Podcasts about jon thanks

Want some advice? You'll find it in this episode where we interview Financial Advisor Jon Cunningham on best practices to teach kids financial skills and tips to start investing early. Don't miss out! This episode is especially great for parents and kids to listen together. This is a two part series so stay tuned! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Transcript Advisor Advice Part 2 Welcome back to another episode of the Cash Kid Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to visit our website at cashkidpodcast.com for more resources and links to past episodes. Follow us on Instagram as well. Today, is part 2 of our “Advisor Advice” interview with financial advisor Mr. Jon Cunningham. If you missed the first part of my interview with him, definitely go back and listen to it first. So much great advice… and he’s got more to share. The Cash Kid Podcast is underway. (music) Intro tease: So you’ve got some cash. Maybe from an allowance, or that money your grandma gave you for your 7th birthday (Here you go sweetie.) Thanks grandma. Whatever it is, what are you going to do with it? Spend it, hide it away… or maybe invest it? Let’s start learning how to make that money grow. Time to learn how to be a cash kid. (cash register) Alright, let’s jump right back into part 2 of our interview with Mr. Jon Cunningham. (music) Cash Kid - So what are some ways that kids can learn about personal finance in the stock market? Jon - Yeah, another great question. You know, I think it's very important someone once told me to always preserve precious capital. And so as you're working as a young person and you're working hard and you're sweating outside maybe mowing grass or doing chores for your parents, the last thing you want to do is earn that money and then lose it. So it's important that you really understand how investments and how the stock market works before you just put money in an account and buy a stock and hope for the best, right? Cash Kid - Definitely. Jon - You know, even when I was in high school, we had a stock market simulation game. And so there are programs out there that will basically give you plain money. So it's not real money. You're not subjecting your own money to risk, but you're buying stocks with this, you know, fake money and not real stocks. But it's a way to simulate how stocks work in the buying and the selling of stocks and researching them without putting money at risk. So that's an easy and safe way for a young person to really understand and learn the market without actually subjecting their money to risk of loss. Cash Kid- Yeah. In our previous episode we've talked about what is the stock market game. And so we talked with one of my teachers that introduced that to me. Jon - Oh cool. Cash Kid - That's how I learned about the stock market. And so that's what our previous episode was about. What are some ways kids can start earning, saving and investing their money? Jon - Yeah, this is going to require a little bit of involvement from from Mom and Dad. But until you reach the age of adulthood, you really can't open an investment account without the involvement of a parent or guardian. So their accounts called up UTMAs Uniformed Transfer of Minors Accounts, and these are accounts that are owned by a guardian or a parent for your benefit. And money can go into these investment accounts and certainly can be invested for your benefit. However, the parent owns this account, so the funds have to be used for you and for your benefit and someday would have to be transferred to you when you became an adult. So this would be a safe way. I'd say safe. This could be a way to open an account with parental oversight that you can invest some of your money in the market that eventually could be for your benefit. Cash Kid - Yeah. Do you think there are any, like, jobs out there that kids could do? Jon - Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have three kids. I love it when they work for me. And I think I think oftentimes kids try to find creative ways of forming a business early, whether it be mowing grass or everything from that to pressure washing, things like that. And oftentimes it's tough to find prospects. It's tough to find customers. It takes time and energy and money and overhead to to make that income. When oftentimes you can find things in your own backyard that you can do for your parents that they would really appreciate and also be willing to pay you some money to do it. And so certainly, I think it's a good thing for kids to have chores and allowances, but then also to work for for that money. So that could be something you talk to your parents about and say, hey, I want to make, you know, $25 a month, you know, what can I do around the house to make that kind of money? And I'm sure, you know, most parents would be happy to oblige. Cash Kid - Yes. Now, I assume you would agree that parents can play a big role in the financial success of kids. I mean, kids are always thinking of a way to pick up spending habits. What ways can parents be involved in helping set their kids on a healthy financial path? Jon - Yeah Cash Kid another great question. One of the biggest issues with with our economy right now is just that more with the amount of student loan debt that's out there. To understand what a student loan is, when a young person wants to go to college and they don't have the the cash or the resources to pay for tuition, room and board and all those types of things, they'll go to lending and lending institutions to get a loan to cover those costs. And often time, oftentimes interest and payments are deferred on those loans until that person graduates. So the risk associated with that is the student goes to college, incurs this debt and they graduate and number one maybe they can't find a job or they can't find a job that pays enough money for them to cover the student loan debt, plus all their other living expenses that's out there. So part of the way that parents can help their their kids be on a on a good financial trajectory is to make sure that they're making little decisions early on in their children's lives by setting money aside in a college related accounts like 529 plans or or other investment accounts that are earmarked for for their kids college. So with some of the listeners that you might be having here, a question could be you know, what can I be doing to set money aside that could help my parents pay for my college someday? Or maybe it's, you know, what can I be doing to do really well in school that I get what's called a scholarship and some of my tuition might be covered and all that could be helpful and ways of setting yourselves up financially for the future. But then also to I think it's important for parents just to be good examples and show good stewardship and be good stewards of the cash flow and educate kids on just simply what's a credit card mean or what's a checking account, and then what can we be doing to ensure I'm building a good credit score, even at a young age. Just kind of having transparent conversations like that I think are really important. Cash Kid - Yes. So, um, I'm sure you tell this to your partners in a lot of like work that you do. So when you educate others about early investing, why do you think early investing is important? Jon - Well, that's a great question. So I was prepared to answer that one. So yeah, when you look at the cost of waiting and waiting on investing, it's very expensive. So take an example of a ten year old child that says, hey, I have $600 a year or $50 a month that I want to invest and I'm going to invest that money and hopefully earn 6% growth for the next 55 years. So you're looking at starting at ten years old to age 65 to 55 years. Guess how much money that person has in 55 years? They have $236,503. So they started at age ten and saved the exact same amount between age ten and age 65. So now let's fast forward and say, hey, a 15 year old says, Hey, I want to do the exact same thing. I want to set aside $50 a month or $600 per year for the next 50 years until I'm 65 years old. Guess how much money that person has? They have $174,201.54, assuming they can make 6% every single year. The cost difference of a little over $62,000. So you see there's a significant cost to waiting and delaying, saving and investing at a young age. Now, there's not many ten year olds that can set aside 600 bucks a year. You know, consistently. That's a lot of work and that's a lot of chores. And and that's understandable. But just that exercise shows you that it's very important to start early, especially when you get out of college and you start making an income to really begin diligently saving and setting money aside for the future and not delaying because it is expensive. Cash Kid - Right? So what age would you say somebody could start investing? Jon - Well, really, it could it could start at any time with the assistance of Mom and Dad or guardian. But typically you have to be at age 18 to open an account by yourself and have an account individually owned by by just yourself. So you have to be 18 years old to have your own account. But again, going back to the previous point, you can open what's called UTMA with the assistance of Mom and Dad. Cash Kid - Right. So what resources would you suggest about researching companies to invest or find an advisor like yourself to get help? Jon - Yeah, that's a great question. You know, oftentimes if you just simply ask your Mom and Dad say, hey, you know, do we have a financial advisor? And chances are they're going to say yes. And oftentimes they'd be happy to talk to people like you Cash Kid and your little listeners for sure, especially if they have good questions. So I think that's step one just to kind of say, hey, is there an existing relationship that I can take advantage of and ask them questions, number one. Number two, if that's not available, you know, Google Finance is something that's a great tool. You can go on and check any stock and you can see all the publicly offered information like revenue and expenses and have it done all of these types of things for the marketplace. So Google finance is a very good and free resource to research and look into the stocks that you have interest in. Cash Kid - That's it for today. We appreciate your time and your expertise. Thank you for joining us on the call today and boosting the financial knowledge of the fellow cash kids everywhere. Remember that anybody can be a cash kid. You just have to learn how to become one. Jon - Thanks, Cash Kid (music) Thank you Mr. Jon. Wow, I’ve got some more homework to do for sure as I learned a lot from Mr. Jon and excited to think of the payout to investing early and knowing how to be financial smart early in life. More great interviews like this one in future episodes. Remember to visit us at the cashkidpodcast.com for more helpful tools, information, and past episodes. Cash Kid, out! Disclaimer: The information presented represents the views and opinions of the guests. This show does not intend to provide personal investment advice through this podcast. This content has been made for informational and educational purposes only. To make a full and informed investment decision, we advise you to speak with a financial advisor and for kids, definitely your parents first before investing.

Want some advice? You'll find it in this episode where we interview Financial Advisor Jon Cunningham on best practices to teach kids financial skills and tips to start investing early. Don't miss out! This episode is especially great for parents and kids to listen together. This is a two part series so stay tuned! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Transcript Advisor Advice Part 1 Welcome back to another episode of the Cash Kid Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to visit our site at cashkidpodcast.com for more resources and links to past episodes. Follow us on Instagram as well. We are so excited to continue to see this audience grow. It’s my belief we can help build a generation of cash kids that’s know how to manage, invest, and grow their money. And our guest today, will give us some tips to help get us there. The Cash Kid Podcast is underway. (music) Intro tease: So you’ve got some cash. Maybe from an allowance, or that money your grandma gave you for your 7th birthday (Here you go sweetie.) Thanks grandma. Whatever it is, what are you going to do with it? Spend it, hide it away… or maybe invest it? Let’s start learning how to make that money grow. Time to learn how to be a cash kid. (cash register) My guest joining me today is Mr. Jon Cunningham with Cunningham Financial Group. Mr. Cunningham, or Mr. Jon, as I like to call him, is a financial advisor and considers his clients, partners in creating financial success. He has also been super helpful in answering some of my questions about the stock market and finances. So we're going to cover a few topics with him about how kids can prepare to invest later and be smart investors. Cash Kid - Mr. Jon, welcome to the show. Jon - Thanks for having me. Cash Kid - First off, tell us a little bit about yourself. Jon - Sure. Well, first, just personally, my name is Jon Cunningham, and I'm married to my wife, Ann. And we have three kids, Wes, Grant, and Charlotte, and actually one on the way that's due sometime in October. Professionally, I'm the managing member of the Cunningham Financial Group. We began in August 1st of 2011 and have grown the practice ever since. We have locations in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Florence, Alabama, and just outside of Nashville and the town Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and presently have about a little over 2000 clients throughout the country. And we're licensed in about 29 different states. So it's a great practice. Cash Kid - That's great. So what led you to having a career as a financial advisor? Jon - Yeah, you know, it's something that I always had an interest in, whether it be everything from just earning money to saving it to investing. And I always had an interest in the stock market. And actually what's interesting, I entered in college hoping to be an accountant and was an accounting major initially and quickly realized that was not the area of finance that I really wanted to focus. You know what's funny? It took a class with a a professor, he’s my favorite professor. His name is Dr. Moron, actually, but a fantastic teacher and and taught me to really love and understand numbers. And so from there I wanted to focus on finance and so quickly took on multiple internships with multiple firms and in different areas of focus and quickly began actually growing the client base as an intern with the company in my junior year of college. Cash Kid - What do you think is the biggest misconception for adults in managing finances? Jon - Yeah, that's a great question. What I kind of find with working with prospective clients and really adults is they look at their 401K as similar to what's called a pension plan. And so people like my parents worked for companies and then their parents worked for companies and they worked at companies like Alabama Power for ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And that generation of client an employee had what's called a pension plan. And what that basically means is if you're going to work for a company for your entire career and when you retire, you have a pool of money and a pension that's going to pay you an income for the rest of your life no matter how long you live. And that gave retirees a lot of peace of mind. Well, those plans aren't necessarily available or not as often available to people that your parents age or even my parents age. And they have what's called a 401k, which is an investment account that's provided by by most employers. And it's just a employer sponsored plan that provides an avenue for an employee to save and invest money for for retirement purposes. And often people look at that and they think, hey, this could be like my pension. I'm going to put money in this plan and I'm going to save money my entire career. And whatever's there is going to last the entirety of my life. But oftentimes there's not quite enough. And often, too, they forget about taxation because all that money that you put in a 401k, you've never paid taxes on that money before. But when you pull it out in retirement, that's when you start taking the tax and paying taxes on withdrawals as you're spending down that money for retirement. And oftentimes there's not enough money there to last a lifetime. Cash Kid - Do you think some of the trouble is because they don't know where to start or they weren't taught financial skills at a young age? Jon - Potentially, Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that kind of go to that point about older generations. There's not always been a lot of transparency when it comes to comes to finances. And oftentimes older generations didn't discuss even how much money they made or what a credit card was or what a checking account was or what a credit score and all those types of things. So I think oftentimes what I kind of see is most clients just weren't taught at a young age, just the basic principles of of finance. So I think that can play into it for sure. Cash Kid - Yes. So what are your thoughts about the importance of kids being presented and taught more financial literacy at a young age? Jon - Yeah, that's a great question, Cash Kid. I think it's very important for for kids at a young age to form good financial habits and to form muscle memory. What I mean by that is when you look at the amount of money that you might be bringing in, whether it be from your allowance or it might be from a lawn business or some sort of employment where you're making an income. It's really important to look at that income in different categories because you worked really hard for that money. And it's important that, you know, some of it spent for fun. You know, you're going to enjoy life. I'm going to go to movies or ballgames or go out to eat with friends or whatever. So a portion of money should be earmarked for for spending. But then, of course, some should be earmarked for for giving, you know, at your local church or charity. A portion should be set aside for savings for a rainy day for the future. And then also a portion should be set aside for investing. Those four categories giving, saving, investing and spending. You know, those are the same categories that you're going to live within as you age, just as you get older, hopefully you're making more and more money and you have bigger pools of money to work with. But I think if you can form that habit, even at your age, that those are qualities and traits that will be transferable throughout life. Cash Kid: Great advice Mr. Jon! We’re going to pause our interview there for today as he had such great tips to share, we had to split it between two episodes. We try to keep our episodes shorter for our audiences attention span….uh umm… no offense, I’m speaking to myself too…hahaha. (music) Alright, that wraps up this episode. Part 2 of Mr. Jon Cunningham’s interview in our next episode. He’ll discuss ways you can help kids start investing now. Don’t forget to check out our website at Cashkidpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram. Cash Kid, out! Disclaimer: The information presented represents the views and opinions of the guests. This show does not intend to provide personal investment advice through this podcast. This content has been made for informational and educational purposes only. To make a full and informed investment decision, we advise you to speak with a financial advisor and for kids, definitely your parents first before investing. Jon Cunningham, Cunningham Financial Group https://www.cunninghamfinancialgroup.com/

