing you money that you're not using.Jeremy: Which is crazy, isn't it? It's crazy. All right. So let's go a little bit more into standards, because you mentioned standards. So there are standards now for a lot of things, and again, GraphQL being a great example, I think. But also from a database perspective, looking at things like TSQL and developers come into an organization and they're familiar with MySQL, or they're familiar with PostgreSQL, whatever it is. Or maybe they're familiar with Cassandra or something like that, but I think most people, at least from what I've seen, have been very, very comfortable with the TSQL approach to getting data. So, how do you bring developers in and start teaching them or getting them to understand more of that NoSQL feel?Patrick: I think it's already happened, it's just the translation hasn't happened in a lot of minds. When you go to build an application, you're designing your application around the workflows your application's going to have. You're always thinking about like, "I click on this. I go there." I mean, this is where we wireframe out the application. At that point, your database is now involved and I don't think a lot of folks know that.It's like, at every point you need to put data or get data. And I think this is where we've taught could be anybody building applications, which makes it really difficult to be like, "No, no, no, start with your data domain first and build out all those models. And then you write your application to go against those models." And I'll tell you, I've been involved in a few of these application boot camps, like JavaScript boot camps and things, they don't go into data modeling. It's just not a part of it.Jeremy: Really?Patrick: And I think this is that thing where we have to acknowledge like, "Yeah, we don't really need that anymore as much, because we're just building applications." If I build a React app, and I have a form and I'm managing the authentication and I click a button and then I get a profile information, I just described every database interaction that I need and the objects that I need. And I'm going to put my user profile at some point, I'm going to click my ID and get that profile back as an object. Those are the interactions that I need. At no point did I say, "And then I'm going to write select from where." No, I just need to get that data.Jeremy: And I love thinking about data as objects anyways. It makes more sense, rather than rows of spreadsheets essentially that you join together, describing an object even if it's got nested data, like a document form or things like that, I think makes a ton of sense. But is SQL, is it still relevant do you think? I mean, in the world we're moving into? Should I be teaching my daughters how to write TSQL? Or would I be wasting my time?Patrick: Yeah. Well, yes and no. Depends on what your kid's doing. I think that SQL will go to where it originally started and where it will eventually end, which is in data engineering and data science. And I mean, I still use SQL every once in a while, Bigtable, that sort of thing, for exploring my data. I mean for an analytics career or reporting data and things like that, SQL is very expressive. I don't see any reason to change that. But this is a guy who's been writing SQL for a million years.But I mean, that world is still really moving. I mean, like a Presto and Snowflake and all these, Redshift, they all use Bigtable, they all use SQL to express the reporting capabilities. But ... And I think this is how you and I got sucked into this is like, well that was the database that we had, so we started using reporting languages to build applications. And how'd that work out?Jeremy: Yeah. Well, it certainly didn't scale very well, I can tell you that, going back to sharding, because that is always something that was very hard to do. So I guess, I get the point that essentially if you're going to be in the data sciences and you actually need to analyze that data and maybe you do need to do joins, or maybe you need to work with big data in a way, that's a specialized aspect of it and I think people could dabble in that if they were just regular developers and they didn't want to go too deep.But it sounds like the bigger, or the end goal here, maybe altruistic, is to just give people access to data. So even if they don't know SQL or they don't know something complex, just make it so that whatever data is there that anybody, with whatever level is, they can consume it.Patrick: Yeah. And move fast with the thing that you're building. Actually, I use a Facebook term, but Facebook does do this. Internally there's a system called Occhio that provides gets and puts for your data, but it abstracts things like geographics and things like that. But the companies that are trying to move quickly, they understood this a long time ago. If you have to reason through, "Am I doing a full table scan? Is that an efficient interjoin?" If you have to reason through that, you're not moving fast anymore.Jeremy: Right. Right. All right. Cool. All right, so let's talk about Astra a little bit more and this whole idea of, because Astra is the serverless version, the hosted version, the serverless version of Cassandra, right? Through DataStax?Patrick: Right. And ...Jeremy: Did I get that right?Patrick: You got it right. And so it gives you full access. You could do Port 9042 if you still want to use a driver, but it gives you access via GraphQL, REST, and there's also a document API. So if you just want to persist your JavaScript API or JavaScript and then pull it back out your JSON, it does full documents. So it emulates what a MongoDB or DocumenDB does. But the important thing, and this is the somewhat revolutionary side of this, and again, this is something that we're looking to put into open-source, is the serverless nature of it.You only pay for what you use. And when you want to create a Cassandra database, we don't even call it a Cassandra database on the Astra panel anymore. We just create a database. You give it a name. You click. And it's ready. And it will scale infinitely. As long as we can find some compute and network for you to use somewhere, it'll just keep scaling and that's kind of that true portion of serverless that we're really trying to make happen. And for me, that's exciting because finally, all that power that I feel like I've been hoarding for a long time is now available for so many more people.And then if you do a million writes per second for 10 minutes and then you turn it off, you only pay for that little short amount of time. And it scales back. You're not paying a persistent charge forever.Jeremy: I'm just curious from a technical implementation, because I'm thinking about PTSD or nightmares back of my days running Cassandra, and so I'm just trying to think how this works. Is it a shared tenancy model? Or is there a way to do single tenancy if you wanted that as a service?Patrick: Under the covers, yes, it is multi-tenant, but the way that we are created ... so we had to do some really interesting engineering inside. So my RCO's going to kill me if I talk about this, but hey, you know what, Jeremy? We're friends, we can do this. He's like, "Don't talk about the underlying architecture." I'm talking about the underlying architecture. The thing that we did was we took Cassandra and we decomposed it into microservices mostly. That's probably, it's still Cassandra, it's just how we run it makes it way more amenable to doing multi-tenant and scale in that fashion where the queries are separated from the storage and things that are running in the background, like if you're familiar with Cassandra because it's a log structure storage, you ask to do compactions and things like that, all that's just kind of on the side. It doesn't impact your query.But it gives us the ability to, if you create a database and all of a sudden you just hammer it with a million writes per second, there's enough infrastructure in total to cover it. And then we'll spin up more in the back to cover everything else. And then whenever you're done, we retract it back. That's how we keep our costs down. But then the storage side is separated and away from the compute side, and the storage side can scale its own way as well.And so whenever you need to store a petabyte of Cassandra data, you're just storing, you're just charged for the petabyte of storage on disk, not the thousandth of a cluster that you just created. Yeah.Jeremy: No. I love that. Thank you for explaining that though, because that is, every time I talk to somebody who's building a database or running some complex thing for a database, there's always magic. Somebody has to build some magic to make it actually work the way everyone hopes it would work. And so if anybody is listening to this and is like, "Ah, I'm just getting ready to spin up our own Cassandra ring," just think about these things because these are the really hard problems that are great to have a team of people working on that can solve this specific problem for you and abstract all of that crap away.Patrick: Yeah. Well, I mean it goes back to the Dynamo paper, and how distributed databases work, but it requires that they have a certain baseline. And they're all working together in some way. And Cassandra is a share-nothing architecture. I mean you don't have a leader note or anything like that. But like I said, because that data is spread out, you could have these little intermittent problems that you don't want to have to think about. Just leave that to somebody else. Somebody else has got a Grafana dashboard that's freaking out. Let them deal with it. But you can route around those problems really easily.Jeremy: Yeah. No, that's amazing. All right. So a couple more technical questions, because I'm always curious how some of these things work. So if somebody signs up and they set up this database and they want to connect to it, you mentioned you could use the driver, you mentioned you can use GraphQL or the REST API, or the Document API. What's the authentication method look like for that?Patrick: Yeah. So, it's a pretty standard thing with tokens. You create your access tokens, so when you create the database, you define the way that you access it with the token, and then whenever you connect to it, if you're using JavaScript, there's a couple of collection libraries that just have that as one of the environment variables.And so it's pretty standard for connecting the cloud databases now where you have your authentication token. And you can revoke that token at any time. So for instance, if you mistakenly commit that into your Git ...Jeremy: Say GitHub. We've never done that before.Patrick: No judging. You can revoke it immediately. But it also gives you our back, the controls over it's a read or write or admin, if you need to create new tables and that sort of thing. You can give that level of access to whatever that token is. So, very simple model, but then at that point, you're just interacting through a REST call or using any of the HTTP protocols or SQL protocol.Jeremy: And now, can you create multiple tokens with different levels of permission or is it all just token gives you full access?Patrick: No, it's multiple levels of protection and actually that's probably the best way to do it, for instance, if your CI/CD system, has the ability to, it should be able to create databases and tear them down, right? That would be a good use for that, but if you have, for instance, a very basic application, you just want it to be able to read and write. You don't want to change any of the underlying data structures.Jeremy: Right. Right.Patrick: That's a good layer of control, and so you can have all these layers going on one single database. But you can even have read-only access too, for ... I think that's something that's becoming more and more common now that there's reporting systems that are on the side.Jeremy: Right. Right. Good.Patrick: No, you can only read from the database.Jeremy: And what about data backups or exporting data or anything like that?Patrick: Yeah, we have a pretty rudimentary backup now, and we will probably, we're working on some more sophisticated versions of it. Data backup in Cassandra is pretty simple because it's all based on snapshots because if you know Cassandra the database, the data you write is immutable and that's a great way to start when you come to backup data. But yeah, we have a rudimentary backup system now where you have to, if you need to restore your data, you need to put in a ticket to have it restored at a certain point.I don't personally like that as much. I like the self-service model, and that's what we're working towards. And with more granularity, because with snapshots you can do things like snapshot, this is one of the things that we're working on, is doing like a snapshot of your production database and restoring it into a QA cluster. So, works for my house, oh, try it again. Yeah.Jeremy: That's awesome. No, so this is amazing. And I love this idea of just taking that pain of managing a database away from you. I love the idea of just make it simple to access the data. Don't create these complex things where people have to build more, and if people want to build a data access layer, the data access layer should maybe just be enforcing a model or something like that, and not having to figure out if you're on this shard, we route you to this particular port, or whatever. All that stuff is just insane, so yeah, I mean maybe go back to kind of the idea of this whole episode here, which is just, stop using databases. Start using these data services because they're so much easier to use. I mean, I'm sure there's concerns for some people, especially when you get to larger companies and you have all the compliance and things like that. I'm sure Astra and DataStax has all the compliance things and things like that. But yeah, just any final words, advice to people who might still be thinking databases are a good idea?Patrick: Well, I have an old 6502 on a breadboard, which I love to play with. It doesn't make it relevant. I'm sorry. That was a little catty, wasn't it?Jeremy: A little bit, but point well taken. I totally get what you're saying.Patrick: I mean, I think that it's, what do we do with the next generation? And this is one of the things, this will be the thought that I leave us with is, it's incumbent on a generation of engineers and programmers to make the next generation's job easier, right? We should always make it easier. So this is our chance. If you're currently working with database technology, this is your chance to not put that pain on the next generation, the people that will go past where you are. And so, this is how we move forward as a group.Jeremy: Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well Patrick, thank you so much for sharing all this and telling us about DataStax and Astra. So if people want to find out more about you or they want to find out more about Astra and DataStax, how do they do that?Patrick: All right. Well, plenty of ways at www.datastax.com and astra.datastax.com if you just want the good stuff. Cut the marketing, go to the good stuff, astra.datastax.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Patrick McFadin. And I'm everywhere. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, I love connecting with folks and finding out what you're working on, so please feel free. I get more messages now on LinkedIn than anything, and it's great.Jeremy: Yeah. It's been picking up a lot. I know. It's kind of crazy. Linked in has really picked up. It's ...Patrick: I'm good with it. Yeah.Jeremy: Yeah. It's ...Patrick: I'm really good with it.Jeremy: It's a little bit better format maybe. So you also have, we mentioned the Stargate project, so that's just Stargate.io. We didn't talk about the K8ssandra project. Is that how you say that?Patrick: Yeah, the K8ssandra project.Jeremy: K8ssandra? Is that how you say it?Patrick: K8ssandra. Isn't that a cute name?Jeremy: It's K-8-S-S-A-N-D-R-A.io.Patrick: Right.Jeremy: What's that again? That's the idea of moving Cassandra onto Kubernetes, right?Patrick: Yeah. It's not Cassandra on Kubernetes, it's Cassandra in Kubernetes.Jeremy: In Kubernetes. Oh.Patrick: So it's like in concert and working with how Kubernetes works. Yes. So it's using Cassandra as your default data store for Kubernetes. It's a very, actually it's another one of the projects that's just taking off. KubeCon was last week from where we're recording now, or two weeks ago, and it was just a huge hit because again, it's like, "Kubernetes makes my infrastructure to run easier, and Cassandra is hard, put those together. Hey, I like this idea."Jeremy: Awesome.Patrick: So, yeah.Jeremy: Cool. All right. Well, if anybody wants to find out about that stuff, I will put all of these links in the show notes. Thanks again, Patrick. Really appreciate it.Patrick: Great. Thanks, Jeremy.

About Julian WoodJulian Wood is a Senior Developer Advocate for the AWS Serverless Team. He loves helping developers and builders learn about, and love, how serverless technologies can transform the way they build and run applications at any scale. Julian was an infrastructure architect and manager in global enterprises and start-ups for more than 25 years before going all-in on serverless at AWS.Twitter: @julian_woodAll things Serverless @ AWS: ServerlessLandServerless Patterns CollectionServerless Office Hours – every Tuesday 10am PTLambda ExtensionsLambda Container ImagesWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jtNLt3Y51-gThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm joined by Julian Wood. Hey Julian, thanks for joining me.Julian: Hey Jeremy, thank you so much for inviting me.Jeremy: Well, I am super excited to have you here. I have been following your work for a very long time and of course, big fan of AWS. So you are a Serverless Developer Advocate at AWS, and I'd love it if you could just tell the listeners a little bit about your background, so they get to know you a bit. And then also, sort of what your role is at AWS.Julian: Yeah, certainly. Well, I'm Julian Wood. I am based in London, but yeah, please don't let my accent fool you. I'm actually originally from South Africa, so the language purists aren't scratching their heads anymore. But yeah, I work within the Serverless Team at AWS, and hopefully do a number of things. First of all, explain what we're up to and how our sort of serverless things work and sort of, I like to sometimes say a bit cheekily, basically help the world fall in love with serverless as I have. And then also from the other side is to be a proxy and sort of be the voice of builders, and developers and whoever's building service applications, and be their voices internally. So you can also keep us on our toes to help build the things that will brighten your days.And just before, I've worked for too many years probably, as an infrastructure racker, stacker, architect, and manager. I've worked in global enterprises babysitting their Windows and Linux servers, and running virtualization, and doing all the operations kind of stuff to support that. But, I was always thinking there's a better way to do this and we weren't doing the best for the developers and internal customers. And so when this, you know in inverted commas, "serverless way" of things started to appear, I just knew that this was going to be the future. And I could happily leave the server side to much better and cleverer people than me. So by some weird, auspicious alignment of the stars, a while later, I managed to get my current dream job talking about serverless and talking to you.Jeremy: Yeah. Well, I tell you, I think a lot of serverless people or people who love serverless are recovering ops and infrastructure people that were doing racking and stacking. Because I too am also recovering from that and I still have nightmares.I thought that it was interesting too, how you mentioned though, developer advocacy. It's funny, you work for a specific company, AWS obviously, but even developer advocacy in general, who is that for? Who are you advocating for? Are you advocating for the developers to use the service from the company? Are you advocating for the developers so that the company can provide the services that they actually need? Interesting balance there.Julian: Yeah, it's true. I mean, the honest answer is we don't have great terms for this kind of role, but yeah, I think primarily we are advocating for the people who are developing the applications and on the outside. And to advocate for them means we've got to build the right stuff for them and get their voices internally. And there are many ways of doing that. Some people raise support requests and other kind of things, but I mean, sometimes some of our great ideas come from trolling Twitter, or yes, I know even Hacker News or that kind of thing. But also, we may get responses from 10 different people about something and that will formulate something in our brain and we'll chat with other kind of people. And that sort of starts a thing. It's not just necessarily each time, some good idea in Twitter comes in, it gets mashed into some big surface database that we all pick off.But part of our job is to be out there and try and think and be developers in whatever backgrounds we come from. And I mean, I'm not a pure software developer where I've come from, and I come, I suppose, from infrastructure, but maybe you'd call that a bit of systems engineering. So yeah, I try and bring that background to try and give input on whatever we do, hopefully, the right stuff.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And then I think part of the job too, is just getting the information out there and getting the examples out there. And trying to create those best practices or at least surface those best practices, and encourage the community to do a lot of that work and to follow that. And you've done a lot of work with that, obviously, writing for the AWS blog. I know you have a series on the Serverless Lens and the Well-Architected Framework, and we can talk about that in a little while. But I really want to talk to you about, I guess, just the expansion of serverless over the last couple of years.I mean, it was very narrowly focused, probably, when it first came out. Lambda was ... FaaS as a whole new concept for a lot of people. And then as this progressed and we've gotten more APIs, and more services and things that it can integrate with, it just becomes complex and complicated. And that's a good thing, but also maybe a bad thing. But one of the things that AWS has done, and I think this is clearly in reaction to the developers needing it, is the ability to extend what you can do with a Lambda function, right? I mean, the idea of just putting your code in there and then, boom, that's it, that's all you have to do. That's great. But what if you do need access to lifecycle hooks? Or what if you do want to manipulate the underlying runtime or something like that? And AWS, I think has done a great job with that.So maybe we can start there. So just about the extensibility of Lambda in general. And one of the new things that was launched recently was, and recently, I don't know what was it? Seven months ago at this point? I'm not even sure. But was launched fairly recently, let's say that, is Lambda Extensions, and a couple of different flavors of that as well. Could you kind of just give the users an over, the users, wow, the listeners an overview of what Lambda Extensions are?Julian: I could hear the ops background coming in, talking about our users. Yeah. But I mean, from the get-go, serverless was always a terrible term because, why on earth would you name something for what it isn't? I mean, you know? I remember talking to DBAs, talking about noSQL, and they go, "Well, if it's not SQL, then what is it?" So we're terrible at that, serverless as well. And yeah, Lambda was very constrained when it came out. Lambda was never built being a serverless thing, that's what was the outcome. Sometimes we focus too much on the tools rather than the outcome. And the story is S3, just turning 15. And the genesis of Lambda was being an event trigger for S3, and people thought you'd upload something to S3, fire off a Lambda function, how cool is that? And then obviously the clever clubs at the time were like, "Well, hang on, let's not just do this for S3, let's do this for a whole bunch of kind of things."So Lambda was born out of that, as that got that great history, which is created an arc sort of into the present and into the future, which I know we're also going to get on about, the power of event driven applications. But the power of Lambda has always been its simplicity, and removing that operational burden, and that heavy lifting. But, sometimes that line is a bit of a gray area and there're people who can be purists about serverless and can be purists about FaaS and say, "Everything needs to be ephemeral. Lambda functions can't extend to anything else. There shouldn't be any state, shouldn't be any storage, shouldn't be any ..." All this kind of thing.And I think both of us can agree, but I don't want to speak for you, but I think both of us would agree that in some sense, yeah, that's fine. But we live in the real world and there's other stuff that needs to connect to and we're not here about building purist kind of stuff. So Lambda Extensions is a new way basically to integrate Lambda with your favorite tools. And that's the sort of headline thing we like to talk about. And the big idea is to open up Lambda to more effectively work mainly with partners, but also your own tools if you want to write them. And to sort of have deeper hooks into the Lambda lifecycle.And other partners are awesome and they do a whole bunch of stuff for serverless, plus customers also have connections to on-prem staff, or EC2 staff, or containers, or all kind of things. How can we make the tools more seamless in a way? How can we have a common set of tools maybe that you even use on-prem or in the cloud or containers or whatever? Why does Lambda have to be unique or different or that kind of thing? And Extensions is sort of one of the starts of that, is to be able to use these kind of tools and get more out of Lambda. So I mean, just the kind of tools that we've already got on board, there's things like Splunk and AppDynamics. And Lumigo, Epsagon, HashiCorp, Honeycomb, CoreLogic, Dynatrace, I can't think. Thundra and Sumo Logic, Check Point. Yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry for any partners who I've forgotten a few.Jeremy: No, right, no. That's very good. Shout them out, shout them out. No, I mean just, and not to interrupt you here, but ...Julian: No, please.Jeremy: ... I think that's great. I mean, I think that's one of the things that I like about the way that AWS deals with partners, is that ... I mean, I think AWS knows they can't solve all these problems on their own. I mean, maybe they could, right? But they would be their own way of solving the problems and there's other people who are solving these problems differently and giving you the ability to extend your Lambda functions into those partners is, there's a huge win for not only the partners because it creates that ecosystem for them, but also for AWS because it makes the product itself more valuable.Julian: Well, never mind the big win for customers because ultimately they're the one who then gets a common deployment tool, or a common observability tool, or a HashiCorp Vault that you can manage secrets and a Lambda function from HashiCorp Vault. I mean, that's super cool. I mean, also AWS services are picking this up because that's easy for them to do stuff. So if anybody's used Lambda Insights or even seen Lambda Insights in the console, it's somewhere in the monitoring thing, and you just click something over and you get this tool which can pull stuff that you can't normally get from a Lambda function. So things like CPU time and network throughput, which you couldn't normally get. But actually, under the hoods, Lambda Insights is using Lambda extensions. And you can see that if you look. It automatically adds the Lambda layer and job done.So anyway, this is how a lot of the tools work, that a layer is just added to a Lambda function and off you go, the tool can do its work. So also there's a very much a simplicity angle on this, that in a lot of cases you don't have to do anything. You configure some of the extensions via environment variables, if that's cooled you may just have an API key or a log retention value or something like that, I don't know, any kind of example of that. But you just configure that as a normal Lambda environment variable at this partner extension, which is just a Lambda layer, and off you go. Super simple.Jeremy: Right. So explain Extensions exactly, because I think that's one of those things because now we have Lambda layers and we have Lambda Extensions. And there's also like the runtime API and then something else. I mean, even I'm not 100% sure what all of the naming conventions. I'm pretty sure I know what they do ...Julian: Yeah, fair enough.Jeremy: ... but maybe we could say the names and say exactly what they do as well.Julian: Yeah, cool. You get an API, I get an API, everybody gets an API. So Lambda layers, let's just start, because that's, although it's not related to Extensions, it's how Extensions are delivered to the power core functions. And Lambda layers is just another way to add code to a Lambda function or not even code, it can be a dependency. It's just a way that you could, and it's cool because they are shareable. So you have some dependencies, or you have a library, or an SDK, or some training data for something, a Lambda layer just allows you to add some bits and bobs to your Lambda function. That's a horrible explanation. There's another word I was thinking of, because I don't want to use the word code, because it's not necessarily code, but it's dependency, whatever. It's just another way of adding something. I'll wake up in a cold sweat tonight thinking of the word I was thinking of, but anyway.But Lambda Extensions introduces a whole new companion API. So the runtime API is the little bit of code that allows your function to talk to the Lambda service. So when an event comes in, this is from the outside. This could be via API gateway or via the Lambda API, or where else, EventBridge or Step Functions or wherever. When you then transports that data rise in the Lambda services and HTTP call, and Lambda transposes that into an event and sends that onto the Lambda function. And it's that API that manages that. And just as a sidebar, what I find it cool on a sort of geeky, technical thing is, that actually API sits within the execution environment. People are like, "Oh, that's weird. Why would your Lambda API sit within the execution environment basically within the bubble that contains your function rather than it on the Lambda service?"And the cool answer for that is it's actually for a security mechanism. Like your function can then only ever talk to the Lambda runtime API, which is in that secure execution environment. And so our security can be a lot stronger because we know that no function code can ever talk directly out of your function into the Lambda service, it's all got to talk locally. And then the Lambda service gets that response from the runtime API and sends it back to the caller or whatever. Anyway, sidebar, thought that was nerdy and interesting. So what we've now done is we've released a new Extensions API. So the Extensions API is another API that an extension can use to get information from Lambda. And they're two different types of extensions, just briefly, internal and external extensions.Now, internal extensions run within the runtime process so that it's just basically another thread. So you can use this for Python or Java or something and say, when the Python runtime starts, let's start it with another parameter and also run this Java file that may do some observability, or logging, or tracing, or finding out how long the modules take to launch, for example. I know there's an example for Python. So that's one way of doing extensions. So it's internal extensions, they're two different flavors, but I'll send you a link. I'll provide a link to the blog posts before we go too far down the rabbit hole on that.And then the other part of extensions are external extensions. And this is a cool part because they actually run as completely separate processes, but still within that secure bubble, that secure execution environment that Lambda runs it. And this gives you some superpowers if you want. Because first of all, an extension can run in any language because it's a separate process. So if you've got a Node function, you could run an extension in other kind of languages. Now, what do we do recommend is you do run your extension in a compiled binary, just because you've got to provide the runtime that the extensions got to run in any way, so as a compiled binary, it's super easy and super useful. So is something like Go, a lot of people are doing because you write a single extension and Go, and then you can use it on your Node functions, your Java functions, your PowerShell functions, whatever. So that's a really good, simple way that you can have the portability.But now, what can these extensions do? Well, the extensions basically register with extensions API, and then they say to Lambda, "Lambda, I want to know about what happens when my functions invoke?" So the extension can start up, maybe it's got some initialization code, maybe it needs to connect to a database, or log into an observability platform, or pull down a secret order. That it can do, it's got its own init that can happen. And then it's basically ready to go before the function invokes. And then when the extension then registers and says, "I want to know when the function invokes and when it shuts down. Cool." And that's just something that registers with the API. Then what happens is, when a functioning invoke comes in, it tells the runtime API, "Hello, you now have an event," sends it off to the Lambda function, which the runtime manages, but also extension or extensions, multiple ones, hears information about that event. And so it can tell you the time it's going to run and has some metadata about that event. So it doesn't have the actual event data itself, but it's like the sort of Lambda context, a version of that that it's going to send to the extension.So the extension can use that to do various things. It can start collecting telemetry data. It can alter instrument some of your code. It could be managing a secret as a separate process that it is going to cache in the background. For example, we've got one with AppConfig, which is really cool. AppConfig is a service where you manage parameters external to your Lambda function. Well, each time your Lambda function warm invokes if you've got to do an external API call to retrieve that, well, it's going to be a little bit efficient. First of all, you're going to pay for it and it's going to take some time.So how about when the Lambda function runs and the extension could run before the Lambda function, why don't we just cache that locally? And then when your Lambda function runs, it just makes a local HTTP call to the extension to retrieve that value, which is going to be super quick. And some extensions are super clever because they're their own process. They will go, "Well, my value is for 30 minutes and every 30 minutes if I haven't been run, I will then update the value from that." So that's useful. Extensions can then also, when the runtime ... Sorry, let me back up.When the runtime is finished, it sends its response back to the runtime API, and extensions when they're done doing, so the runtime can send it back and the extension can carry on processing saying, "Oh, I've got the information about this. I know that this Lambda function has done X, Y, Z, so let me do, do some telemetry. Let me maybe, if I'm writing logs, I could write a log to S3 or to Kinesis or whatever. Do some kind of thing after the actual function invocation has happened." And then when it says it's ready, it says, "Hello, extensions API, I'm telling you I'm done." And then it's gone. And then Lambda freezes the execution environment, including the runtime and the extensions until another invocation happens. And the cycle then will happen.And then the last little bit that happens is, instead of an invoke coming in, we've extended the Lambda life cycles, so when the environment is going to be shut down, the extension can receive the shutdown and actually do some stuff and say, "Okay, well, I was connected to my observer HTTP platform, so let me close that connection. I've got some extra logs to flush out. I've got whatever else I need to do," and just be able to cleanly shut down that extra process that is running in parallel to the Lambda function.Jeremy: All right.Julian: So that was a lot of words.Jeremy: That was a lot and I bet you that would be great conversation for a dinner party. Really kicks things up. Now, the good news is that, first of all, thank you for that though. I mean, that's super technical and super in-depth. And for anyone listening who ...Julian: You did ask, I did warn you.Jeremy ... kind of lost their way ... Yes, but something that is really important to remember is that you likely don't have to write these yourself, right? There is all those companies you mentioned earlier, all those partners, they've already done this work. They've already figured this out and they're providing you access to their tools via this, that allows you to build things.Julian: Exactly.Jeremy: So if you want to build an extension and you want to integrate your product with Lambda or so forth, then maybe go back and listen to this at half speed. But for those of you who just want to take advantage of it because of the great functionality, a lot of these companies have already done that for you.Julian: Correct. And that's the sort of easiness thing, of just adding the Lambda layer or including in a container image. And yeah, you don't have to worry any about that, but behind the scenes, there's some really cool functionality that we're literally opening up our Lambda operates and allowing you to impact when a function responds.Jeremy: All right. All right. So let me ask another, maybe an overly technical question. I have heard, and I haven't experienced this, but that when it runs the life cycle that ends the Lambda function, I've heard something like it doesn't send the information right away, right? You have to wait for that Lambda to expire or something like that?Julian: Well, yes, for now, about to change. So currently Extensions is actually in preview. And that's not because it's in Beta or anything like that, but it's because we spoke to the partners and we didn't want to dump Extensions on the world. And all the partners had to come out with their extensions on day one and then try and figure out how customers are going to use them and everything. So what we really did, which I think in this case works out really well, is we worked with the partners and said, "Well, let's release this in preview mode and then give everybody a whole bunch of months to work out what's the best use cases, how can we best use this?" And some partners have said, "Oh, amazing. We're ready to go." And some partners have said, "Ah, it wasn't quite what we thought. Maybe we're going to wait a bit, or we're going to do something differently, or we've got some cool ideas, just give us time." And so that's what this time has been.The one other thing that has happened is we've actually added some performance enhancements during it. So yes, currently during the preview, the runtime and all extensions need to finish before we give you your response back to your Lambda function. So if you're in an asynchronous mode, you don't really care, but obviously if you're in a synchronous mode behind an API, yeah, you don't really want that. But when Extensions goes GA, which isn't going to be long, then that is no longer the case. So basically what'll happen is the runtime will respond and the result goes directly back to whoever's calling that, maybe API gateway, and the extensions can carry on, partly asynchronously in the background.Jeremy: Yep. Awesome. All right. And I know that the plan is to go GA soon. I'm not sure when around when this episode comes out, that that will be, but soon, so that's good to know that that is ...Julian: And in fact, when we go GA that performance enhancement is part of the GA. So when it goes GA, then you know, it's not something else you need to wait for.Jeremy: Perfect. Okay. All right. So let's move on to another bit of, I don't know if this is extensibility of the actual product itself or more so I think extensibility of maybe the workflow that you use to deploy to Lambda and deploy your serverless applications, and that's container image support. I mean, we've discussed it a lot. I think people kind of have an idea, but just give me your quick overview of what that is to set some context here.Julian: Yeah, sure. Well, container image support in a simple sort of headline thing is to be able to build and package your functions as a container image. So you basically build a function using a Docker file. So before if you use a zip function, but a lot of people use Serverless Framework or SAM, or whatever, that's all abstracted away from you, but it's actually creating a zip file and uploading it to Lambda or S3. So with container image support, you use a Docker file to build your Lambda function. That's the headline of what's happening.Jeremy: Right. And so the idea of creating, and this is also, and again, you mentioned packaging, right? I mean, that is the big thing here. This is a packaging format. You're not actually running the container in a Lambda function.Julian: Correct. Yeah, let's maybe think, because I mean, "containers," in inverted commas again for people who are on the audio, is ...Jeremy: What does it even mean?Julian: Yeah, exactly. And can be quite an overload of terms and definitely causes some confusion. And I sort of think maybe there's sort of four things that are in the container world. One, containers is an isolation mechanism. So on Linux, this is UNC Group, seccomp, other bits and pieces that can be used to isolate processes or maybe groups of processes. And then a second one, containers as the packaging mechanism. This is what Docker really popularized and this is about taking some code and the dependencies needed to run the code, and then packaging them all out together, maybe with some metadata to describe it.And then, three is containers as also a design philosophy. This is the idea, if we can package and isolate software, it's easier to run. Maybe smaller pieces of software is easy to reason about and manage independently. So I don't want to necessarily use microservices, but there's some component of that with it. And the emphasis here is on software rather than services, and standardized tooling to simplify your ops. And then the fourth thing is containers as an ecosystem. This is where all the products, tools, know how, all the actual things to how to do containers. And I mean, these are certain useful, but I wouldn't say there're anything about the other kind of things.What is cool and worth appreciating is how maybe independent these things are. So when I spoke about containers as isolation, well, we could actually replace containers as isolation with micro VMs such as we do with Firecracker, and there's no real change in the operational properties. So one, if we think, what are we doing with containers and why? One of those is in a way ticked off with Lambda. Lambda does have secure isolation. And containers as a packaging format. I mean, you could replace it with static linking, then maybe won't really be a change, but there's less convenience. And the design philosophy, that could really be applicable if we're talking microservices, you can have instances and certainly functions, but containers are all the same kind of thing.So if we talk about the packaging of Lambda functions, it's really for people who are more familiar with containers, why does Lambda have to be different? You've got, why does Lambda to have to be a snowflake in a way that you have to manage differently? And if you are packaging dependencies, and you're doing npm or pip install, and you're used to building Docker files, well, why can't we just do that for Lambda at the same things? And we've got some other things that come with that, larger function sizes, up to 10 gig, which is enabled with some of this technology. So it's a packaging format, but on the backend, there's a whole bunch of different stuff, which has to be done to to allow this. Benefits are, use your tooling. You've got your CI/CD pipelines already for containers, well, you can use that.Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. And I actually like that idea too. And when I first heard of it, I was like, I have nothing against containers, the containers are great. But when I was thinking about it, I'm like, "Wait container? No, what's happening here? We're losing something." But I will say, like when Lambda layers came out, which was I think maybe 2019 or something like that, maybe 2018, the idea of it made a lot of sense, being able to kind of supplement, add additional dependencies or code or whatever. But it always just seemed awkward. And some of the publishing for it was a little bit awkward. The versioning used like a numbered versioning instead of like semantic versioning and things like that. And then you had to share it to multiple places and if you published it as a SAR app, then you got global distri ... Anyways, it was a little bit hard to use.And so when you're trying to package large dependencies and put those in a layer and then combine them with a Lambda function, the other problem you had was you still had a maximum size that you could use for those, when those were combined. So I like this idea of saying like, "Look, I'd like to just kind of create this little isolate," like you said, "put my dependencies in there." Whether that's PyCharm or some other thing that is a big dependency that maybe I don't want to install, directly in a Lambda layer, or I don't want to do directly in my Lambda function. But you do that together and then that whole process just is a lot easier. And then you can actually run those containers, you could run those locally and test those if you wanted to.Julian: Correct. So that's also one of the sort of superpowers of this. And that's when I was talking about, just being able to package them up. Well, that now enables a whole bunch of extra kind of stuff. So yes, first of all is you can then use those container images that you've created as your local testing. And I know, it's silly for anyone to poo poo local testing. And we do like to say, "Well, bring your testing to the cloud rather than bringing the cloud to your testing." But testing locally for unit tests is super great. It's going to be super fast. You can iterate, have your Lambda functions, but we don't want to be mocking all of DynamoDB, all of building harebrained S3 options locally.But the cool thing is you've got the same Docker file that you're going to run in Lambda can be the same Docker file to build your function that you run locally. And it is literally exactly the same Lambda function that's going to run. And yes, that may be locally, but, with a bit of a stretch of kind of stuff, you could also run those Lambda functions elsewhere. So even if you need to run it on EC2 instances or ECS or Fargate or some kind of thing, this gives you a lot more opportunities to be able to use the same Lambda function, maybe in different way, shapes or forms, even if is on-prem. Now, obviously you can't recreate all of Lambda because that's connected to IM and it's got huge availability, and scalability, and latency and all that kind of things, but you can actually run a Lambda function in a lot more places.Jeremy: Yeah. Which is interesting. And then the other thing I had mentioned earlier was the size. So now the size of these container or these packages can be much, much bigger.Julian: Yeah, up to 10 gig. So the serverless purists in the back are shouting, "What about cold starts? What about cold starts?"Jeremy: That was my next question, yes.Julian: Yeah. I mean, back on zip functional archives are also all available, nothing changes with that Lambda layers, many people use and love, that's all available. This isn't a replacement it's just a new way of doing it. So now we've got Lambda functions that can be up to 10 gig in size and surely, surely that's got to be insane for cold starts. But actually, part of what I was talking about earlier of some of the work we've done on the backend to support this is to be able to support these super large package sizes. And the high level thing is that we actually cache those things really close to where the Lambda layer is going to be run.Now, if you run the Docker ecosystem, you build your Docker files based on base images, and so this needs to be Linux. One of the super things with the container image support is you don't have to use Amazon Linux or Amazon Linux 2 for Lambda functions, you can actually now build your Lambda functions also on Ubuntu, DBN or Alpine or whatever else. And so that also gives you a lot more functionality and flexibility. You can use the same Linux distribution, maybe across your entire suite, be it on-prem or anywhere else.Jeremy: Right. Right.Julian: And the two little components, there's an interface client, what you install, it's just another Docker layer. And that's that runtime API shim that talks to the runtime API. And then there's a runtime interface emulator and that's the thing that pretends to be Lambda, so you can shunt those events between HTTP and JSON. And that's the thing you would use to run locally. So runtime interface client means you can use any Linux distribution at the runtime interface client and you're compatible with Lambda, and then the interface emulators, what you would use for local testing, or if you want to spread your wings and run your Lambda functions elsewhere.Jeremy: Right. Awesome. Okay. So the other thing I think that container support does, I think it opens up a broader set of, or I guess a larger audience of people who are familiar with containerization and how that works, bringing those two Lambda functions. And one of the things that you really don't get when you run a container, I guess, on EC2, or, not EC2, I'm sorry, ECS, or Fargate or something like that, without kind of adding another layer on top of it, is the eventing aspect of it. I mean, Lambda just is naturally an event driven, a compute layer, right? And so, eventing and this idea of event driven applications and so forth has just become much more popular and I think much more mainstream. So what are your thoughts? What are you seeing in terms of, especially working with so many customers and businesses that are using this now, how are you seeing this sort of evolution or adoption of event driven applications?Julian: Yeah. I mean, it's quite funny to think that actually the event of an application was the genesis of Lambda rather than it being Serverless. I mentioned earlier about starting with S3. Yeah, the whole crux of Lambda has been, I respond to an event of an API gateway, or something on SQS, or via the API or anything. And so the whole point in a way of Lambda has been this event driven computing, which I think people are starting to sort of understand in a bigger thing than, "Oh, this is just the way you have to do Lambda." Because, I do think that serverless has a unique challenge where there is a new conceptual learning maybe that you have to go through. And one other thing that holds back service development is, people are used to a client's server and maybe ports and sockets. And even if you're doing containers or on-prem, or EC2, you're talking IP addresses and load balances, and sockets and firewalls, and all this kind of thing.But ultimately, when we're building these applications that are going to be composed of multiple services talking together through using APIs and events, the events is actually going to be a super part of it. And I know he is, not for so much longer, but my ultimate boss, but I can blame Jeff Bezos just a little bit, because he did say that, "If you want to talk via anything, talk via an API." And he was 100% right and that was great. But now we're sort of evolving that it doesn't just have to be an API and it doesn't have to be something behind API gateway or some API that you can run. And you can use the sort of power of events, particularly in an asynchronous model to not just be "forced" again in inverted commas to use APIs, but have far more flexibility of how data and information is going to flow through, maybe not just your application, but your suite of applications, or to and from your partners, or where that is.And ultimately authentications are going to be distributed, and maybe that is connecting to partners, that could be SaaS partners, or it's going to be an on-prem component, or maybe things in other kind of places. And those things need to communicate. And so the way of thinking about events is a super powerful way of thinking about that.Jeremy: Right. And it's not necessarily new. I mean, we've been doing web hooks for quite some time. And that idea of, something is going to happen somewhere and I want to be notified of it, is again, not a new concept. But I think certainly the way that it's evolved with Lambda and the way that other FaaS products had done eventing and things like that, is just those tight integrations and just all of the, I guess, the connective tissue that runs between those things to make sure that the events get delivered, and that you can DLQ them, and you can do all these other things with retries and stuff like that, is pretty powerful.I know you have, I actually just mentioned this on the last episode, about one of my favorite books, I think that changed my thinking and really got me thinking about how microservices communicate with one another. And that was Building Microservices by Sam Newman, which I actually said was sort of like my Bible for a couple of years, yes, I use that. So what are some of the other, like I know you have a favorite book on this.Julian: Well, that Building Microservices, Sam Newman, and I think there's a part two. I think it's part two, or there's another one ...Jeremy: Hopefully.Julian: ... in the works. I think even on O'Riley's website, you can go and see some preview copies of it. I actually haven't seen that. But yeah, I mean that is a great kind of Bible talking. And sometimes we do conflate this microservices things with a whole bunch of stuff, but if you are talking events, you're talking about separating things. But yeah, the book recommendation I have is one called Flow Architectures by James Urquhart. And James Urquhart actually works with VMware, but he's written this book which is looking sort of at the current state and also looking into the future about how does information flow through our applications and between companies and all this kind of thing.And he goes into some of the technology. When we talk about flow, we are talking about streams and we're talking about events. So streams would be, let's maybe put some AWS words around it, so streams would be something like Kinesis and events would be something like EventBridge, and topics would be SNS, and SQS would be queues. And I know we've got all these things and I wish some clever person would create the one flow service to rule them all, but we're not there. And they've got also different properties, which are helpful for different things and I know confusingly some of them merge. But James' sort of big idea is, in the future we are going to be able to moving data around between businesses, between applications. So how can we think of that as a flow? And what does that mean for designing applications and how we handle that?And Lambda is part of it, but even more nicely, I think is even some of the native integrations where you don't have to have a Lambda function. So if you've got API gateway talking to Step Functions directly, for example, well, that's even better. I mean, you don't have any code to manage and if it's certainly any code that I've written, you probably don't want to manage it. So yeah. I mean this idea of flow, Lambda's great for doing some of this moving around. But we are even evolving to be able to flow data around our applications without having to do anything and just wire up some things in a console or in a terminal.Jeremy: Right. Well, so you mentioned, someone could build the ultimate sort of flow control system or whatever. I mean, I honestly think EventBridge is very close to that. And I actually had Mike Deck on the show. I think it was like episode five. So two years ago, whenever it was when the show came out. I mean, when EventBridge came out. And we were talking and I sort of made the joke, I'm like, so this is like serverless web hooks, essentially being able, because there was the partner integrations where partners could push events onto an event bus, which they still can do. But this has evolved, right? Because the issue was always sort of like, I would have to subscribe to web books, I'd have to build a web hook to get events from a particular company. Which was great, always worked fine, but you're still maintaining that infrastructure.So EventBridge comes along, it creates these partner integrations and now you can just push an event on that now your applications, whether it's a Lambda function or other services, you can push them to an SQS queue, you can push them into a Kinesis stream, all these different destinations. You can go ahead and pull that data in and that's just there. So you don't have to worry about maintaining that infrastructure. And then, the EventBridge team went ahead and released the destination API, I think it's called.Julian: Yeah, API destinations.Jeremy: Event API destinations, right, where now you can set up these integrations with other companies, so you don't even have to make the API call yourself anymore, but instead you get all of the retries, you get the throttling, you get all that stuff kind of built in. So I mean, it's just really, really interesting where this is going. And actually, I mean, if you want to take a second to tell people about EventBridge API destinations, what that can do, because I think that now sort of creates both sides of that equation for you.Julian: It does. And I was just thinking over there, you've done a 10 times better job at explaining API destinations than I have, so you've nailed it on the head. And packet is that kind of simple. And it is just, events land up in your EventBridge and you can just pump events to any arbitrary endpoint. So it doesn't have to be in AWS, it can be on-prem. It can be to your Raspberry PI, it can literally be anywhere. But it's not just about pumping the events over there because, okay, how do we handle failover? And how do we handle over throttling? And so this is part of the extra cool goodies that came with API destinations, is that you can, for instance, if you are sending events to some external API and you only licensed for 1,000 invocations, not invocations, that could be too Lambda-ish, but 1,000 hits on the API every minute.Jeremy: Quotas. I think we call them quotas.Julian: Quotas, something like that. That's a much better term. Thank you, Jeremy. And some sort of quota, well, you can just apply that in API destinations and it'll basically store the data in the meantime in EventBridge and fire that off to the API destination. If the API destination is in that sort of throttle and if the API destination is down, well, it's going to be able to do some exponential back-off or calm down a little bit, don't over-flood this external API. And then eventually when the API does come back, it will be able to send those events. So that does just really give you excellent power rather than maintaining all these individual API endpoints yourself, and you're not handling the availability of the endpoint API, but of whatever your code is that needs to talk to that destination.Jeremy: Right. And I don't want to oversell this to anybody, but that also ...Julian: No, keep going. Keep going.Jeremy: ... adds the capability of enhanced security, because you're not exposing those API keys to your developers or anybody else, they're all baked in and stored within, the API destinations or within an EventBridge. You have the ability, you mentioned this idea of not needing Lambda to maybe talk directly, API gateway to DynamoDB or to step function or something like that. I mean, the cool thing about this is you do have translation capabilities, or transformation capabilities in EventBridge where you can transform the event. I haven't tried this, but I'm assuming it's possible to say, get an event from Salesforce and then pipe it into Stripe or some other API that you might want to pipe it into.So I mean, just that idea of having that centralized bus that can communicate with all these different things. I mean, we're talking about distributed systems here, right? So why is it different sending an event from my microservice A to my microservice B? Why can't I send it from my microservice A to company-wise, microservice B or whatever? And being able to do that in a secure, reliable, just with all of that stuff kind of built in for you, I think it's amazing. So I love EventBridge. To me EventBridge is one of those services that rivals Lambda. It's as, I guess as important as Lambda is, in this whole serverless equation.Julian: Absolutely, Jeremy. I mean, I'm just sitting here. I don't actually have to say anything. This is a brilliant interview and Jeremy, you're the expert. And you're just like laying down all of the excellent use cases. And exactly it. I mean, I like to think we've got sort of three interlinked services which do three different things, but are awesome. Lambda, we love if you need to do some processing or you need to do something that's literally your business logic. You've got EventBridge that can route data from in and out of SaaS partners to any other kind of API. And then you've got Step Functions that can do some coordination. And they all work together, but you've got three different things that really have sort of superpowers in terms of the amount of stuff you can do with it. And yes, start with them. If you land up bumping up against any kind of things that it doesn't work, well, first of all, get in touch with me, I'll work on that.But then you can maybe start thinking about, is it containers or EC2, or that kind of thing? But using literally just Lambda, Step Functions and EventBridge, okay. Yes, maybe you're going to need some queues, topics and APIs, and that kind of thing. But ...Jeremy: I was just going to say, add DynamoDB in there for some permanent state or for some data persistence. Right? Yeah. But other than that, no, I think you nailed it. Honestly, sometimes you're starting to build applications and yeah, you're right. You maybe need a queue here and there and things like that. But for the most part, no, I mean, you could build a lot with those three or four services.Julian: Yeah. Well, I mean, even think of it what you used to do before with API destinations. Maybe you drop something on a queue, you'd have Lambda pull that from a queue. You have Lambda concurrency, which would be set to five per second to then send that to an external API. If it failed going to that API, well, you've got to then dump it to Lambda destinations or to another SQS queue. You then got something ... You know, I'm going down the rabbit hole, or just put it on EventBridge ...Jeremy: You just have it magically happen.Julian: ... or we talk about removing serverless infrastructure, not normal infrastructure, and just removing even the serverless bits, which is great.Jeremy: Yeah, no. I think that's amazing. So we talked about a couple of these different services, and we talked about packaging formats and we talked about event driven applications, and all these other things. And a lot of this stuff, even though some of it may be familiar and you could probably equate it or relate it to things that developers might already know, there is still a lot of new stuff here. And I think, my biggest complaint about serverless was not about the capabilities of it, it was basically the education and the ability to get people to adopt it and understand the power behind it. So let's talk about that a little bit because ... What's that?Julian: It sounds like my job description, perfectly.Jeremy: Right. So there we go. Right, that's what you're supposed to be doing, Julian. Why aren't you doing it? No, but you are doing it. You are doing it. No, and that's why I want to talk to you about it. So you have that series on the Well-Architected Framework and we can talk about that. There's a whole bunch of really good resources on this. Obviously, you're doing videos and conferences, well, you used to be doing conferences. I think you probably still do some of those virtual ones, right? Which are not the same thing.Julian: Not quite, no.Jeremy: I mean, it was fun seeing you in Cardiff and where else were you?Julian: Yeah, Belfast.Jeremy: Cardiff and Northern Ireland.Julian: Yeah, exactly.Jeremy: Yeah, we were all over the place together.Julian: With the Guinness and all of us. It was brilliant.Jeremy: Right. So tell me a little bit about, sort of, the education process that you're trying to do. Or maybe even where you sort of see the state of Serverless education now, and just sort of where it's evolved, where we're getting best practices from, what's out there for people. And that's a really long question, but I don't know, maybe you can distill that down to something usable.Julian: No, that's quite right. I'm thinking back to my extensions explanation, which is a really long answer. So we're doing really long stuff, but that's fine. But I like to also bring this back to also thinking about the people aspect of IT. And we talk a lot about the technology and Lambda is amazing and S3 is amazing and all those kinds of things. But ultimately it is still sort of people lashing together these services and building the serverless applications, and deciding what you even need to do. And so the education is very much tied with, of course, having the products and features that do lots of kinds of things. And Serverless, there's always this lever, I suppose, between simplicity and functionality. And we are adding lots of knobs and levers and everything to Lambda to make it more feature-rich, but we've got to try and keep it simple at the same time.So there is sort of that trade-off, and of course with that, that obviously means not just the education side, but education about Lambda and serverless, but generally, how do I build applications? What do I do? And so you did mention the Well-Architected Framework. And so for people who don't know, this came out in 2015, and in 2017, there was a Serverless Lens which was added to it; what is basically serverless specific information for Well-Architected. And Well-Architected means bringing best practices to serverless applications. If you're building prod applications in the cloud, you're normally looking to build and operate them following best practices. And this is useful stuff throughout the software life cycle, it's not just at the end to tick a few boxes and go, "Yes, we've done that." So start early with the well-architected journey, it'll help you.And just sort of answer the question, am I well architected? And I mean, that is a bit of a fuzzy, what is that question? But the idea is to give you more confidence in the architecture and operations of your workloads, and that's not a goal it's in, but it's to reduce and minimize the impact of any issues that can happen. So what we do is we try and distill some of our questions and thoughts on how you could do things, and we built that into the Well-Architected Framework. And so the ServiceLens has a few questions on its operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, efficiency, and cost optimization. Excellent. I knew I was going to forget one of them and I didn't. So yeah, these are things like, how do you control access to an API? How do you do lifecycle management? How do you build resiliency into your application? All these kinds of things.And so the Well-Architected Framework with Serverless Lens there's a whole bunch of guidance to help you do that. And I have been slowly writing a blog series to literally cover all of the questions, they're nine questions in the Well-Architected Serverless Lens. And I'm about halfway through, and I had to pause because we have this little conference called re:Invent, which requires one or two slides to be created. But yeah, I'm desperately keen to pick that up again. And yeah, that's just providing some really and sort of more opinionated stuff, because the documentation is awesome and it's very in-depth and it's great when you need all that kind of stuff. But sometimes you want to know, well, okay, just tell me what to do or what do you think is best rather than these are the seven different options.Jeremy: Just tell me what to do.Julian: Yeah.Jeremy: I think that's a common question.Julian: Exactly. And I'll launch off from that to mention my colleague, James Beswick, he writes one or two things on serverless ...Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, every once in a while you see something from it. Yeah.Julian: ... every day. The Besbot machine of serverless. He's amazing. James, he's so knowledgeable and writes like a machine. He's brilliant. Yeah, I'm lucky to be on his team. So when you talk about education, I learn from him. But anyway, in a roundabout way, he's created this blog series and other series called the Lambda Operations Guide. And this is literally a whole in-depth study on how to operate Lambda. And it goes into a whole bunch of things, it's sort of linked to the Serverless Lens because there are a lot of common kind of stuff, but it's also a great read if you are more nerdily interested in Lambda than just firing off a function, just to read through it. It's written in an accessible way. And it has got a whole bunch of information on how to operate Lambda and some of the stuff under the scenes, how to work, just so you can understand it better.Jeremy: Right. Right. Yeah. And I think you mentioned this idea of confidence too. And I can tell you right now I've been writing serverless applications, well, let's see, what year is it? 2021. So I started in 2015, writing or building applications with Lambda. So I've been doing this for a while and I still get to a point every once in a while, where I'm trying to put something in cloud formation or I'm using the Serverless Framework or whatever, and you're trying to configure something and you think about, well, wait, how do I want to do this? Or is this the right way to do it? And you just have that moment where you're like, well, let me just search and see what other people are doing. And there are a lot of myths about serverless.There's as much good information is out there, there's a lot of bad information out there too. And that's something that is kind of hard to combat, but I think that maybe we could end it there. What are some of the things, the questions people are having, maybe some of the myths, maybe some of the concerns, what are those top ones that you think you could sort of ...Julian: Dispel.Jeremy: ... to tell people, dispel, yeah. That you could say, "Look, these are these aren't things to worry about. And again, go and read your blog post series, go and read James' blog post series, and you're going to get the right answers to these things."Julian: Yeah. I mean, there are misconceptions and some of them are just historical where people think the Lambda functions can only run for five minutes, they can run for 15 minutes. Lambda functions can also now run up to 10 gig of RAM. At re:Invent it was only 3 gig of RAM. That's a three times increase in Lambda functions within a three times proportional increase in CPU. So I like to say, if you had a CPU-intensive job that took 40 minutes and you couldn't run it on Lambda, you've now got three times the CPU. Maybe you can run it on Lambda and now because that would work. So yeah, some of those historical things that have just changed. We've got EFS for Lambda, that's some kind of thing you can't do state with Lambda. EFS and NFS isn't everybody's cup of tea, but that's certainly going to help some people out.And then the other big one is also cold starts. And this is an interesting one because, obviously we've sort of solved the cold start issue with connecting Lambda functions to VPC, so that's no longer an issue. And that's been a barrier for lots of people, for good reason, and that's now no longer the case. But the other thing for cold starts is interesting because, people do still get caught up at cold starts, but particularly for development because they create a Lambda function, they run it, that's a cold start and then update it and they run it and then go, oh, that's a cold start. And they don't sort of grok that the more you run your Lambda function the less cold starts you have, just because they're warm starts. And it's literally the number of Lambda functions that are running at exactly the same time will have a cold start, but then every subsequent Lambda function invocation for quite a while will be using a warm function.And so as it ramps up, we see, in the small percentages of cold starts that are actually going to happen. And when we're talking again about the container image support, that's got a whole bunch of complexity, which people are trying to understand. Hopefully, people are learning from this podcast about that as well. But also with the cold starts with that, those are huge and they're particular ways that you can construct your Lambda functions to really reduce those cold starts, and it's best practices anyway. But yeah, cold starts is also definitely one of those myths. And the other one ...Jeremy: Well, one note on cold starts too, just as something that I find to be interesting. I know that we, I even had to spend time battling with that earlier on, especially with VPC cold starts, that's all sort of gone away now, so much more efficient. The other thing is like provision concurrency. If you're using provision concurrency to get your cold starts down, I'm not even sure that's the right use for provision concurrency. I think provision concurrency is more just to make sure you have enough capacity because of the ramp-up time for Lambda. You certainly can use it for cold starts, but I don't think you need to, that's just my two cents on that.Julian: Yeah. No, that is true. And they're two different use cases for the same kind of thing. Yeah. As you say, Lambda is pretty scalable, but there is a bit of a ramp-up to get up to many, many, many, many thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent executions. And so yeah, using provision currency, you can get that up in advance. And yeah, some people do also use it for provision concurrency for getting those cold starts done. And yet that is another very valid use case, but it's only an issue for synchronous workloads as well. Anything that is synchronous you really shouldn't be carrying too much. Other than for cost perspective because it's going to take longer to run.Jeremy: Sure. Sure. I have a feeling that the last one you were going to mention, because this one bugs me quite a bit, is this idea of no ops or some people call it ops-less, which I think is kind of funny. But that's one of those things where, oh, it drives me nuts when I hear this.Julian: Yeah, exactly. And it's a frustrating thing. And I think often, sometimes when people are talking about no ops, they either have something to sell you. And sometimes what they're selling you is getting rid of something, which never is the case. It's not as though we develop serverless applications and we can then get rid of half of our development team, it just doesn't work like that. And it's crazy, in fact. And when I was talking about the people aspect of IT, this is a super important thing. And me coming from an infrastructure background, everybody is dying in their jobs to do more meaningful work and to do more interesting things and have the agility to try those experiments or try something else. Or do something that's better or even improve the way your build or improve the way your CI/CD pipeline runs or anything, rather than just having to do a lot of work in the lower levels.And this is what serverless really helps you do, is to be able to, we'll take over a whole lot of the ops for you, but it's not all of the ops, because in a way there's never an end to ops. Because you can always do stuff better. And it's not just the operations of deploying Lambda functions and limits and all that kind of thing. But I mean, think of observability and not knowing just about your application, but knowing about your business. Think of if you had the time that you weren't just monitoring function invocations and monitoring how long things were happening, but imagine if you were able to pull together dashboards of exactly what each transaction costs as it flows through your whole entire application. Think of the benefit of that to your business, or think of the benefit that in real-time, even if it's on Lambda function usage or something, you can say, "Well, oh, there's an immediate drop-off or pick-up in one region in the world or one particular application." You can spot that immediately. That kind of stuff, you just haven't had time to play with to actually build.But if we can take over some of the operational stuff with you and run one or two or trillions of Lambda functions in the background, just to keep this all ticking along nicely, you're always going to have an opportunity to do more ops. But I think the exciting bit is that ops is not just IT infrastructure, plumbing ops, but you can start even doing even better business ops where you can have more business visibility and more cool stuff for your business because we're not writing apps just for funsies.Jeremy: Right. Right. And I think that's probably maybe a good way to describe serverless, is it allows you to focus on more meaningful work and more meaningful tasks maybe. Or maybe not more meaningful, but more impactful on the business. Anyways, Julian, listen, this was a great conversation. I appreciate it. I appreciate the work that you're doing over at AWS ...Julian: Thank you.Jeremy: ... and the stuff that you're doing. And I hope that there will be a conference soon that we will be able to attend together ...Julian: I hope so too.Jeremy: ... maybe grab a drink. So if people want to get a hold of you or find out more about serverless and what AWS is doing with that, how do they do that?Julian: Yeah, absolutely. Well, please get hold of me anytime on Twitter, is the easiest way probably, julian_wood. Happy to answer your question about anything Serverless or Lambda. And if I don't know the answer, I'll always ask Jeremy, so you're covered twice over there. And then, three different things. James is, if you're talking specifically Lambda, James Beswick's operations guide, have a look at that. Just so much nuggets of super information. We've got another thing we did just sort of jump around, you were talking about cloud formation and the spark was going off in my head. We have something which we're calling the Serverless Patterns Collection, and this is really super cool. We didn't quite get to talk about it, but if you're building applications using SAM or serverless application model, or using the CDK, so either way, we've got a whole bunch of patterns which you can grab.So if you're pulling something from S3 to Lambda, or from Lambda to EventBridge, or SNS to SQS with a filter, all these kind of things, they're literally copy and paste patterns that you can put immediately into your cloud formation or your CDK templates. So when you are down the rabbit hole of Hacker News or Reddit or Stack Overflow, this is another resource that you can use to copy and paste. So go for that. And that's all hosted on our cool site called serverlessland.com. So that's serverlessland.com and that's an aggregation site that we run because we've got video talks, and we've got blog posts, and we've got learning path series, and we've got a whole bunch of stuff. Personally, I've got a learning path series coming out shortly on Lambda extensions and also one on Lambda observability. There's one coming out shortly on container image supports. And our team is talking all over as many things as we can virtually. I'm actually speaking about container images of DockerCon, which is coming up, which is exciting.And yeah, so serverlessland.com, that's got a whole bunch of information. That's just an easy one-stop-shop where you can get as much information about AWS services as you can. And if not yet, get in touch, I'm happy to help. I'm happy to also carry your feedback. And yeah, at the moment, just inside, we're sort of doing our planning for the next cycle of what Lambda and what all the service stuff we're going to do. So if you've got an awesome idea, please send it on. And I'm sure you'll be super excited when something pops out in the near issue, maybe just in future for a cool new functionality you could have been involved in.Jeremy: Well, I know that serverlessland.com is an excellent resource, and it's not that the AWS Compute blog is hard to parse through or anything, but serverlessland.com is certainly a much easier resource to get there. S

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

What comes to mind when you think about the relationship with your manufacturers? Chances are you have the same picture in your head as so many other brands. You see a series of events that starts with opening a purchase order, and goes down the line of tasks including paying for your items, getting them shipped and then starting the process all over again. It’s a transactional relationship that has seen very little disruption through the years. But the times are changing, and a company called Italic is leading the charge when it comes to developing a new framework around partnering with manufacturers. Italic is a membership-based brand that gives customers access to products produced by the same manufacturers of the top brands in the world. Jeremy Cai is the CEO of Italic, and he likes to say that Italic is a marketplace-inspired supply chain. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explains exactly what that means. Jeremy describes new and different kinds of partnerships with manufacturers that, for the first time, makes them true partners in business. Plus, he explains why that partnership is leading to a better end product and happier customers. He also dives into new ways you can leverage manufacturers that many aren’t aware of, and details the metrics and strategies that subscription companies need to be focused on to rise above the competition.Main Takeaways:Getting in on the Action – Traditionally, manufacturers have not had to put much at stake financially when working with brands. But, with a company like Italic, the manufacturers take on a financial risk. In doing so, they also become more involved partners which leads to a better end product.It’s Deeper Than You Think – There is now a partnership opportunity between manufacturers and brands when it comes to designs and in-house pattern design capabilities t In the past, much of the design and pattern work was done solely by brands. But today, many manufacturers have high-quality design and R&D talent inhouse and create showrooms of products that brands can tap into.Meaty Membership Metrics – For membership-based companies, there needs to be less value placed on the traditional metrics that have so often defined ecommerce companies. Tune in to hear which ones are crucial to pay attention to.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce--- Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, cofounder of mission.org. Today, we have Jeremy Cai on the show, the CEO of Italic. Jeremy, welcome.Jeremy:Thanks so much for having me.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on the show. I was mentioning earlier, but I've read quite a bit about you guys. I see you in a lot of the eCommerce newsletters that I follow, so it seems like you're growing in popularity at least when it comes to people writing about you right now.Jeremy:I don't know if that's a good success metric, but we're doing I think a good job on media coverage right now.Stephanie:There you go. I think it's a pretty good one. Tell me a bit about Italic for anyone who hasn't heard about it, doesn't know what it is. I would love you to give a brief overview of what it is.Jeremy:Sure, so Italic is an annual membership that costs $100 a year and our members get access to hundreds of products that we design and develop inhouse, ranging from cookware to bedding to towels to apparel and accessory, footwear and many more coming soon, but the difference is we sell them at prices where Italic it doesn't actually make a profit. This actually results in pricing that is dramatically lower than both direct-to-consumer companies as well as traditional incumbents, oftentimes in the 40% to 50% to sometimes 70% to 80% range. We've been around for about two and a half years, but we've only launched the membership about a month and a half ago, and so far, it's been a pretty good start.Stephanie:Very cool. You have membership and you're not making money on the actual products. Tell me more about what would be an example of something you're selling and how are you encouraging people to sign up for a membership to get access to everything that you just mentioned.Jeremy:Sure. One example of the product that we sell, and this applies to all their products, is let's just take our slumber cotton sheet set, for example. The sheet set sells anywhere from I think ... Actually, I might have to actually look at this for cross reference, but I think it's like anywhere from $80 to $120. Those are prices where we're not actually making money. Those prices do include things like freight and warehousing and fulfillment fees, but generally it still comes out substantially lower than the prices that our competitors would set. Then in terms of how we're actually attracting new members, really I'd say it's from two general ways.Jeremy:One is I think the goal is for our members to be saving money on their first purchase. This oftentimes comes through the lens of product marketing. If we would do a great job of really letting the products tell their own story of saying how great quality they are, the same manufacturers of so and so brands are, which certifications these manufacturers have, what specific details of the products really sell the product itself, I think that actually helps sell the membership for us because we don't really have to say like, "Hey, with this membership, you're saving all this money." instead it's like, "Hey, this product is obviously really great and it's really high quality."Jeremy:Then once you look at the price point, the perceived value is like, "Oh, I'm going to save pretty much the entirety of my membership fee in one or two purchases," which we see in the vast majority of cases. Typically, 93% of our new members will break even on their $100 fee in one order, but on the flipside on the membership, this is different than the standard transactional model in which you have to be a paying member in order to purchase anything. I think we do have do a fair amount of education in terms of showing to our members or showing to our audience who might become members, "Hey, this product, you can only buy it if it's a membership. This is how the platform works. This is why it's different than a brand. I think we have to put out a lot of content in terms of actually sharing like, this is how we were able to put together this offering that doesn't really exist elsewhere."Jeremy:We do a little bit of both, but I would say right now we lean a little bit heavier towards product marketing since we have a lot of new exciting launches coming up.Stephanie:That's awesome. Talk to me through a bit about what was your thinking behind creating a membership program for because I think I saw you started out with it and then maybe you stopped doing it and they started again and feel free to correct me if that's not right, but tell me about what was that journey like.Jeremy:It was not easy. I would say the way I like to view it is the first two and a half years of our business, we've really been focused on the supply side of operations, building out that product assortment, and exactly like you said, we did launch in 2018 with a membership product. Within basically a month or two, we decided very, very early on like, "Hey, we had three manufacturers in three categories at the time, handbags, scarves and eyewear. As you can imagine, those are not necessarily high frequency purchases to substantiate a membership value proposition.Jeremy:We actually never actually charged anyone for the membership. It was always a test to see how the response would be. Overwhelmingly, we saw that the product response was great, the quality was great, but I think the offering was too limited at the time. Instead for the following two years, we ran a transactional model in which we made money through marking up our products, albeit not as much as a brand would. Our products might be marked up two to two and a half times, whereas our competitors will mark them up five, 10, 15 times sometimes. That's how we made our money.Jeremy:Really the incentive was, "How do we build a product assortment that's large enough, so I guess wide enough and deep enough to attract the member to actually convert?" Around, I would say, Q4 of 2019, to be totally honest, I think we saw two things happen. One was the structural, I guess, implosion of the venture direct-to-consumer model in which a lot of brands, I think, who had been raising money and then going out with this one playbook that hadn't been set maybe back in 2013 to 2017, I think suddenly realized, like, "Hey, we are not technology companies. We are a brand and we make money through transactional volume." Basically, I'm just trying to say we saw the writing on the wall if we were to continue that model.Jeremy:Then in Q1, we also took a hard look in terms of our user behavior. We saw frequencies of purchases, our lifetime values get to a place, our product reviews, our NPS scores all get to a place where we felt confident in our product assortment to date. When we first started, we might have had maybe 30 or so skews. Now, we have over 1,000 skews. It finally got to a point where the product assortment felt mature enough to launch a membership product. We tested that, and then basically right when we started testing it, that's also when COVID hit.Jeremy:We figured there's either two options. One was we just pull that and just focus on building the transactional model again and getting it into a sustainable place which is still the goal, right? We don't want to build an unsustainable growth model or alternatively stress test the model in the peak of, I think, consumer uncertainty in which we would see like, "Hey, does this value proposition of saving money resonate in the time when it would matter the most. Thankfully, it did and I think from April to May, June and July, we monitored our cohorts and user behavior really closely and wanted to make sure that the membership was something that we had conviction in.Jeremy:Eventually, we got to a point where we realized like, "Hey, this is ..." I guess the way I like to put it is our customers always liked us, but our members absolutely loved us. We decided to go all in and then finally released the public version of the product in July.Stephanie:That's great. That's good seeing quick pivots and seeing like, "What is the market telling us? Where are things headed?" and trying out different models. How are you going about building out maybe a financial model because I'm thinking if you have only a membership subscription-type model, there's probably only a limited market? You can't scale indefinitely. There's only a certain people who will be on that versus making profits off of each product. I'm sure those are two very different models. How to do think about it financially when trying the two different ones out?Jeremy:That's a very valid point and I think we knew going into it that there is a lot of subscriptions out there and a lot of subscription fatigue and at least the states in the US in which everyone has a Prime membership or a Spotify subscription or Netflix and to add one more to that is always asking a lot. I think we knew going into it like, "Hey, this is all or nothing in which you can't launch a half-baked type of membership product." I think to the financial level, I think two things are worth noting before we decided to do this. One was the fact that we are capping our upside to $100 very literally for pretty much the extent of the year and the incentive in that case is, one, can we launch products and provide a service that our members love so much that they'll stay for years to come in which our LTV or lifetime value in that case would become quite substantial and hopefully our churn would be low and retention would be high and so on and so forth?Jeremy:I guess that's one area is we really were aware of the fact that if we cap our financial upside that the immediate short term would be that we're limited to $100 for the year, but the amount of utility and value that we could provide to a member would be so great that they hopefully stay for years to come in which our LTV would grow to a point where we would actually outperform our transactional type of behavior. Then the second point, exactly like you said, memberships aren't for everyone. We're very well aware of that, but I think something that has been exciting for us to see is if we're able to build this type of product, I think it is genuinely massively different than anything close to us.Jeremy:Whereas most of these direct-to-consumer brands, they're basically providing products and a story to a customer which is an incredibly, incredibly competitive market. We have a product where it's like, "Hey, for $100, you get access to all the products we sell at a price where we don't make money. I think that's a genuinely differentiated product in which we know it's not for everyone, but we think value-driven commerce, it's not sexy per se, but it is something that is very attractive to a very large segment of the American consumer base. I think we were willing to take that bet.Jeremy:Of course, we wanted to monitor really closely so that we weren't losing money on transactions at least and at least that we were breakeven and we were able to accomplish that within the months of the pilot, so we felt confident in rolling it out more broadly, but I think to answer that more directly, if we didn't see user traction, if we didn't see members using the platform or membership or if we saw our NPS or product reviews drop or if we saw an increase complaint rate, increase return rate, etcetera, then I think we would have actually probably returned back to the transactional model, but it was something that we felt confident enough in just off of a couple months of data that we've decided to go all in.Stephanie:That's awesome. I think that's so great, because it really shows a longer term vision and commitment to be around where I think actually a lot of B2C companies right now are missing that. I don't know if it's because of the VC stage where it was like grow really quickly, but it seems like a lot of people are more ready to just quickly make as much money as possible, maybe sell the company off, see what happens afterwards, but I really like the idea of actually telling your customers, "Hey, we're only going to make $100 profit for the year off you that essentially cover some of our costs." I could see that really helping a customer want to also support you guys along with just wanting it because maybe it's a very good service and some platform they use.Jeremy:Thanks. That was pretty much the bat. The reality of the business right now is if you're a direct-to-consumer brand and you're starting out nowadays, you might raise one round of financing, let's say anywhere from $500,000 all the way to like $3.5 million or something of the sort if you want to pursue that route. That's pretty much all you're going to be able to raise or at least assume that's the last capital you're going to