About JonA husband, father of 3 wonderful kids who turned Podcaster during the pandemic. If you told me in early 2020 I would be making content or doing a podcast, I probably would have said "Nah, I couldn't see myself making YouTube videos". In fact, I told my kids, no way am I going to make videos for YouTube. Well, a year later I'm over 100 uploads and my subscriber count is growing.Links Referenced: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-myer/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/_JonMyer jonmyer.com: https://jonmyer.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I get to talk to a guest who has the same problem that I do. Now, not that they're a loud, obnoxious jerk, but rather that describing what they do succinctly is something of a challenge. It's not really an elevator pitch anymore if you have to sabotage the elevator before you start giving it. I'm joined by Jon Myer. Jon, thank you for joining me. What the hell do you do?Jon: Corey, thanks for that awesome introduction. What do I do? I get to talk into a microphone. And sometimes I get to stare at myself on camera, whether it makes a recording or not. And either I talk to myself or I talk to awesome people like you. And I get to interview and tell other people's stories on my show; I pull out the interesting parts and we have a lot of freaking fun doing it.Corey: I suddenly feel like I've tumbled down the rabbit hole and I'm in the wrong side of the conversation. Are we both trying to stand in the same part of the universe? My goodness.Jon: Is this your podcast or mine? Maybe I should do an introduction right now to introduce you onto it and we'll see how this works.Corey: The dueling podcast banjo. I liked the approach quite a bit. So, you have done a lot of very interesting things. For example, once upon a time, you worked at AWS. But you have to go digging to figure that out because everything I'm seeing about you in your professional bio and the rest is forward-looking, as opposed to Former Company A, Former Company B, and this one time I was an early investor in Company C, which means, that's right, one of the most interesting things about me is that I wrote a check once upon a time, which is never something I ever want to say about myself, ever. You're very forward-looking, and I strive to do the same. How do you wind up coming at it from that position?Jon: When I first left AWS—it's been a year ago, so I served my time—and I actually used to have ex-Amazonian on it and listed on it. But as I continuously look at it, I used to have a podcast called The AWS Blogger. And it was all about AWS and everything, and there's nothing wrong with them. And what I would hear—Corey: Oh, there's plenty wrong with them, but please continue.Jon: [laugh]. We won't go there. But anyway, you know, kind of talking about it and thinking about it ex-Amazonian, yeah, that's great, you put it on your resume, put it on your stuff, and it, you know, allows you that foot in the door. But I want to look at and separate myself from AWS, in that I am my own independent voice. Yes, I worked for them; great company, I've learned so much from them, worked with some awesome people there, but my voice in the community has become very engaging and trustworthy. I don't want to say I'm no longer an Amazonian; I still have some of the guidelines, some of the stuff that's instilled in me, but I'm independent. And I want that to speak for itself when I come into a room.Corey: It's easy as hell, by the way, for me to sit here and cast stones at folks who, “Oh, you're going to talk about this big company you worked for, even though you don't work there anymore.” Yeah, I really haven't worked anywhere that most people would recognize unless they're, you know, professionally sad all the time. So, I don't have that luxury; I had to wind up telling a story that was forward-looking just because I didn't really have much of a better option. You have that option and decided to go in a direction where it presents, honestly as your viewpoint is that your best days are yet to come. And I want to be clear that for folks who are constantly challenged in our space to justify their existence there, usually because they don't look like our wildly over-represented selves, Jon, they need that credibility.And when they say that it's necessary for them, I am not besmirching that. I'm speaking from my own incredibly privileged position that you share. That is where I'm coming from on this, so I don't want people to hear this as shaming folks who are not themselves wildly over-represented. I'm not talking about you fine folks, I assure you.Jon: You can have ex-Amazonian on your resume and be very proud of it. You can remove it and still be very proud of the company. There's nothing wrong with either approach. There are some conversations that I'll be in, and I'll be on with AWS folks and I'll say, “I completely understand where you're coming from. I'm an ex-Amazonian.” And they're like, “Oh, you get us. You get the process. You get the everything.”I just want to look forward that I will be that voice in the community and that I have an understanding of what AWS is and will continuously be. And I have so much that I'm working towards that I'm very proud of where I've come from, but I do want to look forward.Corey: One of these days, I really feel like I should hang out with some Amazonians or ex-Amazonians who don't know who I am—which is easier to find than you think—and pretend that I used to work there and wonder how long I can keep the ruse going. Just because I've been told a few times that I am suspiciously Amazonian for someone who's never worked there.Jon: You have a lot of insights on the AWS processes and understanding. I think you could probably keep it going for quite a while. You will have to get that orange lanyard though, when you go to, like—Corey: I got one once when I was at a New York Summit a couple years ago. My affiliation then, before I started The Duckbill Group, was Last Week in AWS, and apparently, someone saw that and thought that I was the director of Take-this-Job-and-Shove-it, but I'll serve out my notice until Friday. So, cool; employee lanyard, it was. And I thought this is going to be awesome because I'll be able to walk around and I'll get the inside track if people think I work there. And they treated me like crap until I put the customer lanyard back on. It's, “Oh, it's better to be a customer at an AWS event than it is to be an employee.” I learned that when the fun way.Jon: There is one day that I hope to get the press or analyst lanyard. I think it would be an accomplishment for me. But you get to experience that firsthand, and I hate to switch the tables because I know it's your podcast recording, not mine, but—Corey: Having the press analyst lanyard is interesting because a lot of people are not allowed to speak to you unless they've gone through training. Which, okay, great. I will say that it is a lot nicer walking the expo floor because most of the people working the booths know that means that person is press, generally—they're not quite as familiar with analysts—but they know that regardless that they're not going to sell you a damn thing, so they basically give you a little bit of breathing room, which is awesome, especially in these pandemic times. But the challenge I have with it is that very often I want to talk to folks who are AWS employees who may not have gone through press training. And I've never gotten anyone in trouble or taken advantage of things that I hear in those conversations and write about them.Everything I write about is what I've experienced in public or as a customer, not based upon privileged inside information. I have so many NDAs at this point, I can't keep track, so I just make sure everything I talked about publicly cited I have that already.Jon: Corey, I got to flip the script real quick. I got to give you a shout-out because everybody sees you on Twitter and sees, like, “Oh, my God, he's saying this negative, that negative towards AWS.” You and I had, I don't know, it was a 30, 45 minute at the San Francisco Summit, and I think every Summit, we try to connect for a little bit. But that was really the premise I kicked off a lot of our conversations when you joined my podcast. No, this is not my podcast, this is Corey's, but anyway—Corey: And just you remember that. Please continue.Jon: [laugh]. But you know, kind of going off it you have so much insight, so much value, and you kind of really understand the entire processes and all the behind the scenes and everything that's going on that I was like, “Corey, I got to get your voice out there and show the other side of you, that you're not there trying to get people in trouble, you never poke fun of an AWS employee. I heard there was some guy named Larry that you do, but we won't jump into that.”Corey: One of the things that I think happened is, first and foremost, there is an algorithmic bias towards outrage. When I say nice things about AWS or other providers, which I do periodically, they get basically no engagement. When I say something ridiculous, inflammatory, and insulting about a company, oh, goes around the internet three times. One of the things that I'm slowly waking up to is that when I went into my Covid hibernation, my audience was a quarter of the size it is now. People don't have the context of knowing what I've been up to for the last five or six years. All they see is a handful of tweets.And yeah, of course, you wind up taking some of my more aggravated moment tweets and put a few of those on a board, and yeah, I start to look a fair bit like a jerk if you're not aware of what's going on inside-track-wise. That's not anyone else's fault, except my own, and I guess understanding and managing that perception does become something of a challenge. I mean, it's weird; Amazon is a company that famously prides itself on being misunderstood for long periods of time. I guess I never thought that would apply to me.Jon: Well, it does. Maybe that's why most people think you're an Amazonian.Corey: You know, honestly, I've got to say, there are a lot of worse things people can and do call me. Amazon has a lot to recommend it in different ways. What I find interesting now is that you've gone from large companies to sort of large companies. You were at Spot for a hot minute, then you were doing the nOps thing. But one thing that you've been focusing on a fair bit has been getting your own voice and brand out there—and we talked about this a bit at the Summit when we encountered each other which is part of what sparked this conversation—you're approaching what you're doing next in a way that I don't ever do myself. I will not do it justice, but what are you working on?Jon: All right. So Corey, when we talked at the New York Summit, things are actually moving pretty good. And some of the things that I am doing, and I've actually had a couple of really nice engagements kind of kick off is, that I'm creating highly engageable, trustworthy content for the community. Now, folks, you're asking, like, what is that? What is that really about? You do podcasts?Well, just think about some of the videos that you're seeing on customer sites right now. How are they doing? How's the views? How's the engagement? Can you actually track those back to, like, even a sales engagement in utilizing those videos?Well, as Jon Myer—and yes, this is highly scalable because guess what I am in talks with other folks to join the crew and to create these from a brand awareness portion, right? So, think about it. You have customers that you want to get engaged with: you have products, you have demos, you have reviews that you want to do, but you can't get them turned around in a quick amount of time. We take the time to actually dive into your product and pull out the value prop of the exact product, a demo, maybe a review, all right? We do sponsors as well; I have a number of them that I can talk about, so Veeam on AWS, Diabolical Coffee, there's a couple of other I cannot release just yet, but don't worry, they will be hitting out there on social pretty soon.But we take that and we make it an engaging kind of two to three-minute videos. And we say, “Listen, here's the value of it. We're going to turn this around, we're going to make this pop.” And putting this stuff, right, so we'll take the podcast and I'll put it on to my YouTube channel, you will get all my syndication, you'll get all my viewers, you'll get all my views, you'll get my outreach. Now, the kicker with that is I don't just pick any brand; I pick a trusted brand to work with because obviously, I don't want to tarnish mine or your brand. And we create these podcasts and we create these videos and we turn them around in days, not weeks, not months. And we focus on those who really need to actually present the value of their product in the environment.Corey: It sounds like you're sort of the complement to the way that I tend to approach these things. I'll periodically do analyst engagements where I'll kick the tires on a product in the space—that's usually tied to a sponsorship scenario, but not always—where, “Oh, great. You want me to explain your product to people. Great, could I actually kick the tires on it so I understand at first? Otherwise, I'm just parroting what may as well be nonsense. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.”Very often small companies, especially early stage, do a relatively poor job of explaining the value of their product because everyone who works there knows the product intimately and they're too close to the problem. If you're going to explain what this does in a context where you have to work there and with that level of intensity on the problem space, you're really only pitching to the already converted as opposed to folks who have the expensive problem that gets in the way of them doing their actual job. And having those endless style engagements is great; they periodically then ask me, “Hey, do you want to build a bunch of custom content for us?” And the answer is, “No, because I'm bad at deadlines in that context.”And finding intelligent and fun and creative ways to tell stories takes up a tremendous amount of time and is something that I find just gets repetitive in a bunch of ways. So, I like doing the typical sponsorships that most people who listen to this are used to: “This episode is sponsored by our friends at Chex Mix.” And that's fine because I know how to handle that and I have that down to a set of study workflows. Every time I've done custom content, I find it's way more work than I anticipated, and honestly, I get myself in trouble with it.Jon: Well, when you come across it, you send them our way because guess what, we are actually taking those and we're diving deep with them. And yes, I used an Amazon term. But if you take their product—yeah [laugh]. I love the reaction I got from you. But we dive into the product. And you said it exactly: those people who are there at the facility, they understand it, they can say, “Yeah, it does this.”Well, that's not going to have somebody engaged. That's not going to get somebody excited. Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I had a call with an awesome company that I want to use their product. And I was like, “Listen, I want to know about your product a little bit more.”We demoed it for my current company, and I was like, “But how do you work for people like me: podcasters who do a lot of the work themselves? Or a social media expert?” You know, how do I get my content out there? How does that work? What's your pricing?And they're, like, “You know, we thought about getting it and see if there was a need in that space, and you're validating that there's a need.” I actually turned it around and I pitched them. I was like, “Listen, I'd love for you guys to be a sponsor on my show. I'd love for you to—let me do this. Let me do some demos. Let's get together.”And I pitched them this idea that I can be a spokesperson for their product because I actually believed in it that much just from two calls, 30 minutes. And I said, “This is going to be great for people like me out there and getting the voice, getting the volume out there, how to use it.” I said, “I can show some quick integration setups. You don't have to have the full-blown product that you sell out the businesses, us as individuals or small groupings, we're only going to use certain features because, one, is going to be overwhelming, and two, it's going to be costly. So, give us these features in a nice package and let's do this.” And they're like, “Let's set something up. I think we got to do this.”Corey: How do you avoid the problem where if you do a few pieces of content around a particular brand, you start to become indelibly linked to that brand? And I found that in my early days when I was doing a lot of advisory work and almost DevRel-for-hire as part of the sponsorship story thing that I was doing, and I found that that did not really benefit the larger thing I was trying to build, which is part of the reason that I got out of it. Because it makes sense for the first one; yeah, it's a slam dunk. And the second one, sure, but sooner or later, it feels like wow, I have five different sponsors in various ways that want me to be building stories and talking about their stuff as I travel the world. And now I feel like I'm not able to do any of them a decent service, while also confusing the living hell out of the audience of, “Who is it you work for again anyway?” It was the brand confusion, for lack of a better term.Jon: Okay, so you have two questions there. One of them is, how do you do this without being associated with the brand? I don't actually see a problem with that. Think of a race car; NASCAR drivers are walking around with all their stuff on their jackets, you know, sponsored by this person, this group, that group. Yeah, it's kind of overwhelming at times, but what's wrong with being tied to a couple of brands as long as the brands are trustworthy, like yourself? Or you believing those, right? So, there's nothing wrong with that.Second is the scalability that you're talking about where you're traveling all over the world and doing this and that. And that's where I'm looking for other leaders and trustworthy community members that are doing this type of thing to join a highly visible team, right? So, now you have a multitude and a diverse group of individuals who can get the same message out that's ultimately tied to—and I'm actually going to call it out here, I have it already as Myer Media, right? So, it's going to be under the Jon Myer Podcast; everything's going to be grouped in together under Myer Media, and then we're going to have a group of highly engaging individuals that enjoy doing this for a living, but also trust what they're talking about.Corey: If you can find a realistic way to scale that, that sounds like it's going to have some potential significant downstream consequences just as far as building almost a, I guess, a DevRel workshop, for lack of a better term. And I mean, that in the sense of an Andy Warhol workshop style approach, not just a training course. But you wind up with people in your orbit who become associated, affiliated with a variety of different brands. I mean, last time I did the numbers, I had something like 110 sponsors over the last five years. If I become deeply linked to those brands, no one knows what the hell I do because every company in the space, more or less, has at some level done a sponsorship with me at some point.Jon: I guess I'll cross that when it happens, or keep that in the top-of-mind as it moves forward. I mean, it's a good point of view, but I think if we keep our individualism, that's what's going to separate us as associated. So, think of advertising, you have a, you know, actor, actress that actually gets on there, and they're associated with a certain brand. Did they do it forever? I am looking at long-term relationships because that will help me understand the product in-depth and I'll be able to jump in there and provide them value in a expedited version.So, think about it. Like, they are launching a new version of their product or they're talking about something different. And they're, like, “Jon, we need to get this out ASAP.” I've had this long-term relationship with them that I'm able to actually turn it around rather quickly, but create highly engaging out of it. I guess, to really kind of signify that the question that you're asking is, I'm not worried about it yet.Corey: What stage or scale of company do you find is, I guess, the sweet spot for what you're trying to build out?Jon: I like the small to medium. And looking at it, the small to medium—Corey: Define your terms because to my mind, I'm still stuck in this ancient paradigm that I was in as an employee, where a big company is anything that has more than 200 people, which is basically everyone these days.Jon: So, think about startups. Startups, they are usually relatively 100 or less; medium, 200 or less. The reason I like that type of—is because we're able to move fast. As you get bigger, you're stuck in processes and you have to go through so many steps. If you want speed and you want scalability, you got to pay attention to some of the stuff that you're doing and the processes that are slowing it down.Granted, I will evaluate, you know, the enterprise companies, but the individuals who know the value of doing this will ultimately seek me and say, “Hey, listen, we need this because we're just kicking this off and we need highly visible content, and we want to engage with our current community, and we don't know how.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: I think that there's a fair bit of challenge somewhere in there. I'm not quite sure how to find it, that you're going to, I think, find folks that are both too small and too big, that are going to think that they're ready for this. I feel like this doesn't, for example, have a whole lot of value until a company has found product-market fit unless what you're proposing to do helps get them to that point. Conversely, at some point, you have some of the behemoth companies out there, it's, “Yeah, we can't hire DevRel people fast enough. We've hired 500 of them. Cool, can you come do some independent work for us?” At which point, it's… great, good luck standing out from the crowd in any meaningful way at that point.Jon: Well, even a high enterprise as hired X number of DevRels, the way you stand out is your personality and everything that you built behind your personal brand, and your value brand, and what you're trying to do, and the voice that you're trying to achieve out there. So, think about it—and this is very difficult for me to, kind of, boost and say, “Hey, listen, if I were to go to a DevRel of, like, say, 50 people, I will stand out. I might be one of the top five, or I might be two at the top five.” It doesn't matter. But for me why and what I do, the value that I am actually driving across is what will stand out, the engaging conversations.Every interview, every podcast that I do, at the end, everybody's like, “Oh, my God, you're, like, really good at it; you kind of keep us engaging, you know when to ask a question; you jump in there and you dive even deeper.” I literally have five bullet points on any conversation, and these are just, like, two or three sentences, maybe. And they're not exact questions. They're just topics that we need to talk about, just like we did going into this conversation. There is nothing that scripted. Everything that's coming across the questions that you're pulling out from me giving an answer to one of your questions and then you're diving deep on it.Corey: I think that that's probably a fair approach. And it's certainly going to lead to a better narrative than the organic storytelling that tends to arise internally. I mean, there's no better view to see a lot of these things than working on bills. One of my favorite aspects of what I do is I get to see the lies that clients tell to themselves, where it's—like, they believe these things, but it no longer matches the reality. Like developer environments being far too expensive as a proportion of the rest of their environment. It's miniscule just because production has scaled since you last really thought about it.Or the idea that a certain service is incredibly expensive. Well, sure. The way that it was originally configured and priced, it was and that has changed. Once people learn something, they tend to stop keeping current on that thing because now they know it. And that's a bit of a tricky thing.Jon: That's why we keep doing podcasts, you keep doing interviews, you keep talking with folks is because if you look at when you and I actually started doing these podcasts—and aka, like, webinars, and I hate to say webinars because it's always negative and—you know because they're not as highly engaging, but taking that story and that narrative and creating a conversation out of it and clicking record. There are so many times that when I go to a summit or an event, I will tell people, they're like, “So, what am I supposed to do for your podcast?” And we were talking for, like, ten minutes, I said, “You know, I would have clicked record and we would have ten minutes of conversation.” And they're like, “What?” I was like, “That's exactly what it is.”My podcast is all about the person that I'm interviewing, what they're doing, what they're trying to achieve, what's their message that they're trying to get across? Same thing, Corey. When you kick this off, you asked me a bunch of questions and then that's why we took it. And that's where this conversation went because it's—I mean, yeah, I'm spinning it around and making it about you, sometimes because obviously, it's fun to do that, and that's normally—I'm on the other side.Corey: No, it's always fun to wind up talking to people who have their own shows just because it's fun watching the narrative flow back and forth. It's kind of a blast.Jon: It's almost like commentators, though. You think about it at a sporting event. There's two in the booth.Corey: Do a team-up at some point, yeah.Jon: Yeah.Corey: In fact, doing the—what is it like the two old gentlemen in the Sesame Street box up in the corner? I forget their names… someone's going to yell at me for that one. But yeah, the idea of basically kibitzing back and forth. I feel like at some level, we should do a team up and start doing a play-by-play of the re:Invent keynotes.Jon: Oh… you know what, Corey, maybe we should talk about this offline. Having a huge event there, VIP receptions, a podcasting booth is set up at a villa that we have ready to go. We're going to be hosting social media influencers, live-tweeting happening for keynotes. Now, you don't have to go to the keynotes personally. You can come to this room, you can click record, we'll record a live session right there, totally unscripted, like everything else we do, right? We'll have a VIP reception, come in chat, do introductions. So, Corey, love to have you come into that and we can do a live one right there.Corey: Unfortunately, I'm going to be spending most of re:Invent this year dressed in my platypus costume, but you know how it works.Jon: [laugh]. Oh man, you definitely got to go for that because oh, I have a love to put that on the show. I'm actually doing something not similar, but in true style that I've been going to the last couple of re:Invents I will be doing something unique and standing out.Corey: I'm looking forward to it. It's always fun seeing how people continue to successfully exceed what they were able to do previously. That's the best part, on some level, is just watching it continually iterate until you're at a point where it just becomes, well frankly, either ridiculous or you flame out or it hits critical mass and suddenly you launch an entire TV network or something.Jon: Stay tuned. Maybe I will.Corey: You know, it's always interesting to see how that entire thing plays out. Last question before we call it a show. Talk to me about your process for building content, if you don't mind. What is your process when you sit down and stare at—at least from my perspective—that most accursed of all enemies, a blank screen? “All right time to create some content, Jackwagon, better be funny. And by the way, you're on a deadline.” That is the worst part of my job.Jon: All right, so the worst part of your job is the best part of my job. I have to tell you, I actually don't—and I'm going to have to knock on wood because I don't get content block. I don't sit at a screen when I'm doing it. I actually will go for a walk or, you know, I'll have my weirdest ideas at the weirdest time, like at the gym, I might have a quick idea of something like that and I'll have a backlog of these ideas that I write down. The thing that I do is I come down, I open up a document and I'll just drop this idea.And I'll write it out as almost as it seems like a script. And I'll never read it verbatim because I look at it and be like, “I know what I'm going to say right now.” An example, if you take a look at my intros that I do for my podcast, they are done after the recording because I recap what we do on a recording.So, let's take this back. Corey will talk about the one you and I just did. And you and I we hopped on, we did a recording. Afterwards, I put together the intro. And what I'm going to say the intro, I have no freaking clue until I actually get to it, and then all of a sudden, I think of something—not at my desk, but away from my desk—what I'm going to say about you or the guest.An example, there was a gentleman I did his name's called Mat Batterbee, and he's from the UK. And he's a Social Media Finalist. And he has this beard and he always wears, like, this hat or something. And I saw somebody on Twitter make a comment about, you know, following in his footsteps or looking like him. So, they spoofed him with a hat and everything—glasses.I actually bought a beard off of Amazon, put it on, glasses, hat, and I spoofed him for the intro. I had this idea, like, the day before. So, thank goodness for Prime delivery, that I was able to get this beard ASAP, put it on. One take; I only tried to do one take. I don't think I've ever recorded any more.Corey: I have a couple of times sometimes because the audio didn't capture—Jon: Yeah.Corey: —but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, I agree with you, I find that the back-and-forth with someone else is way easier from a content perspective for me. Because when you and I started talking, on this episode, for example, I had, like, three or four bullet points I wanted to cover and that's about it. The rest of it becomes this organic freewheeling conversation and that just tends to work when it's just me free-associating in front of the camera, it doesn't work super well. I need something that's a bit more structured in that sense. So apparently, my answer is just never be alone, ever.Jon: [laugh]. The content that I create, like how-to tutorials, demos, reviews, I'll take a lot more time on them and I'll put them together in the flow. And I record those in certain sections. I'll actually record the demo of walking through and clicking on everything and going through the process, and then I will actually put that in my recording software, and then I will record against it like a voiceover.But I don't record a script. I actually follow the flow that I did and in order to do that, I understand the product, so I'll dive deep on it, I'll figure out some of the things using keywords along the way to highlight the value of utilizing it. And I like to create these in, like, two to three minutes. So, my entire process of creating content—podcast—you know what we hop on, I give everybody the spiel, I click record and I say, “Welcome.” And I do the introduction. I cut that out later. We talk. I'll tell you what, I never edited anything throughout the entire length of it because whatever happens happens in his natural and comes across.And then I slap on an ending. And I try to make it as quick and as efficiently as possible because if I start doing cuts, people are going to be, like, “Oh, there's a cut there. What did he cut out?” Oh, there's this. It's a full-on free flow. And so, if I mess up and flub or whatever it is, I poke fun of myself and we move on.Corey: Oh, I have my own favorite punching bag. And I honestly think about that for a second. If I didn't mock myself the way that I do, I would be insufferable. The entire idea of being that kind of a blowhard just doesn't work. From my perspective, I am always willing to ask the quote-unquote dumb question.It just happens to turn out but I'm never the only person wondering about that thing and by asking it out loud, suddenly I'm giving a whole bunch of other folks air cover to say, “Yeah, I don't know the answer to that either.” I have no problem whatsoever doing that. I don't have any technical credibility to worry about burning.Jon: When you start off asking and say, “Hey, dumb question or dumb question,” you start being unsure of yourself. Start off and just ask the question. Never say it's a dumb question because I'll tell you what, like you said, there's probably 20 other people in that room that have the same question and they're afraid to ask it. You can be the one that just jumps up there and says it and then you're well-respected for it. I have no problem asking questions.Corey: Honestly, the problem I've got is I wish people would ask more questions. I think that it leads to such a better outcome. But people are always afraid to either admit ignorance. Or worse, when they do ask questions just for the joy they get from hearing themselves talk. We've all been conference talks where you there's someone who's just asking the question because they love the sound of their own voice. I say, they, but let's be serious; it's always a dude.Jon: That is very true.Corey: So, if people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to go?Jon: All right, so the best place to go is to follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my primary one, right? Jon Myer; can't miss me. At all. Twitter, I am active on Twitter. Not as well as Corey; I would love to get there one day, but my audience right now is LinkedIn.Else you can go to jonmyer.com. Yes, that's right, jonmyer.com. Because why not? I found I have to talk about this just a little bit. And the reason that I changed it—I actually do own the domain awsblogger, by the way and I still have it—is that when I was awsblogger, I had to chan—I didn't have to change anything' nobody required me to, but I changed it to, like, thedailytechshow. And that was pretty cool but then I just wanted to associated with me, and I felt that going with jonmyer, it allowed me not having to change the name ever again because, let's face it, I'm not changing my name. And I want to stick with it so I don't have to do a whole transition and when this thing takes off really huge, like it is doing right now, I don't have to change the name.Corey: Yeah. I would have named it slightly differently had I known was coming. But again, this far in—400 some-odd episodes in last I checked recorded—though I don't know what episode this will be when it airs—I really get the distinct impression that I am going to learn as I go and, you know, you can't change that this far in anymore.Jon: I am actually rounding so I'm not as far as you are with the episodes, but I'm happy to say that I did cross number 76—actually 77; I recorded yesterday, so it's pretty good. And 78 tomorrow, so I am very busy with all the episodes and I love it. I love everybody reaching out and enjoying the conversations that I have. And just the naturalness and the organicness of the podcast. It really puts people at ease and comfortable to start sharing more and more of their stories and what they want to talk about.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time and speak with me today. Thanks. It's always a pleasure to talk with you and I look forward to seeing what you wind up building next.Jon: Thanks, Corey. I really appreciate you having me on. This is very entertaining, informative. I had a lot of fun just having a conversation with you. Thanks for having me on, man.Corey: Always a pleasure. Jon Myer, podcaster extraordinaire and content producer slash creator. The best folks really have no idea what to refer to themselves and I am no exception, so I made up my own job title. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment telling me that I'm completely wrong and that you are a very interesting person. And then tell me what company you wrote a check to once upon a time.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 197. Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberley Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go. Welcome back, you guys. So grateful to have this precious time with you. Thank you so much for coming and spending your very, very precious time with me. As we do this together, it's exciting, we're almost at 200 episodes. You guys, I cannot believe it. I am pretty, pretty proud of that, I'm not going to lie. Today's episode is with the amazing Jon Hershfield. He's been on the show multiple times and I have been really reflecting and thinking about how important it is for us to practice response prevention and how that is so, so important for everybody who has any type of anxiety, whether that be an anxiety disorder like OCD, social anxiety, specific phobia, generalized anxiety. Even for myself, I've been reflecting on any time I'm responding to fear and responding to discomfort. It's just a topic that I want to continue to address because I think from you guys, I just continue to see how much it's a struggle for you. As I thought about continuing education on tools you can use, I thought, who else can I have none other, but Jon Hershfield to talk about using mindfulness to manage compulsions. Now we talk about compulsions like mental compulsions and rumination. We talk about reassurance-seeking, avoidance, any kind of physical compulsion. We also talk about how to practice mindfulness so that it doesn't become a compulsion. And so I'm just so grateful to have John give us his very valuable time and to talk with you guys about these amazing concepts. I'm not going to spend too much more time doing the introduction. You guys know how amazing Jon Hershfield is. He has some amazing books. He has The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD, and he has Everyday Mindfulness that he co-authored with Shala Nicely, and The Teen OCD Workbook, and Harm OCD book. He's just written amazing books. So please do go out and support him. He does share all that information at the end of the show, and I can't wait for you guys to listen. In the meantime, please do go and leave a review. It helps us to reach more people. I'm going to be quiet now and let you listen to Jon's wisdom. Have a wonderful day. ----- Kimberley: All right, welcome. I am so happy to have the amazing Jon Hershfield with us again today. Jon: Thanks for having me. You make me sound like Spiderman of the OCD world. Kimberley: You are the Spiderman of the OCD world. I love it. Jon: What does that mean? Kimberley: Yeah, it's true. Well, that's a good thing. I know my son is probably jumping up and down at the idea of me meeting the Spiderman of something. Thank you for coming on. I really wanted to invite you on, of course, because I love the work that you're doing regarding mindfulness in OCD. I really wanted to talk about how we can use mindfulness, particularly to address compulsion, because a big part of Exposure and Response Prevention is the response prevention piece. I would really love to pick your mind on how you implement mindfulness as a part of that and also address some of the misunderstandings that happen regarding mindfulness. So, let me first ask you, just for those who don't know or new to the show, how would you give a definition? How would you explain mindfulness, particularly in the respect of treatment? Jon: It's interesting because we all make this same grammatical error. I do it too. We say we use mindfulness as if mindfulness was an act or an action or a thing that you use as opposed to a perspective that you take. So I'm thinking about what mindfulness means. Usually, the definition we hear is “Paying attention to the present moment as it is without judgment and without the desire to change it.” And that's a great definition. It's escaping me at the moment who actually coined that exact language, but I think it applies to most mindfulness concepts. But I don't like that it starts with the word “paying” because it still implies that you're doing something. I think mindfulness is actually the perspective that you have when you're paying attention to the present moment. If you want to play around with the words, it's really noticing the fullness of the mind – mindfulness, right? It's a position that you take as opposed to a thing that you do. Right now, I'm sitting here in my desk chair. I'm aware of the sensation of my body in the chair, hearing my voice in the headphones and I have coffee and tasting that coffee. These are all things that I'm noticing and I'm being mindful of. The other part of mindfulness that I think is important to understand is that, in a state of mindfulness, you're best able to observe the difference between an experience – I just listed for you a bunch of experiences – and a story. A story is a narrative. It's the meaning and the webs that we weave around those experiences. So it's me thinking I'd had too much coffee today, right? That's a story about the taste of coffee in my mouth right now and its significance, but they're two separate things. When we're treating something like OCD, which is very much about being pulled away by your mind into these narratives, these fear-based narratives – to be able to drop out of the narrative and into the experience would be to take a mindful perspective, or in colloquial terms “to use mindfulness.” But I think a lot of times when we say “using mindfulness,” we associate that with stopping what we're doing and focusing on the breath, or pulling out an app and doing a meditation, or trying to execute change in our environment by being mindful. When in fact, mindfulness is very much the opposite of that. It's not about executing change. It's actually about stepping back and seeing the way things really are. Kimberley: Right. I love this. So would you say in this perspective that mindfulness is not adding something on, it's just dropping down into what was already there? Jon: Yes. I would agree with that. Kimberley: I like that. So how might we use this, particularly in terms of managing anxiety or uncertainty or any other discomfort? Can you give me a walk-through of what that might sound like or look like for somebody who is practicing mindfulness? Jon: Well, one of the things you might think about, when somebody feels triggered, something happens. You've touched something you think is contaminated or you've become aware of an unwanted, intrusive thought, a harming thought, or something like that. Then you have an experience in the brain and in the body that alerts you to the fact that you're under attack, that you're distressed, something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. What most people do is they immediately go into the story of, “This is bad. I'm triggered. I need to get away from this trigger. How do I make this feeling go away? Because it's unpleasant.” Of course, it's unpleasant because it's your brain's way of trying to help you jump into action to get away from the things that could harm you. So it's natural that we want to get rid of this feeling. And then we do these things called compulsions that reliably, in the short term, get rid of these feelings. If you know anything about OCD as you do, it's like you get stuck in that loop. The more you compulse, the more you really feel the responsibility towards your obsessions as they arise. In that space, between the trigger and the compulsion, there's an experience you're having. A person who has been practicing mindfulness or who is mindfully aware can show up to that experience in the same way they might show up to other experiences, again, without having to make it go away. So you render the compulsion less important because you're willing to be in the presence of that triggering experience. If you were to take this to the mat and think about, “Well, what happens when you're meditating and you get an itch?” what is the instruction? It's not, “Well, just scratch it so you can be more comfortable.” It's usually, “Okay, well, notice what itching is like. Notice what it's like to be sitting, which is what you're doing, and then have your attention pulled away from the sitting to the sensation of itching, to be able to say, ‘Oh, that's itching.'” Now at some point, we all break and we start scratching ourselves all over it because it's too much, but that's fine. But that's not the first instruction. The first instruction is simply notice itching. And then if you're capable of letting go of that and going back to what you were doing before you got distracted by the itch, you'd go back to your breath or whatever the anchor of your meditation might've been. It's the same thing in real life. You're minding your own business. You're trying to read a book and then you have an intrusive thought that something terrible is going to happen. And then you notice that experience of this mental itching and you're, “Okay, that's happening.” And then you have a choice. You can drop down out of that back into your book, or you can dwell on it, ruminate on it, try to figure it out, try to figure out a way to make it go away, and then give yourself permission to go back to your book. Kimberley: So, we call it in my practice, my staff have called it “itch surfing.” Jon: Itch surfing. Yeah. Kimberley: I always laugh when I say “itch surfing.” So, let's say you have the presence of a thought that's really concerning, right? It's triggering. And you're trying to be mindful, but you're also not trying to step across the line to where you are ruminating or being compulsive related to that. How might someone differentiate between the two? Jon: So there's a couple of things to consider here. One is that a lot of people will say, mindfulness is about watching your thoughts come and go. There's a good reason why we use that metaphor, that idea of sitting at the bank of the stream and watching the leaves go by. But it's not really accurate in the sense that it's more about just noticing thoughts coming and going. Watching thoughts coming and going implies that you're supposed to sit there and stare at them and give them special attention. You're supposed to remember, right? It's a perspective. It's not an act. You're supposed to remember like, “Oh yeah, it was a thought coming and going. Okay, that's cool.” And then let go of it. Ruminating is when you're digging up that thought for the purpose of trying to figure it out to digest it. You're trying to act on the thought and get certainty about it. It's a very active thing you're doing when you're ruminating. To be mindful would really be the opposite of that. It would be to notice that you're ruminating and stop. Because the whole point, if you're being mindful, it's not that you're executing change on your environment, but you're simply noticing what's coming up. So it was really impossible to be mindful and ruminate at the same time because that would be like being mindful while trying to figure out some problem. So the instruction would be to notice that urge to ruminate, to notice what's coming up for you in your body, that experience of, “I really want to figure this out,” and then to allow that experience to be there, and again, drop back down into your anchor. In real life, it's whatever you were doing before you got distracted. In meditation, it's whatever your anchor is – the breath, the feeling of your body in the seat. Kimberley: So it'd be like using the metaphor of, if you're sitting at the edge of the stream and you're just watching the leaves come and go, that would be mindfulness. But ruminating or being hyper-aware would be like watching the leaf after it's way, way, way, way down the river, but you're still giving that attention and missing what's right in front of you? Jon: Yeah. It's easy to make that mistake because you could feel like you're being mindful. You could say like, “Well, I'm just watching this leaf and seeing how far it goes.” But in fact, when you're doing that, you're missing everything that's happening in the present moment, all those other leaves that are going by. A lot of times, people think of themselves as being very negative because they get distracted by negative thoughts, and the thought comes down the stream and they follow it. And while they're falling, those negative thoughts, all sorts of other nice things are happening – the smell of their breakfast or the warmth of the sun or whatever it might be. But they're not noticing that stuff because they're immersed in tracking that negative experience that they had. They think of their lives as being negative instead of thinking of their lives as just being whatever it happens to be in any given moment. Kimberley: Right. Talk about, if you will, hyper-awareness, because I think sometimes people think they're being mindful, and I think it's going to be very similar maybe in your answer, but I just want to be really clear for people who I've heard struggle with. They're trying to be mindful, but it becomes hyper-awareness. Do you have any thoughts on that? Jon: A lot of this, I think, comes down again to language. Most of us are trained to say things like “Sit with uncertainty,” which sounds like a good idea, but the implication for some is that you're literally sitting and there's literally uncertainty in front of you. It's like sitting on your head and you're immersed in it and you're dwelling on it. So it gets translated as “Dwell on uncertainty,” and feel bad as long as you can feel bad. Actually, I interviewed Jon Abramowitz who some of you may know in a lecture series