raise, and then subsequently, you're going to try to sell. Nowadays, what I've seen whether it's a PE firm or a conglomerate or a larger direct-to-consumer brand that might be interested in acquiring one of these assets, it's now valued off of EBITDA, as opposed to revenues or run rates which is what we saw in between 2014, let's say in 2019.Jeremy:I think the reality is nowadays if you're trying to build a venture scale business in this model, it's really, really tough. I think the actual advantage of doing so is doing so sustainably with growing off the business off of cash flow as opposed to equity raises and going that route. Then, I think for the companies that have already raised that are in this tricky spot where we were for sure, we had to look ourselves in the mirror and just say like, "Hey, what is something that would be significantly differentiated in the market that has technology scale outcomes that would be potentially accessible if we were to do everything perfectly right.Jeremy:I think that's the only reality where we can actually like continue as a venture scale business. I think that's what we had to really just operate with the mentality of. I think in terms of like the customer empathy too, we always knew that our prices were good, that we always came maybe 15% to 20% lower than the next direct-to-consumer brand, but truth be told, if you were to compare our products which were objectively great products next to a brand's products that built all of their community messaging, advertising, copy, etcetera off of that single category, 15% to 20% off might not be enough to sway one of their customers to decide to purchase the value option, whereas nowadays to go much, much lower into the 60% to 70% range, that's a lot more powerful sway.Jeremy:I think for us we knew that it was a risky bet, but I think the customer would ultimately like it a lot more and so would the investors and I guess, business community at large. I know the brands don't like us, but that's another story.Stephanie:Well, that's actually a good segue. I wanted to hear some of the behind the scenes of partnering with these manufacturers and thinking about the psychology behind, "This is also bought," or let's see, "It's manufactured at a factory that also produces Prada." I saw that on your website mentioning like, "It also manufacturers this, this and this," and I was curious to figure out like, "What was the process to partner with these manufacturers and then also be allowed to say, 'These brands are also built or manufactured at this factory as well'?" It seems like that'd be a tricky area to play in.Jeremy:I can't deny that. I think we have a unique value proposition in that case. That's really what drove I think, a lot of our early interest in the brand over the first two years. In full transparency early on, I was personally quite nervous about it since it is a pretty radical statement, especially since like we position ourselves not so much as an individual brand, so much as, say, a platform or a marketplace or a retailer. I think in the early days we were very careful. All these things, it's not to say that we've loosened up on this. We're still very, very careful about auditing all of our partners, making sure that we're working with the best of the best in each category, regardless of where they are in the world.Jeremy:Oftentimes, that comes along with saying, "Hey, this product is made in the same manufacturer as X, Y and Z brands." That's part of the selling points of the product. I think in terms of the tricky part was obviously on the manufacturer side. We have an interesting relationship with our manufacturers in which it's not like a normal brand in which they're a vendor and we're a client, where we just place a PO and then we'll mark up their products and then that's how we profit. The best we can do in that case is like get letters of credit or Net30, Net90, etcetera.Jeremy:Instead we actually have a financial relationship with our manufacturers in which they actually are taking on inventory risk and we're taking on the marketing risk of this inventory in which their incentive is to take inventory risk for a higher yield or higher rate of return on the inventory that they're producing and owning. Then our risk, of course, is making sure that we can sell that to our members at a price point that is still radically lower than the competition, but at a place where they'd be happy with the profits. I think that was actually the tricky part because manufacturing, and this is actually my personal like family background is a really hard business and margins are already razor thin.Jeremy:On a final sale, a DTC brand might take like 80% of the margin and cost might be like 20% and the manufacturer might actually take like 5% of that cost. That's honestly how it works. It doesn't matter if you're like a legacy brand or a direct-to-consumer brand. Manufacturers treat them all the same because it is the same for them. I think on the flip side for the manufacturer, they are not oriented to take capital risk. They have predictable revenue. If you place a PO, we expect payment certain date, whereas on Italic, there is no legitimate end date for a certain PO to be paid.Jeremy:It's a little bit nuanced and that was actually the hardest part I would say of convincing these manufacturers to join. It really wasn't the brand piece. The brand piece we're always very careful of ... We always do very careful audits to make sure that they're factual claims. We always do audits with our general counsel as well to make sure that we're making claims that are factual. On the trademark side and then on the copyright side, we have a development system when we're merchandising that there's at least a number of differentiating points on the product, but we've actually never really run into major issues on this.Jeremy:Perhaps that's because we're a smaller brand right now. As we grow, the issues might pile up, but at least for now, it hasn't really been, that the legal side hasn't been a big issue. I would say it's actually more so convincing the manufacturers to take on this new type of model, but I think now that we've been around, we have over 50 manufacturers we work with. I think we've had a really good relationship with all them thus far. Yeah, I think other brands always come into question, but it's never actually been like a point of contention.Stephanie:I could see that being really beneficial for you having the background in manufacturing for those manufacturers to also feel like, "Hey, this guy gets me he understands. He knows that we don't have big margins." I want to talk a little bit more about that piece. I could see a lot of the manufacturers really liking that you have a background in manufacturing because you understand that tight margins and you're not trying to maybe push them too far. I was wondering, one, had they ever done this model before where they're taking on inventory risk? Then two, were any of them scared to work with you because they didn't want to make the brands that they work with upset?Jeremy:I can answer the second one first, which I think it's actually pretty straightforward. That has never been a reason why a manufacturer wouldn't work with us. I thought it would be, I guess in actual practice, I think it hasn't been. The reality is most of these manufacturers have a number of clients and I think they will readily offer new clients the current client list and say like, "Hey, this is who we work with. You should trust us," as part of the vetting process. What we're doing is bringing that information that all the brands already know and offering that to a customer as well, so one more layer of information that a normal brand would never offer.Jeremy:The bigger issue with the manufacturer is actually more so just capital. It's like, "Hey, you got to fund hundreds of thousands of dollars for this first run and you're not going to see a payback until we start selling it, and depending on when we decide to launch it or decide to really invest in growing that category or product offering, the return might not be immediate." I think that was actually the biggest problem. Every so often what we'll hear that'd come up is like, "Hey, we prefer that not to happen," but with regards to the brand names being mentioned, it's never been a reason as to why a manufacturer wouldn't work with us. It's always been capital related.Jeremy:Then I think to the point of the model itself, I think people have tried different approaches to this over the years. In the States, at least, there is really no one doing anything like us right now because it is an extremely ... I would say like you really have to be aware of how manufacturing works, how to communicate with them, how to work with them, also how to partner with them. That's not something that like the vast majority of American brands will ever understand and for good reason. They really have no reason to because the entire business model of commerce is built on markups, as opposed to us where you can basically just treat them as a vendor. If it's not working out, if you need better pricing, you can always counter source and so on and so forth.Jeremy:The relationship there was always rather fragile, whereas for us it's very strong from day one because we have to be in which we become basically financial partners immediately. I think they haven't necessarily ... We work with manufacturers in Asia predominantly, in Europe, in the US and for the majority of them, these are not small mom and pop merchants or artisanal shops. They are pretty professional large scale production houses for very large runs. We work with like five different public listed manufacturers. I think for them, this model is, I like to call it like a private label as a service in which they can experiment very rapidly if it works.Jeremy:We do all the design and development in house, so we take care of pretty much all the heavy lifting on the stuff that they don't have, but if it works, great. If it doesn't, the downside is basically the capital that they put into it. We haven't had that happen yet. I think it's a new ... We like to think of it as like a marketplace inspired supply chain which none of these manufacturers have encountered before, but it is something that I think has promise.Stephanie:It's so interesting thinking about everything that's going on behind the scenes and I honestly have not even gone deep into the world of manufacturing, so I have so many questions, but one that comes to mind which is probably maybe a more basic one, but how did you even go about finding out who manufactured what products? If I owned Prada, which I do not, I definitely don't, but if I did, and I was like, "Hey, who makes this? This is really nice," I want to find out what factory it's coming from or who's actually behind the scenes making it, how did you even start that process of finding that out and then finding the next one, the next one and maybe getting referrals?Jeremy:Well, you just named it. Sourcing is a weird business in which it's still and this ... Not just sourcing, but a lot of the supply chain is still heavily relationships based in which it's like, "Who do you know? Who do you know? Who do you know?" and that's who you're able to work with. In the early days, I personally met and lived between China and Italy for the first year of the business and I met with hundreds of manufacturers, many of whom are now our partners, but in the beginning, were very skeptical, "Who is this guy? Who is this company?" I think the best way to put it, it's like in terms of sourcing, the best way to do it is through referrals.Jeremy:We've tried everything from digital platforms to sourcing companies to even trading companies just to see what type of quality and price point we can achieve, but ultimately, we've always found the best option would be to do direct sourcing ourselves. We actually have an internal team coming from the likes of Patagonia, Arc'teryx, Zulily and Amazon, really focused on sourcing the world's best manufacturers in each given category. Each time we want to enter a new category, we will always ask for referrals from our existing manufacturers. There's digital products that help you find manufacturers through other sources but generally we found the best have always come through referral.Stephanie:I think I've looked online before looking into, maybe this is a 3PL that I was looking at. Either way, that whole world seems pretty behind the times when it comes to trying to find things online and get details about it. It does seem like referrals would be the best bet in that industry.Stephanie:I was going to ask when it comes to inventory risk, you were mentioning that the manufacturers take on the inventory risk, do they also have a say when it comes to the pricing of the product?Jeremy:Yup, they definitely do. We are hand in hand with their manufacturers at every single point in the development journey, from material selection, color dyes and sample reviews and so on and so forth in which if we are talking about cost structures and cost payments, or sorry, sample reviews, we're always thinking about price and we're always very transparent with our manufacturers in terms of what our research tells us. If we believe a certain price threshold is too high, we'll tell them, and vice versa, they'll tell us like, "Hey, this is getting expensive. Do you think your customers or members will still want that?"Jeremy:Ultimately, the incentive for manufacturers to earn a higher than normal profit margin on Italic sales because they're taking on the inventory risk, so there, we're able to pay them out substantially more than they would ordinarily make. I think they're very in tune with our orders, sometimes even more than we are in terms of the performance. We've also built a lot of internal dashboards that we'll share with all of our manufacturing partners for them to log into, review the performance. Sometimes, we'll need to set price points that are lower, so that will encourage a product to move faster and they're able to cut down on their margin, but still again, it's at price points that are pretty much close to cost.Jeremy:It doesn't really moving the needle too much nowadays that we're past the transactional model. It's easier to do that on the development side when we're actually developing these products, or on the flip side, if a product is actually performing way too well, they might actually ask for us to develop a more premium version or a version that uses a high quality or a more expensive material, not necessarily higher quality, just a different material. For example, we started with cotton sheets. It was sateen. Now we offer percale and we're looking into linen. Then we also offer eucalyptus lyocell sheet set as well. Those were examples of where we saw their consumer demand really expand what our manufacturers want to develop and as a result their price points were able to change quite a bit depending on the product.Stephanie:I was thinking about that these manufacturers probably have a ton of insights into what's selling with their other brands, what consumers are interested in. I'm wondering, are they even allowed to share that and help influence your guys product designs and say like, "Hey, we see this plain shirt with like a lion on it and selling really well with Anine Bing," which we just had on the show?Jeremy:I guess there's two ways to look at it. One way really is from the lens of like, "Hey, the manufacturer has what I call like extraordinarily delayed insights into performance," in which the only time the manufacturer actually knows about how well a certain skew or style is doing. We're primarily talking about fashion and apparel and other soft goods and home for example. It's a little less seasonal or trend driven, but in apparel for example, a manufacturer will only know the performance of the line after the season or after the client comes back and places the reorder in which their insight is already delayed by a whole, let's say six to nine months.Jeremy:By then, it could already be out of stock or out of favor with the client. The second point is actually much more interesting in which this is the dirty secret of a lot of these brands is the manufacturers nowadays have significantly improved and really, really sophisticated design and development inhouse capabilities. Historically, let's say 30-40 years ago, a lot of the design and development and pattern making and so on and so forth was always done on the brand side. Nowadays, I really call it more of a partnership in which the design and R&D talent inhouse at a manufacturer is so great that sometimes, and this is like extraordinarily ...Jeremy:This is not just like startups. This is like huge multinational brands, all the way to brands just starting out in which their buyers and merchandisers or product developers or designers will walk into a showroom that a manufacturer has made for a season. They'll pick like four or five styles from the manufacturer's design books or pattern books and then say like, "Okay, let's make some small tweaks, but pretty much, it's the manufacturer's design that we're iterating on."Stephanie:Oh, wow. I definitely would never have thought that.Jeremy:It saves a lot of time if you think about it because developing patterns from scratch is really time intensive. You have to ship samples back and forth all the time, whereas if a manufacturer already had a lot of these samples ready to go for you and you just had to tweak, let's say, the material or stitching or whatever it is on apparel specifically that it cuts down development time significantly. It happens pretty much everywhere and really the designers at that point in time are not really designers, but they're just iterating on the final versions of products. I think-Stephanie:That's a good secret that I never knew about.Jeremy:[crosstalk 00:33:15].Stephanie:When you're thinking about getting maybe inspiration though and you're looking around at some of the more luxury brands, how much of that can you actually take and use? Because when I'm thinking about, there's certain things that without a logo on it, you probably be like, "Is that from Walmart?" Sometimes the logo makes it where if it didn't have that, I don't know, personally, why anyone would ever buy it. I sometimes don't know why they would buy it either way have you ever had an experiment like that where you've been trying to maybe let a brand or popular brand influence products where then you're like, "Oh, actually, the logo kind of made that one."Jeremy:I think the way I would respond, one thing we really care about a lot at Italic is having a data-driven sense of merchandising in which we're using our customer insights to really drive the product decisions that we're making, both on the technology front as well as the product development front for our physical products. I think what we realized is, to your point of, "Does a logo make a product or does the product make the logo?" which is actually maybe a good way to think about it, is the fact that logos matter to some people and it doesn't matter to other people, but everyone has a specific category in their lives in which they care about having a logo and then vice versa like that same person might not care about having logos on other products that other people might.Jeremy:I guess a better way to put it is let's say you really care about having a logo on your handbag, but you actually, and I don't know if this is true or not, but let's say you don't actually care about having like the top of the line logo on your bedding or all-clad cookware or Le Creuset Dutch ovens or what have you, right? Let's say that's actually the mentality. On the flipside, I think there's a lot of people out there who would actually have the alternative approach which is like, "I don't care if I have a big fancy handbag, but I am really into cooking and I want the fanciest cookware and I need to have like X, Y, Z brands cookware in order to feel good about my purchase.Jeremy:What we found through a lot of our, I guess, our surveying is, one, the main reason why people buy from us is quality in terms of the product and the second is design and overarching, I guess, the main reason why you sign up is because you're getting quality at cost. The price point and the value you're getting out of your products is really, really high relative to pretty much any other option out there because we're not making money on the products that we sell. I think what we found is the people who sign up, if you're a fashionista for example, you're probably not going to buy our fashion products, but you might actually sign up for your home goods and then vice versa, someone who really cares about that specific type of bedding or having really great towels or candles or what have you, but doesn't really care about having a logo or the next trendy thing.Jeremy:The way we look at merchandising is really anti-seasonal in which we're trying to find products that are always evergreen. They might not be always in style or in vogue, but we know that they're consistent things that people will always want to buy. That's why we try not to fall too hard into having a specific branded look on our products. The product should be able to stand for their own.Stephanie:I like that. I'm just going to say quality always matters, I would think and I'm definitely your person because I'm a logo-less person. I don't care about the brand or where they come from. If the quality is good, it doesn't matter to me who makes it as long as the quality is good and something lasts. I like that. When we're thinking about metrics for subscription business, yours is very unique, of course, because right now, you're like, "We're not going to need more than $100 per person," but how are you guys tracking things? What metrics are you looking at right now to see if things are going well?Jeremy:We've changed our metrics a lot as we transition from a transactional model into a subscription basis as you can imagine, but what was interesting for me is because we run this type of membership in which it's not a ... I guess before I get there, in my mind, there's three types of consumer subscription products. One is you get something in a box every month and it's on a set frequency that you can customize. Secondly is you're paying a subscription for a discount. Then thirdly, as you're paying subscription for access to a certain product, whether it's digital or offline or whatever it is. I think we fall into the latter two in which you're paying for Italic because you want a discount on your products, but you're also paying for access to even shop those products in the first place.Jeremy:I think when we actually transitioned into this model, we realized like, "Hey, all this transactional revenue, metrics that we're tracking are actually great indicators of engagement. Now, those are our leading indicators of, "Are these members happy? Are they getting the most out of their membership? Are they unhappy because they're not using it? Are they logging back in? Is the conversion rate high for members? Is our average order value growing as we add new products or is that actually shrinking in which the products we're adding are actually lower price points?" so and so forth. It's a pretty sophisticated, I think, model that we've had to build in order to actually price these products at a price where we're not losing money on each sale but also not making money.Jeremy:It's on the engagement side all the things that historically eComm companies would track, your conversion rate, your LTV, your frequency of purchase, your contribution margins. These are all things that have now become like performance indicators on a membership basis as a cohort of how we track a certain cohort doing overtime, but now what matters on the company side is actually, "Are we adding new annual subscribers happily? Are they staying? What's our opt out rate? We offer like a 30-day period in which if you sign up and you decide not to place an order and you want to get a refund, we'll provide that, no questions asked. Right now, it's 5%.Jeremy:I think like those questions or metrics that we've done a pretty deep dive in terms of like what we actually want to see. Now really that the core metrics are like, "What's our new annual recurring revenue because it's an annual plan?" and then secondly what is ... We don't have retention yet since our first cohort is still seven months out from renewing. The second indicator of that is like, "What are all the engagement metrics telling us? Does that suggest that they're likely to churn or stay?" I think those are like the metrics that we've transitioned towards. There's a lot more that I could dig in there, but that's at a high level how we think about it.Stephanie:That's great. Are there any methods right now that you're experimenting with and seeing success around when it comes to keeping your users engaged or staying top of mind to them or even like different things that you're changing for the website that's connecting more with the customer when they're coming there? Any tests overall?Jeremy:I think we aren't great about testing and I'll be really forthright about that. We don't have much testing infrastructure built in. We don't have the ability to test their pricing. AB test for us are really just like, I think, very, very incremental changes. I think the biggest [inaudible] which is the transition from the transactional model and I guess the best way to really put this is like for example, during our pilot, we saw behaviors and frequency and lifetime value that we would expect on a transactional customer at month 12. We saw that on a membership level between weeks four to six. It was a literal 10x increase in utility activity for that member versus a customer who would otherwise purchase the product as a standalone.Jeremy:I think that's what I meant going back to the point of customers liked us, members really love us. That was something that we really saw. Then I think in terms of metrics that we're looking to test or at least improve with our customer that can improve the experience for them or at least hopefully it will increase our retention rates, I think that really comes in the form of, "What are the products that ..." The main four reasons why people opt out just for full transparency, one is it's international and we only serve the US, so they actually sign up through eagerly and they're like, "Hey, I didn't know that it's US only." That's actually the number one reason.Jeremy:Number two is financial. It's like, "Hey, I got furloughed or I was laid off," which happened a lot in the early days in April and May. Nowadays, it's less common, but the last two are ones that we can directly address. One is, "The product offering is currently not broad enough. You don't have a product that I want to see or a category that I wants to see." Lastly, "The products that I want are out of stock." This are directly in our control. For example, we'll show now in the coming soon page like what products are coming next for our members and that keeps them excited.Jeremy:Secondly is what products are being restocked. We're placing much, much larger orders, so that hopefully we don't have these out of stock issues. Really the reason was like our members just purchase at a substantially higher frequency than the nonmembers did. We actually underordered prior to the membership, because we didn't know what to expect. I think those are things that ... There are certain features like that that we developed for that use case, but really the only thing that we can solve for in a long-term basis is just develop more products, order more deeply, and hopefully as a result, acquire more members.Stephanie:I love that. I think that's a really good point too about how to keep people engaged and coming back to see like, "Okay, what's coming next? What's the new t-shirt that's coming out that I can get really excited about?" because I could see a lot of members maybe, at least in my head, I would think like if I am in a subscription or a membership, I would probably frontload a lot of purchases right away to get that value and then I might forget. I think that's really smart to find ways to keep someone like me engaged coming back maybe a couple months later if I forget, so that I will renew after the year.Jeremy:Exactly. I think for us really, the goal isn't necessarily to make you buy more stuff if you don't need it. The goal is to hopefully show that, "Hey, you're going to get enough value out of this membership, so that you're going to stay another year, or two or three or four or five in which there's a constant drop of new or a constant allure of new products that will be down the line such as products in travel. For example, we just launched our jewelry line last month and that sold out in a week's time. Now we know, "Hey, there's a lot of demand for that. We should order much deeper in it" I think constantly testing on the product side is something that we do a lot, but now that we're not making money on the transactions, we're not trying to force you to use it unless you want to.Stephanie:Very cool. I saw that you guys had a signup list. I think originally it was over 100,000 or something along those lines. I was wondering, how are you going about acquiring new customers? What kind of channels are working well for you right now? What are you finding success in?Jeremy:The hardest question for anyone in eCommerce nowadays. In 2018, we had a strong waitlist going into the membership, and then once we launched, we were like, "Hey, the membership is not going to work. We dropped it in, and instead all those people on the waitlist became our email subscribers and we were ... Fortunately, they eventually became customers as well. That was where a lot of that 100,000 original list went to. Then more recently, we actually had another waitlist. This time, it wasn't for marketing purposes, but it was actually like a legitimate operational waitlist in which we simply didn't have enough inventory to serve all of our members to a great experience in which if you've logged on in the third of all the products were sold out, that's not something you want to see as a first time experience.Jeremy:We have the waitlist up for a while, up until we can restock more deeply to address those issues which we've recently done. In terms of the new customer acquisition, I'll be like totally honest. It's a mix of performance marketing and brand marketing. We internally separate our marketing team into two. One is brand which is everything nonpixel-based or nonattributable to a pixel. Everything growth is pixel-based in which it's pixel through Google and the intention of growth is to grow the membership base. The intention of brand is to keep our cost per acquisition on the growth side low, so that hopefully it's not the first time that you're seeing, let's say, an ad from us, but instead it's actually a recall.Jeremy:Examples of that would be like influencer would be in brand. TV would be in brand even though I know there's pretty good models for tracking nowadays and attributing podcasts we still put in brand. All these things ... I guess I'm being hypocritical because those do have pixels nowadays, but really the intention of those is to get in front of you first, so that by the time that you see a Facebook ad or a Google ad, that you're already aware of where we are, so your interest is already piqued.Stephanie:Cool. All right. We have a lightning round coming up. Before I move on, is there anything that you were excited to cover that I forgot to ask?Jeremy:Well, our basics are dropping tomorrow-Stephanie:All right. Well, tell me more about the basics.Jeremy:We've had a line of recycled t-shirts for a while and those were really, really popular through a lot of quarantine. The number one requested kind of products for us for years has been a line of just great Ts, plain really high-quality t-shirts. It's finally coming out. I've been waiting literally a year for this. I'm super excited, but that's all. That's it.Stephanie:That's great. I love a good t-shirt. Actually, maybe it's always been a trend and I just haven't paid attention, but now it feels like it's really coming back to just wear a normal plain t-shirt or just something like simple on it. It feels like it's coming back strong, but maybe it's always been here.Jeremy:That's not surprising. I feel like a lot of people nowadays ... I'm sure there's a lot more people out there who could speak much more eloquently on why basics are great, but basics are always in vogue and our members have been requesting it very actively, so I'm excited to finally get that out.Stephanie:I will definitely have to check into that when it drops. All right, let's move on to the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Jeremy?Jeremy:Yes.Stephanie:All right. What's up next on your reading list?Jeremy:Well, I actually just got a copy ... This is going to put me in a bad light, but I don't always read business books, but I just got a copy of Reed Hastings new book. I'm excited to begin. I literally just got it right before this interview. That will be next.Stephanie:Cool. What's the title of it? I don't know if I know which one that is.Jeremy:No Rules Rules.Stephanie:I'll go check that out. You have to let me know if you like it.Jeremy:Yeah, will do.Stephanie:All right, what's up next on your Netflix queue?Jeremy:I've been actually watching The Legend of Avatar which is-Stephanie:I don't know if I've actually seen that one.Jeremy:It's an anime, cartoon that used to run on Nickelodeon as a kid and I forgot how good it was, so I just watched that again.Stephanie:That's great. Netflix probably knows not to advertise that to me. They're like, "You just probably won't like that one." All right, if you were to have a podcast, what would the podcast be about and who would your first guest be?Jeremy:I've actually been thinking about doing one.Stephanie:You should.Jeremy:It's been on the list. That's actually why I have this fancy bike here.Stephanie:You do sound great, though.Jeremy:I think I wanted to do like a podcast show where ... I live in Park City, Utah. There's a lot of great ... I took up fishing during quarantine. I haven't really caught anything, but it's really relaxing. I thought it'd be fun to go out and go fishing and then do an interview at the same time. I think guests-wise, there's so many people out there. One brand I've admired for a long time is the, and I like loosely know them, but I've really liked the Buffy team for a long time. I feel like they're pretty unique. They have a lot of success, but they've still been humble about it and low to the ground. I think it'd be really cool to have them. My background isn't just like eCommerce and retail. I think it'd be a mixture, but yeah, that'd be a cool one.Stephanie:I like it. I can only imagine you catching a fish while trying to interview and how that was found. Interesting. All right, what is the favorite piece of tech that is making you more efficient right now or that you're enjoying?Jeremy:Oh, man, that is a tough one. I use a lot and the whole Italic team makes fun of me for it because I always add something new every week. I think the one that stuck with me for years is this company called Missive. It's a collaborative email inbox that allows the entire team to work in conjunction on emails. Let's say it's an email with a vendor or an email with a YouTuber who we want to advertise with, we can collaborate in line without having to go to Slack or take it to another email thread in the same place. Missive and Front in the same vein does the same thing. I think those two products are ones that I really couldn't live without.Stephanie:That actually sounds really good. Can you send it out? If I was one of your employees, could I say, "Send this out under Jeremy's email because he gets better responses as the CEO than I will"? Personal question. This is something I actually want to know for myself.Jeremy:There's actually a setting to do that in which you can share an address and other people, like let's say an assistant can send it for you, so yes.Stephanie:I like that. I'll check that out. Awesome. The last, slightly more difficult question, what one thing will have the biggest impact on eCommerce in the next year?Jeremy:I'm not going to give you the cliche answer and say COVID changed everything, which it did, but-Stephanie:We all know that now.Jeremy:I actually think it happened last year and then I already alluded to this earlier, but I think the biggest change will be the transition from ... People have been talking about these like DTC waves. The first wave was like the Bonobos, Warby, Everland 2008 to 2012 era, and then, the second wave was like everything thereafter. A lot of the direct-to-consumer brands you see nowadays, it's the category leaders per se, but I think now people ... Let's say from, I don't know, 2014 to 2018-2019. I think there's been a big change in the operating mentality of these newer brands in which if you're a new brand starting out, you can't go out and raise these massive rounds that these companies used to off of revenue growth because people have realized now, this is not technology revenue growth. This isn't like an 80%, 90%, north of gross margin product.Jeremy:There is a saturation level to performance marketing. I know I'm sounding like quite cynical here, but I mean that actually in an interesting opportunity in which you can actually raise that money, but I think if you're creative about cashflow and you're creative about how you grow the business, you can build a huge business. I guess Gymshark would be a great example of this in which you can bootstrap to a really large volume without having to raise equity financing. I think you can do it through focusing on cash conversion cycle which is what Gymshark has with its founders or you can have in any case of owned supply chain like House or Buffy does.Jeremy:I think there's different ways that you can frame the direct-to-consumer model that allows you to still grow, but I think the era of venture-backed DTC, getting into the series, A, B, C and onwards is probably over. I think that's already happened and I think that will probably be the biggest impact on the ecosystem.Stephanie:I completely agree with that. If you sound cynical, then I think cynical too, because I completely agree with that. That's a really good point. All right, Jeremy, this has been such a fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and Italic?Jeremy:Italic is on italic.com and I am @jjeremycai, J-J-E-R-E-M-Y, C-A-I on Twitter. I think that's the easiest way, but we'd love to have anyone as a member.Stephanie:Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show.Jeremy:Thank you.

Why wouldn’t someone like free swag? That’s not a rhetorical question. In fact, Jeremy Parker has been trying to answer that question since he co-founded Swag.com in 2016. Jeremy knew that swag and other promotional items were becoming key marketing tools, and he saw an opportunity to build a business that brought those items straight to the people who needed them. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jeremy takes us behind the scenes of what it was like building Swag.com, including how he went from 3,000 organic site visitors in a month to more than 40,000 organic visitors. The journey to that success was paved with many hiccups, including the difficulty that comes with building an ecommerce platform from scratch, and trying to land their first big-name customer by walking around that company’s campus until they found a buyer.  But today, Swag.com can handle unlimited orders, and that first customer was a little company called Facebook. How did it happen? Learn that and more on this episode.  Main Takeaways: The Snowball Effect — Attracting customers is always easier when you have a proven track record that you can point to. Therefore, it is critical to land key accounts in the early days that can be referenced in future sales conversations. Because when you can point to one successful company that works with you, other companies will follow suit.  What To Know About SEO — Good SEO doesn’t happen by accident. Even though you might have great products and a thriving customer base, organic growth doesn’t happen unless you’re paying attention to your content strategy and making the necessary little tweaks that will bump you up in the search results. If You Build It, They Will Come — When deciding on your product offerings, you have to get inside your customers’ heads and build up an inventory of things that people actually want. Sometimes that means you have to get your hands dirty, do some testing and try things that don’t scale before finally settling on the right blend of offerings. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show we have Jeremy Parker, the co-founder and CEO at Swag.com. Jeremy, how's it going? Jeremy: Hey, thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: I'm excited to talk all things swag. You saw my shirt hoodie. I was ready for you this morning. I have everything branded mission. Jeremy: Every everyone needs a little schtickle of swag in their life. Stephanie: I agree. What is the first piece of swag that you remember? Jeremy: Oh, wow. For myself, I've been going to a ridiculous number of trade shows and events over the years. Honestly the earliest swagger member was stuff that I ended up throwing away and that's one that gave me one of the ideas for Swag.com and we wanted to make sure we only offer products that people actually want to keep. That was my main mission from the very beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, same here. I remember getting a bunch of stuff and throwing it away, but I remember being so excited it was back I think in 2010, it was like my first finance conference and I got like a Koozie. I was so excited because it was like the first thing that I'd ever gotten for free maybe and finances a little bit. Sticklers is about giving stuff away for free. And I look back and laugh now because I would go and collect all this stuff and it would ultimately end up being nothing that I really used. Jeremy: 100%. From the very beginning of our business, we were thinking of swag as an amazing marketing tool if it's used right, so obviously that's a big caveat. And when you think of just marketing in general and you have TV commercials and everyone's trained to now fast forward through commercials and you get a magazine, you flip through the ads, or you put your ad blocker on your computer. If you give somebody really high quality swag, they say, “Thank you.” It's really a powerful tool if it's done really right. And it has to be something that people are actually going to want to use. We don't really like to push the flashiest thing or the new hottest thing. It's all about what are people that actually use every day and get those impressions of. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. Before we dive way too deep into Swag.com, I want to hear a little bit about your background because I see you've done a lot of things in your previous life. And I wanted to kind of hear what your journey was like before founding Swag.com. Jeremy: Sure. I was a documentary filmmaker actually in college, that's why I went to school for. I actually never wanted to be a filmmaker when I went to Boston University. And I looked at the curriculum and I really wanted it to be in high school my whole … Before college life I always wanted to be a marketing guy. I was always into branding and commercials and how to tell stories through marketing. When I went to school and I looked at the syllabus of film and marketing, they really were the exact same thing, except for film taught me how to make videos. And this is right at the onset of like YouTube. I thought that would become valuable. I became like probably the first filmmaker at BU history that never actually wanted to be a filmmaker. Jeremy: But as I was in school for those four years, I ended up making a feature length documentary that ended up winning the audience award at the Vail Film Festival. And I was [inaudible] and I walked down and the brunch the next day after the award ceremony and half the room are these major celebrities and half the room are these struggling filmmakers. And I did kind of an internal gut check of, am I good enough? Is this what I want to do with my life? And it wasn't, so right after I won this award, when people primarily feel like on a high, they're like, “Oh, I'm going to become the biggest filmmaker,” my thought was, “What else am I going to do? What's my plan? What's really my plan? What am I good at?” Jeremy: And when I graduated college, I didn't know what I was good at. I had no real experience in business or anything, but I thought maybe I should start something and just learn what I'm good at, what I enjoyed. I started a t-shirt company right out of college when I was 21, 22. And really I thought t-shirt sounds so simple, but really you're learning manufacturing, PR, marketing, building an Ecommerce experience, all the different aspects of business, fulfillment, all these different things. And I tried to figure out what I was really good at. Jeremy: And over the last 10 years, I've done a lot of different things. I started the company with my brother and Jesse Itzler. Jesse is the co-founder of Marquis Jet, private jet company. He sold ZICO Coconut Water to Coca-Cola. He's one of the owners of Atlanta Hawks. I started a company with him where we partnered up with different celebrity influencers and we owned their celebrity rights to Twitter and Facebook feeds before people knew how valuable it was. This was nine years ago or so. Jeremy: So [inaudible] a lot of celebrities, buying their rights. That company ultimately got bought by a publicly traded company. I then went on to start a social networking app that ultimately failed. Never start a social networking app, I'll tell you that. Extremely difficult. Stephanie: Semi-hard. Jeremy: Yeah, it's semi-hard to do. And we built an app called Vouch. That basically was about like Oprah's favorite things democratize for everybody. You could vouch for your favorite movie and book and charity and anything you'd want to vouch for and people who follow you really get to know what you like. Really kind of making the like button with its own platform. We ended up having 100,000 plus users. We had tons of influences. It just never materialized. And after doing that for three years, I realized that the next business I want to start, it needs to be something where we made money from day one, I could give a service and a product and I started Swag.com. Jeremy: So, it's been almost five years at this point with Swag. We were just named the 218 fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000. We have 5,000 companies from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, Spotify buying on our site and we spent a really big portion of that building is automated experience for purchasing swag. And now it's about, now how do you handle the distribution of swag? It's more than just making it easy to buy. How do you get into the hands of people? And especially now with this pandemic, that's really the most important thing. Stephanie: Yeah, I was just going to touch on that. I know everyone's probably wondering with everything going on, where conferences are being obviously canceled and not coming back for a while. How are you guys handling that? Because I'm that the swag industry right now is down overall. What are you guys doing right now to not be part of that downward spiral? Jeremy: Yeah, that's a 100% true. They just came up with numbers. ASI, which is like the big organization for promotional products, just came out to number that over 92% of companies in our industry are down approximately 50% in Q2 this year versus last year. So, it's really bad. And then obviously it makes sense on the surface where you have our core buyer was like the HR manager buying for onboarding of new hires. That was one of our big purchases and no one's hiring right now. That business goes away. And then you have the marketing teams buying for trade shows and there's no trade shows happening, so that business goes away. Jeremy: Then you have the office manager buying for internal office and company culture, and no one's in the office right now. You have all these different buyers that really are not buying swag for the normal, the typical reasons to buy swag. So like everyone in our industry, we were very nervous like what's going to happen. And what we've been able to do is take this platform, our swag distribution platform, which is what we're really pushing and what we're really excited about. We'd been building this really amazing platform over the last two years, specifically for marketing managers. That was the initial idea of it. Allowing marketing managers to easily be able to buy swag and then send swag to the remote customers or to best leads to close sales. Jeremy: That was their initial intention. But obviously with this pandemic and everyone's working remotely, it's transitioned to office managers and HR managers really buying swag in bulk and sending it to the remote employees addresses to keep the company culture thriving, even when no one's in the office, so much so that not only are we not one of the 92%, that's downloading over 50% our Q2 this year was more than our Q2 of last year and July was almost double our last year July. And it was our best month ever and August is even better than that. We're really growing frankly in a crazy time for everyone. Stephanie: That's amazing. Now, I'm thinking about it. I ordered swag for our team maybe two years ago and the process, it was crazy. It was so much back and forth of like, “Here's your quote. Oh, you want to more of this? Okay. Here's your new quote? Here's what the design might look like.” It was just a lot. And then of course the big box came to me and then I had to maybe ship things out individually or wait until I saw people in-person if I was being a little cheap. What does it look like now I'm thinking about reordering hoodies and shirts for our team members? But of course I would have to individually maybe shift them out again or are you guys different? What is your process look like that's so different than others? Jeremy: Really simple. On our site, we have very curated selection of products. You're not going to be overwhelmed with too many options. Say the top 25 mugs, you find a mug you could use our filtering tools, really easy to search by color or price point or your type of brands. You find the product you upload your logo. Our system will detect how many colors are in your logo, in the nearest Pantone match. We're making sure we're printing, Coca-Cola red and not Staples red. Once the logo is uploaded, you can maneuver the rounds, you can mark everything up. You select on your quantity price adjuster in real time and checkout. It literally takes less than three minutes to buy swag. There's no back and forth. You can also use our instant quote tool, if you wanted to quote things out before you want to go through the design process on our site, you can upload your different variables, the quantity that you're looking for, how many print locations, the number of colors in the print. It takes two seconds and you're coordinating things out. Jeremy: So, there's no back and forth emails, there's no phone calls, there's no presentation decks. It's none of it. It's really completely automated streamlined. And then when you're going through the checkout flow, obviously you can input your own address, so we'll ship everything to your office. Or if you want us to handle all the distribution for you, there's a pink button on that shipping page that says, one is to hold your swag and inventory easily distributed, [inaudible 00:09:29]. You click on the button, you follow the onboarding and then we hold all of your swag in this online Swag closet if you will, where you can manage all of your inventory in real time. If you're ever running low in stock, we'll send you smart notifications to restock. If you want to send 1,000 different locations, you upload a CSV file we'll calculate the shipping costs in real time, based on the product you selected, where they're going. Jeremy: Once you pay for that, we grab those products off the shelf and we're shipping it all over the world for you. We really streamlined the entire experience. We take it a step further if you wanted it, some companies want this, some companies don't, but we have a whole ability to create different inventory closets for location or for a department. You can have a marketing closet versus a sales closet, versus your London office or New York office. Different people should get access to it. There's different permission settings, approval flows, et cetera. You could really break it down by department, by location and we're doing this with a lot of global main companies all over the world. Also, a lot of small startups who just want to use our service as a way to distribute swag. Stephanie: I was looking through your site and I saw products there that I haven't seen in other swag companies. And I wanted to talk a little bit about how you guys go about picking your products because all of them seemed high quality where oftentimes, I'll go through it and I'll find 50 different shirts on a custom t-shirt company website. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, actually let me look through all the reviews. Let me see if they're good. Okay. 95% of them are all bad. They all have bad reviews, bad fits, whatever.” How do you go about making sure that you only have high quality stuff there that people will actually want? Jeremy: That's a great question. And that was the challenge. And it's an ongoing challenge, always. From the very beginning, me and my co-founder, each invested $25,000 of our own money. That was our first startup budget. What be used primarily for that was buying samples. We went out and we went to different trade, shows all over the country and we bought samples from tons of different suppliers. And we saw exactly what customers typically see when they buy from sites. A lot of this stuff was really poor quality, would end up in the trash and we would never feel comfortable selling it. We were really kind of laser focused on only offering a curated selection of products that we would actually want to keep ourselves. It's a lot of testing, it's constant testing. Jeremy: How we kind of look at the whole process is we want to have the best of what's out there. It could be the relatively inexpensive, or it could be premium. It doesn't really matter we have to have stuff in all price points. We don't want it to be known as the premium quality supplier. We want to be known as the quality supplier. We have a lot of products there high-end brands, Public Rec, Rowan, Top Wood Designs, Patagonia, different products like that. We also have no name products that you had never heard of, but they're really, really quality. We have a product sourcing team that's constantly contacting a lot of direct to consumer type of products and brands that are not traditionally found in the promotional product space and going after them as well, because we want to be known as the company that has products that no other company in our space offers. Jeremy: What we've been seeing is that a lot of companies that are okay featuring their stuff on our site or are happy to feature their stuff on our site like Bellroy Backpacks, they've never done it in other promotional product sites because the other sites, feel schlocky or throw away or cheap in some way. And we are really, really not that. We're really trying to focus on quality products, stuff that people would be proud to show off, stuff that when you get it, you're going to want to wear it every single day because that's really the only real reason why Swag is a true benefit is that people actually want to use it. Stephanie: Yeah. So, now that you can't go to trade shows and try things out, and are you still going through that process when it comes to finding new products, like just ordering things that you think are great and trying them out, or is it different than what it used to be? Jeremy: No, it's exactly that. It's less expensive in some ways and more expensive in other ways. We want to make sure we have the right products that we're constantly spending a ton on samples. And now at this point in the business also, we're almost five years in and we're somewhat known in our industry. We're the fastest growing company in the promotional product space. A lot of different, great suppliers and direct to consumer brands have heard of us, so they're willing to send us free samples. We don't necessarily have to pay for it anymore. But we're just constantly sourcing more products and taking some products that maybe were cool last year, but we don't think they're going to be good this year and replacing it with new stuff. Jeremy: We don't want to keep just adding and adding and adding because it then makes it very complicated for customers to make a decision. So, we're constantly, always looking at our site and saying, “Is this the right blend and mix of products?” And we're always never happy. We're always constantly trying to improve it. Stephanie: Very cool. I'm guessing there's also a bit of like a data element where you can probably look into the data and see what people are either enjoying. Do you do reviews? Do you use customer feedback to also influence the products that you choose? Jeremy: Yeah. 100%, yeah. After everyone places an order, we always have a survey that automatically goes on the time of delivery, very basic. It's like one question like, “How satisfied were you?” So we can get our ranking and see how people like the products and how they turned out. If we ever get any sort of bad or not 100% amazing feedback about a product, we'll look into it and maybe there's something wrong, maybe the print quality wasn't great for that order or maybe the product itself wasn't as great as what we thought and we'll just remove from our site. We're constantly listening to our customers, understanding do we have the right products at all times? Because that's very important for us. We need to have that. Jeremy: We're constantly testing more and more products. And obviously we're learning what people are adding to their cart. How many products are being … What products together go? We sometimes find that if somebody buys a tote bag, they're going to buy other products that could fit into that tote, like smaller products. Or if they buy a backpack, other types of products are usually bought with backpacks. We're constantly looking at data and trying to make sure we have the right mix of products that go with each other, so we can start positioning certain products. When you buy a backpack, the products that are featured as you might also like actually make sense. So, not just what we think, but what the data is telling us. Stephanie: I love that. Along with maybe getting personalized recommendations, depending on the product they chose, are you also personalizing the experience based on maybe what company is looking around? If a LinkedIn's looking versus Google, maybe you know that Google always buys hoodies where LinkedIn buys coffee mugs. I don't know. Are you personalizing it based on who's actually browsing? Jeremy: At this point, we're not. And we've been constantly thinking about that. The challenge is that there's so many different buyers within companies. Even if we worked, let's say with LinkedIn, which we do or Google, which we do, there's so many different divisions within Google that are completely different. We're selling to the HR team or the marketing team or the sales team or office manager, or just somebody who's buying it for their local team. Everyone's looking for different things. We've done for Google complete stuff, obviously the normal stuff of notebooks and t-shirts and sweatshirts, backpacks and water bottles. But we've also done custom Allbirds Sneakers. It's hard to kind of match up always and all the buyers are necessarily not always the same. Jeremy: So, it's constantly changing, but as we're growing as our processes and we're able to handle a lot more orders and we're analyzing more data, I think that will be a shift in the future of really making the experience as personal as possible and that might be not making it personal at all based on companies or that might be going the opposite way and making it super, super personal. We're kind of learning what's the right mix at this point. Stephanie: So, to talk a little bit about maybe the backend, the tech stack, it seems like there's a lot going on behind the scenes. I first wanted to start with, I saw that you were quoted saying the platform's able to handle unlimited orders in a day. And I was wondering, is that because you guys are leveraging cloud infrastructure or have you built some kind of scaling methodology? What does that look like behind the scenes to allow you to have unlimited orders? Jeremy: Yes. We do work with AWS, which for the cloud obviously makes things a little bit easier, but our entire platform is fully custom. Every single aspect of our site is custom. We're not using any other services. Obviously we're using like Intercom live chat. We're not going to be building our own chat, but the entire platform itself and all of our pricing is very complicated. That's why there's not a lot of companies in the space that could do what we do because it's fully dynamic. Every price tasting consideration, the quantity that you're looking to buy, how many print locations, the number of colors in the print, all these different variables that have to be in play. And now if we have 3,000 products on our site and 200 core products, they all have different pricing structures, they all have different under base charges, they all have different kinds of printing methods from screen printing, embroidery, laser engraving, all of these come with different complications. Jeremy: So, we really had to build our site from this place from the very beginning we couldn't just take an out of the box solution. And frankly I would have loved to take an Ad Box solution for this because it's been taking me five years to build [inaudible] building. We have a 15-person tech team and we're growing, we keep developing more and more and more because it's important. And we want to always stay one step ahead. At this point, like yesterday we did north of a 100,000 in sales all through our Ecommerce site. Things we could really scale and that same day. The day before we did 50,000 in sales and then hopefully today we do more than a 100,000 sales. Every day could literally be completely different and it's completely the same automation. Somebody could buy 5,000 notebooks or they could buy 50 notebooks or 15 notebooks or 20,000 notebooks. And it takes the same processing ability, same exact time for checkout. Stephanie: Very cool. Yeah, that's great. When you're thinking about back in the day, starting out with a custom website versus maybe pulling something like using a platform that is already out there, how did you go about deciding that you wanted something custom and then what did that process look like? What were some of maybe the mishaps or failures along the way where you're like, “Oh, if you guys are trying to build something custom make sure you don't do this or that you avoid this.” What kind of learnings did you get from doing a custom? Jeremy: Actually the truth of the matter was in the very beginning of the business, we went all in on Shopify. And we went all in say, “You know what? Why are we building our own Ecommerce experience when somebody else could do it significantly better than us or is worked through all the kinks?” The challenges, when we start to really build a Shopify, we realize how complicated our specific industry is in terms of pricing. And there's no really easy way. There's no Ad Box solution that could really do it. We spent literally two and a half months building the Shopify store only to then realize, which was a big mistake on our part, that the pricing was not able to be done. Jeremy: We had to really scrap it and start from scratch. And we realized it's going to take us a lot longer to get where we want to be, but we're still not where we want to be, but it makes the most sense. It's really the only way to streamline it as much as we want to streamline it. Now, the typical process of promotional products, as you mentioned before, it's a lot about phone calls. It's back and forth, this quote versus that quote. You change one little element, the whole quote changes. We didn't want to deal with that. We wanted customers to be able to do it themselves, no talking to anybody. If you don't want it, obviously if you want to call us, we love to hear from you, but you don't have to. You could do every single thing yourself and we want it to make that effortless. Jeremy: You want to hold things in inventory, click on the button and now it's all in inventory. You want to distribute swag, upload this and it ships out. Every single thing on our site, we wanted to make it as easy as possible and historically, and traditionally it's not been easy at all. And it makes sense because of how custom the product offering is. Stephanie: If you would have, maybe on day one started out with like, here's the kind of things that we're most interested in. Did you know that you wanted this custom pricing option and did you go and kind of look at different platforms to see if they could do that? Or did you just jump right in? Jeremy: Yeah. From the very beginning, honestly, we spent a year before we built any platform. Our initial idea was we don't really know the platform to build, we knew that the industry needed to be shaken up a little bit. We knew how old and fragmented the industry was, but frankly, I think most entrepreneurs could agree. You honestly know what the right answer is. Most people don't, they think they do, they don't. From the very beginning, our idea was let's just learn as much as possible. Let's reach out to as many office managers, HR managers, people that we know within industries by swag. And let's ask them what they like and hate about the current buying experience that they're having. And we would show up at meetings and we would literally say, “What sites you buy from?” And they would give us some site names and we would look over their shoulder really. Jeremy: This is what we did for the first year. We spoke to over 200 different office managers, HR-related buyers. And some ended up buying became customers of ours for many years and some moved on to other things, but just to see how they purchase swag was a big tell for us, really what the process was. Looking at their email back and forth 40, 50 emails with a rep just didn't make any sense to us. We kept kind of thinking. That was kind of the first six months of our business. The second six months of our business, the remainder of the year was about, “Well, let's do it the old school way. Let's just launch a landing page. Let's go out there. Let's be a traveling salesman and try to sell some stuff.” And we really learned how painful it is. It's like it takes forever to quote, there's a lot of manual labor. Jeremy: Every single thing that was painful for us, we then figured out a solution to automate it. And we kept just chipping away at it. Stephanie: That's so important. I think it's Paul Graham who said do things that don't scale. And that's how you actually learn, like what's working, what's not working and what to build going forward. That's really smart. Jeremy: Exactly right. And that's the same thing with even getting our customers. Now, I haven't made a sales call in four years, but in the beginning I was doing everything. Me and that co-founder, Josh, we would show up at offices and try to sell. And we sold to Facebook as one of our first customers. First customer, really actually. We had a friend who worked at Facebook, got us in the door. We ended up walking around Facebook's office in New York just speaking to whoever we could to see somebody who would buy swag. Ultimately ended up selling them a couple of t-shirts, like 100 or 200 t-shirts. We barely broke even on it. I think we made like 5% margin, like barely anything, but didn't matter to us. It was just about getting that Facebook logo. I remember two days later we showed up at WeWork in New York and WeWork asked us who else we work with? And we said Facebook. Jeremy: They assumed we probably had thousands of others because we had Swag.com brand and Facebook, but really it was just Facebook. And we got, WeWork and we continued that cycle to get that really five core blue chip companies. It was doing the really unscalable things like showing up, showing the products in-person, making the sale, really learning the process as much as possible, and then automating the experience and making that whole buying experience effortless. Now, people don't need to speak to anyone if you don't want to, that's really what our main goal was. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah. I think we've had a couple people on the show. Who've talked about just finding that first customer that you can kind of leverage as the brand name and then just pointing to them and be like, “Yeah, they work with us. Like you should too.” So I think that's a good lesson for a lot of companies starting up. If you find that one brand name and you can reference them, it'll probably help with all future sales. Jeremy: 100%. It's all about social proof, at least what we have learned, it's everything. People are not going to work with you if they don't feel confident. To build up the confidence, obviously you have to have a great platform, but that doesn't happen overnight. That takes time. You have to have a great brand and a great design, make people feel confident, but other ways are who else you've worked with? A lot of our shirts and what's big reason why we've been able to scale with very little money is a lot of our t-shirts and apparel has a Swag.com in your label. We do our own products. Jeremy: When people [inaudible] t-shirts that's 5,000 people knowing about Swag.com. They see the t-shirts, they see the quality, they feel how great it is, they see the print, they have the instant social proof that Facebook uses them or Google uses them, whoever is getting the product and they see Swag.com and it drives a ton of traffic to us. That only really works if the products are great as well. Obviously people are getting really poor quality and everything's says, “Swag.com,” no one will use us. It'd be opposite [inaudible 00:25:52]. Every single thing really has to work hand-to-hand Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really. Jeremy: Yeah. We were thinking about it initially because I wear jeans a lot. I was thinking like I buy one pair of jeans for like three years. It's kind of looks cooler, the more you wear jeans, it gets more faded. But with Swag.com or swag in general, people buy stuff for a specific reason. You're buying it to give it away and then you need more stuff. If they're buying it to give it away, we have to make the experience of giving away products that other people actually want and see. And then that new person, that person who just bought that 5,000 t-shirts now they need more stuff for the next event. It's a completely different kind of business. And we just try to figure out, we have to make sure that our logo is everywhere that it can be, obviously within reason. Stephanie: I love that. Let's talk a little bit about the backend when it comes to warehousing your inventory. How does it work behind the scenes? If you're able to allow someone to essentially have their cart saved and then say, “Okay, ship this to one person in California and then ship this to one person in Florida.” What does the backend look like to make those logistics work? Jeremy: Yeah. Upfront in terms of the actual buying swag and bulk, we have integrations with different kind of the best vendors in each industry. So, like the best one for drink wear, best one water bottles and obviously we have a big selection of product. When somebody buys 1,000 mugs or something on our site, it's automatically connects to our supplier network that produces the highest quality mug with their logo and then drop ships it directly to the customer's office or wherever. But if they're holding stuff in inventory, it ships into our 3PL. We have four strategic locations all throughout the US and we're adding more locations in Canada and Europe right now to make it cheaper for global distribution. Once the products are in our fulfillment center, then they log into the, my inventory portal and they see all of their inventory in real time. Jeremy: So, if you're ever running low in stock, we'll send you smart notifications to restock. They can easily upload their CSV file. We'll calculate the shipping costs in real time. They pay for it. We grab it off the shelves and we're shipping it to 1,000 different locations. We also have this feature called the Swag Giveaway. Oftentimes, especially now, people don't necessarily know where their remote employees are living. Say you went to a trade show. God willing the world opens up, we have trade shows again, and people go to your booth and they give you their email address. You'll know what t-shirt size they are. You'll know where they live, but you still might want to engage with them. We built the Swag Giveaway feature, where you can create a fully recipient branded landing page. Let's imagine Google just uploads their logo and their colors. Jeremy: And they could easily blast out to a CSV file of just having the person's first name and email, that recipient will click on the link. It will be branded with Google, they'll select their t-shirt size or they'll select their mug, or water bottle, they'll be able to choose which product they want. Input their address, submit. It all speaks to our system. And now we have the address that we can distribute. We're building all of these tools to allow people to distribute if they're shipping to one address, thousands of addresses, or even if they don't have the recipients addresses, but easy way to capture that and also distribute. Stephanie: Wow, that's a lot going on behind the scenes. Jeremy: Yeah. Stephanie: How are you thinking about the front end part of the website because to me when you're ordering swag or something where you really want to see the details of like, is that embroidery right, are the colors right and also just like making sure that you have people who are converting and not just sitting on maybe their design or their shopping cart? How are you moving people along through the website and what kind of best practices have you seen when setting up the front end user interface? Jeremy: Good question. It's probably the most challenging thing for our business because it is custom and everyone is somewhat concerned about, is this going to come out perfect, is it could be the right logo color, is it going to be the right positioning. What we've learned is obviously we built our patent technologies is one of the first things we built to detect the number of colors and the nearest panto match in your logo when you're uploading it. So, to make people feel really safe, they're going to get their exact color. Now, obviously it can never be 100% because web colors are not the same as Pantone colors that are used for printing and t-shirts, but it really gets to the closest match. And if you want, and if you know your Pantone, which a lot of companies do, it allows them to easily input their exact Pantone, so it overrides everything and it makes it really easy. Jeremy: Obviously they can maneuver their logo, they can mock it up. And what we say is, after you place your order, we're always going to create for them a virtual production mock-up to approve before we ever start to print. We'll never go into production until they give us the green light. Really customers should feel super safe that even if they upload their logo and they're not sure is this straight or is this exactly the right position. It doesn't really matter. We're always going to create that mock-up and they can make as many revisions as they want before we start with the print. That makes it really easy. And in terms of our distribution, obviously they can always just add this stuff to inventory and just easily distribute. The process on the front end, we try to make it really effortless and streamlined. Jeremy: It's taken us four years. We're constantly adding more and more features to make that experience better. We're launching a feature very soon called the Company Art Folder. Imagine you bought something and 20 other people in your company buys different things. It should lump all of your artwork together as a company art folder, so you never have to really hunt down the designer to make sure you have the right file or is this the right logo, is this the approved logo for swag? You can always, when you're uploading your logos, select the pre-approved designs that have been used and purchased by other people in your company, so you feel more safe. Or unlike my orders page, let's say Jennifer on your team is out sick one day, you can log into your account, you'll see all of your orders and then there's another tab that says company orders. You see everyone else in your company what they purchased, so you could easily reorder what somebody else ordered and easily subtract and make sure you're using the exact same artwork. Jeremy: We're trying to build this platform as effortless on the front end to make it really, really streamlined. And in terms of getting people through the funnel, what we've seen is our platform really does work well. I think that the more simple features that really solve a problem. And as you mentioned before, Paul said, “Do things unscalable before you scale it.” Every single thing we do, it has to be super painful for us, for us to spend time developing a solution for it. Once it's overwhelmingly painful, then we build the solution to make it easy. Jeremy: Then obviously we see their abandoned carts. We can track everyone's abandoned carts. And then we have our SDRs calling all these abandoned carts within like 10 minutes of the time that they'd been in to make sure that there's no experience that's wrong. Sometimes people say, “The shipping is too high.” Or, “It doesn't seem I can get in my in hand date.” There's certain things that we could actually help out and maneuver possible. And if it's not possible, we'll let the customer know it's not possible. But getting in front of them right when they're thinking about, are they going to purchase or not and they might have issues, that's really, I think we found the most important thing for us. Stephanie: Yeah. That's really smart. Have you seen people pick up their phone right away or have you experimented with texting instead? Jeremy: We haven't done texting and I've been researching some companies and I think it's actually a really good idea. We've seen a lot of people if they're actively looking on our site or they've just left in 10 minutes, they're likely to pick up their phone. Even when people fill out a form on our site and we have a lot of … Obviously our core business up until this point was Ecommerce experience adding it to distribution, but we have a whole ‘nother business where people could buy swag boxes in bulk, giving a really great unboxing experience for new hires or engaging with your best clients. That's fully custom branded boxes inside the boxes, as custom notebook and water bottle and pen and custom note card, crinkle paper. We've allowed people to custom build those boxes effortlessly through our site. Jeremy: All you have to do is upload your logo, the same process as buying and adding to your cart, you click on the button that says, “Build a box,” and it lumps, all those products together as a box listing. It makes the entire experience super simple. And we've seen with those bigger box orders. A lot of times it might be like a two to three week sales cycle. When Ecommerce could be like they land on a site and they check out that same day, boxes, they're fairly larger sizes. Typically, they're usually using our distribution platform for distributing because no one has room in their office for boxes or wants to boxing up themselves. So, they actively use our distribution platform for that. And that cycle takes a little longer. Getting on the phone with them, really talking through the challenges or what their issues are and what their questions are, we find is really, really important. Stephanie: Yeah. That's really great. Oftentimes when you're talking or this can happen, when you're talking to a customer, they don't always tell you exactly what they need. One example you gave there was, you want to be able to go into a library where your logos are there, which is huge. I remember ordering swag back in the day at other companies and it was always kind of a review and escalation process of like, “Is this the most recent logo? Are these the right colors? Is this our team logo?” Okay. How would you find out something like that that maybe a customer wouldn't know to tell you, but it would just make it easier if they did have that there? How do you go about getting in your customer's head? Jeremy: Yeah. I think it's just like just being their teammate. We like to think of in all of our customer success likes to think of it, is that we're an extension of your brand. Obviously if you're buying swag on our site, it has to really be the quality, but it's only going to be quality and only what you like, if the logo is right, the positioning is right, it's exactly what you want. Especially dealing with bigger orders, we like to jump on a call with customers, have a conversation, try to understand what the use case for their swag is, what their budget is, what their timeline is who the audience is. And we like to suggest ideas and obviously customers can go on the site and not talk to us if they want to talk to us and use our filtering tools and our search tools and just our browsable experience and find what they want. Jeremy: But if they want our help, we want to be there to help them. I think it's just constantly trying to understand, the reason for them buying swag and with the use cases. And then we constantly offer different suggested items that we know that we work with that other companies in the similar space have worked with. And we give other solutions for them to kind of play with. And I think it just gives a great experience where they could do their own kind of sourcing and they can also use us as a guiding tool to find them exactly what they're looking for. Stephanie: When you're thinking about getting new customers, what kind of acquisition channels are you using or finding success in right now to get these large companies using you guys? Jeremy: Yeah. I like to think about marketing and it's not always going to be the same traction channel is always going to work. Now, from the very beginning, we were doing a lot more Google ads because we wanted to get paid back fairly quickly and we've realized early on, at least for our business prospecting on Facebook is a little more challenging when you're dealing with B2B buyers. But for Google, when is looking specifically for swag it's quite challenging [inaudible] Google, obviously it's very expensive. In the beginning it maybe makes sense to do Google just to get those early wins and get the credibility. But then maybe you kind of shift away from Google and you do some more SEO. SEO for us has been tremendously successful. We started really diving deep into SEO about 18 months ago, just to put things in perspective. Jeremy: Last January, we had about 3,000 organic visitors to our site, in 2019 January. January of 2020, we had North of 20,000 organic visitors. And last month we had nearly 40,000 organic visitors. Really growing the base in terms of organic, putting out tons of content, always it's content that maybe has stuff to do with swag buyer like buying swag or maybe just has to do with the audience, HR managers, the best HR solution tools. Doesn't necessarily have to be about swag, but it's a valid topic related to the buyer. And then ultimately when the buyer comes on our site, reads about it and then is going to Facebook or Google or any of their other properties, we can re-target them. That's been a really great driving force for us, but also partnerships. Jeremy: There's a lot of different companies in our space that don't necessarily sell swag. They sell other products to the office manager or other products to the HR manager, that we could really parlay and work on. We could promote them to our audience. They could promote us to their audience. We've been trying a lot of different things, affiliate marketing, a lot of different stuff, but usually it's always the one or two kind of traction channels that are the most beneficial at that time. And right now it's SEO [inaudible] hands down has been the best driver of customers for us. Stephanie: Okay. I want to dive into that a bit then, because I hear people are always talking about SEO. There's so many SEO agency, they'll do all this SEO stuff for you. I think there's like tons of bar jokes, maybe not bar jokes. Maybe just be regular jokes about SEO agencies and consultants and stuff. I want to dive into, what are you guys actually doing when it comes to your SEO strategy because it sounds like it's been successful? How are you finding out what topics to write about? What are you seeing work? Give me all the nitty-gritty on what you all are doing behind the scenes. Jeremy: Yeah. I think from the very beginning with SEO, it was about making our site compatible and making it work for Google traffic. Our site, at the very beginning … I'm a branding person. My background is in branding and user experience design for the customer. There's a lot of things that are behind the scenes that Google looks at, that the customers don't even realize. And frankly, it doesn't even mean anything to the customers. I had to learn that. I didn't know anything about that. Frankly, I'm fairly new to SEO. We started really 18 months ago and I realized our organic rankings should be a lot higher based on our brand, based on these experience. We're getting a quality product out there and it should be getting a lot more traffic. The first step was just analyzing our site and realizing, “Well, how do I make the site faster?” Jeremy: Or, “How do I make the site make more sense in terms of Google?” So for example, on every single product page, 18 months ago, we had no other associated products below the fold. Now, most people don't necessarily look at those below the product the fold because they're trying to upload their logo, mock-up things. There's a lot of stuff for them to do on the product builder page to add to cart. But you need to add those other products below the fold, so that in terms of Google, they see that that product listing is connected to four other products or so, right. There's all these small kind of tweaks or theoretically, you want to keep adding and making your site feel refreshed. You're not going to be refreshing your homepage every single two weeks. It doesn't happen. Jeremy: You're not going to be redesigning your product builder page every two weeks or your browsable experience every two weeks. What you can do, is you can maybe put like a blog post in your footer, make it like the latest blog posts. Every time you update your blog, every day or every two days, your site is getting refresh constantly. There's all these kinds of small kind of tweak things that you could do in terms of overall site. And then it's about kind of pinpointing the content that you really want to go after and saying, “Well, who is our buyer?” So, really understanding who your customer is and trying to write really good content, not just like throw away stuff, really good content with great subject lines that get people to read something and learn something, get real value out of it that might not be about swag related, but has to do with swag adjacent, if you will. Jeremy: If someone's looking for office holiday party ideas. They might not be looking for swag, but maybe we could get swag in there somehow. Or best ways to engage your remote employees or something like that. Or what healthy snack food to have in the office, literally has nothing to do with swag, but the person who is looking for that is ultimately going to be looking for swag. And we don't necessarily need to convert them today, at this point, we could convert them a month from now. When they are looking for swag, just be on the top of mind, re-target them and ultimately convert them. Just putting out consistency. I think in general, whether it's SEO or whether it's being a startup founder or whether it's anything you do in life, I think it's just really all about consistency and just trying to have more good days than bad days. Jeremy: Constantly just trying to keep pushing as hard as you can because at the end of the day, you're going to get to a much better place if you're consistent with it, you keep pushing forward and no small setbacks really affect you. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. Are you all doing the content creation and things like that in-house still? Or have you hired that out? At what point would you say like, “Oh, it's about time to hire this out,” to have someone else work on it instead of maybe an entrepreneur doing it all themselves? Jeremy: So, initially it was all me writing the content, then it became use some freelancers and now it's becoming, now we have the resources we're hiring actually this week, a full-time writer for our own team to be writing content and doing all of the stuff that we want to do. I think in everything, it always starts with the founders. Me and my co-founder, I think we've done really ridiculous, crazy things over the last four years to get to where we are. We've driven u-hauls 11 hours making deliveries at 11 o'clock at night. Having my family and my grandma, my aunts and uncles rolling t-shirts for three days straight trying to win these big deals and having no resources to do it. You're always kind of founder, CEO and head intern all at the same time. Now, at this point we're able to hire some of those roles that doesn't really make sense for us to be doing at this point or frankly, people who are just a lot better at it than we are. And that's where we're really excited to get to. Stephanie: I love that. I'm sure your grandma thanks you. Poor grandma, she's a real VIP over there, rolling t-shirts. Jeremy: Yeah. She was making fun that she hurt her back and that's why her back is messed up because of the [inaudible 00:43:33]. Stephanie: All because of you, Jeremy. Jeez. That's great. Before we move into a lightning round, is there anything that you wanted to cover today that I missed? Jeremy: No, no, this has been great. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Yeah, it has been a blast. All right. So, let's move onto the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to throw a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Jeremy? Jeremy: I'm ready for it. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Jeremy: Oh, cool. I started watching … I was in the Hamptons this weekend. Stephanie: Fancy. Jeremy: I know, very fancy. My mother-in-law's in town and she wanted to go out. [inaudible] and there's all these ads all over the place for million dollar beach house or something. I think I started watching some real estate show. Stephanie: There you go. I saw that also on Netflix. I was watching Selling Sunset, though I need to finish that one first. Jeremy: That's fine. Stephanie: All right. What is the best promotional item you've ever received? And what's the worst one? Jeremy: Well, okay. The worst one is obviously easy. It's all about the schlocky pens that don't write. Stephanie: Oh my gosh, yes. Jeremy: Pop socket, lighter. There's some of these things, stuff when they do the hybrid stuff, it's just kind of ridiculous. Like the highlighter that also acts as a compass. It's like, “No, that's not the right thing.” So, a lot of those. And a lot of people trying to sell me on selling their stuff and it's not good. Stephanie: You're like, “No, this is no.” Jeremy: Yeah. I don't want to be mean to anybody. I just say, “I don't think it's the right fit,” or something like that, but it's not good. And the best stuff I think is honestly anything really you're going to keep it. A really high quality water bottle, something you're going to see every single day it's could be on your desk and you're going to get those impressions. I'm really proud of that, but obviously we've done bicycles for companies. We made fully custom bicycles. A company came to us and they had their whole executive team. They're very into health. They want to do something a little bit different, unique. They have a campus. We create a really cool custom, fully custom logo, colors, everything bicycles. That was a really cool project to work on. And obviously we've done really cool backpacks. We did a backpack for Facebook, which I thought was really cool where the logo was nowhere on the outside. Jeremy: [inaudible] was we wanted to make the product so kind of premium. These are like very nice backpacks, that it didn't like scream Facebook. No one even know about it, except for the people who are wearing it. So, it was black-on-black logo on the inside of the backpack, so like when you open, only the people who are wearing it, see it. That's, I think is very important. I knew this was going to happen because frankly I started getting a sense that socks were going to become very popular. We sell [inaudible] socks and clearly socks is very … No one really sees it, but it's all about the person who's putting on the socks, is wearing it, who were seeing your logo. It starts to feel that kind of connection to your brand and eventually becomes that brand evangelist. It's all about that internal. Stephanie: Yeah, that's awesome. What is a new Ecommerce tool that you're trying out that you're loving right now? Jeremy: New Ecommerce tool? We're using a company called [Tend 00:46:36]. It's very early in it, but you're able to kind of track all the different people who are coming to your site without them inputting real information, which I think is kind of spooky, but kind of cool, just to see who's checking what. Stephanie: Cool. Jeremy: For me, it's kind of the core stuff. It's the Intercom, it's the HubSpot, it's just the marketing automation, streamlining things. And there's two different things, obviously with Intercom, which is our real life customer success. People are always here to help and jumping on the phone call. Then you have the HubSpot, which is really automating the experience. Having both sides for our type of businesses is very important. Stephanie: Great. All right. The last one, a little bit harder. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Jeremy: Wow. Stephanie: Yeah. Jeremy: That's a good question. I'm still laser focused on swag. I don't necessarily always think about the broader industry as a whole. I think for swag, I think it's easy. I think it is swag distribution. Everyone's working remotely. I don't see people getting back into the office anytime soon. Even if they do, it's going to be somewhat of a new normal, maybe not every day. People are still going to be able to need to engage with the remote employees or the best customers. And who's going to want to fly across the country, maybe to that trade show. They might want to do things a little more remote and automated. For Swag, that's where we're going and we're going to be automating the distribution of Swag. I think that's our next phase. Jeremy: Or somebody's one year anniversary, send them automatically Swag in the mail. Or somebody's had a baby, send them Happy Mother's Day or Happy Father's Day type of swag in the mail. So, really automating different life activities where you want swag. Stephanie: Awesome. Love it. All right, Jeremy. This has been a blast. Where can people find out more about you and Swag.com? Jeremy: Yeah. You can obviously reach out to me on LinkedIn Jeremy Parker, and obviously come visit us at Swag.com. That's S-W-A-G.com and we would love to work with you on your next order. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks so much for joining. Jeremy: Thank you so much for having me, guys.

Serious questions are asked. What is the equivalent of girls going to the bathroom for guys? Why won't the intern text Jeremy? What happened at the Rams vs Giants game? These questions and more on Jeff and Jeremy.