here at Sheppard Pratt not too long ago. He said he likes to say, “Act with uncertainty instead.” I really like that because to me, that is still mindfulness. You're doing something, you notice you became distracted, cool. That's what that's like. Now I'm going to go back to what I was doing before I got distracted. I'm going to act with the uncertainty instead of sitting, letting the uncertainty sit on my head. I think it's such an important distinction because to be mindful of your thought process is to be aware of it. But it's not the same thing as to be trying to figure it out or be certain about it. That would be the opposite of mindfulness. And so the whole instruction, if you've had a lot of experience meditating, it might sound something like you wander away from your anchor and you start trying to figure out what's wrong with your life. And then you go, “Oh yeah, thinking.” And then you go back to your anchor. No meditation teacher is going to tell you like, “Well, just notice that you're trying to figure it out and keep trying to figure it out and try to get to some sort of outcome.” That really would go against the larger project. Kimberley: Yeah. I mean, for me, if I were to explain it, if I were out and about, and let's say another emotion showed up, like shame or guilt or something, my practice is just to go, “Oh, hi, Shame.” I think actually in the last episode, you were here talking about teens and you were like, “That's cool, bruh,” or whatever it was, but that's observing it and allowing it to be there. But then there's a redirect to the present. Would you agree that's a method that you use? I mean, again, we're saying it's not a doing, but talk to me about whether that's something that you would apply to. Jon: I would absolutely apply that. I mean, at the end of the day, we're coming up with fancier and fancier ways of politely and compassionately saying, “Let it go.” We might have all the different ways of saying “It's okay to let it go,” where we understand that it's very painful to have these experiences and that makes it difficult to let it go. We don't mean let it go, like, “Oh, you're being silly.” I mean literally, it arrived and you allowed that, and now it's leaving and you can allow that to let it go. To become aware that you have an urge to ruminate or an urge to do some other compulsion and to let that urge be a thing, don't sit there and stare at the urge and wait for it to go away. just be like, “Oh, that's happening.” Just like shame arises or guilt arises. And then just gently note it and allow it to be, and you don't have to do anything. It's really a beautiful thing. The shame and the guilt and the urge to ruminate and the urge to wash, it'll go away in its own time. You don't have to be actively involved in it. Kimberley: Right. It's like mindfulness underneath there. A major component is non-attachment, to not be attached to it or the story we tell about it or what it means and all the things. Jon: I mean, if you look at that and the concept of diffusion, they have specific skills for trying to make that happen. I think people can argue over like, “Well, what are the mechanics of building those skills? And could there be some compulsivity involved in that?” I mean, I think there's some people that certainly could. If you're going around saying, “It's just the thought, it's just the thought, it's just the thought,” that's not exactly what we're getting at when we talk about diffusion. But the end game is diffusion, it's being able to say, “I'm having a thought that...” What we want is to be able to do that without having to say it, without having to remind ourselves. But instead, simply have the experience that the thought arises much the same way the credits in a movie arise on a screen. Okay, yeah, that is the thought. And then you get to decide, “Do I want to engage with this or let it go?” If it's an obsessive thought that you've been grappling with, that you've decided is your OCD because you keep trying to get certainty about it, well then the instruction is going to be to drop it, not to play with it. Kimberley: Right. Yeah. I think that this was a lesson for me early in my mindfulness game. Mindfulness is not just that heady, heady meaning like only a cognitive skill. It's like you talk about dropping down, and it's a behavioral skill as well. It's not just sitting still and thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking your way out of discomfort. It's also a doing. It's a body thing as well, instead of it just being heady. I think that's where we get into trouble, right? We start to try to think our way out of problems or our way out of discomfort. Jon: Look at checking OCD, for example, like OCD where there's a lot of checking compulsions. What happens is there's this experience of not being complete, something missing or something being lost. And rather than own that experience and be able to say, “That's something that just came up for me and I'm willing to allow that,” the instinct is to get rid of that experience by engaging in the checking compulsion. So, mindfulness plays an important role in being able to say, “I'm aware of this urge to check, and that's fine. I have all kinds of urges throughout the day. I don't have to give in to this urge.” You don't have to do anything about it. Like you were saying, that's an experience you have in the body, like a sense that the body is craving a change and your willingness to allow that craving. Again, not to sit there and stare at it and wait for it to go away, but just simply just know that it is there and then go onto the next thing. Kimberley: Right. I think that this is true in so many compulsions. Would you use the same skill? Would you use the same concepts regarding reassurance-seeking compulsions? Jon: Yeah. Well, reassurance-seeking is really just another form of checking, isn't it? It's like you have a sense that you know something, just like you have a sense that your door is locked when you go back to make sure. In the case of reassurance-seeking, you're going to a person or the internet to try to make sure. But again, it's that experience of dis-ease, right? Not feeling ease with your experience and wanting to change. Instead of resisting that by doing compulsions, you're saying, “I'll allow it.” I've been using this coping skill with the client. I might have mentioned that they prefer “allow” rather than “accept” because accept felt, I don't know, it felt different to them. We can use whatever language you want, but I liked it. I've noticed that as a coping statement. If something comes up, like, “I want to change it,” and they're like, “Nope, I'll allow it.” And then now you're free. Kimberley: Open the gates to it. Jon: Yeah. Kimberley: Right. I like that a lot. The same goes for avoidance, right? Do you want to share how you might drop into mindfulness when it comes to avoiding, whether you're about to avoid or you're already in avoidance? What would your thoughts be there? Jon: Well, it's like observing your inner magnet, right? Something is pulling you in a direction. It might be pulling you away from something or pulling you towards it. And again, what does that feel like for you? What does that experience in the body? And rather than telling yourself “Accept it, accept it, I got to accept it, and push, push, push, push, push,” can you just notice where the resistance is? Can you let go of that, that part of you that's resisting? you want to go to this party, but it's overstimulating and you might say something embarrassing and there's something there that might be triggering for you or something like that. But you want to go. As you're approaching it, do you notice that resistance? Do you notice that push-pull in your body? And again, can you allow it? Can you say, “Worth it, investment return, worth it.” Very quickly, not spending a lot of time on it. Again, I think cognitive therapy gets a bad rap a little bit in the OCD world because it can so easily turn into mental rituals, trying to assess the probabilities and things like that. But just a pinch, like a pinch of salt, a pinch of cognitive therapy where you're able to say, “Come on now, this is a black and white thinking. I can handle this.” If you're allowed to do that. Kimberley: It's funny that you say that because I was actually just about to ask you, like, go back to your story. Remember at the beginning, you were talking about the stories we tell ourselves. And I think in avoidance, there are so many stories that take us away from mindfulness. So I was actually going to ask you. Do you want to share how you would maybe implement a cognitive skill there? Jon: So, if you're being mindful, it means that you're aware that you're thinking. And if you can be aware that you're thinking, you can also be aware of the tone of thinking. This is especially useful if you're trying to quickly assess. Are you ruminating? Are you engaged in mental rehearsal? Are you thought-neutralizing? What is the mental behavior? If you're noticing the way that you're thinking and that tone, you might be able to pick up historically if that tone has been helpful or not, or if it usually ends in you feeling like you have to do compulsions. Take catastrophizing, for example. You're saying, “Something in the future is definitely going to go badly and I'm not going to be able to handle it.” Now, if you're aware and you're mindful, you know you're thinking, and then you know that that's what you're thinking, and you know that that's catastrophizing, you can simply say, “Yeah, that's catastrophizing. I don't need to do that right now.” Very simple. “I can't predict the future.” You don't have to go into “Everything will be fine,” or “The probability is that this is going to go my way.” Again, we want to spend as little time there as possible because we don't want to get wrapped up in arguing with the OCD, but to just call it out and say like, “I can't predict the future. I'm going to just go with this and see what happens.” And then when you make that choice, notice what that feels like. Can you allow that or not? And if you can't, that's okay. You can go find something else that you can allow. Kimberley: Right. I will always remember many, many years ago, probably even when we worked together, a client of mine, and they gave me permission to tell this story, but I won't, of course, disclose any information. But they always said they can feel the shift in their body. And that was them being mindful. They said as if they were holding onto the sides of their chair. So even though they weren't sitting in a chair, they could feel this shift in their body of clenching. You can't see me on the video. You can see me on the video, but listeners can't. But just this wringing of the hands or clinging of the hands, and that her being able to just identify that slight shift in her body was enough to be able to shift out of that avoidance or resistance. I think just being aware and mindful of that, I think, is a big piece of the pie. Jon: So, it's knowing the quality and the tone and the texture of your internal experience. That's essential for being able to pick out and resist mental compulsions. Ruminating is not just thinking about something because you like to think about it. Ruminating is very much like, there's a puzzle and you've put all the pieces together but one, and now you can't find that one piece that it's somewhere. Maybe it's on the floor, it's under your desk. You know what that feeling is like. It's so intense. And that mental quality is what's going on with the person who's ruminating. And that's what they have to let go of, or be able to experience to let go of the ruminating. If you can't truly appreciate the tone and texture of your mind that “Sometimes when I'm thinking this way, it feels like this, sometimes when I'm thinking this way, it feels like that,” it's just very difficult to trust yourself enough to call out the mental compulsion as they happen. Kimberley: Yeah. I love this so much. I think it's so important that we do address it. So, in all, I know there has-- we have addressed this, but I want to make sure we're really clear. Do you believe that someone can mindfully ruminate? Jon: I think it's an oxymoron because to be mindful is to remember that everything going on inside is an object of attention, and to ruminate is to really engage in a changed behavior. So it's really the opposite of mindfulness. There are types of meditations like traditional meditation. You have an anchor. You notice when you're not paying attention to the anchor, you return your attention. Then there's other types of meditations that might involve free-floating, like free-associating. Notice that this thought then connected to that thought, then connected to that thought. That is a kind of meditation. And you could argue that there's a kind of mindful awareness of where things are going when you're doing that. I still wouldn't call that ruminating though, because ruminating is done with purpose. It's done with a specific intention. It's not just watching where your thoughts land. Now, if you have OCD and you're learning to meditate, I certainly wouldn't recommend you do the type of meditation where you just watch your thoughts bounce around each other. But if you're a more experienced meditator and you want to do that free-associating of watching each thought arise and fall and rise and fall and connect to other thoughts and feelings, that can be fun. But it's not ruminating. To ruminate would be to intentionally try to figure out or try to get certain about your obsessive content. And I don't think that there's any mindful way to do that because it is literally the antithesis of mindfulness, in my opinion. Kimberley: Right. No, and that's how I was trained on it as well. I think the thing that I often will say to clients is, anything can become compulsive. Treatment can become compulsive. If you were to technically look at the term, engaging in compulsive treatment isn't actual treatment because it's going in the direction of doing compulsions, which is not the technical term for treatment. Jon: It's tricky with exposures. For example, I encounter people all the time who are doing checking compulsions but calling them exposures. “I have a fear of something. So I'm going to go over and pretend to do that thing and expose myself to that fear by being in this scary situation. And then it's going to go away and then I'll know that I'm not going to do that thing.” Well, that wasn't an exposure. It might've been hard, but it really wasn't ERP. I usually tell people not to do ERP when they want to. That's usually suspicious of that. And also to consider what the point of it is. Like, if your OCD is getting between you and some valued behavior, that's a good reason to go do that ERP. But if it's not, and it just exists in your head, you don't have to go ahead and be ready to go find any ERP to do. You're allowed to just live your life. That's allowed. Kimberley: Right. Jon: Yeah. I think that the other thing that happens with rumination that I think is very confusing and hard for people to appreciate is that, though, I wouldn't say you can mindfully ruminate. You can certainly be lost in thought and you can certainly ruminate without full awareness of what you're doing, because a lot of it is habit, right? Rumination, some compulsions, they can become habitual, but most of them are pretty easy to tease apart from habits. But mental behavior is a little bit trickier, I think. In the same way that a person who's-- let's say they have difficulty with biting their nails, and they always bite their nails when in front of the computer. The computer becomes the cue to bite their nails. The hands go up to their face. They start chewing on their nails. They're not necessarily thinking, “Oh, I'm going to bite my nails now.” It's just happening. And then they might become aware of it. And if they're working on it, then they might use a habit blocker or some other strategy that they might remember to be mindful of the urge to bite it and come up with another strategy. The same thing happens in the mind where if you're someone who's used to engaging in compulsive rumination in different contexts of your life, there are going to be things that actually cue you to do it without you paying attention. You might not notice that, but it's like, “Oh, every time I'm in this chair, I start to ruminate.” The goal here in terms of improving your mental health situation would be to take ownership of the moment that you become aware of what you're doing. Not to beat yourself up for ruminating, because again, your mind was like, “Oh, are we sitting in that chair? Okay, sure. Let's bring up that topic and start reviewing it.” And you can't take responsibility for something you can't control. You might argue, “Okay, well, that's not really rumination because you're not the one trying to control it,” but it has all the same words. You're just lost in this thought of like, “Well, I know this thought must not be true because of this and that, plus my therapist said this and I read in a book, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You don't know that you've left the building. You still think you're sitting in the chair. But then, boom, you become aware. You suddenly remember, “Wait a minute, I'm a guy sitting in a chair, having a thought, and wait, I'm trying to figure out if my obsessions are true. Nope. Not going to do that. That's rumination. Okay, good. Where was I?” Let it go. But I think people can get very self-critical, really hard on themselves, and say, “I can't stop thinking, I can't stop ruminating.” In part, some of that is then taking responsibility for something that's-- it's just habit. It's just the brain has been trained to just start revving up the engine. That's all right. You'll catch it earlier and earlier and earlier if you practice. Kimberley: Right. Okay. Is there anything else that you feel we haven't covered in this area? I mean, of course, we haven't covered everything, but is there anything that you really want to drive home here in this conversation? Jon: Well, I guess one thing that's been on my mind is, we talk a lot about how thoughts aren't the problem, right? If you're being mindful, thought as a thought is a thought. And if you have mastery over your OCD, whatever, a thought about what day it is or a thought about hurting your baby, they're just thoughts. It's no big deal. And to some extent, that's true. We don't treat OCD by treating what thoughts people have. We address how they're relating to those thoughts and what behaviors they're choosing in response to that experience. But in the interest of remembering self-compassion too, I think it's important to recognize that it may also be the case that people with OCD are more predisposed to the average person to receive certain types of thoughts in a certain way. So even though those thoughts are normal events, it is normal for you to have thoughts about all of the potentials in human existence, all of the different things. We can kill and have sex with all of these things. It's totally normal to have thoughts about them. But it might also be that when you have that thought, it hits you in a way that immediately generates an urge or a moral responsibility to address it. And yes, mindfulness can help because it can help. You both recognize the arising of the thought as an object of consciousness and the arising of that desire to do something about it as an object of consciousness. But it's also worth noting that it's just hard to have OCD sometimes. And every once in a while, you're just going to get sucker-punched by it. And that's not because you've done something wrong, it's because your brain is conditioned or wired to receive some thoughts in that way. And that can be something that you develop mastery over. But I think when we take all of the emphasis on behavior and none of the emphasis on perspective or predisposition, some people feel like they're not being heard. Kimberley: Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I think that that's been largely the feedback I have gotten as well. If people are struggling and they don't want to struggle, and they're trying to navigate this thing, that feels like an absolutely crazy puzzle that, like you said, they don't even have all the pieces. They don't even have half the pieces yet. So I totally really loved that you said that. I love the idea of compassionate responsibility, which is, we can take responsibility for our experience with the absence of self-criticism. I think we sometimes think that owning this and experiencing this has to mean you have to beat yourself up and that it has to be like “You should've done better” kind of thing. But I do not like that. Jon: Well, you've recently written a book on the subject, and I could go on and on about self-compassion. We could do a whole other episode on it. But I do want to end on this note, which is, a lot of what mindfulness means is simply being honest, and we often lie to ourselves about our experiences. We say, “I should have known better,” but when you look at it, there's no way to have known better, that everything you've done is preceded by a thought or an urge or an emotion and we can track this back very, very far. I'm not making the case for no free will or not taking responsibility for anything. I'm just saying self-criticism is inherently dishonest. I say, “I'm a bad person.” That's a story. That's not an objective fact. I say, “I feel terrible.” That's an experience. That's honest and that's also mindful. Kimberley: Right. I love it. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful. I wanted to navigate all this, but I didn't want to do it on my own. So, thank you for coming on and helping me because you're just so good at explaining this stuff, and I really appreciate the way that you conceptualize this. So thank you. Jon: Well, I appreciate you inviting me. I always love hanging out. Kimberley: Yeah. Are there any projects or things you've got going on that you want to share with us? Jon: Well, right now, we're working really hard at The Center for OCD and Anxiety at Sheppard Pratt. We have some new team members and so we're helping a lot of people that way. Not too long ago, we launched the residential program, the OCD program at the retreat here at Sheppard. We've had a few people come in and out of that program. It's really exciting because it's just a different way of working, working as a team on one or two cases at a time and seeing them every day. That dynamic is new and exciting for us. And then book-wise, the OCD Workbook for Teens is out there. The second edition of Mindfulness Workbook for OCD is out there. I just started working on a new one that I'm co-writing with a friend on how to combine ERP and DBT. Kimberley: That's fantastic. Jon: Yeah. So, dealing with relentless thoughts and painful emotions. Kimberley: Nice. That would be so important. Jon: Yeah, I hope so. Kimberley: Oh, without a doubt, DBT is such an important piece of the work, particularly when those emotions are really strong. So that's super exciting. We'll make sure all of those links to that are in the podcast notes so people can check that. Thank you again. Jon: Thank you. ----- Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbtschool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.