James: Hey, audience and listeners, this is James Kandasamy from Achieved Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcasts. Today I have Jeremy Cyrier from Boston. Jeremy is one of my mentors, you know, I'm happy to have him here to talk about commercial real estate and Jeremy has been focusing on taxes and a lot of markets out of North East U.S like Rhode Island and you know Massachusetts and of course Texas and he have done a lot of bills, you know, I think he used to syndicate and now he's also investing as a passive investor and he focuses a lot on multifamily medical office buildings, retail and also office.  Hey, Jeremy, welcome to the show.  Jeremy: Hey thanks, James.  James: So, what's happening? I mean with all this covid 19, I know you're not in New York, but you're in Boston, which is, you know, almost near to epicenter there. I mean, what's happening with you personally and the commercial real estate business right now?  Jeremy:  That's a great question, we're all healthy, we’re home. I've got four kids, eight and under and it's a little crazy, but we're feeling just frankly blessed at this time to have a moment of pause in our lives to focus on the basics together. I think, you know, amidst all the tragedy that's unfolding around us, that's actually a blessing.  James: Yeah. Sometimes you know, you have to look for positive things in a, you know, whatever situation that we are in right now. Right? So tell me, I mean, about what are you seeing right now in the commercial real estate space? What was happening in February before this whole covid 19 and now we are in the middle of it. This is like almost in April, mid April to, you know, towards the end of April. What are you seeing right now that has completely caught your attention and create that "aha" moment for you?  Jeremy: Well, I'll tell you the interesting thing is we've been over the last three or so years saying, well, when's the recession coming? And we were looking for it, we're looking for leading indicators of a recession and here it is, it's upon us and it's more of a black swan event than really any of us would have expected to have happened to such a point where I've been talking to people about this being similar to our country being invaded and the government shutting down our economy is a defense mechanism. So, that's a pretty fascinating set of circumstances for us to be operating within right now in any business, let alone the commercial real estate space.  James: So do you see a lot of transaction has died down right now from what you were doing two months ago and  Jeremy: Yeah, so the, one of the things I do is I track data, so I live outside of the Boston market. I track that data very closely to see what the volumes look like and I'll tell you the 2020 Q1 data was up 75% in terms of sales volume over Q1 of 19 and so it was a very healthy start to the year but as soon as you go and you shut down the economy, all the volatility comes into the market and buyers start to pull back, lenders try to figure out what to do, who to lend to, how to lend and then you've got sellers pulling back saying, am I exposed here? Is this a dangerous time for me to be selling my property?  So, I'd say the first month of this event was really characterized by people trying to figure out what's going on, what's happening and this last month it's being characterized with more intentionality. Okay, here's what I'd like to see happen in three months, six months, nine months, twelve months. So the discussions are moving forward to a, I'm going to stop focusing on the hourly new cycle and I can see more of a two to three day new cycle and within that environment I can start to think strategically about what's next for me.  James: Got it. So do you see, so you're saying sellers are starting to look at more strategically, so, I know some people were talking about V-shape versus U-shape and I think some of the V would have changed to U right now, right? I don't know where the Nike swish. Right. So where do you think we are heading from March, 2020 you know?  Jeremy: Yeah. What's the letter of the alphabet are we going to see? You know, I listened to a great webinar, which was done with KC Conway and Eddie Blanton, Eddie's the president of the CCIM Institute. KC is the chief economist, they got on a webinar and I think you can see this; you can catch on YouTube and KC got on and he talked about the letters and he goes through the different shapes. Some of them I'd never heard of before, but they, like, what happens when you have a fiat currency recession, it's a Q, I guess but he said, you know, if early on we were hoping for a V he thinks it's going to be a W and I think he's right, I think the W is, we go through an initial dip, we have a recession now.  We start to rebound and recover, in the summer, people start to get outside and start to circulate and you know, return the flow of capital but we go back into a secondary recession in the fall driven by two primary things. One a concern over covid, you know, spiking again and the second being the, all the bad news that accumulated from March through September that shows up and we see a secondary recession as a result of what's happening right now. He said it's probably, and I think he's right, we probably don't start to see the volatility come out of the market until this time next year, 2021 and it's just going to be a matter of writing this, you know, writing things out the best we can in 2020  James: So, when you talk about the second V, right, I mean, I think first of the V and after that is another V which is coming in, which makes it a W? Right?  So are you saying the, from your perspective, do you think the second lowest point will be lower than the first low point or will be higher than the  Jeremy: I don't know but I know those low points take a lot of pain and they dish it out and so in our business, in commercial real estate investing, is it, people have been asking me: Okay, so when one of the deals are going to show up, you know, where are all these distressed sellers? Well, it takes time. Right?  James: What kind of time, why do you think we need to take time? Jeremy: Well, if you look back historically when we go through, we've gone through recessions and they happen just about every 10 years in the last four years. This one was a longer cycle than we'd seen.  So typically you see expansion kickoff and the third year of a decade, you see a transition year in the eighth year of the decade we go into a recession, then we come back up and out. This one didn't happen that way. I think it's because the Obama administration didn't push the FDIC to recycle assets like we'd seen in prior recessions, which extended the recovery period, it took longer to recover and expand in this last cycle, so as a result of that, the cycle lasted longer. I think it just was a longer period of protracted growth. So we have, you know, in the time frame of how things tend to play out, on the inside, you might see real estate deals two quarters after a Dow correction, but typically I see like a fourth to six quarter lag off the Dow.  And there's a reason for that, if you follow the money, so start with the Dow. What is the Dow? The Dow is a highly liquid market people are trading on nanoseconds and they're trading based on projections and perceptions. So from their companies, their shares are devalued, they, report, you know, revenue, they have revenues coming in lower, their earnings are lower, they start adjusting their P and L's, they lay off people. Okay, so unemployment comes up. Then they start to look at their real estate and they say, well, we need to reduce our exposure of real estate, we're not demanding as much square footage. Let's give some back. That goes back to the landlords. The landlords get the space back, they rent it for less or they can't rent it. They burn through cash?  Then they go to the bank and they say, hey bank, I'm having some issues. Bank says, okay, well let's work with you for a little while and see if you can get through it. That takes another three or six months before ultimately hits the point where the bank says you have to get out of the asset, we've got to take it. So, it's a slower moving asset class. That's one of the reasons why people like it. I mean, when you're buying, you want it to happen now you want it to be fast, but when you own this, it has less volatility than the stock market does and that's one of the reasons why people get excited about building durable wealth in the space.  James: Really interesting. So, I just want to touch back on what you mentioned just now. So you said during the Obama administration, the 2008 crisis, you said FDIC did not recycle assets as quickly as you know. So can you clarify that because that's completely new and I never learn about that. Jeremy: So, if you look back at the savings and loan crisis, this was back in the late eighties, the tax reform act. What happened was depreciation schedules were changed on how real estate was owned and written off. The tax world had distorted real estate evaluations, that combined with the junk bond industry and banks investing in junk bonds, chasing yield, okay, to make money. So, those two things together broke down the system and what happened was banks, the FDIC went into banks and said, we've got a lot of, your balance sheets are a mess, your ratios are out of alignment, we want you to call your notes and recapitalize. So, banks actually started calling owners up and saying, you have to pay us in 30, 60, 90 days. Pay off your mortgage. Well, okay, but when all the banks are doing the same thing, there's a problem. So owners were foreclosed on, they dropped their prices to liquidate their buildings. They filed bankruptcy and all this real estate ended up coming onto the bank balance sheets and the FDIC came in and said, okay, well now we're going to set up a corporation called the resolution trust corporation to liquidate all this stuff, flush it out. Okay? Establish the market bottom and then we'll come out of it. So, in 08', a lot of people were thinking that was what we were going to see. We had finance and demand induced recession and so we expected to see real estate defaults go back to the banks.  The banks would take the properties over, the FDIC would come in and say, push the stuff back out on the street, market down, recapitalize, and then we'll get back to business, they didn't do that. Instead what they did was they came in, they closed the really sick banks and they, a lot of them were set up as M and A deals. So they had other banks buy out the sick banks to dilute the balance sheets and then clear off the sick real estate. But what they ended up doing was they did a lot of forbearance agreements and they extended loan terms so that they could keep the owners operating the assets even through all the pain of the recession. So as a result of that, we never saw a real mark down or mark to market on all those properties. They weren't quote and quote recycled.  So if the idea was to keep all the real estate and everyone's in all the owner's hands, you saw fewer deals on the buy side and you just saw these owners just barely making it, holding onto these things, waiting for the economy to start to pick back up and for demand to come back into the space so they could recover the valuations and ultimately refinance the bank off the asset or sell the asset and recover or just break even on it. That takes a little while to do that. So I think that's one of the reasons why we saw this sort of longer cycle this time. I mean, a lot of people were looking at Trump's administration and his policies for continuation of this. I do think that was part of it but I think what we really had was, we had a long recovery and it took us until 2013 to really jump into an expansion phase from 08' but it wasn't like a jump, you know, it, it was kind of a slog to get there.  James: Yeah. You can see 2013 onwards and other property, the caplets not comprising a lot more compared to, you know, from 2008 to 2012 right.  Jeremy:  Yes. James: So do you think that's gonna happen in this market cycle where somewhere there's going to be, you know, FDIC going to come and do inaudible15:42  Jeremy: I don't, I kind of think that's not going to happen because if you follow the logic here with me. So country gets invaded, government shuts down the economy. People are forced out of business. Landlords default on mortgages. Banks have to foreclose on property. FDIC makes them and says; now you got to recycle the buildings. So if I'm the owner of the building that went through that whole horrendous experience, I'm looking at the government going, “Well, wait a second, you shut down the economy and now you're telling the bank to take my building away. How can you do that?” So I'm not sure that's the outlet on this one, I think the outlet's probably going to be just a market and it's going to be buyer demand and what buyers are willing to pay but it's going to be driven by two things over the next couple of years. One is who your tenant is, their stability and their durability to pay rent and number two, the lending resources that you have available.  My concern about this situation we're in is banks freezing lending, to attempt to reduce their exposure to the degradation of net operating income? That's a concern because they take the debt liquidity out of the market, when that happens, that slows transaction velocity down considerably and that will bring pricing down and that's, you know, if you're buying and that's the time to buy, when money's hard to get, when it's easy to buy and money's hard to get. James: Would you still be you have a challenge in terms of lending, right? The terms may not be as favorable during the peak tomorrow. Jeremy: But it's interesting, I think the lenders, when we go through recessions, they get picky about who they lend to, having relationships with your lenders is critical so your local banks are extremely valuable. They want to know that they've got strong hands operating these assets and using the money correctly. So those are elements to be very focused on in maintaining those relationships. It's the national banks that concerned me with inaudible18:30, so working on a deal last week and well as Fargo said, well, we're not doing it, we're not doing the deal, we're not lending period. Just shut it off.  James: Yeah. Except for multifamily, I presume all of the asset classes, like very less in terms of landing multifamily. I know Fannie and Freddie still doing it even though they have additional visa requirement, which is good for multifamily, but I think it's just hard to do any deals anyway right now because no one knows what's the price. Jeremy: What's the price? James: And no one knows what the cap rate, I definitely know Capita has expanded, right? Definitely not compressed as they, from what, two months ago but how much it has expanded, right? And who's going to take the risk of, what are they buying? Right? No one knows.  Jeremy: You get back to good old fashioned cash flow and I always tell people, there's always a market for cash flow in any market cycle, there's a market for cash flow. So the key is figuring out who the tenants are and in multifamily, where do they work? It amazes me when I talked to multifamily investors about their properties, I asked them, when your tenants fill out credit apps, you know, our rental application, you get their place of business, wherever they work, you should be cataloging every single employment center in your portfolio and finding out which industry sector they're in because you could, I mean for all you know, you might have 60% of your tenants working in the cruise industry. You just don't know, you know? So having an idea of what your economic footprint is by income diversity in your multifamily properties is really valuable information to have.  James: Yeah. Even multifamily near to airports, right? Where there's a lot of workers from airports and the airports are shut down, right? So that can be a bigger issue as well in terms of demographic, right? So yeah, we never really looked at it because, you know, but I recently looked at, it looks like we have really good diversified in my portfolio, but I don't think so many multifamily bias have done, you know, demographic analysis until now, recently, right?  Jeremy: Yeah, it's good to do.  James: Now, it's like, okay, you better know who are your dynamics.  Jeremy: Yeah, you want to know who is paying rent. So I have a question for you.  James: Sure. Jeremy: Okay, so multifamily deal making, where the deals are, where are they going to be. One of the things that KC Conway mentioned on his webinar that fascinated me was he said he expects to see hotels converted into multifamily housing and he also said, we may even see cruise ships become multifamily housing.  James: I just heard recently, I mean in fact, this morning I was listening to a podcast, by Robert Kiyosaki and Ken McElroy, who are talking about 10 years ago, someone was pitching this idea, let's convert the cruise ship into a moving condos and sell the condos as an apartment. I mean, if you heard about that, I was like, wow, really? Maybe that's coming back.  Jeremy:  It may, these crew lines they're going to have surplus cruise ships, aren't they?  James: Yeah, absolutely. Jeremy: I don't imagine demand will drop off for a considerable period of time and hotels.  James: Yeah. So let's go back to the tenant demographic analysis and the economy. Right? So, looking at what happened 2008, we did some kind of a benchmark with what happened then and what happened now but what happened now is basically the service industry and the people who want a paycheck, you know, paycheck to paycheck, right?  People are living paycheck to paycheck, they are the biggest impacted because everything stopped, right? So the people who have higher pay, who are basically living in A class or you know who are working on a normal, you know, highly paid job, they are working from home, they didn't lose their job, right? So, this is my thinking, right? My thinking is just like, yeah, I mean people, once everything opens back up, you know, the paycheck to paycheck is going to go back to work, right? But there's also going to be a global economy slow down because now this virus has impacted almost every country, right? The whole economy, the whole global economy is gonna slow down. So, my thinking is, you wanna multifamily class B and C, you know, where people are living paycheck to paycheck, they're going to go back to work and they might be a quick recovery, but people want class A, who are, you know, who are working from home, the company is going to have impact, right? That's where the Dow is going to have impact cause now your corporate profits going to come down because now you have a global economy slow down, right? So, I think even though now you're saying this is just my thinking, maybe we can just, you can figure it out whether you're thinking of the same, the class B and C is gonna is getting impacted right now. Class A not so much, but it's going to swamp later on, maybe in the second part of the W right? Or the V in the second.  Jeremy: Well it's starting already. If you look at, office work and employment and you read the news, you're going to see that companies that didn't lay off office workers are reducing their salaries.  James: Okay. Jeremy: And you're hearing about owners saying, you know, the owner of the company saying, okay, I'm going to waive my salary, everybody in the organization is going to take 10, 20, 30% pay cut with a floor, you know, not to be no less than. So following that logic, you're taking all that money out of circulation and it's not being spent, of course that slows things down so the question is how long you, you definitely have a slowdown, that's, inevitable but the second piece is how long those people stay employed? And are they able to get through this and operate at a level that with those cuts they can sustain operations and then start to pick back up when spending returns and it's going to be incrementally returning.  It's not, it doesn't just, this won't be a light switch so we're talking about W's and then I talk about it's a dimmer switch, you know the dials so you go and you can flip the switch in the room and the lights come on, but there's the round dial, you kind of push the knob and then you can adjust the, I think we're going to be doing that for a little while, turning the lights up, turning them back down, turning them back up and it's going to be partially in response to people hearing about hotspots or breakouts of covid until we have a situation where majority of the population has been exposed and we've processed the virus or we have a vaccine to manage the virus.  James: Yeah but this is going beyond the virus, right? So, I mean maybe the vaccine is already up in the next, you know, eight months or one year. I'm sure people are saying one to one and a half, but I'm sure the administration is going to cut a lot of red tape too, you know, well that.  Jeremy: Hey, they built a nuclear bomb pretty fast, right? They had to. James: Yeah because you know, during these times, everything is all hands on deck, right? So all the processes get thrown away or you know, there need to be some kind of leadership happening there but I think it's happening, but I just think the second order effect right on the overall slow down on the job losses on how the world is going to change. Right? And how it's going to impact commercial real estate. So, well, what do you think would be impacting a commercial real estate? Let's say, you know, you have experience in office, multifamily, retail. So let's go to each asset class and see, you know, what do you see it?  Jeremy: All right, retail, very, you know significant damage to retail. Okay? I mean, department stores are pretty much talking about the end of their era here this may be an extinction event for the department store.   James: So do you think if today we have a vaccine, what would the impact be if you already have a vaccine?   Jeremy:  If we had a vaccine, for the department stores? James: Yeah, for the department store for the retail industry. Jeremy: I don't know that they really cut, they survive longer, but this is devastating for them when Walmart, Target, Costco and Amazon are seeing 25 to 35% revenue growth, all that money is flowing, you know, flowing in different directions than Macy's and Lord and Taylor and Nordstrom's.  So the department stores are definitely, they were weak coming into this, this is terrible for them. General retail, you know, I think quick service restaurants like with drive-thru's come back very quickly, the drive thru is kind of an ideal service model for this environment where we'll be going through and coming out of and the cost hits a point, it's a low cost dinner, you know, dinner for the family, to go to Chick-fil-A, you know, and grab, you know, feed the family for 50 bucks. So quick service comes back quickly, I think some of the other sectors where we've got, you know, experiences, you know, it's interesting, services and experiences were really kind of the bellwether in this e-com impact on retail real estate but they're getting hammered and so you're going to have some service and experience spaces return, they'll reemerge from this and the weaker ones, they just won't make it back. They won't make it back, so it's, I think in restaurants, full service restaurants, maybe half of them come back from this. It's just going to be very difficult to reopen all those.  James: But don't you think someone is definitely going to buy that space? Somebody else that have the same vision as the previous owner. I mean, maybe the original owner is no more there, 50% have gone right because they kinda lost it. Jeremy: You're going to see new operators come in and it's, that's, look restaurant, full service restaurants, they can be recycled and you're going to have operators say, well we, you know, we made it through, let's open another location cause it's on sale. We can get the equipment and refurnish it and open and go. So there'll be opportunity there for new operators.  James: So the industry is not going away, it's just the operators are disappearing.  Jeremy: The operators that disappear, it's a slow recovery for them. It's a difficult recovery and the real estate; there will be some good restaurant real estate that will become available. It will happen. Okay, so I know retail, that's sort of my take on it. I wish I did. James: Are you seeing a lot of distressed sellers right now. I mean are you doing a lot of transactions right now?  Jeremy: No, not right now. I think it's early.  James: Yeah, I think it's still early. I think people are just riding through their cash flow. Just walk up and watching and nobody knows what's the price and nobody, not many people are distressed.  Jeremy:  Yeah. Multifamily, I agree with you, if you segment by class ABC, you look at the populations that are renting from those units. The A-class seemed to be more insulated because they tend to be professional, high-income office working  James: Those that work from home as well, right? Jeremy: Yep. The B's and C's tend to be more service level and they've got a lot more exposure in this environment. So, you know, they get laid off quickly, but they get rehired first because they're lower cost, the office workers, they get hit later and they, you know, they're slower to come back. I mean, what's that rule of thumb, if you've got, for every $10,000 in salary, it takes you a month to replace, to find a new job. James: This new ratio. Jeremy: I know this new ratio if it's true, but I've heard that. So the bigger question that I've got on multi-family is the suburban versus urban, we've been in an urban cycle the last 10 years.  James:Yes. Jeremy: And I've been. James: Explain that a bit, what do you mean by urban cycle? Is it people building more multifamily in the urban areas?  Jeremy: Yeah, it's the live, work, play, lifestyle, millennial, you know, millennials and baby boomers wanting to live in the city near where they work, walkability people that live in rich environments. There was a quote that I was reading today from Goldman Sachs and they're saying, they're expecting a flight of millennials to the suburbs from urban markets and it makes sense.  What does this suburb offer? Less density, more value for what you rent, you know, you may be working from home more so they may be making decisions about, well I could have done a one bed but I have to get two bed cause I need a home office, that's a consideration to take into or keep in mind and then there's just the overall comfort of, hey, you know, I don't want to be in downtown New York right now. That's not a good place to be, I want to get out to the burbs and just have some more space. So I think the idea of urban versus suburban is it's going to be a big topic here over the next four or five, six years.  James: Got it. So I think that's very prevalent in where you are, but you also buy in Texas, right? I mean, from what I see in Texas, everything is a suburban mid-rise apartment, not in style apartment. So I mean there is very people I know who buy apartments near downtown, even though they [33:34unclear]  Jeremy: Sure James: It could be depends on which market you're talking about.  Jeremy: Yeah, I agree with you on that. In Northeast, we have a very clear urban, suburban experience. You know, Texas, you guys just keep building rings.  James: Yeah, we have a lot of land here, right? So everything is garden style and [33:58unclear]  Jeremy: Yeah, as long as you got the water.  James: Yeah but there could be like tertiary market where it could be more interesting. I'm not sure it would be less density or not, I mean everything seems to be less density for me in Texas just because we have a lot of land here, you know, people move around pretty well, everybody, I guess so. Jeremy: Yeah, you got a lot of roadway.  James: Yeah. Could that also mean that there's a lot more investment coming from the coastal city to places like Texas or Florida or where  Jeremy: It could mean that, yeah. What's interesting about the last cycle nationally, the suburbs have been kind of out of fashion. So, it didn't have the same run up in value that the urban markets did so I started to see that the last couple of years where investors were starting to look at suburban markets and say, well, I can still get some yield there, so I'm going to go invest in the suburbs. This is now going to really bring that conversation to the forefront.  James: Yeah, I think that's why I like places where you are like Boston is called like gateway cities versus you know, places like where I inaudible35:17. Jeremy: Yeah. James: Suburban market, I would say so. Jeremy: Yeah. So industrial, I'm still bullish on industrial. I think we'll see some dislocation in distribution and port industrial, I don't know what the future looks like with China. I mean we import a lot from China through Long Beach and it goes to the inland empire and I think we're going to see some of that shift to other port markets as we start importing from other parts of the world but overall with consumer behavior shifting, it had already started before this. If there's been anything that's going to accelerate the demand for industrial spaces, it's this because you're going to have ghost kitchens, you know, restaurants that basically just, they're like catering kitchens that they just run full time, they have no seating and they deliver food, you know, basically meal prep. You're going to have more demand for online consumption and distribution and shopping, that's going to put more pressure on existing in industrial inventory, I sort of thought the industrial market was peaking in the last couple of years, but that may not be the case, there may still be some runway in that market.  James: So when you're talking about industrials, basically, warehouses where, you know, products made and distributed, I would say, right? I mean, I can see that with more manufacturing going to be coming in house right now, I mean, with all this, that's one shift that's going to be permanent.  Jeremy: Yeah.  James: Everybody knows that, right? So, do you think industrial would be the asset class that most beneficial from that? I mean, because I'm looking it’s going to be a lot more manufacturing factories coming here; I just don't know which assets.  Jeremy: Yeah and that's really, I mean, if you remember doing 102 in CCIM and we talked about basic employment. James: Yes, absolutely.  Jeremy: As soon as you start to see manufacturing coming back into the United States, that's going to be really good thing for our economy.  James: Correct.  Jeremy: It's going to really boost multifamily, a lot and it will help retail and it'll help office but you know, it's really a value, it's a power source, it's an economic engine for importing money into economies, local economies. So, I think industrial overall in terms of, if you're on the buy side, it's like you want to be really careful about industrial exposure to China, but the rest of the industrial story I think it's going to be a good place to be, I think it's going to be a good asset to own.  James: So, is industrial equaling to manufacturing factories.  Jeremy: Yeah, so manufacturing, flex R&D, so that's research and development, Warehousing, distribution, bulk storage, cold food storage. Just there, you're going to see that stuff cranking.  James: Cold food storage  Jeremy:Yeah, cold food storage. James: This is not the same storage that we are talking about now? Jeremy: No, we're talking about like freezer facilities that type of thing, yeah. James: Why is that? Jeremy: It's because people are going to be continuing to demand home delivery of food and you got to store it somewhere.  James: Well, I never seen one when I drive around, so I don't know.  Jeremy: Kinda funny looking, you know, if you, sometimes on the outside they're a little funny look.  James: Now, it's going to be looking nicer because it makes more money. So how do I position myself or anybody else listening? Let's say if I want to take advantage of this manufacturing coming in house right now. I mean, how would a commercial real estate investor should be able to position?  Jeremy: It's a good question. So you want to, you know, the main thing about manufacturing is you want to find buildings that have good characteristics for an efficient manufacturing operation. So grade level, you know, Celeste slab on grade buildings with ceiling heights in them that are preferably 16, 18 feet or higher, that have good loading access, you can get a truck, tractor trailer, multiple tractor trailers in and around the building to access it, plentiful parking for labor so typically you're gonna see, you know, one parking space per 800 square feet is kind of the building code standard for manufacturing warehouse but depending, you know, power supply, how do you have enough power coming into the property and utility services.  So you could probably, you know, you're probably going to be able to find some outlier properties that you can bring into that market and you know, convert over and, I mean, the other thing is you might want to be looking at retail and converting that to distribution, zoning is restrictive for that because typically municipalities don't like to see industrial uses in retail locations but you may end up seeing big box or department store or retail buildings that have those characteristics of what I just described cause a lot of them do being converted to that use, it could be manufacturing or it could even be distribution.  James: So which market should we be looking at to position ourselves for this kind of industrial asset class?  Jeremy: I think you can look at pretty much any market in the U.S, I think this is not a specific market, now if I, you know, I think you do this, you to follow that formula in any market in the U.S now if you want to do a, let's look at the demographics and the economic drivers in a market. You want to look for population growth, employment growth, that it's, you know, if there are more people move in there and live in there and it's growing, that's a good thing because people demand space.   James: Yeah. Well I mean the other way to look at it also is like, if there's already a manufacturing hub in that city or state, you know, that could be a good expansion place, right, if you find some assets around it. I guess  Jeremy: It could be, the other thing you're going to see are companies trying to find manufacturing redundancy. So if they've got a facility that goes down in their location, they can continue supplying from an alternate, which is, it's really interesting cause it's sort of contrary to what Gordon Gekko would tell us to do, right? Build shareholder value, become more efficient and be more profitable, do things faster and increase volume and the way you do that as you bring everything into one location and make it as streamlined as possible but now we're looking at a situation where, and this has been going on in manufacturing for a little while, customers demand redundancy because if there's an event or a disruption to a location, they want to make sure that they still have a continuity of supply chain.  And so they're getting what they need so that's even more important now than it ever was. So we'll see some of that. So I think you gotta kind of get into that world and talk to people and find out you know who's looking at bringing things home who isn't, and then start to think about the properties that they could be using and you might even have the opportunity to go out and pick up some land and put something on the land for someone.  James: Yeah. And I'm sure there's going to be some kind of government incentive to do that, right? Because now the government wants lot more manufacturing.  Jeremy: So I think so. Yeah. So office. James: Yeah, let’s go to office. Jeremy: You working from home, if you had a choice today to go to the office or work from home, which would you prefer? Is the question and I got to imagine a lot of people are saying, I'd love to get back to the office. I miss talking to people, socializing that's missed and I think the home office thing is great, but boy, when it's home officing and schools are shut down, it's really hard.  James: That's a good point.  Jeremy: This sort of experiment is, you know, forced home officing can companies do it? We've got a variable that shouldn't be there and that is the kids, the kids should be in school. But it's, I think people go back to the offices, but they, you know, offices may end up seeing a similar thought, which is, hey, instead of piling everybody on the train or getting their buddy into the center of the city to work, maybe we need to have a smaller office in the center of the city and then have some suburban offices, spread people out, improve their commutability and create redundancy in our workforce.  You know, with people being closer to their smaller offices. So I think that, I'm hearing that a little bit in the market now with people I talk to, I think that's something to keep an eye on that. So again, I kinda like the suburbs, I think there's an opportunity in the suburbs and office may actually be a suburban opportunity here.  James: Got it. So what you're saying is people are just going to go back to office. I mean, it's not going to die.  Jeremy: I don't think it dies. No. I mean if anything, you know, we've gone from, in the office space, I mean you see these offices where people are like in their benching and I mean I went into an office building and people were waiting in line to get in the bathroom, in an office building and the reason is that the building was built for more or less one employee for every 300 square feet and when companies come in and they go, we're going to be more efficient, we're going to get 1 employee in for 135 square feet, all of a sudden the bathrooms are overloaded, the parking is overloaded and that the buildings, it's too dense. The amount of people in there, it's not designed to carry that density. We'll throw a pandemic in the mix and the idea is for us to be six feet together in this world we're in right now. Maybe we're going to see that, you know, that office demand change where you know, I want to be able to shut my door to an office, I don't want to be at an open bench next to my colleague sneezing on my keyboard, you know, so that, I think we would go back to the office.  It's important, the nature of the office is to bring us together and for us to work and collaborate, share ideas, but also to have deep work time, need to be able to do deep work and we need to go somewhere to do that. So maybe it's not about packing as many people in and forcing them to assemble and work together rather spreading them back out a bit, providing some, you know, some work from home, some work from the office days, maybe your home two days, three days in the office. So I, this is a fluid one, but I think we go back to offices. I think it's how we do work. We can do it this way, you know, we can talk to each other, but it's not as fast in my opinion, information slower than it is in person.  James: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was talking to a doctor, Glenn Mueller, right? So I'm sure you know him, right? This was like two months ago when we're looking at all of the asset class and office was the opportunity it was going from, into the expansion cycle. Right? So, and I asked him the same question, what about people working from home? He said, well, you know, humans are social creatures, you know, they like to be together, right? And you're absolutely right about communication and deep work and all that, just so hard to do working from home. Right? So I think people are going to go back to the office, especially after the vaccines is [48:47unclear] right?  Jeremy: Yeah, I will make this prediction. So just like after 9/11, the U S government moved in security and defense. This is a healthcare crisis; I think the next decade will be a healthcare decade. We tend as people, we tend to overcompensate for a trauma that we just experienced so that we never have to feel it again and so I think we're going to see when we rebound from this, healthcare will come back very quickly because there'll be such a backlog of demand for everybody else who's not suffering from Covid but has a knee replacement or you know, an oncology treatment and everything, they're going to be there, they need to get in for services but we're going to have a situation where healthcare is going to be at the forefront of government decision-making, investment and in development of protective and planned responses to anything like this coming again. So I see that space is a very fascinating space to watch and get involved in as you see us start to come out of this and these discussions come to the forefront.  James: So how should we prepare for that opportunity too?  Jeremy: Well, it centers around the hospitals and if you follow a hospital strategy, they've been merging with each other to become more efficient as they struggle to operate profitably in a very narrow margin environment and one of the things they've done is they've expanded by going out into retail locations and creating outpatient and urgent care services that essentially become a feeder for the hospital. So I expect to see more of that because that's a lower cost way for hospitals to expand. Hospitals are very expensive and they tend to be constrained geographically because of where they were cited. You don't see a lot of just new hospitals being built around the country. They tend to have additions put on them. So as a result they expand out into multiple locations that become more like a hub and spoke model. So I'd be looking at anything in the healthcare space in the next several years. I think it's just going to be really good place to be.  James: So are you talking about like medical offices or you're talking about labs or life sciences Jeremy: Medical office, yes, I can't really comment on life science, I don't follow it very closely, it's so specialized, but I probably should know more being out of Boston cause it's just a center for it, I hear about all the time. I just kind of go,"...oh yeah, labs, ugh"  But, that I, anything with healthcare, I'm loving it in the next several years.  James: But even on medical offices, I mean, the tenants have a long lease terms, right? I mean, how would that increase the valuation of the property as a real estate investor? One is, we look at the cash flow, the other thing we want to look at value increase as well. Jeremy: Well, there's, it's durability, yeah, that's one of the great things that medical office offers you is 90% and higher renewal probability rate. The you know, historically it's been a recession, quote and quote proof, investment class, not this time. I mean, I was looking at data last week 42,000 healthcare professionals lost their jobs, were laid off. I mean, you go, what, no way.  James: Why is that?  Jeremy: Why is that? Because hospitals aren't allowing for elective procedures, urgent care only. So they're laying people off, it's a fiscal nightmare for the healthcare system right now. So they, that's short term, okay? There was the version, what is it, version three of the P we're on now that just came out and there's billions of dollars going to the healthcare system, which is a good thing.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: Good thing. So short term healthcare is volatile that may be the opportunity to pick up some property, I think that over the next decade it's going to be a wealth builder.  James: Okay, so you mentioned about some of the healthcare which is located in the retail centers and all of that become like a hub and spoke model. So that's like single tenant healthcare, right? Compared to a multi-tenant. Jeremy: It could be single tenant, could be multitenant. You might have a medical office building with four practices in it. Sure. Yeah.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: Yeah, I think those are really good investments.  James: Okay and it could be offices converted to medical offices.  Jeremy: Yeah, it could be. Yeah, I mean it's, I just looked back at 2001. I mean if you were in the like the metal detector, you know, security business in 2000, probably not really interesting. James: Right, like 2001 [54:48unclear]  Jeremy: Yeah, so that's what I see here. I'm like, this is going to be interesting, there's going to be an overreaction in healthcare. I think there's going to be opportunity there.  James: Could there be like construction of healthcare facilities like medical offices or do you think just buying new medical offices.  Jeremy: I think there could be development, we're early on that. I don't know that's anything that we're going to see probably for three years. I'm just following the trend, I'm kind of following how people are, what they react to and then where they go and for us to come out of this and not have a national discussion about how are we going to be prepared for the next pandemic.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: Yeah, it's going to happen and money is going to flow there and, and there's going to be a lot of pain and people are going to say, I don't want to do that again.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: I don't want to hear about ventilators next time. You know? And so, I think that presents an opportunity for investors to get in front of that now. James: Yeah. I'm sure for the next three, four years people are going to say we didn't want to have that healthcare problem again. Right? And I don't mind paying for this. Right? Some kind of thing. It's going to be a lot more investment. So I think medical offices would be a really good investment.  Jeremy: Yeah. I liked it before this and I like it even more after that. James: Awesome. Good. So what about other asset classes like self storage or mobile home parks and you know, what else is there, warehouse I think is probably part of the industry.  Jeremy: We talked about warehouse, hey, you know, self storage, kind of a maturing asset class in this last cycle but I think it's still very viable and it's a good place to be. You are going to have dislocation of residences the next couple of years so self storage is going to be valuable to people who need to store their belongings, mobile home parks, I mean, look, everybody needs a place to live and if it's affordable, you know, it's gonna work. So again, there I think I see an opportunity too. James: Got it. I think multifamily; we did talk to her in detail about it, right? Do you think there's going to be a lot of crash happening in the single family space because there's so much short term rentals, people bought a lot of short term rentals as second houses and probably right now there's no short term rentals happening.  Jeremy: Yeah, that's not so good like kind of the Airbnb, I mean you're sort of in the hospitality business there so yeah, those folks are gonna need to convert to long term or sell.  James: Correct. So I think there's going to be, you know, a lot of people, you know, giving up their second short term rental houses that way to the banks. It could be a lot more houses available I guess. Right?  Jeremy: Yeah. That could be an opportunity, you know, if you want to buy and rent or buy in rehab and then resell that space could have some volume coming through. Yeah.  James: Okay. Got it. Interesting, yeah, I mean, did I miss out on any asset classes? I think that's the more important. Jeremy: I think we got most of them.  James: Yeah and do you think we are going to be much better in terms of economy wise? Just because there's going to be a lot more base employment, which is manufacturing happening in the U.S. Jeremy: I'd love to see that, I hope our companies can come home with that and who knows, I mean with the unemployment rate being what it's going to be for a while and the wage growth that we didn't really see in the last 10 years, and we just lost on that, maybe there's an opportunity for us to employ people that otherwise we couldn't have a manufacturing basis to make it make sense. I don't know. I'll leave that up to the manufacturers to figure out.  James: Got it. So, I didn't want to forget one asset class, which is hotels, right? I'm not sure whether we went deep into hotel. So that's going to be, I think the hotels are really suffering right now.  Jeremy: Oh, it's terrible.  James: Right now.  Jeremy: When I hear 9% occupancy rates.  James: Yeah. Jeremy: That's bad news.  James: Yeah, that's crazy right now. So hopefully hotels survive through this downturn, I guess. Right?  Jeremy: Some will, look, we still need hotels.  James: Yeah, I know.  Jeremy: We still need them so they're the strongest, best located hotels will come out of this thing, others, you know, they'll fail and they'll either get bought at the discount and with a lower basis they can compete in the market and grow back out or you're going to see them reused for something else.  James: Got it.  Jeremy: That's maybe the multifamily conversion.  James: Yeah, if the city allows it of course, then they can be a lot of studios and efficiencies, I guess and I've seen that happening in some cities and some projects. All right, Jeremy, thanks for all the value, can you tell our audience and listeners how to get hold of you?  Jeremy: Sure. So you can check out our stuff on CREinvested.com, that's C R E I N V E S T E D.com, I've got an investment course there, that is available and if you ever want to chat with me, you can email me @jeremy that's JEREMY@creinvested.com  James: Yeah, Jeremy is a wealth of knowledge. I mean, he's also a senior CCIM instructor, right. So that's a lot of knowledge if we came in, absolutely, you will be a really huge value to connect with you and just to learn from you. So thank you very much for coming on the show.  Jeremy: Hey, thanks James, it's a pleasure. James: Alright.

This week on the podcast we level-up in two different ways. First, we hit our 200th episode! And the second way we leveled-up? We have the very cool Drew Dixon on the podcast. Drew is not just a gentleman and a scholar -- nope -- he's also a master podcaster and world-class gamer who explores the intersection of faith and gaming. Are you a gamer? What's your favorite game? Has a game made you cry -- like Eric did with Bastion? Or do you love Minecraft as much as Jeremy? What did you think of Drew's thoughts about the Shadow of the Colossus? Tell us @ChurchMag using #cmagcast, send us an email at podcast@churchm.ag, or submit your thoughts here -- we want to talk about some video games.

PC Perspective Podcast #475 - 11/09/17 Join us for discussion on Intel with AMD graphics, Raja's move to Intel, and more! You can subscribe to us through iTunes and you can still access it directly through the RSS page HERE. The URL for the podcast is: http://pcper.com/podcast - Share with your friends! iTunes - Subscribe to the podcast directly through the iTunes Store (audio only) Video version on iTunes Google Play - Subscribe to our audio podcast directly through Google Play! RSS - Subscribe through your regular RSS reader (audio only) Video version RSS feed MP3 - Direct download link to the MP3 file Hosts: Josh Walrath, Jeremy Hellstrom, Allyn Malventano, Ken Addison Peanut Gallery: Alex Lustenberg, Jim Tanous Program length: 1:29:42 Podcast topics of discussion: Join our spam list to get notified when we go live! Patreon PCPer Mailbag #16 - 11/3/2017 PCPER Plays: Mirror’s Edge (2008) Week in Review: 0:04:30 Intel Announces New CPUs Integrating AMD Radeon Graphics 0:15:55 Raja Koduri Leaves AMD and Joins Intel to Build Discrete Graphics 0:35:30 CASPER News items of interest: 0:40:00 Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Arm-based Server Processor Begins Commercial Shipment 0:52:15 Light And Dark-Side Collector’s Edition NVIDIA TITAN Xp for Pre-Order November 8th 1:00:55 AmpliFi Announces Teleport, a Zero-Config VPN For Travelers 1:07:45 StarCraft II Going Free-to-play on November 14th 1:09:30 Rumor: Google Pixel 2 XL Slow Charging Hardware/Software Picks of the Week 1:13:40 Allyn: Relatively cheap Samsung 82” (!!!) 4K TV 1:17:45 Jeremy: What exactly is a "technology certificate license" Logitech? 1:23:45 Josh: 1800X for $399!!!!! 1:24:50 Ken: The Void Wallet http://pcper.com/podcast http://twitter.com/ryanshrout and http://twitter.com/pcper Closing/outro

In this episode, we have a special guest - Shaun Thresher. Shaun is an employee of mine who makes his first guest appearance in an episode every entrepreneur needs to listen to. We go over the biggest reasons most entrepreneurs struggle in business, how to overcome those obstacles and what you need to do starting TODAY to make breakthrough profits in your business. Check it out, share it and let me know what you think! Resources Mentioned Want To Work With Me? Visit http://www.JeremyReeves.com or email me at Jeremy@JeremyReeves.com Enjoy! Transcript Jeremy: Hey guys this is Jeremy and welcome back to another episode of the sales funnel master podcast. I have a special guest on the line today and he is actually my employee, so there is no really intro. Basically, he works for me that is his intro. His name is Shaun and he is an Italian which you might have (inaudible 00:00:37). He is from Italy and I actually just had him in a couple of weeks ago and we spend I think 5 days something like that, getting to know each other better because we never saw each other in person. I am a huge on transparency and relationship stuff like that, so I have Shaun in and we have planned out the next 90 days and we came up the idea. Number 1 to focus more on the podcast which I have been doing if you have not noticed over the past couple of weeks and number 2, I am actually going to start having him more on the podcast when I do my own parts of the podcast besides guests and stuff like that. So today -- and I’ll let Shaun come on and talk for a minute -- today, we are going to talk about why people succeed and why other people don't because there are such big differences and a lot of it comes down to just mindset and execution on what you are actually doing rather than how smart you are or what kind of business you are in. I mean, in most cases, that stuff really does not matter at all. It matters about what your plan is and then how well you execute it. So that is some of the stuff we are going to talk about it today. Shaun, come on and introduce yourself, so they can kind of get to know you a bit. Shaun: Hey everybody, yeah, I am Shaun like he said, I live in Italy. It is kind of funny about that, I am a transplant. My wife is an Italian so that is kind of how I round up over there. I met Jeremy about a year ago, it was kind of a weird thing. I just came on there and I saw he was the funnel expert and I was like “Well, hey Jeremy, what’s up? What do you think if I jump on with you?” and he has taught me some of the ropes and so that went good for a little bit I worked on small project with him. He kind of like the work I did and everything went good. So he hired me and here we are. Jeremy: Yeah, and one thing I want to point out to people is that and it actually ties in really, really well to succeeding and not succeeding, is Shaun did not come to me and like “Hey, you know, I’ll charge you X dollars for this” and he said, “look, I want to work with you, I want to let you know -- I want to prove myself before we ever talk about him giving me fees and stuff like that. So he actually did a project for me right up front and he did that, I liked it and we started moving forward after that and I think it might had been another week or two or something like that before I actually hired you but that is kind of like what we are talking about today, if you want something, you have to go out and get. You can't just sit back and think “(inaudible 00:03:13)” with your sales funnels and your business. A lot of people are “oh, I’m not growing this year” (inaudible 00:03:19) and then if you look at the actions that they are taking and number 1 how much action they are taking and number 2, what type of action they are taking, it is completely off the mark and it is so easy to go in somebody’s business and transform it just based on that, and not even some of the other stuff that we are going to talk about today. So I just want to kind of start off on that note. If you want something, just go and get it. don't have an excuse for it. don't sit there and bitch and moan about why things are so bad. I mean, take it in your own hands and just go out and freaking get it. So Let's start off. You actually just sent me a statistic that said that 90 -- I forgot what it is, the competition in your business, 90% give up and this is really with any business. 90% give up before they see any results because a lot of people are worried about competitors and things like that, but most people they come into a marketplace are going to be gone in the next couple of months, and even the people who stay and again, this goes back to really any business, whether it is your competitors whether it is my competitor, I mean, it is really just anybody. There is only a small percentage of people that are going to be there long term. Most people come in and they try one or two things and they fail and they give up and they are gone, and then other people, they come in and they do kind of well, they get a little bit of success and then they hit one big giant road blocking road and they fail. They give up, it is too hard. For example last year, I had a rough year last year because my dad got cancer and I was spending -- tons and tons and tons of time with him. I was taking work off to go spend time with them. I was taking him to get chemo, I mean it was -- it was a rough year and my income went down a little bit. It is already, I actually did surpassed it this year for last year. But, I mean, most people just give up and they kind of take that and use it as an excuse rather than say, “Okay, it is going to go down a little bit obviously” because you are just not spending as much time at work. I mean I probably spend maybe half the time that I usually do last year actually working because of all that. It is just kind of a mindset difference in entrepreneurs and the 90% they’re going to come in, they’re just going to give up. They are going to hit a road block, give up and then there is a couple of percent that are going to, another 5% or so that are going to -- they are going to do well until they hit some kind of giant road block or they going to get distracted with shiny object syndrome or something like that is going to happen and then the other 5% or probably less than that are going to be your actual competitors and those are the ones you should focus on. You should focus on the big players in your industry because if you look at them, you are going to find similarities between them. They are going to be the people that succeed because they, you know like I have been saying, there is really two things. Number 1, being able to actually execute. How much you actually get done in a given day and then you multiply that over whatever 365 days or how many days a year that you work, whatever it is. That is number 1. But if you are not working on the right things, then it does not do anything and that is honesty where a lot of people fail. I have tons of people and Shaun, you know this because we kind of talk about this. I have tons of people that come to me and they are like, you know I wanted a sales funnel. I already know that I am losing money every single day because my funnel is not optimized and blah, blah, blah and I actually just had one guy that I have been working with. He told me he is losing about $2000 a day waiting for his funnel to be fixed and he has a fairly good excuse. I would not really say that it is good enough for my standards but it is a little bit better than most people. But, people are like, “Oh, you know, I can't spend $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000 or whatever it is on a sales funnel” even though they are making a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and what happens is, people are spending their life “Oh, you know, I have to get my website redone.” I have someone actually that is a perfect example. Someone came in and I quoted her a project and I could easily, easily, easily add an extra 10 grand a month to her business easily. I mean, it is just a complete no-brainer for what I was going to do for her and she has been stalling now for roughly, I think, it has been 2 months or so because she has been waiting for her website to get done and it is like, “Oh my God come on” I mean that it is just such a bad excuse in my mind because, yeah, first of all, why can’t you do both? I just don’t understand that. You are an entrepreneur, you should be able to prioritize. Shaun: Right, and the funny thing about that is, it is a funnel work from the backend anyways. It is like if you have a list, you build the list, send out the sequences, and then there you go. So, I did not know what their excuse had to be for their website to be ready anyways. Jeremy: I know, yeah and with her, what we were doing, it was not a typical sales funnel for her. What we are doing is doing basically joint venture sales funnel. So one of the things has worked really, really, really well and it is a risk-free way to grow a business is one of the best and the most risk free that really could ever have on a business is doing joint ventures. And Shaun, you know this, I mean some of my biggest projects come from my joint venture partners. So, that is what I was actually going to build for her was a funnel going out and reaching out and acquiring joint venture partners. Because, you know, with that, if you send out a direct mail package or something, maybe you are paying few bucks for it, whatever, I mean, that is basically risk free. You don't even have to do that. You could just reach out the email which is what most people do. But I was going to put together a -- it was actually a smaller funnel, it was not that much money. It was basically a funnel to reach out to joint venture partners for them to promote your business to their audience and you have to do it in a really, really, specific way. You can't just reach out to some of the people in your industry and say, “Hey, you want to send people? Do you want to put of all of you reputation on the line to send out my business?” That is not going to work. Shaun: It was not basically just to wait for her to break the ice and kind of digitally shake hands and say “Hey, this is what I got going on. This is how I could help your customers.” Jeremy: Yeah, exactly and that is one of the things that we don’t put through the whole process of one of these joint venture funnels. But, one of the big things is, and you know this again, when we do this, we get, in fact I just had the other day, we got compliments on our cold emails all the time. I did one for when we were reaching out to people to be on their podcasts or for them to come on our podcast or for potential joint venture partner or if we are reaching out to somebody to do like a webinar or to do a guest article and we do all of these things, by the way. We actually get compliments on the email itself and it is like, “Oh my god it was such a well-written email.” And yeah, that is because we actually put time into it. I mean, you dug in, you know this. We sit there, we’ll go write one email to somebody and spend an hour on it. Because it makes a difference when you -- Shaun: Yes, like half a page (Inaudible 00:11:33). Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, it is only a couple of paragraphs. I mean, if you read it out louder, it probably take you 15 seconds. It is not big, but the thing is you have to, and this is where a lot of people go wrong is they just want to tell people about their product, “Oh, I’m so great and I’m such an awesome person and my products are the best.” When you reach out to people, they don’t care about that. They care about what is in it for them. In the case of joint ventures, it is really number 1, is for one we are going after people and this is really the case for most joint venture deals is number one is about a new income stream. So, you are adding something that was not there before. So, that always gets attention and then you kind of say, “Yeah, here’s what’s happened for our last.” The last time somebody sent me a client, I sent them X dollars so you have some proof in there. Then the biggest thing is people don't want their reputation ruined if they send you somebody and you treat them poorly. So then we also have things in place that show people how we treat our clients and plus, you know, I mean, it is free money for them. Like I said before, it is a new income stream. I mean, it is different in every case and again I would not go into too much detail. But the point is, going back to kind of what I was talking about before, is people just have excuses and those excuses are typically really bad. I got a lot of them and sometimes it is like listen, if I quote you $15,000 or $20,000 for a sales funnel and you are barely scraping by, that is a good excuse because you don't have money, like you literally have to borrow it, you get a loan or something like that. Shaun: You know, what’s funny about that because that is probably a guy we want to work with anyways because he is out there hustling. Jeremy: Yeah, you know, some of the clients I have had in the past where it is like, “Man this is a pretty bad stretch for me and I am going to go out and borrow money” but those are typically the best clients because like you said they are hustlers and if you are an entrepreneur, if you don't look at yourself in the morning and think, look at yourself in the mirror and think that you are a hustler, I mean, that is a very bad sign. We wake up every single day and hustle our ass off and do things that just -- Here is a good example. Yesterday, I actually accomplished all of my weekly goals for the week and that is actually including, I actually went golfing on Wednesday for the afternoon. Shaun: I confirmed that. Jeremy: Yeah and I have shot absolutely, absolutely terribly and really, those kind of last minute thing. It was only because it is getting cold here and it was the last time I am going to be able to go this year. So and I have 3 other guys that I was going with and I was like, you know and I am just going to go. But I accomplished all of my weekly goals and you saw the list because I actually share my weekly goals with Shaun because like I said I believe in transparency. So I just started doing that and that list was not small in any stretching imagination and I actually finished it yesterday and instead of just saying “Ok, well I will just take Friday off” I added more to the list and I have a whole big list of things that I am getting done today and I am actually going to be working -- I forgot, either tomorrow or Sunday morning for new thing because we are in the business. We started a new thing that we are doing. Where we’re reaching out to specific people offering and very specific link, I won;t get into it. But that is kind of what I am doing there to kind of, instead of just saying okay we are doing good, we had three of the biggest months in a row that we had in the last like a year and a half and they were right in a row. Shaun: Yeah, it has been crazy. Jeremy: Yeah, it has been insane. So we are doing really well, but I don't want to stop that. I want to get to the end of that and then it slows down again. So, we are trying this new thing and I want to get really good momentum for it. So, I am waking up early. I can't remember. I have a mark in my calendar but one of the days this weekend and it is basically -- I am waking up before the rest of the family gets up. I am going to work for probably 3-4 hours and then depending on what day it is, I think it is Sunday and I am waking up doing that, coming up for breakfast with the kids I will get up probably 2-3 hours earlier than everybody else and that I am coming up and I am going to spend the day with the kids and then I am actually going to my mom’s for we are having like a little birthday lunch thingy for my brother’s birthday. Shaun: Nice. Cool. Jeremy: Yeah, and then leaving there and going to Katie’s mom for dinner and her brother and sister are all going to be there so it’s a very, very family-focused day. Shaun: Stromboli? Jeremy: No, no, no. Katie makes the Stromboli. Katie’s mom does not make that. I don’t even know what we were eating there. Probably some kind of roasted chicken or I have no idea. Shaun: Cheese pizza? Jeremy: Oh, you must missed cheese pizzas. But anyway, so that is one thing is that the whole kind of argument there is you have to have a priority in your business. Like, Shaun you know, we have basically three things that we are focusing on for the next 90 days. Shaun: And we just came up with that though, that was kind of our thing, we were like “Hey, we are kind of losing our focus and so Let's just drive and focus on this one thing for the next 90 days and boy, I mean, you see the results. You can see all the business we have got in. Jeremy: Yeah, instantly! I mean it was within like a week and again, Like Shaun said, there are 3 things that we are focusing on that is it. We are not testing 10 different types of ads, we are not doing Facebook and Google and Twitter and Youtube. We are just doing Facebook, we are just doing the direct outreach thing that I mentioned before and that is kind of like a secret little project, so I can't get into that, and then we are focusing on the podcast, and that is it. We are doing nothing else and the results have been just phenomenal so far. So the first thing is, make sure that you have a focus on the business for the next -- for the rest of the year. We only have like 2 months left and -- Shaun: Maybe you recommend that book that we went through to come up with our plan? Jeremy: Ahh.. what was the book? I don't even remember. Shaun: It was like, --. Jeremy: The 12 week year, I think it was called. I am pretty sure it was 12 week year. Shaun: Yes, 1 year of work in 12 weeks. Jeremy: Yeah, basically, that book talks about instead of planning for the year which -- anybody listen to this, everybody probably plans for the year. I used to. I don't even do more. But you plan for the year and then you get to like February, the entire thing shifts. So, there is really no point in even planning for a year. You could have like some kind of major overarching goals for the year like income you want to make or something like that. I don't even focus on that anymore even. I just focused on -- I kind of focus on what I do. I think of what I want to hit at the end of the year and then I work backwards and say, okay, what do I have to do to hit that and then I just forget about the number, just let it all happen and then -- Shaun: And starts to take 2 months off? Jeremy: Yeah. Shaun: Get it 2 months early. Jeremy: As we go things changed. So for example, the next 90 days we are focusing on those things. Within those 90 days, we are going to know if they were successful or not. So if they were, we do more of them if they were not, we switch. It is really that simple. In most cases, people have all these excuses for not doing a funnel and it is like, “I’m going to wait 2 months, I’m going to wait a year, I have got do this first, I have got to do this other thing first, I have to clean my office before we start.” I mean it is like, the excuses I have received over the years are just absolutely pathetic. So just figure out if a funnel is your weakness in the business, maybe it is, maybe it is not. Sometimes your price points are off. I am working with a new client and I looked at his business. He is actually a revenue share partner. I am basically just taking a piece of his business essentially. And the first thing that we are doing is I increase his prices by like 50% because he is closing 80% of people. So we are increasing prices to get that down -- Shaun: And that guy is an executor. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am sending him stuff and he is writing me back 20 minutes later that is implemented. That is an entrepreneur. He is a hustler. He actually, it is kind of funny, he actually emailed me and he is like “Oh, yeah, just so you know I bought a house” and I was like, “What? What are you talking about? Like were you looking for one?” and he was like, “Kind of. We kind of have one in mind and then we walked into the house, I love it and I bought it within the next 48 hours.” I was like “What?” If you do stuff like that, that shows you that you are a hustler, that you are like a true entrepreneur. So that is number 1, lets us move on to the next one. One of the things that people struggle with and this is like a big priority, is getting cold traffic to work. I worked with so many people and nobody really focuses on getting cold traffic to work. It kind of -- I mean it kind of depends on this. If you want to scale, you have to. I mean, there is really no other way about it because well in certain cases, but -- Shaun: That is pretty much the holy grail. Jeremy: Yeah, it really is because when you get cold traffic to work, Let's say Facebook for example, let just say start you start with Facebook, you get that to be profitable and profitable enough like if you are spending a dollar and making a dollar and 2 cents. I mean, technically, that is profitable, but you are really not going to scale on that, but if you get it to an amount that is acceptable, an acceptable ROI say that is like you are spending $1 and making a $1.50 or $2 or $3 whatever it is for your business, it kind of depends. If you have a product, it could be like a $1.25 or $1.50 and that is fine. If it is more of a service, it has got to be more like probably 3 times ROI (inaudible 00: 21:57) at least to be able to be profitable. You kind of have to get that because once you get it and I always recommend clients to start with one thing. Start with AdWords and once you get it profitable then maximize it and once you can't even do anything else with it, then go on to the next traffic source. So you do, just for example, AdWords, you get that profitable that is your big breakthrough, you open a bottle of champagne and you kind of take a night off and then you come back the next morning and you say, “Okay, how do I make this more profitable?” and you maximize that, and then you move on to Facebook and then you get that profitable and then you maximize that profit, and then you move on to the next thing, Tweeter, Youtube, Instagram or direct mail, whatever it is. But a lot of people are like, “I’m going to try cold traffic. I’m going to try simultaneously a postcard campaign, a radio campaign, a TV campaign, Facebook, Tweeter and that is -- go ahead. Shaun: That is the 90% that we were just talking about at the beginning. Jeremy: Yeah, and they do that -- not even just with cold traffic, that is with basically everything they do that with. That is how they hire employees, that is how they run their business on the day-to-day basis. It is how they -- even as far as planning your days. If you have everything mixed up in the same day, you are not going to be productive. So for me, I am a writer, so I have days where it is just writing and when I am on a writing day, I am just like -- I just go into the dark hole for the day. I don't even pop up, and that is why I am able to write an entire 15-page sales letter in 1 day, is because I have such ridiculous focus on those days. Now, can I do that every day? No, but when it is my heavy writing days, I can do that, in fact, I just did it this week. It was a -- I think it was a 14-page sales letter and I started the sales letter and finished the sales letter within 1 day, I think it was my lunch actually, and then I moved on. The reason that I do that is because of that laser, laser focus and you can apply to that to every area of the business with how you plan out your days, with how you are getting revenue into the business. One of the things there is look at your business, and figure out -- okay, like lay out all the various ways that you make money, all of your revenue streams. Maybe you have, I don't know, 4 of them. And then you look and you mark down and you say, okay, Let's just say that is A you get $5000 a month, B you get $5000 a month, C you get $5000 a month and D you get $5000 a month. So they are all equal and so you would look at that and say, “Okay, well, they are all equal so we are going to put equal amount of time into them.” Well then, that is not really the right way to do because if you look, you are going to find that you are putting different amounts of time into them already. So with A, you might put 10 hours to make $5000, with B you might put 30 hours to make $5000, with C it might be 50 and D might be 100 or whatever. So you look at that and you say, “Okay, well, I’m putting in -- I basically making $500 an hour on A so hey why don’t we focus on that one.” It is not really rocket science. It is just taking the time to look through your business and see what is working, what is not, where your leverage points are and then focus on that. Coming back to cold traffic, it is the same thing, focus on one piece of traffic. I usually do -- I focus on 3 and then like 1 in each once. So there is like free traffic and then kind of like authority traffic and then paid traffic. Just focus on one of those each. In that way, you get a little bit of diversity but then you are also maximizing the time that you are putting into each of them. So that is kind of another kind of big reason that people are not succeeding in businesses because they are just focusing on so many different things and it is just -- they have so many going on and it is one of the reasons why I get people that are like “Oh, you know, I have no bandwidth left.” and it is like “Yeah, that is because you are trying to do it by gazillion things” Here’s an idea, don’t do that. Just in case Jeff is listening to this, it is not really -- he is my client that I said has a decent excuse. He has got through a lot of kind of weird stuff lately and some giant headache. So he’s kind of in a weird spot, but most people that I talked to gives similar excuses but have not gone through the big things that he has gone through. It would be a whole podcast just explaining what we went through. One of them for example is, he ended up having to -- he had to redo his website and he ended up like paying like, it was like 3 or 4 times the amount that the developers that are originally quoted him because they got to the end of his first whatever quote period and they were like, “Oh yeah, we are not even close to being done, and we can’t stop now, and you can't hire anybody else because they are not going to know where to pick up and it is probably going to be about 3 times the amount that we quoted you.” That was basically the situation. He got kind of screwed which I have no idea if that was (inaudible 00:27:35) or not. He is actually not even declining it so I don't know if that was like an internal thing, like a bad hiring (inaudible 00:27:42) what happened but he is in kind of a weird spot. Let's move on to the next one. The next one is that people don't have a backend. Shaun, I am going to have you kind of talk about this from a little bit. So just kind of pick it up and we will see where your thought goes. Shaun: I don't have backend either. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, right? Your backend is me and your frontend is me. Shaun: Yeah, backends, they are kind of unusual creature because once you kind of get the frontend lined out, then your backends come in and that is kind of where I picked up -- where I started helping Jeremy was. We always try to teach people that there is certain touch points in how you want to communicate with your customers. One of the most recent clients that we had he was in a daily niche and then I had to go in and read through what he was talking about and kind of pick up his voice and communicate properly to the customer where he could have done that on his own but if he is not really paying to attention how the customers respond to him, they come in and respond to support emails, if he is not taking any consideration when he writes his sequences for a sales funnel, I see that is where people make a mistakes. The other thing I see mistakes when clients come to us on the backend is they just don't have anything there. Maybe, they will have a service or they will have a product and that’s it and you ask them “so what is next?”they were like, “Well, what do you mean?” What do you think about that? Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I can't tell you - and I have fought with customers over this. You are bringing people in and Let's just say that you have $97 product upfront right? So you get customers, Let's just say you are making $100 grand a year, you are doing okay. You are pushing along a little bit but you only have that one product. You have all those customers who trusted you with $97 of their money, I mean it is not a lot of money, but the point is they are trusting you with whatever result that you promised to get them. Shaun: Another thing that we were saying to -- they do the one contact, so the guy comes in and he will buy from you one time and then they never follow up with them. Jeremy: Oh yeah, I mean people put so much time into the front end and it was like, “Okay, I’m going to do 50 auto-responders for my prospects” and then it is like “Okay, people buy now what?” Shaun: What’s that 50 (inaudible 00:30:19) like? The cost of a new client versus a previous client? Jeremy: It is something like 7 or 10 times less expensive to get them to buy again. Let's just say that your cost per acquisition, cost for acquiring customer is Let's just say its $100. Basically, it would cost you somewhere in the range of like may be $10 to $15 to get them to buy a second time and the thing with that is -- I don't know about profitability because one person might have $500 backend, one person might have $10,000 backend, so I am not sure with that, but Let's just say that you have a $97 product and it costs -- Let's just say that you have $150 product and it costs you $100 to get them, so making 50% basically for each customer comes in and then you have a $500 product and it cost you $15 to get them buy again. I mean, look at the difference in the profitability? That is where most smart business make their money. People are like, “Oh, I have this one product, and I want to be hugely profitable on it.” And I talked to them and then like look, “that’s not how business works.” Business works by having something upfront that allows you to kind of gather the largest amount of customers in a break even or may be just like a tiny little sliver of a profit, and this is where the whole like trip wire thing came out. Everybody say, “Oh my god tripwire, it’s a brilliant idea, it’s been out for like 8000 years. (inaudible 00:32:10) I just want to name on it. Same thing with survey funnels like basically adding marketing concept, I mean it is all out there already. It is just putting a different name on it. Shaun: It was not called like a ‘Lead Magnet’ or something at first? Jeremy: Well, “Lead Magnet’, that is more of like a free report or kind of thing, but again, giving a free report. Two step mailing, I mean that has been out since like the early 1900s, they have been doing that in direct mail, and it is just somebody has to put a name on it. Shaun: So what would you think if somebody could implement today, like one small tweak they could implement to their backend starting today? Jeremy: Yeah, that is easy, come out to freedom offer. I called it freedom offer -- this kind of varies between the business but come out with something that is roughly 5 to 10 times as expensive as whatever your highest thing is now okay, maybe its 3 or 4 -- it is several times more expensive. Shaun: Could you explain that, I think that came out kind of confusing. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, so Let's just say -- for example, this client that we just joint, his highest package I think was -- I think it was like $2000. So what we are doing and he said like, when he brings people on, they are not really complaining about price because he gets tons of tons of visitors, he does a lot of qualifying on weeding people out. So when he gets on the phone with people he is closing like 80%+ because they have already seen the price, they have already kind of talk about a little bit so when people come on they are not really talking about price, I’m like, “well, dud, you gotta increase your price.” So one of the things and he also said, he is like -- a lot of people come in and they only get like 2 or 3 months of coaching, but that is not really going to transform your life and that is even when I talk about with funnels and stuff and that is why, as you know, were moving away from just like one-time projects and things like that, we are moving way, way more towards actually partnering with people because the difference and I think -- Shaun: Yeah, but that is not just so we could profit, that’s so we can really dive in and learn somebody’s business so we could -- so they can benefit more. Jeremy: Yeah, I mean it is so hard like when you are redoing a sales funnel for somebody and it is like okay, Let's do a sales letter and 2 up-sells and a buyer’s sequence and a prospect sequence. You don't -- I mean, there is not enough time to really, and especially, because most clients are like, “I going to make you wait 3 months, 3 weeks, I got a delay, I got a delay, I got a delay, okay, I am ready to go, why is it not done?” We get that all the time. Besides that, but it’s -- you can't go deep enough when it is not on a revenue-sharing basis. Just because of the way that is structured fee-wise. I mean it is just not -- Shaun: And would you think it’s like dating? Jeremy: What’s that? Shaun: I mean it would be similar to dating wouldn’t it? Jeremy: Yeah, so for him, he would get a lot of people that would come in and he is like a dating coach, so he would come in and they would get a date and then it will be like “okay, I’m done” and it is like, okay, well do you know how to keep her? Do you know how to stay with her? Do you know how to set boundaries with her? So you are not like one of these guys that just gets like trampled on by the wife and there is -- trust me, a lot of guys like that the wife just rules the house and it should not be like that and the guy should not either, it should be a balance and that is how you keep a healthy relationship and that is why divorce rates are like whatever 50%+. You have to accept those boundaries and free -- first of all, you have to be with the right person first of all. But anyway, one of the things that I kind of took all this information and we are coming out with several packages. We came out with a 2-month, a 3-month, a 6-month, and a 12-month package and people are going to naturally fall into the various categories. They were not available before so people did not do them, now that they are available, I guarantee you, so his highest package now is $15,000. It is like whatever it is like $1200 a month for 12 months, whatever that -- Shaun: About that, maybe talk through about why somebody would build a high package even if they get no customers for it. Jeremy: Yeah, that is actually a good point. So Let's just pretend that nobody does it. He is going to get people in it because in every marketplace, there is roughly 1% of people just have tons of money, they just want the best thing that you have, it does not even matter a lot -- he is ridiculously awesome. But it does not even matter what it is really, there are just people -- they just want the highest end just across the board whether it is a vacuum cleaner, a computer, a car, a house whatever it is. They want the best thing that they can possibly get. So if you don't have these things that really make people stretch, and I will talk about -- actually a new thing that we’re going to be coming out with -- first of all, you are not going to attract those people that always want the highest thing because if you don't have that really, really high thing you are not even going to attract those people. Number 2, even if you don't sell any, so he has his $15,000 program, when he is on the phone with people, I am going to have him start with the $15,000 program that he is talking about because he is going to -- basically, we give them like a little bit of an overview at the various program that he has and then when he is on the phone I am going to have him start and then it is like okay “what packages do you have?” and he will start talking about it, and we still actually have to build a selling strip for all of this. He is a fairly new client. He’s a fairly new client, he’s only been on for about a month, something like that, not even. Actually, October 1st we started, so not even like 3 weeks. So what we are doing is I am going to have him start at the $15,000 okay and what that does is that created a juxtaposition, and that basically like if you see a big elephant next to like a little fox, that fox is going to look smaller than if you see another fox next to that fox. So that is basically called a juxtaposition, it just makes it -- it kind of like enhances whatever it is, if it is a small thing it makes it look it smaller if it is big, it makes it look bigger that kind of thing. So if he is going down and he is going to start with okay my highest price program is $15,000 and this is for the most like bad ass guy. We are going to work together for full 12 months. He will go into his whole pitch and then most people are going to be like “wow, that is like way too much” and then he will come back down like “okay, well we have another one” and it is only $2500. That looks so much cheaper than if he just said “okay, I think you have fallen to the $2500 one.” Because you are coming -- instead of just starting basically from 0 to 2500, you are starting from $15,000 and coming down to $2500. Number 1 by doing that, it is going to help him close more people on the phone like higher percentage, but another thing is, he is going to get more people into the higher end program, so he is -- Shaun: Another thing about that too is you just got done talking to the guy about his higher end program, in his mind, he sees himself already there, but you offer him a lower program, he is like, “it’s almost there, it’s quite there, it’s close enough.” Jeremy: Yeah, basically, what that does is that, that establishes your authority. If you have the ball to charge $15,000, I mean you look at that, and you are like, “Wow, this due really must know what he is talking about” instantly, like even if you know nothing else about him and obviously we are in the process of putting funnels in place that really build his authority before they get into a call, but even if -- as you are sitting there, pretend that you need help with dating, okay, and by the way, if anybody needs help with dating, reach out to me and I will hook you up with them because he is ridiculously awesome. Let's just pretend that you need help with dating and you get on the phone with 2 people, okay. The one and you don't know anything about either of them, okay. So there is Charlie and Mark, right. So you get in the phone with Charlie and he is like, “Okay, you know, I am going to help you with dating and my package is $2500” for 3 months or whatever and you are like okay, and then you get on the phone with the other guy, forgot what name I set for the other guy, and you get in the phone with him and he says, “Oh, I can help you with dating and my highest price program is $15,000 and we are going to work with you for the whole year and if that is not in your range, we have another one at $2500.” The difference in that just by having that high end program, you instantly -- just think in your head right now, who do you think is more credible, the guy with $2500 program or the guy with the $15,000 program? It does not even matter if he has anybody in it or he can even deliver on, obviously you are going to want a deliver on it. Shaun: Yeah, there’s a bit of disclaimer about that though, I mean it is an actual program. It is not just something we just put up there. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah -- Shaun: (inaudible 00:41:34) lots of content. You know, I mean, if somebody signs up for it, they are getting a massive amount of value. Jeremy: Yeah. It is like that most high level thing like ever, you know you get -- Shaun: And the other thing I see people when they’re hesitant about developing a program like that is what we’re talking about before was -- they are like “what I am going to offer in that program” I can't charge $15 grand, I don't know what to offer them that” Jeremy: Yeah, so in that case, you have to become better. I mean it is just that simple and maybe that sounds harsh, but that is the truth I mean you know when you came in, I said, I mean, we started talking about me implementing a higher end program and this is not even live yet. Shaun: I think I have been pushing you to make that happen to. Jeremy: Yeah, you have a little bit and it has been one of those things on the back burner and now it is coming through but by the end of this year, I am going to have a program that is $120,000 a year. It is basically $10,000 a month and then I will probably have a thing where you can pay like a $100,000 upfront or whatever and just get it, but I am going to have a program that is $120,000 a year right. That instantly makes me more authoritative and I am going to obviously make it worth. It is basically going to be what we do for the revenue share partners, but for someone like if you have a $30 million dollar business or something like that maybe you don't want to do revenue share because that can be ridiculous amounts of money so you just kind of do this instead. Obviously, it is not going to be for everybody. If you are making $100,000 a year, you can't afford to spend that but there is a certain percentage of every single audience in the world and if you don't believe that I want you to email me so I can yell at you personally. Because, I mean, honestly, there are things -- let's just have a completely obscured -- knitting. That is the most like ridiculously, like, you would never think someone in charge -- Shaun: My grandma love knitting. Jeremy: Right. So you would never think the classes you probably go to you probably spend like $5 a class or something like that. I guarantee you, there are certain people in the knitting niche that would spend, I mean I don't know how much, but at least a couple $1000 and what you can do with that is let's see -- I am trying to put myself into the knitting mindset here. Shaun: I would think that if you were to teach like a lady how to start your own type of business they could do like trade shows or crop show. Jeremy: Yeah, that is one. You can be like a certified knitter. You could go and do a live event where the person comes and maybe there is some famous knitting lady. A lot of people pay tons and tons of money. Most people, if you -- anybody listening to this, if you have gone to seminars or you have met people at masterminds or something like that. You know how excited you get to meet people and it is funny because you meet your big heroes and then you are like, “Oh, really, that’s it?” I can't tell you how many times it had happened which I am not starstruck like whatsoever anymore, I could not care less, because there are just people that are good whatever they do, but the point is people pay a lot of money for that. Think of let's just say, Justin Bieber, right. Justin Bieber is a big hit, I guarantee you that there are parents that would spend at least $10,000 for their, little like 15-year-old girl or whatever -- I would imagine 15-year-old girls like Justin Bieber. I guarantee you, there is a market for him charging $10,000 to $50,000 for like a couple of hours and I guarantee you that there are 15-year-old girls’ fathers who would pay that to give their little girl the privilege to do that. I absolutely guarantee, it is going to happen. The point is, how about them? That is kind of where we are going back to, and it does not have to be -- if you have this, you kind of have like a value ladder. If your product is $100 maybe don't go up to like $10,000 right away. Do $100 and then do like $500, $1000 and then $5000 or $10,000. You should have kind of different levels for different purposes and typically it goes -- like an information product is may be a couple $100 and then you go up to like maybe -- Shaun: A group coaching? Jeremy: Yeah, or like templates kind of depends on the market but like templates might be a little bit more or group coaching and then one-on-one coaching and then one-on-one coaching for longer or done for you. You kind of like see how that progress upwards, that is the main point there is most people don't have a backend and when I work with people doing webshares and even clients and stuff like that, usually the clients -- instead of me building it for them, it is basically like, “Hey, do this.” Here is what I think should be the next step for us and then just let me know like when you are done and then we will implement it into the funnel. That is what I kind of do with a lot of clients that are more of like the one-on-one clients. Like I said, just don't limit yourself. don't have that mental block in your mind that, “oh, people won’t pay that amount of money” because they will. I mean, it is just a fact of life they will. So don't let that be kind of excuse. Shaun: Right. Plus, too, you use it as a positioning tool. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. Again, like we talked about before. Even if nobody buys it obviously don't charge a ton of money if you can't deliver that value. I always -- you should be able to deliver at least 5 to 10 times that value. So from my $100,000 program that I am going to be coming out with, by the way, if anybody is interested in hearing that we can kind of talk about, you can help me, we kind of strategize the whole thing, but I will do extra stuff for you too by the way. In that, I am looking for ways like when I sit down to plan that out and exactly what I am going to do for people, I already know what I am going to do for them. Basically, the same thing I do every day but just way, way, way, way, way more deep, but I am going to just map it out for people so that it is easier to understand, because you can't say, “oh give me a $100,000 so what are you going to do for me?” I don't know, some stuff. I am going to help you grow, it is not very sexy. So I am going to map that out but when I am mapping that out and actually putting bullet list of like exactly what I am going to do for people, I am going to be looking at, okay, I am charging these people $100,000 over a year, that means that I need to make them at least $500 to a million dollars, $500,000 to $,1,000,000 in trackable results. The people that I am going to be working with are not going to be $200,000 businesses. They are going to be in the 7 to 8 figures. I am not looking for a lot of clients obviously. In that range, if I get a couple in a year, that is awesome and that is really all I even want for that level of service because -- Shaun: And then we’d be (inaudible 00:48:48). Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. I mean there is only a couple that you can do before I have to expand the team further and stuff like that, but anyway, I think we kind of hit the point on the backend. The next one is missing the crucial touch points in the email sequence, and first of all, people just typically don't have good emails, people think that you just sit like, “oh, I need a prospect sequence” and it is like, “oh, I am not going to hire anybody because --“ Shaun: Maybe explain what the prospect sequence is. Jeremy: Yeah, that is a good idea. A prospect sequence is basically when you bring people in and we are talking about before a lead magnet, something free of value, it could be an automated webinar, it could be a free rapport or video or whatever it is, something with online like a chiropractor, it could be -- bring them in for a free 20-minute massage or free backtracking, which actually, I have to go to chiropractor today because my neck still hurts from a month ago. When Shaun was in here we were lifting together and we were doing shoulder presses and so I was the first one to notice it. This is really weird my right shoulder just feels like so much more weak than my left shoulder. I was throwing the last one up with my left shoulder, it was just going right up in my right when I was struggling to get it up, I don't know what is going on with my right shoulder. So we went through -- I mean both of us, it had to be like (inaudible 00:50:17). Shaun: Yeah, yeah, I felt it to, but I did not say anything. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, and so we are looking and it turns out we had 5 extra pounds on the right weight set and we were lifting like that, I mean, I think that is what threw my neck out because I woke up the next day and I can barely like move my neck. I had to take them in and I hate pain killers. I have to take them for like a week straight. So I finally went to the chiropractor and I am still going every week. So I have to go later today. They have been helping but it is still a little bit off. Going back to email sequence, first of all, you have to have a way to keep in touch with people who come to your business, because if you don't do that, they are going to forget about you. Just plain and simple. Shaun: You would say that we are talking to the people who have not bought from us yet? Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, these are prospects, yeah. Email sequence that can be for anything. That can be for prospects, it could be for buyers. You have to strategize them. You have to map them out. You can't just -- so many people are like “Oh, I’m just going to do my emails” all you really have to do is keep in touch with them and they will buy, and it is like, “No, that’s not it.” You have to overcome the objections because when people come, they are going to have objections as to why they are going to buy. They are going to be looking at you and comparing you against your competitors. So I mean, think of anything that you have ever bought in your entire life. You went through a process, a mental process where you sat there and you said, “Okay, I need X product.” And they you will go and you will look at probably like 2 or 3 different people who provide that product or service and then you look at it and you say, “Okay, this person does this thing, this one is cheaper, but they get a better result” you see, you kind of do all these in your head. Well, why not just get them into your sequence, into your funnel and do all that thinking for them. You know what I mean, and show that -- why-- Shaun: For me, a good example is like when you go to the restaurant. If you go to the restaurant, there is a great waiter, they are going to open the menu, they are going to recommend 2 or 3 things in the menu and you will like, “Oh, well that is incredible” you probably going to buy one of those, once you go there and they just give you menu (inaudible 00:52:33) menu and you look at the picture like, “what’s that?” you’ll pick something at random. Jeremy: Yeah. Exactly, that is actually a really good example. Think of the last time you went to a restaurant and if you were lucky enough to have a server who did that for you, because it does not happened often, but I know when -- this happened to me a couple of times and when it happens I almost always buy what they talked about. Shaun: I got a funny story about that. I went with my wife one time and she was like trying on a pair of jeans and the cashier was like, “Hey, what are you doing?” and I was like, “She is in there trying the jeans” and she say, “Hey, I saw you are looking at the jeans, you want to try them on?” We walked out spending like $400, I don't want to buy anything. Jeremy: Yeah, that is why car dealerships give you rides in the car because you get emotionally attached to that specific car. My neighbor actually just bought a Porsche by the way. He just bought the Porsche like a day after you left. I came home and I was sitting in his driveway I was like, “Oh, man, Shaun would have love it.” Yeah, if you are able to get into the mind of the person that you are trying to sell your product to and come at them in a very authentic way, there is a couple of things that you need to do in your emails and this is really buyer’s or prospects. First of all, you need to overcome all the objections they are having. So with dating, it is like, “Oh, I’m too fat to get a date” or “I’m too ugly or I’m too dumb” I mean, they have all these things like going on inside their head. It is basically low -- Shaun: What if she says no? Jeremy: Yeah, what if she says no, I can't approach them, I am too nervous and that kind of thing. So you have to overcome them and we just wrote this. We did a very good job in doing that. You also have to -- once you have overcome the objections, then they are like, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” I am going to hire a dating coach, and then its, okay, “who do I hire?” then you come back and you say, “well here is why you should work with me.” I have done that a couple split-tests actually with comparison charts where you -- like on, just for example, like a supplement page, where you compare your product against the other ones and they usually increase conversions by like 15% plus, like you cross the board and all the test that you have ever done and it is just because people have -- it goes to show you like the proof, I mean people, in their mind or physically, are researching you against your competitors and when people hire me I know that they are looking at me and may be one or two or three whatever other people to help them with their sales funnels. Shaun: And that actually is a good tactic thing, encourage them to look at the competition. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. I mean if you provide something better, you could go so crazy as if you -- Let's just say that -- Let's pick a random example. Let's just say that you have a martial arts studio and you know that your service is just light years beyond everybody else. You can actually say, “look, go try them out then come try me out, and if you like them better, I will actually pay for 3 months membership for you.” Think about the confidence that would give you in that person to go with that. You probably think like “Oh my god, I am just going to go with you and not waste my time with the other person” just think of it that way, I mean that might be a little bit too much for most people, but if you really want to grow, I mean you do stuff like that. For us, maybe I should be doing this. This is like, hey look go look at them, look at their results, look at how they treat you, look what they do after they work with you. Shaun: Actually, we just had a client who did that. Jeremy: That is true, yeah. Because he said all this and this and then I realized I was missing something in the -- I think it was like 2 different things in the way that I was approaching him so we fixed that immediately and then got him as a client. We are working with him now, it is a pretty big project. It is just because, again, people are doing that research in their head. So instead of them coming to conclusion, your email should allow them to come to your conclusion, if that make sense. There are several things that you need in your emails. Number 1, you have to bond with them, like I said, you have to overcome their objections first of all. You have to bond with them because if they don't like you as a person, first of all that is fine. There are a lot of people that probably don't like me, they don't like -- whatever, my voice, my personality, or whatever -- the way that I talk about my kids, they send an email out today with a picture of Logan in it because it was just hilarious. Whatever that is, that is okay, you don't want to attract everybody. You want to purposely have a very, very specific personality in the way that you do things so that people who resonate with that immediately bond with you and then they will start listening to you, you gain their attention because you have to get their attention first before they will start listening to you. So you get their attention, then you overcome the objections and then once the objections are overcome they come to a conclusion that they are going to buy -- they need the solution for whatever their problem is, then you have to show them that you are the solution, okay. You kind of do this like intertwine -- Shaun: Yeah, I mean for me, when I am writing emails, I could put myself in their shoes like, oh men I have been there, I know what is like. I have had the struggles. I solely made it through. This is how I can help you the same. Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. It is not really a linear process because people are in different stage of this. It is not the exact same thing for everybody. One person might take 3 months to make a decision whereas the other person takes 3 minutes. So you kind of have to put like all of this as fast as you can, it is kind of like a very delicate thing. You can't just overcome objections, you have to overcome objections, bond and show them why you are the best all at the same time, that make sense. And that is why it is so important to get it done -- get everything all the stuff done professionally because if you are coming at it from a point of view where it is like, “Oh I’m great, I’m awesome. Work with me. Hire me, buy my stuff.” It does not come across as genuine, but if you come across and you know this, we kind of adopted like the more of like a J. Abraham type of approach where it is a very genuine and authentic and coming from place of why they need you and not why you need them. So, it is like, when I am talking clients on the phone, it is like, “look, I am going to help you, you need help in your business” whatever the thing is, you are stuck, you are in a plateau mode, you just want to make more money, a lot of people they just send me they just want to do better, which is (inaudible 00:59:39) I mean we are doing very, very well but we just want to make better because we are entrepreneurs. It is just how we are. You have to just help them come into that conclusion that you are there to help them. It makes such a difference and I wish I had an email up here to show specific example but it is like, I always -- a lot of times in my copy, I use the phrase, “you don’t deserve it.” You don't deserve to be overweight. You deserve to be fit and healthy and have a nice butt and have big biceps or whatever the case is and that completely switches it. Instead of saying, “oh I am going to help you lose weight and because I have done this and I have done that and I have this technique, look, you don’t deserve to live a life where you don't feel confident and when you put your clothes on, you are embarrassed to lock out the door and blah, blah. Do you see the difference there? It is just night and day in the way that they perceived, whatever it is that you are telling. That is why people -- I say this all the time, Yes, you can technically have a sales funnel but you have to do it right properly. If you have a landing page and a sales letter and an up sell and emails, yes, technically, you have a sales letter, but that does not mean you have it done the right way, that does not mean you are maximizing your potential. If your lead magnet, whatever you give him away for free, if it does not match what you are selling, it does not take people and lead them to the next thing, you are not going to do very well. Shaun: And all that is engineered when we sit down with somebody and write out their sales funnel. Jeremy: Exactly, yeah. I mean that is -- we are very, very strategically, it is not just like -- if you are selling weight loss it is not just like, “Let's just make a report”, I don't know. Shaun: Yeah, (inaudible 00:01:47). Jeremy: Yeah, like 7 ways that -- eating more salad can make you feel better and then the course is about like bodybuilding. I mean, there is such a disconnect there, it has to be -- the report has to --. Here is a good example, we just did one for -- we have been working with NuWave. There is probably a lot of people on here that have NuWave ovens and NuWave stove tops, right, the infomercial product. So we are working with their company and one of the things that they are doing, they have another kind of like subset or offset whatever, they are called Duralon pans. So these awesome nonstick pans are really safe for you. The nonstick itself is just - it just works better than anything I’ve ever had. So the thing that we are doing first is we are driving cold traffic to a page where they get a free pan, it is like a free plus shipping thing and I think it is $6.95 or $7.95. Shaun: That is an insane deal. Jeremy: Oh my god, it is awesome. The pans are ridiculous. Again, if you want me to send the page just let me know. It is actually in the process of being designed right now. So that is the -- basically like the tripwire, that is to use the coined phrase. So they come there and it is just ridiculously awesome offer and then the off sell to that is not like how to cook better which would not be too bad, but it is not that connected. The off sell is, okay, now you have this pan, how about you buy the whole set? It is a perfect relation to what they are buying because it is like, okay, you have this pan, Let's use that and we actually don't even push them that hard. In the buyer’s email sequence, we have -- I think there was like 10 emails after it go out for 45 days or something like that. In that sequence, we are not trying to sell them immediately. Shaun: Well, the thing about that pan is, it sells itself because it is so good. Jeremy: Oh yeah, and that is why talking about engineering everything, that is why when we were strategizing the buyer’s sequence it is not -- we weren’t like, “oh hey, you got this, buy the whole set.” We offer that because we know some people are going to do that immediately, but we don't push that. What we push is getting them to use the pan because we know that, that pan is so good that when they use it, and I actually thought this idea because it happened to me. I use the pan the first time and I was like, “Wow, this thing is awesome” and now I am actually getting the whole set myself. Shaun: I remember that. Jeremy: We specifically engineered and this comes down to strategizing. Most people don't think about this in depth. They kind of just like, “Oh, Let's just throw a bunch of emails in there” and this does not work. It has to be very strategically engineered. So what we are doing is the first like, it is like the first 5 or 6 emails are getting them just to use the pan, and it is like reminding them to use the pan, “hey, you know, it is going to be there tomorrow” getting them excited about it before it comes. Shaun: And that is one thing too, I mean, we go on and on and on about that. You will be surprised how much people don't utilize the product after they bought it. Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, I mean that is why I was just talking to a guy named Mike Weiss yesterday. We are actually speaking of doing joint ventures. I am talking to him and he has built a membership kind of platform and what it is, is when you have an online course and again, if you want (inaudible 01:05:05) just let me know. If you have an online course, most people I forget the statistics, it was like, I think it was like 90% of personal development products and like 97% of business opportunity products or any kind of like marketing product that kind of thing. That many people don't use it, right? Shaun: Right, myself included. Jeremy: That is why when you have products and you have -- even if you have a backend, most people are not doing it because they need -- they already spent money and if they don't get a result from the first thing, why would they do business with you again if they never got result from the first thing. It is not -- I mean it is kind of your fault. Basically, it is not your fault that they did not get a result because they did not use it, but it is your responsibility to get them to use it to then write the result, you know what I mean? So if you want like -- I tell a lot of clients that -- if you want to increase your backend, get more people to actually use the first thing they bought and that is why I always harp on doing buyer’s sequences because that is -- typically, the first half of the buyer’s sequence is to get them -- I (inaudible 01:06:27) a personal coach campaign is to get them to use whatever they just bought, and then the second half it starts to s

No.24“你什么情况啊？” – 邀你说英语经典台词【句子】Jeremy: What&`&s your deal? 【Vampire Diary】S1E1【发音】[wɒts] [jʊə(r)] [di:l] 【翻译】你什么情况啊？【适用场合】意思有一点点类似What&`&s the matter with you? 但是今天学的这句话更加随意一些。Vicki在假期和Jeremy特别亲密，但是开学了Vicki就再没理过Jeremy，所以Jeremy着急了，就问她：What&`&s your deal? 你什么问题啊？你要怎样啊？怎么回事啊？不熟悉的人不要用。欢迎加瑶瑶老师微信：teacheryaoyao 邀请你进入全英文口语交流群不定期开展【英语发音+新概念】培训

In this brand new episode I have my first guest on the show! This is the first of many great interviews to come. Now if you've listened to most interviews, quite frankly they usually suck. Everybody talks about "their story" and you get no real value. Not with this interview. In this interview Kavit Haria and I interview each other. It's like sitting in on a high level mastermind group. We'll get into the SPECIFICS of what each of us do with our clients to get such outstanding results. It's one you won't want to miss. In this episode I'll discuss... Kavit's advice for anybody launching a new product into the marketplace... Exactly how, when and why to do surveys in your market... *Ninja tips on how I 6x'd my optins for my side business using popups... Our top 3 book recommendations each... And MUCH more... It's a great interview. Check it out, share it, and let me know what you thought! Resources Mentioned Funnel Day OptinMonster InsiderInternetSuccess.com SurveyMonkey Transcript Jeremy Reeves: Hey guys, this Jeremy Reeves from the Sales Funnel Mastery Podcast and I have on the line with me today, Kavit Haria, you have to let me know if I said that right. Kavit Haria: Kavit Haria. That's right. Jeremy: Right. Kavit Haria. So today, Kavit and I have been talking and we decided that it would be kind of a cool thing to do. So instead of having a one-person interview, we're just talk and brainstorm and kind of almost like the little mastermind group. I think that's going to be most beneficial for both of our audiences. So if you're a listener of mine, you know who I am. My name is Jeremy Reeves and if you're not, if you're one of Kavit's subscribers, then you may or may have not heard me before and if you don't, again, my name is Jeremy Reeves and I am a Sales Funnel Specialist. I basically help people figure out what their sales funnel's going to be, the whole automated marketing funnel thing? That's what I help people with. So taking people from prospects, from when they first hear about you, and making sure that you have the right positioning in place, the right offer, and having them go through automated sequences. Emails, sales letters, videos, and everything that makes up a sales funnel. And do that in the proper sequence and have all the right offers for people to greater profits and automate your marketing so you can focus on higher leverage activities and all kinds of stuff that we'll get into today. My website is JeremyReeves.com if you've never heard of me before. I'm going to pass it on to Kavit and let him explain what he does, who he is, so that my audience can get a good understanding of what he does. Kavit: This is a pretty interesting thing, Jeremy. I guess we are co-interviewing and co-answering also. So not only am I being interviewed, I feeling like I'm also interviewing you, so that's pretty cool. My name is Kavit Haria and I've been online for about 10 years. I've been trying to build businesses online. Succeeded in a few different ways. Got into a few, different, cool ventures. Ultimately, I like the fact that I'm a musician and I play (02:30-02:32) and I use that to launch business online, selling music education to other musicians. Kind of like helping them work in a good (02:41-02:42) that marketing is very important in my career. I needed it to help me get out there and show my music. If I wasn't good at marketing, I wouldn't get (02:51). If I wasn't good at promotion, I wasn't going to get an exposure. Nobody was having me sign up for a band. Nobody was signing up for promoting and my music essentially is part of my dream. So I learned that marketing is very important. To cut the story short, really, the problem at first is inside our music business where I learned to create info products and sell a lot of educational material and automated funnels, which is what we're going to talk about in a second. I also learned that I have this ability that I engineer a process where somebody would come to the site and really engage with me and really engage with my stuff and buy my stuff, not once but over and over again within a period of time, that my lifetime customer value is really high in such a short period of time and I was doing all that, once build, and never having to touch it again. So I heard some really cool things there that I didn't go out on a flight to other businesses that I went out to consult in before starting my current business InsiderInternetSuccess.com. Where we basically work with people that have profitable business ideas or business ideas that they think will really work and we sit down with and walk them through a business strategy, a business model, and build the entire thing on the web. So we're kind of very similar in what we do, so it's really good to collaborate with mastermind right now. I'm talking a little bit about how we're building sales funnels individually and have different angles to it, but it's all very creative work and also scientific work and also how other can benefit from just listening in on this. Jeremy: Yeah, definitely. I even said we're almost semi-competitors but I'm kind of on the mindset that there's more than enough people, that everybody has their unique flavor to what they do and people respond differently, they resonate with people differently. So it's cool once you get two people together that do similar things and pull the intricacies of what we do. I think it's going to help both our audiences quite a bit. So really quick, when I first heard about you and when I read about you, your whole music thing, I didn't realize how you're very humble about how you said that because I saw your 'About' page, you did performances with Paul McCartney and Jimmy Paige and all these heavy-hitters and famous musicians, so tell me a little about that. I'm curious. Kavit: Well, and they are really awesome and nice. I remember them very, very clearly and they were also in big venues. We're all about world festival in Holland and U.K. and lots of places. I've performed in different continents, also. But I guess I (05:44-05:45) to get out and play my music. Because I know how to make instrument but I didn't want to play with Indian music, I really want to fuse it with the Western stuff and we hear it a lot these days. Now, it's a lot more mainstream. A lot of R & B and Hip-Hop scenes. Even rock music and Latin music, even that you hear these days. I can hear it very intricately and I can hear the same drum that I play up here in that music and people don't even know what it is. They key was I had to learn to build confidence. I had to learn how to very clearly articulate what I did, and very clearly know exactly know what I did and help somebody else. And as soon as I started to do that, as soon as I started to tap into other musicians and show them how this could work for them, how it could really help them stand out if they were to use this kind of stuff, and then we started to perform and get known, it lead to other bigger opportunities. And so I remember performing for our best musician called 'Donovan', and he was celebrating his wedding anniversary as a concert in the Royal Albert Hall. He was singer from back in the day and he was singing with the London Contemporary Music Orchestra and his friend who was a special on the show, was a performer was Jimmy Paige. So I remember this occasion. I actually, I got (07:10), I have to admit. Music and Jimmy and Paige, didn't know what he looked like, don't remember his music, nothing. But I remember we were in the musician's canteen and the orchestra was performing and rehearsing with Donovan and I was sitting there and I ordered a bit of food from the musician's canteen, I was a nobody, I remember at that time, still with music, to be honest. And this guy walks in and comes and sits with me because I'm the only one sitting there, so he comes and sits, so we start talking and I realize that this is Jimmy Paige, I realize that Jimmy Paige is a great guy, I started to feel a little interested in what he was doing and we talked for 45 minutes, right before the performance. I didn't even know he was there to perform, I had no clue, whatsoever. We then went behind stage, we practiced for about an hour and we performed on stage and it was beautiful. It was absolutely beautiful. Jeremy: That's awesome. That's a really cool story. Kavit: So the picture you see on my 'About' page is us sitting in the canteen, having apple pie or custard, basically. Jeremy: Sounds good. I can go for an apple pie, actually. That's one of my favorite desserts. I haven't had one in a long time. So let's jump in more business stuff. We each have our own approach to how we work with clients, how we work with customers, that kind of thing. Let's just say someone was coming to you and they didn't have anything. They had no assets in place, whatsoever. If they were basically starting from scratch and wanted to build a lifestyle business, that's a big buzz word these days, what would be your process to help them from that first stage of business, going from nothing to 6-figures is the big first mark and then it's like half a million and then a million. So what would your advice be like? What would your process be working with somebody to get them to that first stage? Kavit: For an automated business system, there 3 stages. The first stage is strategy. We basically sit down and think about their profitable business idea. At the end of the day, you got to have an idea. If you don't have an idea, then you generate a whole list of ideas (09:21) with analyzing and testing information and find the best one. But generally, apart from that one, you got an idea, you got to simply think about, "What is the product that I want to sell?" And the way you think about that, first of all, is "What are the problems that the market that I'm attacking or going for has and what is the solution that I can provide to them?", so you got this idea, you got this market, you got this huge problem that might be facing that you're trying to solve in the service or product and you've really made it knocked down. For me, the biggest way to test and do all these things is surveys. And I do a huge number of surveys. In the beginning, at the end, after purchase, before purchase, throughout the lifestyle of the client. And I'm trying to find out and get into my head and really understand what is really important for them? What challenges do they have? How can I help them with their challenges? What would it mean to them if I helped them solve their challenges? So I really want to get and understand all of this stuff. And it's really, really worth the time to do that because even one or two, three insights that I get could change the way that our (10:29), could change the way that I present it when I speak it. I'm sharing my value with them and that could mean a lot more sales. So surveys are (10:36-10:37) that. And essentially, what I'm looking for is a sales funnel that has two key parts. The first is what I call the '24/7 Marketing Machine' which is really giving a lot of value on the front end to solve that problem that that person might have in their market and giving them a value in exchange for their information, for some ideas or survey questions that they might complete and then giving them a series of emails that builds on my relationship with them and then that segment which is the '24/7 Marketing Machine'. The second segment is the 'Simple Sales System'. The way that the Simple Sales System works is once you build the trust and engagement in your emails, once you give them the value of building an engagement with them, the next step would be to figure out, "How would I take these people who are now hot leads and convert them to sales?" It could be a sales letter, a webinar, just an application form, that they speak to you on the phone, it could be any of these things. But what is the process that would work best based on what that person is selling? So there are two key systems. These are really crucial. What most people do is mix the marketing with the sales when really, they are different things. You can't sell to somebody if they're seeing you for the first time. It's very unlikely that they're going to buy so I've always found that take the time to invite somebody, to court them, to nurture them so they're ready to be sold to. Otherwise, you're (12:12) to people that don't want to be sold to and then you're why you're never getting sales. That is because they don't want to be sold to. So the first thing to ((12:21) is there two parts to that process. Get that person ready and then have it processed to sell to them. And then anybody that's starting out should always be thinking, "Well, there's so much to build, there's so much to do, how do I get all of these things done?" And the first step is to take each step at a time. So set up the first element, the marketing section and then set up a sales section. Put it all together. The second thing is then to stop thinking about how you can bring other people in to help you to do that because there is a huge amount of work and you want to whatever you can to get it right from the beginning. It might be about the cost, it could be systems, it could be technology. But whatever it is, I'm not saying you have to spend money on hiring people, but it just could be the right technology to help you automate the things that you  need automate so that you've got more time off to go back and spend sending traffic which (13:10-13:11) part in the system. Jeremy: Yeah, and it's funny a lot of people make the mistake of putting their time in the things that don't make a difference. You have to figure out what your unique ability is, like what you're best in the world at, and make sure that when you’re working on your business, you're working on those activities. One of the easiest ways to find growth in any business - doesn't matter what stage you're at - is to just get rid of those activities that aren't giving you the highest leverage and hand them off people who are still capable of doing them. Whether it's a freelancer, like a part-time kind of thing, just outsourcing or full-time employee, whatever it is and focusing on the activities that are bringing you highest leverage for your time. Beyond all the sales funnel stuff and that makes it all automated, for the stuff that you're doing on a daily basis, it's so important to figure out when you sit down, when you're at your computer, at your keyboard, you know what you should be spending your time on. That makes a big difference. You mentioned about surveys. That's a huge part of my process too. In fact, after we get off the call, I'm setting up a survey for a client that I'm working on. A lot of people stop with just an online survey. Most people don't do any type of surveys. They really don't understand their market at all. They really don't understand their frustrations, the pain points, what people are there for, what ways to segment. Surveys are a really good way to segment your audience so that when you're sending out your emails, you're sending them to the right people. So doing the survey is step one. And then if you really want to get in tune with your market - and this is especially crucial if it's a new market or if you're trying to get to the next level of growth whether that's from 500,000 or to your first million, whatever your next level of growth is - talk to people on the phone. So when at the end of the survey, you have a question like, "Hey, do you mind if we call you? Leave your phone, it's optional of course." you'd be surprised how many people leave that. I know when I have clients, a lot of times, I'll ask them to send out an email saying, "Hey, we're trying to improve your experience. We have someone that wants to call you and understand how we can help you better.", then I'll call their customers and do that. For some reason when you get on the phone, you can get 200 survey responses. And that's usually around the number I'd typically recommend because over that, you start getting the same thing over and over and below that, you're not really able to see trends as well. So 200 is a pretty good number to start with. But if you talk to five people for 20 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever out of your time, you're going to get so much deeper of an insight than what you get with just online text surveys. That's one thing I would recommend when you're doing this. Regardless of where you are in your business, you should be doing surveys. Kavit: That's a great idea. Do you have a formula for how you make them work? Jeremy: What do you mean for how to make them work? Kavit: Like, how do you get the maximum input from your users or your prospects? So like, they're giving you the really good information that can help you turn a lousy campaign to a really good campaign. Jeremy: Do you mean on the phone when I'm talking to them? Kavit: No, in the survey itself. Jeremy: I don't have any specific templates. Like, you're asking for their biggest challenges. It's kind of different with each market. I write them specific to that market. Like, "When you're doing this, what's the biggest problem you're having?" or "What's the biggest challenge you're facing?" or "What's the main reason you're doing this in the first place?" For example, if people want to lose weight, "Why are you losing weight?", and it's so different. Some people want to do it because they want to look good for their spouse, other people will want to do it because it's more of an ego thing, they want to look good for other people or walk down the beach with their shirt off. That's a good idea. I should come up with templates for it. I usually do it based on that market. When I start any new project, I always obligate a questionnaire. I always talk to the client about it and a lot of times I do funnel days. It's like an in-person consultation with the client so I spend the whole day with them so that I have a good understanding of the market and then I base the surveys off of that. But even just to get started, even if you have a two-question survey that is basically, "What is the greatest challenge that you're having when it comes to..." and then whatever you're trying to help them with. And then also "What's the number one reason you're trying to achieve that goal?" If you just start with that, then that would help quite a bit. It's a really good place to start. And then you can get deeper as you go, take those questions, talk to people and you'd be able to come up with other questions based off of those. Because you'll start seeing trends. I really should get templates, though. Kavit: Quick question about that, how do you then use the survey information? Like, do you segment your mails? Or do you use that information on emails? What do you do? Jeremy: That's a good question. One of the main reasons I do surveys is obviously, number one, to understand the market and that's for all the pieces of the copy. There's a lot of times that I've used actual quotes in the copy or I kind rearranged it a little bit and used it as a headline if I see it coming over and over again, it's a huge pain point. What I do is when I go through the survey, I make a list. Let's just say that's frustrations. So the two main things are the frustrations, the challenges, the problems and then the other side is the reason why. So depending on the market, what I do is I go down and I have two separate Word documents and I go through all the surveys manually because you just get a lot out of it. You can do multiple choice but I usually do open-ended questions because people give you real answers rather than whatever you want to give them, basically. So I go through it. I spend half the day or whatever. So let's just say I'm reading through and I see seven big objections coming up all the time, I write them down in a bulleted list and then  mark down how many times it comes up. So if one of the main objections is price, then I know to counter that and write a copy to overcome that objection more in the copy and I place it higher on the page. And then the same with the reasons why their doing it, I segment that based on the reasons why. Let's just say I have a side business and I did surveys to find the reason why they want to dress better. So I went through it and I found out that the three biggest segments were: Number one, getting girls, attracting other people to them for dating and things like that. The other one was confidence. A lot of guys, this is a guy's website, they feel more confident when they're dressed nicely. You just feel different when you're dressed in a nice suit rather than comfy pants. You stand tall and get more confident and all that kind of stuff. And then the third one was success. There's a segment of guys that are young professionals, they're trying to get a raise, they're trying to get better (21:56), all that kind of thing. So I look through that question and I mark down segments based on that and then I can in the emails. So that just gives me three segments. You can also do this with quizzes, by the way. So let's just say three segments. It could be two, it could be ten, but let's just say three. In the first email, somebody comes into your funnel. So there's two ways to do this. Number one is you can segment with your lead magnets that you get. Like the free value it could be free video, free report, whatever it is. You can segment with that. For example, I might have three different lead magnets. One is appealing to guys who want to dress better for success. Seven ways to dress better to get a big promotion or whatever it is and then you can segment that going to a separate list that talks about success and overcomes the objections, the frustrations they're having that area, it gives them tips, and builds relationships specifically to that. So that's one way. And then the other way is if you have more of a general lead magnet. Then let's just say 'How To Dress Better In The Next 4 Days', like, we have a four-day crash course  on how to dress better. So what we can do with that is in the first email, "Hey, I want to send you these emails that are you going to tell you how to dress better but in order for me to send you the most relevant information, I just have a quick question - what's the biggest reason that you want to dress better? Is it to pick up girls? Is it to get more success in life? Or is it to feel more confident?" And for this, you need Ontraport or Infusionsoft, like a CRM. Basically any email service that can automatically segment based on a link that they clicked. Then they click the link and then they go into that specific segment. So then there's a little process after that. Does that answer your question? Kavit: Yeah, that's great advice on surveys and segmenting and stuff like that. What I want to know is, and I think this will be useful to everyone, what is the process you go through to build a sales funnel? You're sitting down with a client, you're talking through the while process, what is it? Jeremy: The first thing I do is I get in touch with the market. Research. Understanding the market, understanding what they want, and then looking at the different products. Some clients already have the product. Maybe they're successful in another business. They hired me for a new business, whatever the case, we have to build the products. Actually, the guy that I'm working with coaching is doing that. So we find out what are the needs that are not being met in the market place? And that's based on surveys, talking to people. You can look at your competitors, see what they're doing. I do more for ideas rather than ripping them up. So that's first. The second is there are three stages - before, during, and after for the sales funnel. And one of the things that you talked about was not every sales funnel is the same thing. There’s a lot of people that are like, "The 8 Sales Funnel Templates", and it doesn't really work well because different types of funnels work for better for different markets and for different needs and for different products. In one, you might have the typical free report and then the emails and then the upsell sequence and then buyers' sequences. For others, you might want to start with the webinar. For example, I'm working on a project right now and he's selling a $7,000 coaching program to cold traffic. So that is very much different. There's a lot of relationship-building and trust-building and... Kavit: And it depends on what they're selling, the price point, the audience, the mindset, what they're used to or accustomed to, all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, whatever you do has to, in my opinion, get the person ready to (26:48-2:50) Jeremy: Yes. Exactly. And one of the big things is time frame with that. If you're selling a $5,000 coaching program, you need a little bit more time for them to warm up with you first. Video's really good if you want people to bond with you a little bit faster. If you're selling $27 e-book, you can do that in a lot shorter time frame because it's not much of a risky for them. But you still need to create that bond. But you can do it a little bit faster. So the first thing is figuring out what do we have to do? People come to you when they first meet you. They first sign up to your list. They're on the left side of the line, that's where they are right now. And then the right side of the line is where need to be to buy your product. And again, that line is going to be bigger or shorter, depending on all the different things you said. The 'Before' process. What do you have to do? What emails have to be in place? What bonding has to be done? What authority has to be shown? What trust has to be built? That kind of thing to move people down that line. So each little touch point that you have - you show them a case study, it moves them to the right a little bit. You give them results in advance, it moves them down the line a little bit. I always think in my head, instead of like, "Oh, let's do x amount of emails", and then that's it. It's more of how do you gain control of their buying process? So you're constantly thinking, "How do I move them down the line?" rather than like, "Okay, let's just throw ten emails in here. It doesn't matter." and you just mish-mash them. It has to be done in a specific sequence. Kavit: It's psychology. So the whole point is that it doesn't matter emails you're going to do. It could be as little as sixteen or it can be as many as fifty, but the whole point is that person's got to be ready to buy. Jeremy: Exactly. So that process, part A, the 'Before'... Kavit: I have a question there. How do you know when they're ready to buy? How do you decide that? You, know, this is the number of emails or this the point where they're going to buy? Jeremy: I wish there was an answer to that because I would be a billionaire by now. It's kind of based on intuition and market research and doing best guess. If there's any way to figure that out specifically, I would love to sell that. Buy it's just based on understanding the market. Each person is going to come to you in a different way. I've had people that found out about me whether it was on the podcast or a guest article and I've had people do $20,000 products within one week of finding out about me. I'm doing a sales funnel for somebody and I forget, like, 13 grand or something. And I never spoke to them on the phone. I did it all through email. And that's because it was a referral. So that's a very different process from if he's never heard about me, he got referred to me by someone that he trusted. so he was already three-quarters down that line. And because he was using that trust from the referral, pushed him all the way down the line. He didn't have to go through my typical process to be able to do that. So everybody comes in there differently. And that's why even from the beginning I give them the chance to buy. I'm not really a believer, and everybody has different opinions on this, I mean there's really no scientific answer for this - again, it just comes out of my gut feeling - but even from the beginning, I always want them to know that the product and services are there. It's a really soft sell for a while. But at the same time, they still know that they're there. So if they are ready, then they just click the link in the email and they're good. A little bit more aggressive stuff come later. And I never really get too aggressive because I'm a huge bonding kind of guy. My scale of aggressiveness is less than most. But that comes a little bit later. Again, I wish I had a specific way. That would be incredible. So at that point, that process gets them to guy for the first time. And you touched on this before. There's a process for getting them to buy for the first time and then there's another process for getting them to become repeat buyers and higher value buyers because they already built that trust with you. Whether your first product is the (32:08) like the really small-priced thing. It works well with some markets. It doesn't really work well with other markets. If you're selling a really high-end coaching program, it really doesn't work well in my experience, at least in those circumstances just because of positioning. So the second phase is what happens during the buying process? They literally just bought your product one second ago. That's the typical upsell experience. I think most of the people listening to this probably understand what that is so I won't go into that much. But it's the process of the one-click upsell where they just bought the product and you give them offers for buying products. It could either be at a discount or they get a special bonus if they buy it right now. And that can be done. Just look up one-click upsell script of software. Most CRMs like Infusionsoft, Ontraport, Hubspot have that built in. I think what shopping cart does, auto-responder, Aweber, email services like that, you can always integrate with a shopping cart that does it. Kavit: I find a lot of people don't do the upsell clicks. Everyone talks about it but not everyone does it. Why is that? Why do you that is? Jeremy: I don't know. Kavit: I think it could be a lot of work or it could be they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to automate it. It could be those reason. Apart form that, do you think that there's people out there that are concerned that it might irritate people? And how do you go with that concern? Jeremy: It's a very valid to think but in reality, it's very rare to get complaints from people. Everybody always uses the McDonald's example. You go in there, "Do you want fries with that?" sorry I haven’t been to McDonald's for ever. But super-sizing, that's it. And you don't get mad at that. They're just offering you a question. I think a lot of what it comes down to is how the copy's done, how you position it. If you're really aggressive with it, then people might get mad at you. I's all about relation and bonding because that person just gave me money, I want to take care of them. I want to make sure that they know that I am someone they can trust and relate to and bond with and have a relationship with. Mine is always worded in a careful and considerate way. It's kind of like, "Hey, you just bought this. This other thing is going to give you...", usually, the big three are better results, faster results, and easier results. So if you're thinking about what to put in your back end, whether it's an upsell sequence or it's just in the back end, that's always what sells best. Easier, better, faster. Kavit: Well, there's some people that are starting out that are listening to this. So easier, better, faster, what do you mean? Jeremy: So let's go to weight loss. You sell them whatever the initial product is and then 'better' could be, you're going to get the same results, let's just you're going to lose ten pounds, here's a seven-day blueprint to lose ten pounds. So they're getting the 'faster' and 'better' in that. Or with 'easier', it could be just adding "Without giving up your favorite foods". Whatever the things that work really well is software. Like, "Our software will do it for you", that's always another good one. I went through a webinar, I'm actually going to buy it (36:39). Probably tomorrow. So I went through a LinkedIn training on how to connect with people on LinkedIn and gain more traffic through LinkedIn and his whole thing, was "Here's the process for doing it but if you want to just automate everything, my software will do it for you.", so that's his upsell. It's easier, you get better results because it actually gets done faster because the software does it for you. So it hits all three of those points. Kavit: That's interesting. Jeremy: So software is a really good way to do it but there's a lot of different ways. Coaching is another good upsell because that's faster and better and easier. It's kind of like, "Hey, you can do everything by yourself, or you can work with me and I'm going to show you, step-by-step how to do it. We're going to get things done so much faster..." Hopefully, that gives you a couple of good examples for people that they can use in their business. Kavit: Let's talk tricks for a second. I want to make sure to understand, what are cool new things that I can add or do on my website? Because everyone's using all these tools like online chat and pop-ups and all these things. What are your (38:09)? What are your favorites? What do you see worth creating well? If you were to give me your secret advice, what would it be? Jeremy: I would say Live Chat is a good one and it's really easy to implement. You can go and just get Olark, theyr'e one of the free live chats, there's a bunch of them. Most of them have free plans. Usually, if you have live chat, it'll bump up your conversions just by having it regardless if people use it. For some reason it just gives them that feeling of confidence. Live chat is a good one. Compare to the amount of people on your pages, you don't get a ton of people that use it. I don't do my own live chat anymore, I actually used to. That's another good way to do research, by the way, just to throw that in there. Even if you just want to talk to your customers and do research. My employees do that for me. They're saved a lot sales because people will be, just for example, on the order form, and they're having problems, and they're like, "Hey, I'm having x problem, what do I do?", you can just outsource all of this and have your employee walk them through what might be happening, refresh the page, try this, and have them go through the whole thing. So live chat helps. I'm a big fan of pop-ups. But instead of having the same, it all comes down again to segmenting. Instead having one pop-up on the whole website, what I've seen really helps is - and I did this in my side business and I think it was probably about 6x how many opt-ins I get. Again, instead of just having it on every page, you have it on specific pages. For example, on our sales letter. I was looking for my Analytics and people who got this one email, converted at 4x the rate of just the average person on the (40:25) and that email was giving them a sneak peek of the product - so I was like, "Wow! That's a pretty big increase!", so I thought, "How do I scale that? How do I get that to more people?". My idea was on my sales letter, when they leave the sales letter, it says, "Hey, you weren't interested but maybe that's because maybe you wanted to take a sneak peek at the product first and make sure that it's for you." So then they opt-in, they get it. So that was my way of using analytics and then you say, "Okay, how do I scale that? How do I put that in the business?" So that bumped up the conversions quite a bit. That's just one example of using pop-ups in a much smarter way than just throwing it on there. If you have different categories for blog pages, let's go back to the weight loss example. Let's just say you have recipes and nutrition advice and strength training advice. So there are three very different segments. On all your category pages for recipes, you can have a pop-up that offers them. It's like, "Hey! You came here, you enjoyed the recipe, do you want our free e-book that gives you fifty more?" On the nutrition letter it's like, "Hey, you enjoyed our nutrition article, do you want one that gives you our 30-day nutrition plan?" You can also do that on your blog pages. I use Opt-in Monster, by the way. That's my preferred opt-in plug-in. So you can do that. One of the things that I did for Kinowear, the side business, is they have one specifically designed for mobile. They have the normal one and there's one specifically for mobile and when I added that, the mobile actually gets more opt-ins than the regular one. I have to split test this. This is kind of just like conjecture, but I think the reason that it converts so well is because of how I positioned it. I positioned it as, "Hey, you're on your phone," and this wasn't the actual copy, it's the concept, but it's like, "Hey, you're on your phone, it's probably going to be hard to read the website, why don't you sign up here and I'm going to you free advice on getting stylish and the next time you're on your email, you can read it. It's just going to be a lot better of an experience for you." I forgot the exact copy that I have on the opt-in form but its' like that concept but it's like, "Hey, let's make this easier for you. You opt in here, and I'll send you this through email. You can check the next time you're on your computer." So that helped quite a bit. Kavit: That's awesome. You know what I wanted to do was (43:30-43:31). So for a while now, I've been creating and testing a lot of different lead pages, especially when I do advertising. I know on my own site, I got a lot of lead boxes all over the place. Inside blog posts, I've got specific blog posts about lead pages. Like one, if it's a report about content marketing, I've got something I'm giving away about content marketing, there's a lead box for that. If it's a blog post saying about a plug-in, I've got to push for that. And then I got video episodes like podcasts. Then I transcribe each episode and I give the PDF away but in order to get the PDF, they got to opt in. So every single episode is like a lead page. And that's 90+ lead boxes just for the episodes so it's really, really cool. Then I'm building lots and lots of opt-ins, Then (44:19) segmenting in so many different ways. And I found that although some people opt in, like, 10, 15x in different lead boxes, because they want different things, the more they opted in, the more I'm able to segment them and say, "Hey, you seem like an active user. I think I'm going to follow up with you to say maybe you want to come up on one of our discovery (44:40)" or whatever it is just they are more hyper active. Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a good idea. I like that. Kavit: We're running out of time now, so I got a question for you. I think for me, whenever I want to get to know somebody, I want to know what they read because what they like to read tells me a little about the kind of person they are. So what are your top three recommended books? Jeremy: Let me give you two business books because we're talking about business. But I'm also a huge fan of a life of balance. Like, not just working all day because I have one-year-old, I have a three-year-old, I have a wife and with a good relationship with her. So I want to see all them. All of our family lives within a 15-minute radius of us. We actually have friends coming over tonight. So we're always doing stuff with family and I think that if you just work all the time, and a lot of people are like, "Oh, my business is my passion" and my rebuttal to that is, "Okay, I think it's kind of a limited life if you only have one passion." I love this. I absolutely live working all day but I have a lot of other passions. I'm getting certified as a chef right now just because I love it not because I'm going to go out and cook for people. My wife likes it. Kavit: But this is certified chef. Jeremy: Basically, like a professional cook. But there's online classes and stuff that you can take and get professionally certified but I'm just doing it because I love to cook. Anyway, I'm also going to give you one non-business book. The number one person of influence is Jay Abraham. Sometimes I think a little bit too strategically, that's I have number two. The first person is Jay Abraham, any of his books, just read them. Kavit: If I was to answer the same three questions, the first book to have on my list is 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got'. Jeremy: That's number one for me. Kavit: That's really good to hear. Jeremy: So 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got', that's number one. Number two is Dan Kennedy. Basically, anything by Dan Kennedy. He's got a whole bunch of books. I would say like off-the-top-of-my-head, the one that really resonated with me is 'My Unfinished Business '. It's almost like autobiography. And also another one is Richard Branson and his autobiography was awesome (47:44-47:45). And then the non-business one, I don't know if you're familiar with Strategic Coach but they have a thing where you have either a focus day, which is your top priorities, top leverage activities, your buffer days which is more delegating and kind of just like those stupid, little projects that you have to do, but they're not contributing all that much. And then free days. When I take a free day, there's zero business, whatsoever. I can't talk about business, I don't look in my email, I don't answer my phones calls. It's just to completely unplug and it makes a huge difference in your motivation levels, your creativity. In fact, this weekend, I'm doing Saturday and Sunday free days which is cool. So my non-business book would be anything in the Alex Cross series. But Jane Patterson? Those books, last January... Kavit: You know what? James Patterson and Lee Child, I absolutely love Lee Child. Jeremy: He's actually on my list for... Kavit: You got to read his stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, I'm reading 'Dracula' right now. Kavit: I'm just saying, Lee Child inspired me to write better email. They're short. (49:00) it's as if you're speaking. Personality, it’s (49:03). Jeremy: And that's the same with Alex Cross. One of the big things that I've learned from him, and another thing is when you read novels? You really do become a better writer. Because you pick up and you're like, "Oh, man." Like the way he structured that, with Alex Cross, his cliff hangers, they're just unbelievable. It's absolutely brilliant. On my free days, I'm always reading novels. Like I said, I'm reading 'Dracula' right now. Again, Lee Child is on my list for after 'Dracula'. So I'll be buying a couple of his books. So those of are my three. Kavit: That's pretty cool. (49:44) and I appreciate that stuff. Jeremy: Yeah, how about you? So number one, 'Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got'. Kavit: Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got', and then number two, I would have to say would be 'The Ultimate Sales Machine' by Chet Holmes. Jeremy: Okay. That's a good one. Kavit: That's a pretty good book. At number three, and it's non-business, I would say 'The Four Agreements' by Don Miguel Ruiz. It's like a spiritual slash (50:12) those kind of books. Really, really good four agreements that (50:16-50:19). Jeremy: I bought a whole bunch of bookmarks that has the four agreements on them. Yeah, we seem to share a lot of very similar interests. Kavit: Yeah, but of course, like I said, the books that I generally read that are not business-related are Lee Child and that kind of stuff so that's kind of cool. Jeremy: Nice. Kavit: Well, I appreciate you inviting and I inviting you on this cold call and I hope that everybody gets some really good benefit from this (50:50). Hey, Jeremy. Where can people find you? Jeremy: I'd like to think that my website does a good enough job of "selling me". I won't send to a free report or anything like that, if you just go to JeremyReeves.com. When you go there, it basically tells you who I am, what I do, you'll be able to see testimonials, case studies, results that I've gotten for people. And then there's three things like if you're interested in working with me or doing anything with me, you can either get on my list and there's a free report there. I have automated webinars and stuff that you can go on to get tons and tons of value. There's a 'Services' button if you're interested in working with me. There's a 'Products' page if you're interested in looking at the products that I have. I would say just go to JeremyReeves.com and see where it takes you. Kavit: Brilliant, brilliant. Jeremy: How about you? Kavit: InsiderInternetSuccess.com. You should just check it out and you'll see what I'm talking about. Jeremy: I highly recommend his 'About' page so you can see his music stuff. That was intriguing for me. Kavit: You should write more about your chef stuff and family stuff. Jeremy: Oh, I do. Kavit: That was new to me. Jeremy: Yeah, in all my emails, that's where I have most of that stuff. Hey, it was great talking with you and everybody will get a lot of value. Kavit: Yeah, speak to you soon. Jeremy: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.  