In this premiere episode, author M.C. Beeler joins the podcast to discuss what it's like to dedicate nine years to a project, the benefits of self-publishing, and why it feels so good to have someone read your work. Timestamps and full transcript included below.Links:M.C. Beeler's Website: www.margaretcbeeler.com M.C. Beeler's Instagram: @margaretcbeelerSacred: Eslura's Calling: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Signed CopiesThe Heart of the Kella Short Story: AmazonFREE* copy of The Heart of the Kella via M.C. Beeler's Newsletter SubscriptionOther works mentioned:The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: Amazon | Barnes & NobleVisit www.causeofcraft.comFollow Jon on Instagram (@jontilton) and follow the show (@causeofcraft).Topics Covered with Timestamps:IntroWorking on a Project for 9 YearsGetting Encouragement on Early DraftsBen 10 InspriationScenes That Survived Every DraftThe Stories Within Us and The Hero's JourneyDiscovery WritingPlanting Seeds for the SequelsConnecting a Short Story to Your NovelChanneling Emotions into WritingChoosing Self-PublishingCollaborating with Other ArtistsDeciding to PublishThe Value in Having Someone Read Your BookWhere to find M.C. Beeler's BooksOutroAbout M.C. Beeler: Raised in northern Indiana, Beeler lives in a small city just close enough to be considered part of the Chicago-land area. A student at Marquette University, she is studying business with a concentration in Marketing and Entrepreneurship in hopes to use her skills to not only help herself, but other authors pursue their writing careers.On the off chance that she isn't stationed at her writing desk, she can be found glued to whatever Nintendo console she can get her hands on working to sustain her self-proclaimed title of “Pokémon Master.” You might also find her snuggling with her Goldendoodle or hitting the slopes during the winter season (aka her favorite season) either snowboarding or skiing.Episode transcript: (May contain some errors due to automated AI transcription):Jon: Welcome to Cause of Craft, I'm your host Jon Tilton. Why do we create? Where do our ideas come from? What does our craft say about us? These are the ideas we explore here on the show, and this week I'm joined by M.C. Beeler, author of Sacred to discuss what it's like to spend nine years on a project, the benefits of self publishing, and why it feels so good to have someone else read your work. Welcome Maggie.Maggie: Thank you so much for having me.Jon: Yeah, thanks for coming on. I'm super excited. You must be excited because you have a book out. Can you tell us a little bit about that?Maggie: Yeah, so I'm releasing my first book, next week, it's actually a week from today and today is the recording date so very exciting, i It doesn't feel real quite yet, but I'm sure in a week it will feel real to have a book out I've been, you know, working on it for nine years. So it's finally going to be out there and it's just very exciting.Jon: Yeah, nine years, that's not like a short amount of time that's a big chunk of your life there. What made you first decide you wanted to write. And this might be a different part of the answer but what kept you working on it for such a long time to see it through to this point.Maggie: Yeah, so to the question of what made me want to write. Well I feel like, obviously I have the cliche answer that I've always been into writing, but it's actually kind of a funny story so I was on vacation in Florida, and I was 12 So I was kind of, you know, an annoying like preteen whatever, and I was really bored and I kept nagging, my mom about like my boredom, and I wanted some sort of solution so she bought me a notebook and told me, she's like you're creative sit down and write and I was like okay, so I started writing, and at the time I was very into the show, Ben 10, I don't know if you know that show. It was a pretty popular show at the time, and I was very into it so my first draft was to be quite honest, of Ben 10 fan fiction. And it was just very entertaining to write that, and what kept me going over the years is, I think, I sort of realized as I was writing, you know, I shared bits and pieces of what I wrote with my parents and it was very exciting to share something, and hear feedback so I think that sort of feeling really carried me through it is the feeling of like getting some sort of confirmation that what you're doing is like good and worth it and like worthwhile. So I really wanted to like see this project through, though. Over the years, I mean it took me nine years to finish this thing so I wasn't consistently working on it, it was more of like in the back of my head like oh I have this, this book and I kind of want to publish it, but I don't really want to like work on it because it's like a lot of work and I would like, work on it for like a week at a time I like write for like a week straight in, and then I'd put it away for like a month, and then I'd like pull it back out and like, type a couple words and put it away for a while, and it was just this whole like cycle of like working on it and then not working on it and then at a certain point I think I was like, 18, or 17 I was like, I really want to publish this thing, and I want to take the steps to learn how to like publish a book, and I learned and I took the steps, and I finally finished and now it's gonna be out in a week. That answers the question I kind of go long winded there.Jon: No, it definitely does and I think you answered both parts of it really well in the same kind of the same answer did cover both things and so that's really interesting, you know, both how you got started led into why you kept going. I was, it struck me when you talked about how you put it away and came back to it. Did you find… Have you been able to look back on the times that you were taking it back out to work on it and like what was… was anything particular prompting that or was it more of, oh, I have some extra time I'm going to pull it back out I'm bored, I'm going to pull it back out, or it was it something else that drove you to come back to your manuscript?Maggie: You know, quite honestly, I don't know I want to say like, I mean, no to get all spiritual on ya, I don't know I feel like I just had something in the back of my head that was like you gotta like do this like this is like something that's really important and will be really important to you and it obviously is it's like kind of my life now, but I don't know I just like, I'd be like sitting around in my room I've like any kind of want to like just work on this thing because like I have it, and like I had shared it with a couple people at the time who told me that it was good and obviously they were lying because it was a first draft and it was really really bad, but their encouragement, kind of like in the back of my head, you know, push me to keep going. And I think that's really important for like people who are like just starting off in the creative industry to really have that like to, like, the confirmation that like what they're doing is worthwhile and like will be worthwhile and I think that's really what like carried me through it, the entire ways that like I had people who were like telling me that what I was doing is worthwhile and what I was doing was good, and that in the back of my head was like, Oh, I'd like me to keep doing this because it's good and it's worthwhile.Jon: I think anyone who spends that amount of time working on a project like there's something about them that I meant to do this and I think it's funny you mentioned about oh well my friends were lying because it was a first draft. You know, I wouldn't be so sure about that, you know, I've had terrible first drafts, I think, I think most first just are probably terrible for everyone, a lot of house season they are, but there's something that there's something there I think if you have if you're meant to be doing it, and you have some talent, even if you don't know how to bring that talent out of yourself yet. I think people can look at elements of it and you know it requires a friend or family member or someone who has a good eye for seeing incensing what's there behind kind of the mess, and know that there oh there's some gold in here that I see, even though it's not all uncovered yet so I think kind of I'm tempted to say the same thing or it's like oh, people are being disingenuous about what they say about some of my early writing. When I talked to them specifically about what they do like about it and I understand the elements that are working, and then I noticed oh they're not saying this, or oh I have a mentor who points this piece out of my writing that I can improve. Right, I think it's all that process of going into something chipping away at it until you really have a refined product that, that speaks to people.Maggie: Mm hmm. Yeah I mean I agree with that because it's definitely they definitely weren't like looking at like my grammar or my like dialogue or whatever they were more probably looking at like the imagination and the ability to like come up with something like that just like randomly not like, you know the actual story structure which is like, I think, really good like to just encourage people at a young age, you know, just not criticizing everything because it can like ruin. You know, if I had showed my parents or my mentor I did have like a little non official mentor but he was like a family friend that was in the publishing business, and I would talk to him a lot about writing. If I had showed them my draft, and they said, “this sucks,” I would probably never have continued, so it's just like really important how you go about talking to young creatives, I think personally.Jon: What is it about Ben 10, that spoke to you as a kid? I know the show but I haven't seen it.Maggie: Yeah, so I just like well I was actually like so obsessed with it at the time I was like just I download it all I like a Kindle Fire at that age, and I just like downloaded all the episodes onto my Kindle Fire and my mom thought that I was like reading but I was really just like watching back then. And, well, I took the idea of the two cousins, and their grandpa and a trailer going around on these like cool quests and like having all these magical powers which like you can kind of see it seeping into my novel now a little bit with like the the powers and stuff but not as much. I mean, my like I literally had it down to the T. Like it was a boy, main character and his like redheaded cousin. So it was like very much the same, but yeah over the years it changed a lot, obviously, and I think it's just like, how much I worked on it and how much I was changing as a person throughout those years because I mean 12 to 21 is like a really like big age range, and like you go through a lot of change then so I think my story was like growing and changing as I grew and changed, and yeah I just like really did a lot of like, I don't know like editing with the plot, and I really don't even know how to like, explain how it changed it just kind of happened like ruin. Look at parts and be like oh, this needs to be something else, and I think it also ties in to me learning what actual story structure is.Jon: So that's one of the questions I actually had listed down here to ask you was just, again, branching off that nine year aspect of this project for you. Like, I think about, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit older than you are, and my first book took about three years to do it on and off, and I think about how much I've changed in that time. And this is an age range that I've done this as a short amount of time, and it's an age range where you don't really change as much as you know the ages from 12 to 21 Right? So, it just blew my mind when you first told me that you had worked on this project for nine years, I was just like, okay, how many times is this rewritten? Are there any scenes, I guess, that's another question, maybe without giving anything too much away that you don't want to… but is there a scene that really stayed with the book the entire time that that you can point to as a scene that stayed in the draft the entire time?Maggie: So, yeah, um, about the drafts first. I literally I think I counted how many drafts I have I have about like 14 drafts of this novel, not including like the written ones, but throughout all those drafts. There is one scene that has stayed very consistent throughout them all. And I don't think it's much of a spoiler because it happens within like the first four chapters, and it's kind of in the blurb to I mean obviously she goes into another world. So there's a scene where she goes into a cave, and I won't really expand much, but she goes into a cave, and that has been in pretty much every draft not the first draft because the first draft was like literal bedtime fan fiction, just like going in an RV, whatever. But the cave thing has been consistent through it all and if you've read the book you'll know what I'm talking about. It also characters there's a couple of characters who have stayed consistent I have a character in my novel who's basically a giant talking lizard, and he's been in every single draft, thus far, and my side character Well she's not a side character really anymore. She was a side character, but my main character Reagan has been in every draft as well. And there's one more I believe I have a giant talking dog as well I'm kind of very into the talking animals, named long pause, who's also been in every draft so those three have survived the nine years of revision.Jon: It's really interesting when you mentioned those things because those elements are directly. I've been really into learning more about Karl Yune, and I've been reading here with 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell, and the lizard person, and the going into a cave like those are big, like within story elements or at least you know there's obviously debate about these sorts of things but those two elements are often things that come up in stories belly, or the cave, being kind of the belly of the whale element. So it's interesting that that's there and to be in the fourth chapter, that's exactly where it goes, you know, in the hero's journey so I'm guessing you're not reading Joseph Campbell when you're 12 years old. So I think it's, it's always so fascinating to me how much these things do actually show up in people's work, and there's just something about being human that like is leanness to this. And there's also the lizard people that's, that's something that shows up a lot in fiction, as well. And so it's interesting that those two things have stayed consistent. Yes, if their connection to those, but of course you know they're coming out and, and I think that's why it's so fascinating to me these sorts of things because how it shows up in different people's work is completely different and so you find out all these things about a person based on how they, how they approach these kind of deep seated, things that are somewhere in our brains and so it's just fascinating to me. I've always been interested in how that works and, and how it comes out in different people's stories.Maggie: Yeah, well I thought about that too because I heard, I saw a little post a while ago that pretty much everyone is writing, Almost the same story I mean because we use the hero's journey template and there's a ton of other like templates but it's really how you make that story your own like using all these because I mean, someone came up with dragons, a while ago and then everyone uses them now in their own way, in their own novel and it's just like the different ways that you use things that make it unique to like your story.Jon: Yeah, and it might not even be a literal Dragon, it might be yeah I mean that that resembles it or that even handset something like, I'm writing something now, and there's a dragon element to it but it's, it's not a dragon at all it's a person but the fact they're guarding something that's the dragon element, you know, the classic like the hobbit with the dragon guarding the gold. Yeah, there's still that element in it, and it's just, it's just so fascinating to me. So it's cool, it's cool to hear a little bit about how that's showing up in your writing.Maggie: Yeah.Jon: Those ideas are actually kind of what brought me to the idea of the show in general, because I started thinking well why am I writing like what I'm writing like why is this element in the story because I don't know if you have the same experience but a lot of times when I write, you know, there's, there's a lot of intentionality behind it but then all of a sudden something will come in, that just pops onto the page and pops into the scene and I just can't control or explain it, and it's, it's, I kind of have to just explore it, that's where I became kind of fascinated with these concepts, and trying to figure out why is it that that happens, but also why is the way that I approach it different than everyone else, you know, that sort of thing.Maggie: Yeah, as you mentioned something about the ideas just kind of popping into your head in that kind of brought a thought to my mind because I mean, when, when people ask me how I've come up with like these ideas I'm like, I don't know how to like explain it because it's kind of like they just appear in your mind, you know, It's like there's like another person in there, kind of like whispering these ideas and you're just like, okay, then you write them down, you're like I don't know how I got this.Jon: Yeah, it's, it's that and that's probably the closest analogy because it's definitely at least for me, it's not like a literal person whispering in my ear. Yeah. but it's like, but I can't explain it because it's like okay I'm locked in I'm writing. And then I have a plan for the scene, and then all of a sudden by the end of the scene it's like well that's not what I planned for and I'm a big planner I like to be a big planner in life. Yeah, I think actually writing has taught me that. Well, it's maybe not the most important thing to stick to your plan 100% And let let what happens happen and respond to it, like, going in with a plan is good, but responding to what's real, I think is, is kind of the key to it.Maggie: And I've seen, I've actually heard. I mean I've read a lot about other authors in their processes and I've read a bit about George RR Martin, the author of Game of Thrones he writes the book. And then he doesn't plan, like he writes one book, And it's, you know, he wouldn't have planned out the series before, and he'll go through the book and see kind of like what seeds he's sowed and see what those seeds can like grow into like work with what you have. But then, for me, I don't I haven't really outlined a story that I've written before I don't know like what you do but I you know I write as much as I can. And then I'll like look back at what I've read and kind of like George Martin, and kind of see like what I have and like where it can go from there. And then I'll like kind of like workout a little bit of an outline based off, like what I've gotten like what I can work with and stuff like that but I kind of like to just sit down and write as much as I can without planning because I feel like, you know, like you said, the more planning you do the more it's like restrictive and it's better to just kind of like, let yourself. Write and see what happens.Jon: That makes me want to ask you this question Stop me if I'm not allowed to ask about the sequels but, and that this is part of a trilogy is that right?Maggie: Yeah, so it's I'm, I mean, if it's two books it's two bucks if it's two bucks, three bucks, if it's four bucks, I don't want it to be more two bucks. Yeah right. I mean I don't I really don't want it to be more than three I feel like three is like a nice sweet spot for this series, but if I can wrap it up in the second one I would, or, you know, just as long as it needs to be I'm not really, I don't have like a restrictive like guideline or anything I just am going to write until the story is done, if that makes sense.Jon: So you right now have kind of a direction you want to start in with book two or is that going to be like I guess how much in for people who aren't writers, there's kind of this mentality of, are you a pantser or planner and I think most people are probably a mix of both. It sounds like that's kind of where we're both that.Maggie: Yeah.Jon: But I guess when you start the project I think there's, there are definitely like two camps of like I started with all my plans and then it got a little bit changed where I started with no plans and then had to outline later.Maggie: Yeah.Jon: What's your approach.Maggie: So, I have a couple chapters thought out for the book I have like a little folder of ideas that I've been stashing stuff in for the second book that you know, like I said, so I've put stuff in the first book that I'm like oh this is totally gonna like grow into this and the next book. So I'd have like those chapters thought out I guess you could say, and I do have the first chapter of the next book kind of renowned I like to do for my books, I like to start the book off like kind of in the villains perspective, almost. So if you've read my first book, it starts off with the villains, and I do like that because it kind of gives you like a little bit of an insight into like what's going to happen throughout the plot. So I do have that first chapter thought out for my next book and I'm really excited about it, but I haven't actually like gone in and like written it yet. I just have like, that's cool, you know, bullet points is like this is gonna happen this is gonna happen this character is gonna say this and this and this. So like I have it like planned out, but it's not like in it's, it's not written yet.Jon: Yeah, so you have like a goal you have your aim in mind. Yeah, you're, you're complete, you know how to approach it yet isn't there yet. Yeah right. I think that's cool that's a, that's a cool thing.Maggie: Mm hmm. And then also it's the same with the ending I know exactly how Book Two is going to end as well.Jon: And another cool thing about you is you have a short story, then yeah, there's two ways to get it, you can go on Amazon or Barnes and Noble any of these places and pay the 99 cents or if you subscribe to Maggie's email newsletter, you can get it for free and it's a fantastic short story. Thank you so it uses characters that are in the book in sacred Yeah, did you find that you had more to tell about those characters or did you kind of go hunting for something you could do a short story, like how did the short story come about.Maggie: Yeah, so I was a part of this Facebook group, and they were kind of nailing it in my head that I needed to have this like newsletter. I was like alright, I'll make this newsletter so I made the newsletter, and they're like, you should have a newsletter magnet to kind of like draw people into your newsletter and I was like okay, so I had that thought in the back of my head but I wasn't like actually planning to write one because I was like, I don't know like how, you know, whatever, how big, I'll make my newsletter or anything but now, currently I love my newsletter, but anyway, so I didn't really want to write the short story thing. And it was in the back of my head and then one night. This was after like I was going through a breakup, so I was kind of in like a moody like. And I was just laying in bed just thinking in this idea for the short story just like popped in my head like, out of nowhere, and I was like oh my god, and I just like started writing I pulled out my laptop because I couldn't sleep because I was just like so stressed out with all this stuff going on, and I just started writing it, and then I finished it the next day. So I was just like, awesome, really just like kind of like, I was almost like I was channeling my emotions from that like breakup into the writing, like, almost like kind of a therapy thing. And I found myself doing the same thing right now. But going through another breakup and writing another short story so maybe it's a, it's like a thing that's gonna keep happening.Jon: So you're the Taylor Swift of books right?Maggie: The Taylor Swift two books, literally, actually.Jon: So I don't relate on the breakup level, because when I started writing I've been married so I, didn't have that conflict in my life, but I do definitely relate to that idea of when you're going through something right and, and it's interesting because originally we had all these house renovations, and it really tore our lives up. And what I went into that time with was this idea of… “oh no, if I write now, it's gonna screw everything up, like, like my mind is not right right now yeah shouldn't right, and I ended up pointing out that that, that is exactly the wrong mindset because what ended up happening was I didn't have a way to process what I was going through, because I wasn't writing, and then it ended up doing double damage because what I did start writing, I use all of the kind of emotions and the conflict that I was going through I figured out how that related to my characters in my story and I just it just propelled me through the next draft of my novel, and it's so funny because I was like wait, I should have been doing this ahead of time because it would have benefited my book. First of all, and then second of all, once I got that all out like I had this new perspective on the situation. And I thought, well shoot… here I was like miserable about it for so long, and when really I had to do was just keep working. And I actually would have been able to process it better so it's it's cool that you know obviously there's things that are, You know, big or small things are awful and you don't want awful things to happen to you, but when you do when they inevitably do, there's definitely something that you can tap into to both overcome the problem but also benefit your writing so it's, I don't know it's maybe it's a kind of a weird way to look at life but, but I think it's a, I think it can be helpful for someone to to think about, Okay, I'm going through this, how can I turn the lemons into lemonade.Maggie: Yeah, definitely. I mean I've always seen, writing is kind of like a therapy type of thing because it really is like, you know you're really absorbed in your writing for that period of time where you are writing like when I sit down at my desk and I start to write, it's like, that's all I'm thinking about so it is like kind of a good little escape from everything that's going on and it's a good way to like, you know, get your emotions into something that's, you know, constructive.Jon: It's interesting you say that too because it is an escape, but it's almost like if, if, you know, people tell you how to handle certain situation right and you're like, they're like oh just don't think anything about it and just escape. And it's like, okay, that's an option but then that leads it to its own problems because you're not dealing with the problem, then you have the other side of it where it's like, okay, just focus on it internalize it, figure out what you know like, really, really think about it, and it's like, well then you're overthinking about it and you're probably doing some other damage to yourself, but writing, it's almost like both of those things happening simultaneously, bring you into this central point where it's like okay I am escaping the issue, but in the back of my mind I'm actually dealing directly with the issue, and I think that that's, that's such a, obviously, neither of us are mental health consultants, like that so we don't, we don't really know the science behind it but I really think there's something to the process of writing and maybe this translates to other disciplines to where you're escaping something but you're also dealing with it in this kind of act of creation.Maggie: Mm hmm. Yeah, I agree, definitely.Jon: So, you have self published Sacred. Did you go through any, any debate with yourself about whether to try out traditional publishing or dive right into self publishing like what all went behind that decision?Maggie: So originally, what I was like, just lucky like first considering publishing when I was like 16 or something like that it was, it was in like fresh, it was, I don't know what year of high school was like maybe like sophomore something year. I have the I considered both options, because I think it's best to, you know obviously consider both options first before you make a decision, so I really did a lot of research and do both industries at first, but the more I started learning about self publishing the more I realized that this was the option for me because I would, I wanted to have complete creative control over my project, you know I had a vision for what I wanted and I was going to make that vision a reality. I didn't want there to be any middleman making decisions for me I wanted to be at the forefront. And I've kind of always had this like sense of like, like this entrepreneurial spirit so I, it was a very exciting thing for me to take this project head on. And I mean, it's had its ups and downs of course you know, so publishing is quite stressful because you're the only one doing it in the success of your book really hinges on like what you do. But of course, success is different for everyone would depends on your definition but anyway, it definitely was the option for me because of the creative control, and the, you know, having my own project in my name in my hands and yeah, just like being able to do everything by myself. Which, I mean, for some people that might be a little daunting, you know, Having to do everything by yourself is definitely daunting but for me personally, which is why I say like, definitely research your options before you make a decision, you know, just because one person does something doesn't mean that it's like right for you. So, you know, of course, research the options before you make a decision because what works for someone might not work for you, and self publishing ended up working out very well for me.Jon: So you did a live stream the other day with your hardbacks coming in. The quality is really good, both on the product itself but in the design as well. You really thought through every element with your designer, and you guys did a great job. And not only that but inside the book you have illustrations. So, each is it each chapter or how many illustrations you have?Maggie: Yeah, every chapter has an illustration. And then there's the map as well.Jon: I mean, I might be making assumption, but you did not draw the illustrations, is that right?Maggie: No I hired out and illustrator.Jon: Okay, and so when you're working with that person. How do you communicate, kind of what you wanted and did it take long to get to a place where you're like, oh, that's, that's what I mean or like can you talk about that process?Maggie: Yeah, so I did. I wrote out little descriptions for every single header and I would be like, I included reference photos of what I want, made it as clear as possible so she knew what I wanted and she was pretty much spot on and in she did a great job with it. You know a couple of the headers are creatures that I've actually made up, so you know she did a really good job bringing those to life, and you know working with me I think it's all about finding the right person to work with, because you know there's tons of creators out there, and, of course, many of them are very talented, but you know it's all about finding the person who kind of like matches your vibe and sees your vision and knows like, you know, kind of understand you, it's a little bit of a mutual understanding between the creator and the you know the commissioner because obviously they get a little bit of creative control as well. But yeah, I sent descriptions of what I wanted. And she was, She was very spot on with all of them, I think, you know, I found a good artist and she did a really good job.Jon: And this is separate from the cover designer, right?Maggie: Yeah.Jon: So that's two different people and so I imagine it's kind of the same thing you think okay what do I want from the perspective of what someone sees when they pick up the book, and what do I want when they're experiencing the story.Maggie: Mm hmm. Yeah, it's actually I have a cover designer, a map like a cartographer, I guess is the official name, and then I have an interior illustrator, so I need different artists working with me on this project, though, for my cover, which is kind of funny, I actually am the character on the cover. So, I like took a photo of myself in that position, and then drew it out. So that's kind of like a weird little tidbit that people don't know.Jon: That's cool, as I did not know that about it.Maggie: Yeah, yeah.Jon: Cool, well the cover looks great, everything about it really looks great. And by the time this episode is out the book will be available so some of what we're talking about is like oh looking forward to release, but just, you know, being a new podcast we're recording a little bit ahead of time so when did you okay so you're writing when you're 12. And then you are changing this kind of semi Ben 10 fan fiction into something that's your own. I imagine that 12 or 13 or whatever the ages, you're not thinking, Oh, I'm going to self publish this one day, because self publishing is super new when you're that age, so it's probably not even on your radar. But I guess when does the switch flip for you thinking to… “you know what, I don't just write this I write this so other people can experience it.”Maggie: Yeah, when I first started writing and I, I had no intentions of publishing I was just writing for fun, and like seeing what happened. And so I you know I was talking with my I call my mentor, but he's not really a mentor, it's more of like a friend like a family friend that I was really close with. I was talking to him and he suggested he, he suggested that I look into publishing, and I was like, oh I don't know like I, at the time it was kind of like, oh publishing a book that's like, I can't like I can't do that like that's not something that's like even an option available whatever like publishing a book just was like, you know, because I feel like everyone when they're little is like, oh I want to publish a book, blah blah blah. And it's, it was like a weird like out of the reach kind of thing, but I considered it I was like, Oh, that'd be cool, like, if I could publish it. And then over the years he kept telling me I should look into it, and when I got to be like 1617 somewhere, somewhere around there. I really was like, I mean, what if I did like look into publishing because it's like, why not, Why not just like research publishing, because I've been working on this thing for so long and I wanted to kind of like, you know, do something with it. So I like, did the research and then I decided that I was going to take my big take a shot at it. And that was, at first I was interested in traditionally publishing so I was doing like research into agents and stuff like that, but then I discovered self publishing, and that really took that really took hold in my mind, and that's when I was like, oh, it's gonna be this I'm gonna self publish this book and it's gonna happen. And I started doing all that research and I got my cover design way early, so I was like alright I'm gonna finish this book, within the next month and I'll polish it. That was when I was like 17 So, obviously, that did not happen. It took me a lot longer than a month to finish. But, you know, with that, it's like, take however long you need, it doesn't need to, you know, doesn't matter if it takes you a month, or nine years to finish something it's, you know, that dedication to continue working on it is like really what matters but yeah I don't know, long winded answer to the question.Jon: Well it's funny because you mentioned you getting the cover done early, and you know I think that kind of speaks to, it almost sounds like you kind of had like, once you decided you were going to do it, you almost have like this fearlessness about like I like just gonna go ahead and do it like it wasn't, it doesn't sound like you had a lot of like, doubts creeping in. At that point did you or, and that was just a different sort of response or did you ever have that come into play later?Maggie: I feel like I've always had the confidence about it because it's been a passion project for me, I mean I've been working on it for nine years. So, you know, it was more. I want to publish this because it's been so important to my life for so long. I don't really care. You know how well it does I'm publishing this because this is my passion and I wanted the guy set my mind to it and this is kind of like a goal accomplishment for me. But of course you know I want the book to be successful because, obviously, anyone who puts something out wants it to be successful. But in the back of my mind I do, I'm just very happy with, you know, any sort of result, you know I put this book out, and it sells one copy and I'll be thrilled. I'll be excited about that but, you know, if I put it out and it's well received, that's also good, but for me it's just, it's been such a huge passion project, this is just something that I needed to do in my life, and having finally done is like, wow, it's like I've done this I can do anything you know. Yeah. The doubts, haven't really been like that big, because it's been a passion project, you know, The worst that can happen is it flops, and then I read another book, and whatever you know it's just, it's, it's like, I saved up all this money for this. You know I don't want to spend my money on anything else like this is like my like thing. I don't know it's like it's hard to like explain, because I don't know it's like, it's weird. It's such a passion, such a very important thing to me. So, but yeah, obviously I do want it to be successful. Because that'd be cool.Jon: Is there something about like the you know you mentioned if just one person reads it, or, and again we were talking about when you decided you wanted to publish it, what does it mean to you when you have a reader, and, you know, these ideas that you've had for nine years are developed this story for nine years, Like, I struggle to ask this question because I'm like if someone asked me this question I don't know how I be answered. I don't know it's like sometimes that's unfair, but, like, like I don't know if you've been able to identify and maybe that's why I want to ask it because I'm like trying to identify this in myself too like, like what is it about like having someone else read it, that is satisfying.Maggie: Yeah, that's I mean that's a good question. It's just, I think it really comes down to like the affirmation that like the confirmation that, you know what you're doing is worthwhile and like they you've created something that's like a value to someone else, and you know when I see someone reading it, or when I hear that someone really enjoyed the story I'm like, Okay, so like, that's awesome. Like I spent so much time on it and it was worth it was worthwhile and people are enjoying it and it's like giving them something to do in their free time, you know, helping them through something you know whatever like they're that your creative work is appreciated, and it's just, it's like, it's kind of deeper than that though I feel like, like when someone reads your book, it's like deep down and you you're like, you have this feeling, it's like, oh wow, like, that's awesome. I don't know how to explain the feeling, but like, you know, when I would get reviews for my short story and people would message me saying that they loved it or whatever that they cried or something like that. I was just like deep down like had this feeling I was like, that's awesome, like it's just such a it's such a weird thing to explain like like you said.Jon: Okay, I think, in what you're saying I think you're helping me understand it better to it which is why my guy asked out because I don't know there's something about like someone else reading it because what you can put in a novel is different than what you can just talk about like most people, I don't think can describe just the emotional journey, and the end what an author can contain into a novel, like if you had the same amount of words to not use a story, and say what you're trying to say. Yeah, it's not going to come off the same way. So, having part of yourself in a fictional story is almost this way of communicating to someone else, how you feel. And you know, to have someone else read it, you are then heard in a way that you can, can't be heard by just speaking to someone like, yeah, like me and you talking now like we can get into deep issues like we have and talk about all these things, but it's not the same as when, like, so I read an early draft of your novel and it's like, oh, like, like there's some, like there's elements here, where, you know, you go through it and then, oh, I've heard something that this person is communicating right and I think there's just this extra kind of, you know, magical. I don't know if there's a better word, but yeah, magical value to understanding someone through reading their work and so I wonder if there's a little bit of that element, and then kind of going off of that and going off of what you were saying, you know, when you see something, or when you read someone else's novel, and you go through this experience of, well how would a satisfying story and and really spoke to me you know I've really, I really connected with the story, like there's just something about that that's so powerful and so the ability to give that feeling to someone else I think yes, you know, it's almost like you know you mentioned this, this mentor of yours and I'm sure that it because I have someone in my, my life who has mentored me a lot. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times I think, Oh, why is this person spending so much time on me like it doesn't make any sense. And then I've explored kind of this idea too and I think about times that I've been able to mentor someone about something else or even writing now and it's like there's something about it where, like, helping someone to be able to give that gift of their story to someone like there's just something powerful there and yeah, again, it's like, it's almost like we have to talk around it because we can't, maybe that's sort of a story should actually be, we should have a story about what it's like to read a story and then understand it, but it's hard to explain. But I think we at least wrestled with it which is, which is good. We attempted the explanation.Maggie: Yeah, it's hard, I mean it's like, I feel like writing is such like a personal thing and then you like, share it with other people and they can interpret it in their own way based on like what they're going through and it's just, it's weird writing is, I mean writing is obviously very special and it's something that I think, you know we'll be around for ever, because it's like a way of telling something it's a way of like expressing your emotions, it's a way of expressing who you are, it's literally like an outlet, I feel like to, to who a person is and it's just such an important like thing and our winner world. And I just, you know, I love writing.Jon: Same here. I love writing too, and I think that's a great note to end on, Maggie, thank you so much for coming on the show it was a pleasure to have you.Maggie: I really enjoyed this conversation and I just want to thank you again for letting me come out here being your first guest.Jon: Can you let everyone know one more time where they can find your books?Maggie: Yes. So, this short story is available on Amazon for those of you who do not want to subscribe to the newsletter, but if you do subscribe to the newsletter. I promise I'm cool and will not spam your inbox, and then the story is called Sacred, Eslura's Calling and that will be available June 24, a week from recording, and that will be available on every platform that you can buy books, and as well as you can get signed copies on my website.Jon: Thanks for listening to this episode of Cause of Craft. For more information about Maggie's writing, head over to www.margaretcbeeler.com There you can also join her newsletter for your free copy of A Sacred Tale, The Heart of the Kella. I'll have links to her website and her Instagram in the show notes, and also at www.causeofcraft.com. Hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode, and follow at cause of craft on Instagram, to stay up to date on the latest news and clips. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider leaving a five star review on Apple podcasts, and if you have feedback, suggestions, or guest recommendations, send an email to Jon at causeofcraft.com. See you next week.*Not affiliated with Cause of Craft, offer may be limited time.