In this brand-new episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast, I am interviewed by Eric Barton. I guarantee this is one of the most value-packed interviews you've ever listened to. Here are a few things we discussed...1) Why most people talking about conversion rates aren't telling you the WHOLE truth...2) 3 quick and easy ways to increase retention rates...3) How to increase price and skyrocket net profits without dropping conversions...4) A current split-test I'm running which you've NEVER heard of (but must try!)...5) And tons more!After listening, head on over to http://www.JeremyReeves.com   Transcript: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast. I hope you’re loving what you’re getting so far. I have a ton more content coming up for you. I wrote out the other day about sixty different ideas. That’s not even including interviews, which I’m going to try to do about once every two weeks or so. For this podcast, I have something a little bit different for you. In fact, this is the actually the first interview, except the difference is I’m not going to be interviewing somebody else. I’m going to be giving you an interview that somebody did for me. I’m going be getting interviewed. It was an interview from Eric Barton, from Fast Easy Success. When we talked, we went over a lot of really, really good marketing stuff; including a conversion split test that I’m currently running. It’s still running right now, but I guarantee you it’s something you’ve never heard before. It’s definitely something you want to try because as of right now, it’s winning by about 50 percent over my control. You’ll see in this interview that the percent doesn’t really matter, but it’s winning right now. I think the comp was about 92 percent. Here is that episode. I hope you really enjoy it. Let me know what you think. Eric: Welcome to episode ten of the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider podcast. I want to thank everyone for tuning into the Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. A lot of exciting things coming today and in the future for you. Make sure you hit that subscription button right now, so you don’t miss out on the value-packed podcast coming your way as well. Before we dive into our show and our very special guest today, I just want to welcome everyone to head over to fasteasysuccess.com. Go ahead and grab your business building tips sent directly to your email daily. When you head over to fasteasysuccess.com, I’m also giving you your free business cheat sheets. This is going to help you with your websites, emails and writing. Let’s dive in because I’m excited to have this special guest coming on the show today. If you haven’t discovered this man yet, you’re definitely in for a treat today. He’s a direct response copywriter who actually specializes in building very profitable sales funnels for clients. You may even have heard this man referred to as the sales funnel specialist, and really the world’s number one most trust sales funnel authority. Ladies and gentlemen, joining us today, I want to welcome to the show, Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to jam with us today. Jeremy: Thanks for having me. I’m really, really excited. I used to get a little nervous getting interviewed, but I’m actually very pumped to be talking to you. Eric: Beautiful. That’s what I like to hear. I’m sure the audience is definitely, they got their ticket to this profitable thrill ride and ready to jump in. Let’s just ask real quick, for the people who are not familiar with you, can you originally tell people how you started out in the sales marketing or copywriting world or how you really go involved? Jeremy: One thing I want to say, just as everybody is listening at the beginning of the interview, I’ve listened to a lot of interviews. I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and all that kind of stuff. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of interviews because a lot of people take too long to tell their stories and don’t really give a lot of good advice, just in general. I did want to throw out there that I am really going to give out a lot of really, really good content. It’s not going to be all about me. I’ll give you my quick little story here for about 30 seconds, but then I’d like to just jump in. I like to demonstrate my authority by demonstrating that I actually know what I’m talking about, instead of telling my story. I just wanted to throw that out there in the beginning. I like to do unique interviews. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: For my short little blurb here, I got started as a direct response copywriter, writing sales copy for clients. Right at the beginning of my career with that, which was about, roughly seven years ago, I realized that writing, understanding the dynamics of writing copy and being able to sell on paper and all that good stuff really doesn’t do much if the strategy behind the copy isn’t right. I really started focusing a lot on the marketing strategy and how to write the copy to fit that strategy. If you have bad strategy with a great copy, it’ll do okay; but if you have incredible strategy and okay copy, it can still do fantastic. The strategy really compels it. When you add the really good, hard-hitting copy on top of it, that’s when things really take off. I really started focusing on the marketing strategy behind the copy and that led me down, through working with all kinds of different clients, a lot of the industry leaders that you’re probably familiar with. It really made me specialize and focus on building sales funnels, because I realized a lot of the challenges that people deal with have to do with not having systems in place and not having—basically, not being able to buy paid traffic; which is one thing I really, really focus on. When you have an automated sales funnel in place, you can pretty much look at your sales funnel as a whole and see, I got 1,000 people that hit the first part of the sales funnel. By the time they got to the end, I made X dollars. You know what each person is worth or your earnings per visitor. That way you know what you can pay for traffic. If your average earnings per visitor, for each person that you send to a landing page, for example, the first part of the funnel, if that’s $5, then you know you can pay $2, $3 or $4, whatever you want to keep your margin at, to get new people into the funnel. It really makes your business really, really stable. Then you keep tweaking and testing and making everybody worth more money. That’s where all the fun comes in. That’s pretty much my history. Basically, started as a copywriter, went into strategy. I worked with all kinds of different business owners from internet marketers to a couple celebrities and really high name, high profile clients; to even all the way on the other side of the coin, to people like, dry cleaners and hair dressers and people like that. A pretty big gamut of people that I’ve worked with. Eric: Right. That’s what I was saying, it works with a lot of online and as well as offline. It works with the large and the small businesses. One thing I wanted to ask, it’s been the theme the show, I’m going to ask it in the beginning, because I think if they set up in the beginning, it’s going to help. This goes into what you were talking about, the paid traffic. Really what I’m referring to is the un-sexy sales secret, which is what I call it, is lead generation. I think, unfortunately, this is a point that a lot of business owners get wrong. A lot of people mix up with lead generation with customer generation. A lot of times they want customers instead of leads. Leads are something that you nurture. You can grab the low hanging fruit, obviously, but it’s something you have to build. Can you share your thoughts or what’s your view on the lead generation part of whether they’re starting a funnel or just bringing them to a sales page or website et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a lot to go into on that. I’ll just take when I’m working with clients, I’ll go off of that. One of the things that I try to do, a lot of people talk about cost per lead and things like that. That’s good … Eric: Bad? Jeremy: No, it’s definitely good to know and I track that metric and all that, but there’s a big difference in the quality of leads. Let’s just say you have Facebook ads, Google ads and SEO, you’re doing those three things. You might have leads that are worth, let’s say your average lead on Google AdWords is worth $3. It might be worth only $1 on Facebook and $6 for SEO. You really have to look at, I’m getting this amount of leads from this source, but what are they worth to the business? Because everything, the leads coming in, they all have different values. Eric: That’s a great point. I think that’s what a lot of people mix up too. They’re getting in a lot of leads, and they’re like, yeah, I’m doing good. But how much is that lead actually worth, like you just said. That’s a great point. Jeremy: Exactly. You could even dive in more. For example, I have Facebook campaign that I’m running right now. We tag them as Facebook leads and I can track it overall and look at it every month and say, we’ve got 1,000 leads this month and we made $3,000 from that. We spent $1,500, whatever the numbers are. If you want to even take it to another level, you can tag them by the audience that you’re targeting. For example, let’s just say you’re in health and you’re targeting men, 50 plus, and then another group is women, 30 plus, whatever. It could be anything that you’re targeting. You can actually tag them as that, and then track those specific things; so you know, not only do you know how much your average Facebook lead is worth, but you could also say, I have these two segments that we’re targeting. This one is worth this much; this one is worth this much. You can get pretty crazy with the metrics. I usually recommend that for people that are really advanced and trying to take it to a completely new level and gains a huge competitive advantage. That particular one is more for people that are a lot more advanced. Eric: It’s a little more work. It’s more profitable, but it is more work. If it’s something that competition isn’t really willing to do, that’s a good thing for people in our world. This can go into the testing, too, because that’s something that you’re definitely known for is heavy testing. Do you do the simple split, like A, B, split test or really how do you start your test? What’s the best way you start testing where people can do that? Jeremy: That’s a good question. I get extremely mad at a lot of people in the conversion rate optimization field. That was one thing that probably last year, it might have even been 2012. In the last two years, I was really heavily involved in that. I got offered a really healthy, six figure offer by one of the biggest conversion rate optimization companies in the world and turned that down. I’m still really friends with them. I just don’t want a job. There’s so much I can go into here. There’s a lot of things that you need to look out for when you test. One of the things you’ll hear—and I’m not going to give out any names here, because I don’t like to make enemies. A lot of people when they say, “We got an 80 percent increase doing this.” “We got a 60 percent increase doing that.” If you look at the actual stats and sometimes they’ll show you in a video, they’ll show you a screen shot of their stats and all that. A lot of times you’ll notice that the numbers are really small. Maybe they hit 95 percent confidence. If you’re familiar with testing, you’ll know what I mean, but it’s essentially 95 percent chance of that test being a winner. It doesn’t mean that you have a 95 percent chance of that test winning by that percentage. For example, let me pull up a test I have running right now for a Facebook campaign. It’s running to a landing page. The one call to action on there is “give me my free report.” It’s the control, call to action. The one I’m testing it against is “show me your sales funnel secrets.” That’s the A, B test. They get split up. Eric: Sure. Jeremy: Let me go to my results. It just became a winner this morning. The control, which was—I forget it already. The control, which was “get instant access,” I think it was, is converting at 24 percent and the “show me your sales funnel secrets” is converting at 39.68 percent. This is a fairly new test. It’s only been up a day or two. The percentage improvement is 65.34 percent. A lot of times you’ll see a lot of experts showing that, “Hey, I got a 65 percent improvement,” and they pretend they’re big, they know everything about split testing and all that. This one, by the way, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. Eric: 98 percent, nice. Jeremy: What’s that? Eric: I said, 98 percent? Jeremy: Yeah, 98 percent. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: This one is a winner, right? What a lot of people won’t tell you—and this is something that’s really, really important to understand—is that, right now it has a 65 percentage improvement, but it’s everything always comes back to the norm. Even though it’s a winner, as more conversion data comes in—this is only based off, I have 43 conversions total. As I get up to 100, 200, 300 conversions and there’s more data, that percentage of improvement is going to come down and get closer to the median or closer to normal, where it would be even. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Basically, the thing to take away is that when people tell you, “We did X and we doubled our results.” Don’t listen to the percentage that they tell you, just get the idea. The idea, for my example, so you guys can test this, is test something normal that you would normally use; “get instant access,” “get free report now,” whatever is, versus something that’s a little bit more like a more novel, more “show me your sales funnel secrets.” It’s not something they see every day. Test that, but don’t look at the—when conversion rates experts tell you the numbers, don’t really pay attention to any of that. Just pay attention to what the strategy behind it was, and then do your own testing. Mine is 65 percent now. I’m going to let it run a week and after that, it might only be 30 percent or it might be 20 percent. It should still be a winner. It’s just that the percentage of an improvement is the one thing that—basically, don’t get too excited about it. Eric: Do you have any advice on how long they should let a test run? Is there a certain amount of views or clicks you should let a test, on average, run? Jeremy: That’s a good question. It really depends on a couple factors. What I usually do is look for at least 30 conversions for each of the variations. If you have two variations, wait until you get at least 30 to 50 conversions on each of them. You also always want to make sure that you do it for at least a week, so it can go through. You’ll find that out that some days convert a lot higher than other days. If you really dig into the data, weekends might do really bad or really good or whatever, so that’s the second thing. I use Visual Website Optimizer. Any split testing software you use is going to give you a chance to beat the original. You always want that to be above 95 percent. A little bit of a caveat to that is that if you have a business and you don’t have a lot of conversions, it takes you awhile. It’s really just a percentage game. It’s just a chance that you have. It’s a very high probable chance. This one, for example, has a 98 percent chance to beat the original. That doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely going to beat the original. It means that I have a 2 percent of that actually losing. Don’t think of testing as a definite thing. Think of it is as, this is the most likely scenario. If you’re testing and you don’t have a lot of data, if it takes you three months to get one test done, just go with whatever you’re comfortable with. If you get up to 90 percent chance to beat the original, then go with that. Just go with whatever. I usually recommend 95, but you also have to look at the time factor and the time cost too. Eric: That’s true. Jeremy: That’s just a couple things to think about. Eric: Let’s say you had that definite winner, and that Facebook button was the winner for you, the submit button; would you challenge that to another test then? Do you say, lesson learned for now, that’s the winner. I’ll let that go and move onto the next thing I want to test, whether it be a website or something else. Jeremy: That’s another good question. What I’ll do is this is a winner, has a couple days left. Whenever a week is over, if it’s still a winner, on the page, I’ll change it to the winner. At that point, I’m trying to think. I will probably, on this landing page, I will, I actually might do a little bit more of a big test. The landing page right now is all text based, so I actually might go to an all text, to just a video and an opt-in form, something big like that. Pretty much, when it comes to figuring out what to test next, I look for the things on the page that are going to make the biggest improvements; so going from an all text to all video. The call to action button, believe it or not, it’s a big factor. Eric: No, it is. I think a lot of people miss that. When I changed my opt-in on my site, I tested it all that time. Just simple changing of words can make a huge, dramatic—a perfect example, my Facebook fan page, a client had something like “send my email here.” We changed it to a simple, “give me the info.” It dramatically increased the opt-in that same day. We let it run and that’s what we’ve been using, but just simple, like you said could be huge. A lot of people drop the ball on the simple stuff. Jeremy: Yeah. It really can, especially, the shorter the page, the more that’s going to have an effect. If you have a 15 page long sales letter, doing “add to cart” versus “buy now” probably won’t make a huge difference, but if you have just a quick little landing page, then it can make a huge difference. Eric: Right. Jeremy: Even with that, another cool little thing to try just to get people’s minds, get it creative and going a little crazy, is one of the things—and I might do this for my next test, I’m not sure. I’m excited about the idea because I don’t remember seeing it before. You’re going to get an exclusive idea here. What I’m going to test now is “show me your sales funnel secrets” versus a big, huge call to action button that essentially has 30 or 40 words in it. It’s like, “Give me your secret that you’ve invested or that you’ve got over a million dollars worth of testing research under your belt. This is what you came up with;” something really, really long. Eric: Oh, nice, like a direct response order form button or kind of like “Yes, Eric, I’m ready to invest.” Jeremy: Yeah. Something like that, but in a button form on a regular landing page. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: To be honest, I have no idea if it’s going to work or not. It might bomb horribly. I have no idea. I’ve never seen that done before, so I’m going to do it. I, personally, think that it’s going to work, just because you have to read every word of that. Nobody’s ever seen that before, so the novelty of it, the newness and uniqueness of it. As soon as people hit that page, how do you not read that? Eric: Right. That’s going to be a button form, kind of thing, where they push it? Jeremy: Yeah. Eric: Yeah. I haven’t seen that done. Definitely let me know how that works out for you. That’s going to be interesting. Jeremy: I’m excited. Eric: That’s nice. I know what we’re talking about is once you’re doing the testing, they’ve come to your page or they’ve opted in. This is the thing, like you said, too, that you really work with clients with this, is building their sales funnels. If we could maybe dive into a little bit about how business owners can go out and find the holes currently in their funnels or if they’re starting out, how they can get that process at least started, to make it profitable from the jump. Jeremy: I’ll take that in two different ways. If you’re just starting up, what you want to do is—I’m going to try to make it as generally applicable to everybody listening. When you’re just starting up, let’s say that your order process is, somebody comes into your website, they buy and they get the thank you email saying, “Your order was successful,” and that’s it. It’s not really even a sales funnel, but it’s a way to get them in, I guess. What you want to do and most basic thing that I always try to get people to do is, number one, give away some type of value added thing. It could be a free report, a video, anything that gives value to the people that you’re trying to serve, to get them to essentially raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m interested in what you’re selling.” You put them onto a prospect auto responder list. The point of that is to sell them your main product, whatever that is. After they buy your main product, you should have—I’m trying to think of a minimum here. I would say probably at least two other, either products or services. One thing is I always try to tell people, if you’re a service business, make sure you have product. If you’re a product business, make sure you have services. It’s really the only way to maximize your funnel and really find those hyper buyers in your list that are going to pay you for anything that you come out with. Eric: That’s a great point. Can I ask on a sidetrack, but related. Do you find that a lot of clients come to you from your products that you release or vice versa, they become your clients and then go after your products? Jeremy: Both actually. A pretty huge percentage of clients will buy a product, and then I hear from them three days later. It’s usually along those lines, for me personally. I mean, it’s different for everybody. My services are really expensive, in the four and five figures, so people want to make sure that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll get a lot of emails that say, “Hey, Jeremy, I just bought X product. Didn’t even go through it. I just wanted to make sure you were the real deal and you actually did what you said you did. That’s why I’m writing to you now and I want to talk about hiring you.” I get those emails all the time because I’m the sales funnel guy and people want to go through my process, and say, “Let’s see if the sales funnel guy has his own sales funnel.” Eric: Yeah. See if he’s just preaching there, exactly. Jeremy: I get a lot of those emails. I also get a lot of people that come in and they become clients or coaching students or whatever, and they want to learn more. These are mostly the business owners that they really love to learn. They just can’t get enough information, so they’ll be working with me as they’re going through my products. Eric: Right. Those are the best kind of clients, absolutely. Jeremy: Yeah. It’s kind of both. Eric: Nice. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get you sidetracked. I thought it was important to throw that out to the audiences that are trying to get some products. That’s a good way to bring in business as well. Jeremy: For everybody that has a service business. I’m doing this Facebook campaign. It’s giving away a free report, getting them into my funnel. I just had somebody, I think it was yesterday, where I looked at their—I like to look at the—I have office autopilot, I can see, somebody opted in for this and went to this page, and they filled out this form, so I can see the whole process of everything they did. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It essentially tracks all the pages, and you can see the whole process that they went through. This happens all the time. This one is just one example. They opted in. They’re from Facebook, so they never heard of me before. They opted into the same landing page that I’ve been talking about. Three minutes after that, they went to my services page and read my service about building sales funnels and opted into that. They became a coaching prospect, I guess you could say, or a client prospect. It’s pretty cool. You get ancillary benefits of doing a lot of traffic. You should factor that in, by the way, to when you’re buying paid traffic. There’s always that little side shoe. If you’re selling products, there’s always a certain number of people that are going invest in your services and other products and things like that. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: I forget where I was going with that. Eric: I’m sorry. I threw you off. We were talking about, basically, with everything, that’s part of the funnel process obviously. Let’s say someone has an auto responder set up, someone has a product or services; is there common holes that you’ve found with clients that are maybe just leaking profits for them or something they could do to plug those holes up real quick? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s an interesting one. Holes in their funnels? It usually has to do with the frequency of communication. What that means is, essentially, a lot of people—and I mean, by a lot of people, I mean probably 90 plus percent of entrepreneurs—they’re kind of afraid of communicate with their prospects. Personally, I have a hard time understanding this. It might just be for me. I kind of got my chops reading J. Abraham and strategy preeminence where everything is just, you just start the relationship by adding value. That might be the reason for that. Everything I do, it starts with value. I don’t ever, ever expect anybody to do business with me before me providing them value first. The thing with communication is people are afraid they’re going to annoy their lists. It’s kind of bogus because they wouldn’t be doing business with you, they won’t be on your list unless they wanted to hear from you. If you have a weight loss website or if you’re a dentist and somebody signs up for your newsletter or whatever. They did that. It’s not like somebody is holding a gun to their head and they made them sign up for the newsletter. They did that because they want to hear from you. They want to hear about you, about what you do about how you can help them. About how you helped other people. To see you demonstrate your expertise so they can make a decision whether they should go with you or somebody else. The biggest hole when you’re building your funnel is, make sure that you’re communicating with your prospects as much as you possibly can. That includes auto responder sequences. It includes retargeting campaign, people who saw certain pages and didn’t buy what you have. You follow up with them with banners or Facebook ads, doing retargeting. You can do direct mail, emails, postcard, text messages, voice mails. There’s all kinds of stuff, but make sure that you are communicating with them frequently. Along with that, getting them in as risk free as possible. Usually start with whatever your lowest price product or service is and offer them that, get them into the buying cycle. It gets them used to spending money with you and then just constantly working on taking them up the ladder. Let’s just say right now you have a $37 product and a service that’s $97 a month, just for an example. Once you start getting people that are going to that $97 a month product or service, you should be thinking, what else? How can I add more value to these people and charge a higher price? Usually, that’s a “done for you” thing, or more of a step-by-step process. Coaching, you can do coaching in almost any business. Any business that you have. You want to make things faster or easier for people, and then get creative. Think of new products, new services, that you can charge more money for because there’s just a lot of people. There’s a certain percentage in every audience that will spend several times more money with you than you’re currently offering them. That’s a huge hole that I find in almost everybody’s funnel. They don’t have enough high priced, high ticket items. It really makes a huge, huge difference. If you’re selling $37 products and you have a $5,000 product, you only have to sell—or let’s just say for easy math, a $30 product and a $6,000 really high ticket thing. You have to sell 200 of the $30 products, for one of the $6,000 sales. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: If you’re selling 200 a month, you’re making $6,000 a month. You add in a $6,000 product and you sell one of those to one out of every 200 people, you’ve just doubled your business. It’s really, really important to have those high priced, high ticket offers in there. It really can do some pretty amazing things to your bottom line. A lot of times, if they are services or something like that, they’re higher profit too. Your profit margin is, typically at least, if it’s one-on-one coaching or something like that. Your profit margin is pretty huge. Eric: Right. Are you a big fan of the marketing ladder? Say, moving people up from the $39 e-book or product all the way up to the “done for you” services, et cetera? Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have tomorrow and Friday, we’re recording this on a Wednesday, tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, I have back-to-back in-person, full day consultations with a client. Eric: Nice. Jeremy: It’s $3,000 a day, so it’s $6,000 in two days. That’s essentially, for me, an upsell from my typical monthly coaching program. It’s essentially doing several months in advance, doing it in one or two days. It’s a way to do everything faster for people. It’s very, very profitable doing that. Definitely, because people want to spend more money with you, it’s just a matter of showing them the value. It really all comes back down to value. I could go out there and have $100,000 coaching program, but if I can’t show people that they’re going to make $500,000 or $1 million, then nobody is going to buy it. You have to find out how much value you can provide to people and then charge accordingly. Eric: That makes sense. I guess what you said before, and I wanted to ask you about this, I know you’ve said before the truth about price; what the main reason people really buy your product or services is? Jeremy: Yeah. A lot of people think that people buy based off price. In some cases, it’s true. Sometimes people literally just don’t have the money to pay you. I was talking to someone who desperately wanted to join my coaching program, but she couldn’t afford it because she was going month to month and she could barely even put food on the table. I was like, “Listen, don’t even.” She wanted to join, she’s like, “No, no, I’ll sell something,” or whatever. I said, “Listen, I’m not comfortable enough. If this doesn’t work, you literally can’t feed yourself. I just can’t live with that.” I guess that’s a good demonstration of my sales funnel selling her on my coaching program. It’s the same way with your sales funnel. You want to make sure that people understand the value that you’re providing them. That’s what it really comes down to. In most cases, like in 90 percent of cases, it’s not that something is too expensive. It’s that they don’t see that the value you’re providing is more than the prices they’re paying. If you’re offering, we’ll go to health, just because it’s easy and it’s relatable. Say it’s $97. If you don’t show the value is worth more than $97, then people aren’t going to buy. Whereas, if you show them that its worth $197, $297, $997, whatever it is, then people are more likely to buy on the higher you show that value, then the bigger gap between your price and the value. Obviously, with the value being higher, the higher your sales are going to be. That’s what copywriters do is, essentially, bring out that value and show the benefits and overcome the objections. That’s why operating it is so important, because when you really boil it down, that’s what we’re doing, is bringing out and showing people why they’re paying X dollars, but the value is X dollars times five, ten or twenty or whatever. Eric: Yeah. Like you’re saying, it doesn’t really have to be what you’re adding to it, you just have to raise the perceived value and that will raise the prices. Maybe a tip you give someone to raise the perceived value without adding more to their product or service or their widget? Jeremy: Yeah. That’s a good question. First of all, before I even get into that, raising your prices is probably the best and fastest way to grow your business. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I wish I could just get paid for saying, “Raise your price.” Because you can go into a million dollar business and say, “Raise your price ten percent,” and they can increase their profit by $100,000. If your margins are low, the lower your profit margin, the more you raise your price, the higher that multiple is. I can’t really do any examples off the top of my head because there’s a lot of math involved. Just basically, before I get into how to raise your perceived value so you can raise prices, make it a point to do a split test and raise your prices. If you’re nervous about it, I know a lot of people are, that’s totally fine. If you’ve never done it before, don’t be worried about being nervous about. Do it at 5 percent or 10 percent or something like that. If you think about it, if you’re selling something for $897 and you go to $997, that’s ten percent higher. People really aren’t going to notice that difference. If you go from $9 to $9.90, that would be 10 percent. People aren’t going to notice that. If you want to do that, number one, is if you can just price test and see if people will pay a higher price. A lot of times you’ll see that you can go up to 20 percent without changing anything about the offer and your conversions stay the same. Sometimes, not too often, but sometimes you’ll actually increase your conversions because sometimes people, if you have too much value and your price is too low, it’s actually one of those scenarios, where people are like, “That can’t be real. There must be something about this. That’s just wrong.” Eric: That’s a great point. That happens all the time because speaking in the marketing ladder a lot of times with a client I’ll do an SEO. From there, go onto the marketing and the copywriting because they need that afterwards, before or during. A lot of clients, a lot of packages, the price, they just couldn’t believe that’s what I was offering. I had a lot of skeptical people because they were coming from other companies that had ripped them off or had bad experiences with them. That’s a great point, sometimes people just don’t believe it if it sounds too good to be true. Jeremy: Yeah, people are skeptical. You kind of have to think as a consumer. Take your mind out of being a business owner. As a consumer, you have this natural sense of what a price should be. You can probably look at things and just line ten items up. You could probably get within 20 or 30 percent of that actually price, just by guessing at what the price would be. We kind of just have that internal filter of what a price should be. If you’re out of that range, people’s flags go up and they’re like, “Wait, something is not right here.” They get that gut feeling that just something is just not adding up. The conclusion they come to is, “Well, they must be lying.” Eric: Right. Jeremy: Going back to the raising perceived value. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Number one is improve your copy. If you’re trying to do the copy yourself, hire a good copywriter, not somebody from elance or not somebody for $500 for a sales letter; unless you’re just starting and you really just don’t have money. It’s better than nothing. If you have a relatively successful business, number one, is hiring a copywriter or learning copy yourself. Then get some courses and learn how to write really good copy because, like I said, you learn to overcome objections. You learn to gain attention from people. You learn to develop interests and get them engaged in the copy to really showcase the benefits of your product or service. Number one is write better copy. Number two, is show your personality. That’s actually one thing that most people don’t really think of, but I’ve made a big, big shift in the last year, because I see a huge trend in going towards personality and transparency. If you follow my emails, you’ll see how personal I am. I’m always telling stories about my wife and my kids and stupid things that I’m doing, like last weekend I jumped into an ice pond for a polar plunge. It was for charity. I like to talk about that. One guy actually wrote back and told me I had a death wish. It was fun, talking about that stuff. It’s just me being me. You can’t be fake anymore. You have to just be whoever you are. If you’re a big flamboyant really off the wall character, and you’re really loud and obnoxious, then just be that. If you’re kind of quiet, shy and reserved, be that person. You can’t really fake it anymore with social media and all that kind of stuff. Number two is be yourself. Usually that’s done either through emails or videos. In case you’re wondering in your head, “Wait how does that increase perceived value of your product or service?” That really doesn’t increase the value of the product or service. It increases the value of you and the relationship that they have with you. It all starts with a relationship. They have to trust you if you’re selling something. If they don’t trust you, you could be giving away bars of gold for $1 and nobody is going to buy it, because they think you’re lying. That’s number two is build trust by being yourself, being personal, telling stories, and that kind of thing. Another thing you could do is add bonuses. Add whatever your product is, whatever your service, add little extras, little bonuses. If you’re selling an information product, you can have bonuses on little extra videos or how to get faster results; how to get better results with this certain technique or whatever. That’s one that probably most people know. Another thing, make it better risk reversal. Have better guarantees. You could have longer guarantees. You could have conditional guarantees, like a money back guarantee if they can prove that they went through your program or did your service or whatever and they didn’t get the results, then they can double you money back guarantee; something that takes the risk off that person and puts it on you. Another thing you can do is establish—juxtapose your product or service with somebody with an industry leader that they already trust. You can kind of borrow that credibility. For example, you have a course and you’re selling information. It really doesn’t matter. It could be a service, course, whatever it is. If you somehow involve either something in your industry or a celebrity or somebody like that and you kind of juxtapose, which essentially means you tie it into your product, then that increases the value because you get that borrowed credibility. Those are a couple ways to help increase your perceived value. The easiest way is probably better copy, I would say. Eric: Right. I agree. I always say this, but I think copy marketing and sales are the most important skills. The better the marketing, the easier the sales process and copywriting and salesmanship tie together. Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. Eric: Nice. One thing I want to ask you, not only to provide value for the audience, but selfishly, as well, I guess I should say. I’m coming out with a new course here. This is about product launching. Is there steps that you, personally, do when you work with clients or start off your launches on the right track? Is there something that you could do or suggest to people? Jeremy: I’ll let you take most of the credit for the product launch stuff. I don’t want to jump on your toes too much. I’ll give one recommendation that reverberates through the whole product launch sequence, and that is, proof. Proof is just everything. When I was launching the funnel formula, which is my flagship product that teaches you how to build sales funnels. When I did that launch to my own list, I didn’t do affiliates and all that kinds of stuff. That’s just too annoying for me. One of the things, I just focused on proof, proof, proof. Every single email that went out, every piece of communication that went out had some type, at least one piece of proof in it; whether it was a result that I got for a client, whether it was case study from a client, or an example of what happened when a client or me built the sales funnel or added a piece of the sales funnel. Telling them things they didn’t know, like, “Hey, in module three, there’s a really cool tip that let’s you do X.” That’s a style of proof, everywhere from there or telling about my past results. I did something that I was a little bit nervous of, but during my launch, and it really only works for selling to marketing people. I’ll give you an example of how you can use it in another niche. What I did was during my launch, I did it—I can’t even remember the dates. It might have been Monday through Friday, I forget. Throughout the week, I was telling my audience and giving them proof on how sales funnels worked, based on giving them numbers of my own sales funnel and how that launch was going. Eric: Nice, so a play-by-play of your launch. Jeremy: Exactly. I had screenshots. I said, “Hey, look, I would have made X dollars if I didn’t have this sales funnel in place.” I didn’t actually say dollars, I just did percentage. It was something like, “I made an extra,” I forgot what it turned out to be. It was something like, 33 percent of my sales were from selling the main product, and 66 percent of my sales came from the sales funnel, after they bought that first product. I said, “Look, I would have been leaving 66 percent of the money I made on the table if I didn’t have this sales funnel.” That was huge. I actually showed even more proof. I showed a screenshot from inside my office autopilot, which is my CRM, so they could see what I was talking about. One thing that you can do, let’s just go back to weight loss. That one is easy. If you’re selling a weight loss course, you can say, maybe you did a two week launch. You could say, “Somebody bought this on the first day, four days later, they’re already down eight pounds. This other person bought it and within two days, they were down five pounds.” Throughout the launch, you can talk about the results that people are getting since the launch started, results that people have done in the past. You could even do things like with scarcity, with deadlines and scarcity. Saying, “We only have 50 left and there are 20,000 people waiting on the list. They’re waiting for the cart to open. Make sure you get there as soon as I tell you it’s open, because there’s going to be 20,000 people that are going to buy this product.” You can do scarcity like that. Make sure you don’t lie. I hate when people lie in marketing. Eric: That’s a good point. My last course I did that too. It was a higher price course. What I did with the list that was on the list for that course was scarcity and social proof. I would literally list the people. I would say, “Jason from California invested today.” I listed the people’s first name and the state they were from of who invested that day during that launch process as social proof as well. I never really tested that, to be honest with you, against not doing that. When I did that, the results seemed to be more dramatic then when I did this before without doing that added factor. Jeremy: That’s one of those things that it’s a given that it’s going to do better. Hopefully, that helps with product launches. Eric: Nice. That’s beautiful. Just to clarify, I don’t know if you misunderstood. My course, it has nothing to do with product launches, but as this launched a new course or product. I know you actually worked with that, but my audience at the end, we’ll give out Jeremy’s website at the end. If you do have a product launch, you can talk to Jeremy as well. Jeremy: I thought you were having a course about product launches? Eric: No. It’s going to be a full marketing strategy, sales copy, the good stuff. Before we wrap it up today, because you shared a lot of good value and I definitely want to thank you for coming on. I know a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs listening may have a continuity service or maybe a continuity or monthly program, or maybe they’re even thinking about starting one, which could be very profitable. Can you share a tip or two before we leave today on how they can increase their retention rates? Some way to make their customers stick with them longer. Jeremy: Yeah. Let me throw out three different things. Number one is one of the things that I really love to do. Again, everything all goes back to value. As soon as they buy something, this is especially true with a continuity program, but it’s also true with any service, any product. I put people into what I call a “personal coach campaign.” Somebody buys one of my products and for the next, roughly 30 days, it depends, but roughly 30 days; they get emails specifically based on that product. The point of that is to get them to consume the product, not eat the product, you know, consume the product. Eric: Right. Jeremy: I guess it could be to eat the product, if you’re selling some kind of food. Eric: That’s awesome. That’s motivating them at the same time you’re there for them, right, supporting them? Jeremy: Yeah. There’s a couple things that it does. It establishes a relationship with them. You already have a relationship with them because they trust you enough to buy your product. A lot of people have buyer’s remorse. They’re kind of like, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t have bought it. Now I’m going to have to return this.” They think that a lot of business owners don’t care. They’re just in it for the sale. If you have a full 30 days of emails or could be a mix of emails, videos, whatever you want to do with it, the media. It really shows people that you care about them. You should care about them, regardless if it increases retention rates or anything like that. You should do this anyway because you care about your customers. The side benefit is that it increase retention rates, reduces refunds, because it establishes and builds that relationship. It all comes down to value and relationship. That’s one thing that, everything revolves around that. That’s one thing is to have a personal coach campaign. It’s just easy. They could be quick, just to say, “I really appreciate that you bought it. I want you to know that I’m here for you. I actually care about you and hope that you get the results that you’re looking for.” It’s not just like, “Hey, thanks for your money. See ya,” and you never talk to them again; which is what most people do. It’s rare that I get emails, maybe out of all the product I’ve ever bought in my entire life, I could probably count on one hand how many campaigns like that that I’ve ever gotten. You stick out like crazy, if you do that. Eric: Great. Jeremy: Number two … I’m sorry. Eric: I just said that’s great. That’s fantastic. I haven’t seen, like you said, I’ve really never seen it. I can’t think of any product or service that I’ve bought where there’s been an ongoing campaign like that. Jeremy: Yeah. For some people, it’s that they really don’t care. They just want your money. For others, they just haven’t thought about it yet. The second thing is send out some type of email. It could be anything. It could be a salesman calling them, a customer support person. It could be a postcard, letter, text message, whatever media you want to use. Essentially, do a stick letter. In direct mail, they do stick letter. That is kind of close to a personal coach campaign, but it’s just one piece, where you just thank them for the order. If there’s any membership details, you can put that in there. Just reassure them that it was a good purchase. They’re going to get value out of it. maybe add a little tip in there to help them get more value out of whatever they just bought, and then sell them another product. Eric: Absolutely. That’s a fabulous way to get your back end going. Jeremy: Yeah. The product should be, if you’re selling a supplement for, let’s just go back to weight loss again. If you’re selling something for weight loss, you can’t sell them a supplement for getting rid of toe fungus or something like that, because there’s no congruency there. Whatever it is, it has to be really congruent, and really make sense to add more value to take whatever results they’re going to get and take them to a new level. That’s the second one, send a stick letter. The third one, I just had it in my mind. The first one is the personal coach campaign. The second one is a stick letter. Third one, another thing you can do for retention rates is get people—this is kind of a mental type of thing. Get people to give you testimonials. You may not have really heard this before, I’m not sure. If you can get somebody to give you a testimonial and cement that idea in their mind that they love this product, it’s helping them. Who do you know that’s going to give somebody a testimonial and ask for a refund? Know what I mean? You can do this in your personal coaching campaign. If you do a campaign and get them to commit to doing business with you and to admit that you’re helping them and you’re doing a good job for them, they’re probably not going to ask for a refund. They’re going to stay with you longer. A fourth bonus thing that goes in with the stick letter is keep selling them additional products. Keep selling them additional services, because as they go down the rabbit hole with you, they’re going to get more attached to doing business with you. The more they spend with you, the less likely they are to ever leave you because you’re now their knight in shining armor that’s helping them fix whatever problem their trying to solve. Eric: Fantastic. Absolutely. That’s great. This has been awesome, Jeremy. I definitely want to thank you. You shared a lot of fantastic value, great value share here. I want to thank you for coming on the tenth episode here of The Fast Easy Success Marketing Insider. Before everyone goes out and dives in on all the tips and takes action on everything we talked about, can you tell the listeners where they can learn more about you, check you out? Jeremy: Two things, pretty easy. My name is Jeremy Reeves. I’ll tell you why I’m saying this in a second. You spell it J-E-R-E-M-Y R-E-E-V-E-S. The reason that I’m spelling it out is because the number one thing that I would recommend is just going on my website, www.JeremyReeves.com. On there, you can see whatever you want. I have free stuff on there. There should be a popup that comes up and gives you a free report up in the navigation bar, there’s a resources section that says “free” on it. There’s different things that you can opt-in to and get a whole bunch of free stuff, interviews and reports and videos and all kinds of stuff. The other thing is I have my own podcast. It’s called, Sales Funnel Mastery. Go into iTunes or whatever you listen to and do a search for that. You can follow me on my podcast. I do a lot of short sections, where I usually cover a single topic in five, ten, fifteen minutes, something like that. Little tidbits of strategy and stuff like that. Those are the two things, www.JeremyReeves.com for my website. If you want to look at any of the free products I have, free services or whatever is right for you, or check out Sales Funnel Mastery. That’s my podcast. Eric: Nice. I was telling Jeremy before the show, I checked out his podcast yesterday. I definitely recommend everybody check out there, and definitely his site. You get some good value. I recommend it. It’s definitely worth it. Jeremy, wow, it’s been an absolutely pleasure with you. Thank you for taking the time and sharing everything with the listeners. All you listeners out there, I hope you enjoyed the show and most importantly, take action on everything Jeremy and I talked about today. Before we go, if you guys could do me two quick favors, I’d really appreciate it. Simply hit that subscribe button, so you don’t miss out on a future business boosting podcast. If you stuck around this far, you obviously enjoyed the value share. Make sure you do those reviews and comments. I need your help in getting noticed and getting the value out to more people. I’m your host Eric Barton, a result specialist, signing out today. We’ll see you next week for another fast easy success marketing insider. Here’s to your success. It’s Jeremy back here again. I really hope you enjoyed that interview. For more information on this podcast and everything like that. A couple things, make sure that you’re subscribed to this podcast to make sure you’re getting every episode. This is the kind of stuff that I cover, everything that we went over in that interview; just really, really solid, insightful strategies for building your business. Make sure that you’re telling friends about the podcast, we can get the rankings up there and get the word out to everybody. Make sure that you’re leaving reviews and clicking the little stars; especially, in iTunes. That helps me boost the rankings and get more attention so everybody else can benefit from this. That’s pretty much it. I will see you at www.JeremyReeves.com. I really hope you enjoyed this. Thanks.