How can you prepare your businesses for operating in a future that has yet to be determined? Today, Jon explores the future of CRO. With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify are we nearing the end of incremental improvement from CRO? For help with your CRO visit: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT Ryan: All right, Jon, as a business owner and strategist, I'm constantly thinking about the future and how I can prepare my businesses, my teams, clients for operating in a future that has yet to be determined. For me, it's just kind of fun to think through. Recently, one of the things that's been on the top of my mind has been the future of CRO and how do we continue moving the needle to improve our sites, but doing that like five years in the future, what is that going to look like? With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify, are we nearing the end of incremental improvements in CRO? That's kind of the thought that's going through, and I guarantee you have some serious opinions on this that I have no idea about. So I'm excited to learn from you what you're looking for in the future. But it also came top of mind because of a recent Google announcement that they're going to start including site experience into their organic algorithm. And so let's just start with that. Based on what you've heard and what you know about Google, what do you expect this to look like when it rolls out? Jon: Well, I think that the biggest concern for brands and the biggest concern they should have is that if you haven't been optimizing your site's consumer experience, it's going to severely impact your rankings, and thus your organic traffic is going to go way down. Google was kind enough to tell us now, even though it's not going to roll out until 2021. So we're recording in mid 2020. So they have given you a six months heads up, which is very nice of them. They also have provided all the tools you need to be able to improve your site experience, including one of my favorites, Google Optimize, which is their A/B and multivariate testing tool set that they've released that's great. So they're not only just giving you the tool sets, but they're also giving you the guidance on the fact that they want you to have a really great consumer experience. Say when they go to Google and search, and then they end up on your site, that they have a great experience and that they love the search results that Google is producing. So that's what Google cares about right now, is they're saying, yes, everybody knows if I need an answer, I can go to Google. But a lot of those sites that rank first have made the experience so poor in an effort to get listed higher that they don't have a good experience on those search result pages. Ryan: How much in your opinion, and maybe you can assign a percentage, is the actual act of converting on a site the experience? Can you break that out into its own piece, you think? Jon: Well, without question, I think Google has been very upfront about this. Normally they'd never release a specific percentage that anything weighs into that algorithm, but they are saying that it's going to be one of the top factors. Ryan: Is the rate of conversion on a site? Jon: They can track conversion to some degree, but I think what they're looking at is how long are people staying on your site? How many pages are they looking at? Are they converting is definitely a factor in there, but are they bouncing right back to Google? And I think they're looking at a lot of other metrics too. They're looking at page speed. They have a whole bunch of algorithms and artificial intelligence, AI, that has gotten really, really good at telling things like, do you have a popup on your site where it, as content loads on the screen, that popup kind of moves around a little bit, and just because the page loads slowly and you have this bad user experience, and now people are trying to click buttons and the button keeps moving as the page loads. Ryan: I hate that. Jon: Exactly. That's the thing that Google does not want, that experience, what you just had, that emotional reaction. If you had clicked on the first item in a search engine result page, and you went to a site, and you had that reaction on that site, Google now knows that that's what's happening, based on their AI, because they can test for those type of experiences. And so really what they're advocating for here is the consumer experience on your site, the user experience. And they're asking you to make sure that you have a consumer friendly experience. And I think that's really what's going to matter. Now, the outcome of that is naturally going to be higher conversion rates. So I've always been a proponent with CRO that says the goal of the brand is to convert higher, almost always, right? The goal of the consumer is to have a better experience. Those are actually very much aligned, because if you have a better experience, you're going to convert more. And I think Google is recognizing that now, too. Ryan: You could take the stance of maybe some of the conspiracy theorists out there, that a higher converting website in the eCommerce space could hurt Google's revenue, since people don't have to go back to Google to keep researching. They're just going to find it, buy it, kind of like how I usually convert, versus my wife, who's all over the place in her conversion path. What would you say to those conspiracy theorists? Jon: Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's, you know, Google's pretty upfront how they make their money. It's what the ads on the search engine result pages for the vast majority of their revenue. So yeah, they want people to keep coming back to Google, but I can promise you that if I keep searching Google and I keep getting a search engine result as the first second, third, which are the only ones people are really clicking on for the vast majority of times, and the experience is crappy, I'm going to stop going to Google. So they must know, because they've factored this in as one of the top ranking items in their algorithm, they must know that this is causing a concern, and they're feeling a lot of pressure from tons of other search engines out there right now. I mean, you've probably heard of, what is it, DuckDuckGo. There's all of these other search engines that are way more privacy focused right now. Windows, any Windows laptop comes with Bing as the default search engine, Microsoft search or whatever they're calling it these days. So I think they're feeling that pressure of making sure that people have a great experience, so they continue to come back and search on Google. That's why they're making it such an important factor. Will it cost them some money? I don't know. I think they must've done that math, but I will tell you that I'm excited that this is new and that they're making a big stance for this, because it's needed. It's really needed. Ryan: Speaking of competitors to Google, Amazon controls over 50% of the online transactions in the world. And how much in the future do you think Amazon is going to impact the way we view a checkout or a conversion process? If we play it out, say, let's just say Amazon is going to continue increasing in dominance. You can't do much with their checkout. So are we going to be so conditioned as Amazon Prime members that anything that deviates from Amazon's checkout process is going to throw us for a loop, and we're not going to know what to do? Kind of like the idiocracy model, where we just get dumber, because it's so simple for us? Jon: Well, I think that's the internet. The evolution of the internet has been that way for years. And I think we did a prior episode where we talked all about how eventually what's going to happen, are we going to totally optimize ourselves out of optimization, right? You're going to have done so much optimization that every experience is going to be the same. And I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think, I mention this book all the time, it's called Don't Make Me Think. And the whole point of that is that as consumers get used to conventions, it makes it easier for them if you follow those conventions. It's so true today that people are used to Amazon checkout. They're used to the Shopify checkout. They're used to these platforms that have grown to be the monsters in this space. And if you really deviate from those best practices, then you are potentially creating a barrier. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't areas that can be optimized in those. There most certainly are. But at the same time, looking at Amazon as an example, in terms of how to convert better and not just on the checkout, I think Amazon does a lot of nice things. But you know what? It's akin to when a small footwear brand comes to work with The Good, and they say, "I really like what Nike is doing. I want to do what Nike does. Can you help me do that?" And I say, "Well, but you're not Nike. Think about this. Nike has hundreds of product lines across all these different sports. Their marketing is based on the celebrity of getting athletes to market for them. And you don't have the money to go out and get LeBron James to market your shoe. You are fighting a 10,000 pound gorilla here, trying to fight a gorilla fight when you're not a gorilla. So think about having the better consumer experience." Nike can get away with having a worse consumer experience because of how ubiquitous their brand is. It's the same thing with Amazon. I go to Amazon to buy something because I know they're going to probably have what I want. And it's a quick and easy way to just go there, type in what I'm looking for, get a handful of options, do some research, and buy something at a decent price point. And I know I can get it in a couple of days. But if I really want to find a particular item, I don't go to Amazon to buy that particular item. I'll go to the brand website to do that research, because I know in my research it's going to get way, way deeper, even though maybe the consumer experience isn't going to be as good. Maybe I won't get it in two days. However, I know that I'm going to have more content and I'm going to have a better research path on that brand site than I will on Amazon. Amazon is great for not going very deep, but going very wide. Looking at tons of different products, but not going very deep into the research on each of those individual products. And a brand site is different. It's going to help me go real deep on products, but not very wide on competitors. So I think they serve different purposes. And it depends on if I'm looking for a commodity, right? Like, I was looking at ethernet cables yesterday. I needed a 50 foot ethernet cable. I just ordered it off Amazon, because it doesn't matter. It's a commodity. I can get an ethernet cable anywhere. But I know I can get it in two days. I needed it quickly. In fact, they dropped it off the next day and it said, have it by next day. And I was like, perfect. That's what I need. So I didn't even look anywhere else at price. It was fine. It was like a $10, $15 cable. It's not going to break the bank to do that. If I saved two bucks going someplace else, it didn't matter to me. But I think that's where Amazon has its place. And I don't want people to get confused by thinking we have to meet Amazon's experience, because they're doing a lot of things that I would not recommend and do not test well. Their navigation is a mess, but it's like walking into one store, in a retail store, versus walking into your local mall that has hundreds of stores. And Amazon is trying to be that mall, when you're trying to just be the retailer. And you really need to take that approach a little differently. Ryan: Looking forward a couple of years, and maybe the physical checkout process on a site is pretty standard across a lot of things. I mean, there's Bolt right now. There's even Shopify checkout that's been very simplified. So CRO, I would assume over the last five to 10 years that you've been doing it, you've had to educate some people on just the basics of checkout. Like, why are you doing checkout this way? So if that goes away, it sounds like you're saying CRO becomes more of a brand experience on your side rather than, okay, you changed your checkout button from pink to purple, and then look at that [inaudible 00:12:29] type thing. Jon: Right. I mean, look, I think CRO has evolved over the past, we've been doing this 11 years now, but over the past five years, it's become something that most people know about. If you're on the eComm side of any reasonable size, you're looking at and doing some CRO. I think the biggest difference here is that you're right, that there are areas that are transactional that just need to be transactional. And then there's areas of a site that are going to have a better consumer experience, that are going to then reflect better on the brand. And I think that's what you mean by branded experience, where if I go to a site and I just have a poor experience, then I am at that point going to have a bad reflection of the brand. And I think that's exactly what Google is trying to prevent here, is saying that you need to have a good reflection of your brand so that people don't just equate that Google, where you started, gave you a bad experience, as well, by sending you someplace that has a bad experience. Ryan: Got it. Okay. So if you're looking five years into the future and making some crazy predictions or looking at, what are you preparing your agency, The Good, for in the CRO space? What are you maybe not doing now that you think you will be doing in CRO in five years? Jon: I think that what needs to be happening is a way to make this more accessible to brands of all sizes, first of all. I think CRO, just like most technologies and consulting and things of that sort, it's for the elite when it starts. You have to be able to afford it. It's a competitive advantage. And so you're looking at the top one percent is able to take advantage of it. Then it starts filtering down. And that's what we've seen over the past five, six years, has been really the first five years that we did CRO, it was only for massive brands. And then it started getting to the point where those mid market brands really knew it was something they needed to do, and it became more available, and the tool sets got more available. We went from having just Optimizely, which is a great platform, but it's $10,000 a month to use, just the platform, to having Visual Website Optimizer, which was a couple hundred dollars a month, to now we're at Google Optimize, which is just as good as VWO, and it's free from Google. We've kind of run that whole gamut, and each of those tools have their space, don't get me wrong, and they're good at individual items. But my point here is we've gone from $10,000 a month to free over a span of a few years, and I think we're going to see that democratization of CRO continue to happen. So what needs to happen is that it needs to have these methodologies, and the strategy behind them need to catch up with the tool sets and need to be accessible to brands of all sizes. And right now that's not the case. The only things that are out there are eLearning, where you as a small eComm owner, and you're wearing tons of hats, you don't have time to sit down and learn for 25 hours and watch videos and then figure out how the heck do I apply this to my site specifically, and pick and choose, and then still act on it, right? So you've invested all this time and you still haven't made any changes to your site. So there's some ways to fix that, and we're working on that at The Good, but really I think that democratization of CRO is where this needs to go. And I think in addition to that, I think we're really going to see tool sets continue to evolve, and I think AI is going to play an even bigger role. As you know, we've been proponents of that for years. We do AI eye tracking heat maps, which is our way of dipping our toe into that. And we've been tracking it for years, and looking and testing at those algorithms to the point where we wanted to make sure it was something that worked before we heavily invest in it. And we're ready to heavily invest in it and go all in. Being a data driven company, we're seeing a lot of artificial intelligence with big data sets really start to pay off and make this successful to brands of all sizes. Ryan: That's [inaudible 00:16:46]. I think that is going to be phenomenal, when these small companies that we know of that need the CRO services are able to get those at a point that makes sense for them financially and for the improvements that'll make. That'll be cool. Okay, here's a fun one. Besides the death of the email capture pop up that you're so advocating for and the death of Wheelio spin-to-win, do you see something that we all currently expect on an eCommerce site to not be a part of an eCommerce site in the next two or three years? Jon: Yeah. I think putting your credit card in is going to go away. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm fully in on the Apple ecosystem. And if other ecosystems catch up with this, I know Google has done a lot with this, with Google Pay, but Apple Pay, I will now, if I'm searching online to buy something, I will use Safari just so that on my phone or even on my laptop, I can just do Apple Pay and not have to go get my wallet. I don't want to have to memorize my credit card. I don't want to have to deal with any of that. And in fact, it's just like retail. If I have the option to use Apple Pay and not touch anything and not give somebody my credit card to swipe or even have to touch the screen to do it myself, I will do that. And I use Apple Pay every single time. I was even in a drive thru getting food the other day and I used Apple Pay, and it's just like that's my first question anymore. It's like, do you take Apple Pay, because I don't want to touch anything. And it's so convenient. So same thing online. Everyone expects to have to put in their credit card. I think we're going to see that go away. Shopify has taken a big leap in that direction, by making it, you can put in your phone number and then it will auto fill out your information. It'll send you a text and confirm, and then you can auto fill all your information in. I think there's a lot of things like that that are going to start happening, just as a way to make this process way easier. Ryan: Yeah. I'm excited for that. It's during this pandemic, where we're not going into an office or commuting, I found that I don't have my wallet on me. And so when I'm off somewhere else on our property and I want to transact, I don't want to go get my wallet. So if it already has my information, I'm more than likely to go to that site, and I may pay an extra dollar. But for me, it's like, nah, it would have cost me 10 minutes of walking somewhere on my big property. So I'll pay the premium to use, so that it's already stored. Jon: That's exactly it. Ryan: I didn't even think about that, but that's very true. I may be lazy sometimes. Okay. Jon: Sometimes. We'll leave it at that. Ryan: Sometimes. Yes, sometimes. Is there something out there that you see that if just something on an eCommerce site that if a brand adopted it now, they would have a pretty significant advantage over competitors in the next couple of years, if they really took a leap of faith? Outside of using our services, because we're so amazing, what would that look like, do you think, if you had to pick one thing? It's like, yeah, most people aren't using this yet, but I think if they do, they're going to have a big advantage in a couple of years. Jon: I think that it's not just one tool, and I don't even want to go to a hundred percent to tools, because I think that's the first spot that every eComm owner looks to, is like what's the new greatest and hottest tool that I can deploy on my site and be ahead of everybody else on that? A tool is only going to do one of two things. It's either going to help you do something better, or it's going to expose a weakness. And what we see is a lot of brands jumping into tools. And what I would like to see these brands doing is using tools like Klaviyo, for instance, to do email followups post purchase. We have a whole episode, go back and look for post purchase emails and what people should do for post purchase optimization. I talk about all the different email flows that you should be thinking about post purchase, and there's so many things like that that brands right now just aren't doing. And I'm not a big proponent of just having a best practice checklist, but I will tell you, there are a bunch of items that when we jump into work with a brand, we just immediately look at and evaluate and figure out what are the top opportunity areas here. And I'm always surprised, no matter what the size of the brand is, that there's almost always things on that list. And one of them is, as I mentioned, post purchase followups. One is definitely the checkout. Are they optimized around that? You mentioned Bolt and Shopify and things like that. And I think there's a lot of great optimization happening in check out right now. I think there's also a lot of optimization that can be happening in just assets on the site. What do I mean by that? Well, like product photos. You and I have talked a lot about 360 photos, and the revolution that's coming with that, in the past. And I think that that's, you know, having better product photos as more people are going online to purchase, is really going to matter, because you can't touch a product right now. So making sure that you have a way to see every angle, to really understand what you're buying, is going to be really important. And I think reviews and social proof is a huge one that people miss out on. And I'd be shocked if more brands don't do that in the future, because there are right and wrong ways to do that. But it is something that if you don't have reviews on your site, people start getting suspect about trust. They don't trust your brand as much. They're wondering why you're not sharing reviews or collecting them. And we've seen time and again, consumers trust what other consumers have to say more than what a brand has to say. Ryan: That's awesome. So thank you for all of that information. That definitely got my mind going, and some of my brands and what I should be doing that I'm probably not, because I'm stuck in the minutiae of the business myself. So thank you for all those insights of what we're going to be looking for in the future of CRO. Any parting thoughts or words on the future of CRO? Jon: Well, I think the best way to stay ahead of the curve is to start tracking your data today. Understand how people are engaging with your site. Make sure you're tracking every click and movement. And if you do that now, no matter what tool you deploy, no matter what you start doing down the line, you will have more data to make informed decisions, because you're going to have a longer timeline to look at trends. You're going to have a longer timeline of data to look at what potential changes you made and when, and what the impact of those were, so that you can skip having to collect all that data and wait around before you can take action. Because the biggest issue I see with brands who aren't collecting data when we start working with them, is they start getting anxious, because they say, "Hey, we're just sitting and waiting right now." And I said, "Yeah, we need to get all this data that you weren't collecting forever, so we can make informed decisions. And then we can act." So it's this whole issue of eComm brands who come to the table ready to act, but then they don't have the information or data to do it, and then they get anxious because they were so ready to act. They made the decision to act, but then they can't do anything yet. And so they have to fill that gap somehow. And I think that's a big concern for eComm brands, and I think we're going to see more and more brands collecting data. And I think it's becoming a lot more popular and easy. The tool sets are so easy right now. But just get some data collecting every click and movement. Set up Hotjar and just let it run. Even if you can't do much else, just set up heat maps and let them run for a while. Do some session recordings and let them sit there. Google analytics, of course, but there's even tools like Glew, G-L-E-W, that is amazing for helping you understand your consumer audiences. All of that data is really going to be important. So that's what I would recommend. If you want to be able to take advantage of what's coming down the line in the future, start collecting data today. Ryan: You heard it here first. Jon Macdonald says collect data. Do it. Thanks, Jon. Appreciate your time. Jon: Thanks, Ryan.

In this episode of the Business Cloud Native, host Emily Omier talks with Jon Tirsen, who is engineering lead for storage at Cash App. This conversation focuses on Cash App's cloud native journey, and how they are working to build an application that is more scalable, flexible, and easier to manage.The conversation covers: How the need for hybrid cloud services and uniform program models led Cash App to Kubernetes.  Some of the major scaling issues that Cash App was facing. For example, the company needed to increase user capacity, and add new product lines.  The process of trying to scale Cash App's MySQL database, and the decision to split up their dataset into smaller parts that could run on different databases. Cash App's monolithic application, which contains hundreds of thousands of lines of code — and why it's becoming increasingly difficult to manage and grow.  How Jon's team is trying to balance product/ business and technical needs, and deliver value while rearchitecting their system to scale their operations. Why Cash App is working to build small, product-oriented teams, and a system where products can be executed and deployed at their own pace through the cloud. Jon also discusses some of the challenges that are preventing this from happening. How Cash App was able to help during the pandemic, by facilitating easy stimulus transfers through their service — and why it wouldn't have been possible without a cloud native architecture.  Links: Cash App: https://cash.app/ Square: https://squareup.com/us/en Jon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tirsen?lang=en Connect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tirsen/?originalSubdomain=au The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, I'm here chatting with Jon Tirsen.Jon: Happy to be here. My name is, as you said, Jon Tirsen, and I work as the engineering lead of storage here at Cash App. I've been at Cash for maybe four or five years now. So, I've been with it from the very early days. And before Cash, I was doing a startup, that failed, for five years. So, it's a travel guide in the mobile phone startup. And before that, I was at Google working on another failed product called the Google Wave, which you might remember, and before that, it was a company called ThoughtWorks, which some of you probably know about as well.Emily: And in case people don't know, the Cash App is part of Square, right?Jon: Yes. Cash App is where we're separating all the different products quite a lot these days. So, it used to be called just Square Cash, but now it has its own branding and its own identity, and its own leadership, and everything. So, we're trying to call it an ecosystem of startups. So, each product line can run its business the way it wants to, to a large degree.Emily: And so, what do you actually spend your day doing?Jon: Most of my days, I'm still code, and doing various operational tasks, and setting up systems, and testing, and that sort of thing. I also, maybe about half my day, I spend on more management tasks, which is reviewing documents, writing documents, and talking to people trying to figure out our strategy and so on. So, maybe about half my time, I do real technical things, and then the other half I do more management stuff.Emily: Where would you say the cloud-native journey started for you?Jon: Well, so a lot of Square used to run on-premises. So, we had our own data centers and things. But especially for Cash App, since we've grown so quickly, it started getting slightly out of control. We were basically outgrowing—we could not physically put more machines into our data centers. So, we've started moving a lot of our services over to Amazon in this case, and we want to have a shared way of building services that would work both in the Cloud and also in our data centers. So, something like Kubernetes and all the tools around that would give us a more uniform programming model that we could use to deploy apps in both of these environments. We started that, two, three years ago. We started looking at moving our workload out of our data centers.Emily: What were the issues that you were encountering? Give me a little bit more details about the scaling issues that we were talking about.Jon: There two dimensions that we needed to scale out the Cash App, sort of, system slash [unintelligible] architecture. So, one thing was that we just grew so quickly that we needed to be able to increase capacity. So, that was across the board. So, from databases to application servers, and bandwidth, everywhere. We need to just be able to increase our capacity of handling more users, but also we were trying to grow our product as well. So, at the same time, we also want to build and be able to add new features at an increased pace. So, we want to be able to add new product lines in the Cash App. So, for example, we built the Cash Card, which is a way you can keep your money in the Cash App bank accounts, and then you can spend that money using a separate card, and then we add a new functionality around that card, and so on. So, we also needed to be able to scale out the team to be able to have more people working on the team to build new products for our users, for our customers. Those are the two dimensions: we needed to scale out the system, but we also needed to have more people be able to work productively. So, that's why we started trying to chop up—we have this big monolith as most companies probably do, which that's I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in there. But we also wanted to move things out of that, to be able to have more people contribute productively.Emily: And where are you in that process?Jon: Well, [laughs], we're probably adding still adding code at an exponential rate to the monolith. We're also adding code at an exponential rate outside of the monolith, but it just feels so much easier to just build some code in the monolith than it is outside of it, unfortunately, which something we're trying to fix, but it's very hard. And it is getting a little bit out of hand, this monolith now. So, we have, sort of, a moratorium on adding new code to the monolith now, and I'm not sure how much of an effect that has made. But the monolith is still growing, as well as our non-monolith services as well, of course. Emily: When you were faced with this scaling issue, what were the conversations happening between the technical side and the business owners? And how is this decision made about the best way to solve this problem is x, is the Cloud, is cloud-native architecture?Jon: I think the business side—the product owners, product managers—they trust us to make the right decision. So, it was largely a decision made on the technical side. They do still want us to build functionality, and to add new features, and fix bugs, and so on. So, they want us to do that, but they don't really have strong influence on the technical choices we've made. I think that's something we have to balance out. So, how can we keep on giving the product side and the business side what they need? So, to keep on delivering value to them while we try to rearchitect our system so that we can scale out our operations on our side. So, it's a very tricky balance to find there. And I think so far, maybe we've erred on the side of keep on delivering functionality, and maybe we need to do more on the rearchitecting things. But yeah, that's always a constant rebalancing act we're always dealing with. Emily: Do you think that you have gotten the increased scalability? How far along are you on reaching the goals that you originally had?Jon: I think we have a pretty scalable system now, in terms of the amount of customers we can service. So, we can add capacity. If we can keep on adding hardware to it, we can grow very far. We've actually noticed that the last few weeks, we've had an almost unprecedented growth, especially with the Coronavirus crisis. Every single day, it's almost a record. I mean, there's still issues, of course, and we're constantly trying to stay on top of that growth, but we have a reasonably good architecture there. What I think is probably our larger problem is the other side, so the human side. As I said, we are still adding code to this monolith, which is getting completely out of hand to work with. And we're not growing our smaller services fast enough. It's probably time to spend more effort on rearchitecting that side of things as well.Emily: What are some of the organizational, or people challenges that you've run into?Jon: Yeah. So, we want to build smaller teams oriented around products. We see ourselves more of a platform on products these days: we're not just a single product. And we want to build smaller teams. That is, maybe we have one team that is around our card, and one team around our [unintelligible] trading and so on. And we want to have the smaller teams, and we want them to be able to execute independently. So, we want to be able to put together a cross-functional team of some engineers, and some UX people, and some product people, and some business people, and then they should be able to execute independently and have their own services running in our cloud infrastructure, and not have to coordinate too much with all of the other teams that are also trying to execute independently. So, each product can do its own thing, and own their own services, and deploy at their own pace, and so on. That's what we're trying to achieve, but as long as they still have to do a lot of work inside of our big monolith, then they can't really execute independently. So, one team might build something that actually causes issues with another team's products, and so on, and that becomes very complicated to deal with. So, we tried to move away from that, and move towards a model where a team has a couple of services that they own, and they can do most of their work inside of those services.Emily: What do you think is preventing you from being farther along than you are? Farther along towards this idea of teams being totally self-sufficient?Jon: Yeah, I think it's the million-dollar question, really. Why are we still seeing exponential growth in code size in our monolith, and not in our services? And I think it's a combination of many, many things. One thing I think, we don't have all of the infrastructure available to us in our cloud, in our smaller services. So, say you want to build a little feature, you want to add a little button that does something, and if you want to do that inside our monolith, that might take you two, three days. Whereas if you want to pull up a completely new service—I think we've solved it at an infrastructural layer, it's very quick and easy to just pull up a new service, and have it run, and be able to take traffic, and so on—but it's more of the domain-specific infrastructures of being able to access all the different data sets that you need to be able to access, and be able to shift information back to the mobile device. And all these things, it's very easy to do inside a monolith, but it's much harder to do outside of the monolith. So, we have to replicate a big set of what we call product platforms. So, instead of infrastructural platform is more product specific platform features like customer information, and be able to send information back to the client, and so on. And all those things have to be rebuilt for cloud services. We haven't really gotten all the way there yet.Emily: If I understood correctly from the case study with the CNCF, you sort of started the cloud-native journey with your databases.Jon: Yes, that was the thing that was on fire. Cash App was initially built as a hack week project, and it was never really designed to scale. So, it was just running on a single MySQL database for a really long time. And we actually literally put a piece of hardware on fire with that database. We managed to roll it, roll it off, of course, didn't take down our service, but it was actually smoking in our [laughs] data centers. It melted the service around it in its chassis. So, that was a big problem, and we needed to solve that very quickly. So, that's where we started.Emily: Could you actually go into that just a little bit more? I read the case study, but probably most listeners haven't. Why was the database such a big problem? And how did you solve it?Jon: Yeah, as I said, so we only had a single MySQL database. And as most people know, it's very hard to keep on scaling that, so we bought more and more expensive hardware. And since we were a mobile app, we don't get all the benefits from caching and replica reads, so most of the time, the user is actually accessing data that is already on the device, so they don't actually make any calls out to our back end to read the data. Usually, you scale out a database by adding replicas, and caching, and that sort of stuff, but that wasn't our bottleneck. Our bottleneck was that we simply could not write to the database, we couldn't update the database fast enough, or with enough capacity. So, we needed to shard it, and split up the data set into smaller parts that we could run on separate databases. And we used the thing called Vitess for that, which is a Cloud Native Foundation member, a product and [unintelligible] CNCF. And with Vitess, we were able to split up the database into smaller parts. It was quite a large project, and especially back then, Vitess was—it was quite early days. So, the Vitess was used to scale out YouTube and then it was open-sourced. And then, we started using it. I think, not long after that, it was also used by Slack. So now, currently Slack uses it for most of its data. And we started using it very early, so it was still kind of early days, and we had to build a lot of new functionality in there, and we had to port [00:15:20 unintelligible] make sure all of our queries worked with the Vitess. But then we were able to do shard splitting. So, without having to restart or have downtime in our app, we could split up the database into smaller parts, and then the Vitess would handle the routing of queries, and so on.Emily: If at all, how did that serve as the gateway to then starting to think about changing more of the application, or moving more into services as opposed to a monolith?Jon: Yeah, I think that was kind of orthogonal in some ways. So, while we scaled out the database layer, we also realized that we needed to scale out the human side of it. So, we have multiple teams being able to work independently. And that is something we haven't I think we haven't really gotten to completely, yet. So, while we've scaled out the database layer, we're not quite there from the human side of things.Emily: Why is it important to scale any of this out? I understand the database, but why is it important to get the scaling for the teams?Jon: Yeah, I mean, it's a very competitive space, what we're trying to do. We have a very formidable competitors, both from other apps and also from the big banks, and for us to be able to keep on delivering new features for our customers at a high pace, and be able to change those features to react to changing customer demands or, like during this crisis we are in now, and being able to respond to what our competitors are doing. I mean, that just makes us a more effective business. And we don't always know when we start a new product line where it's exactly going to lead us, we sort of look at what our customers are using it and where that takes us, and being able to respond to that quickly, that's something that is very hard if you have a big monolith that has a million lines of code and takes you several hours to compile, then it's going to be very hard for you to deliver functionality and make changes to functionality in a good time.Emily: Can you think of any examples where you're able to respond really quickly to something like this current crisis in a way that wouldn't have been possible with the old models?Jon: I don't actually know the details here. I live currently in Australia, so I don't know. But the US government is handing out these checks, right? So, you get some kind of a subsidy. And apparently, they were going to mail those out to a lot of people, but we actually stepped up and said, look, you can just Cash App them out to people. So, people sign up for a Cash App account, and then they can receive their subsidies directly into the Cash App accounts, or into their bank accounts via our payment rails. And we were able to execute on that very quickly, and I think we are now an official way to get that subsidy from the US government. So, that's something that we probably wouldn't have been able to do unless we've invested more to be able to respond to that so quickly, within just weeks, I think.Emily: And as Cash App has moved to increasingly service-oriented architectures and increasingly cloud-native, what has been surprisingly easy?Jon: Surprisingly easy. I don't think I've been surprised by anything being easy, to my recollection. I think most things have been surprisingly hard. [laughs]. I think we are still somewhat in the early days of this infrastructure, and there are so many issues; there's so many bugs; there's so many unknowns. And when you start digging into things, it just surprises you how hard. So, I work in the infrastructure team, and we try to provide a curated experience for our product teams, the product engineering teams, so we deal with that pain directly where we have to figure out how all these products work together, and how to build functionality on top of them. I think we deal with that pain for our product engineers. But of course, they are also running into things all the time. So, no, it is surprisingly hard sometimes, but it's all right.Emily: What do you think has been surprisingly challenging, unexpectedly challenging?Jon: Maybe I shouldn't be, but I am somewhat surprised how immature things still are. Just as an example, how hard it is, if you run a pod, in a EKS—Amazon Kubernetes cluster, and you just want to authenticate to be able to use other Amazon products like Dynamo, or S3, or something, this is still something that is incredibly hard to do. So, you would think that just having two products from the same vendor inside of the same ecosystem, you would think that that would be a no-brainer: that they would just work together, but no. I think we'll figure it out eventually, but currently, it's still a lot of work to get things to play well together.Emily: If you had a top-three wish list of things for the community to address, what do you think they would be?Jon: Yeah, I guess the out-of-the-box experience with all of these tools, so that they just work together really well, without having to manually set up a lot of different things, that'd be nice. I think I also, maybe this all exists, we haven't integrated all these tools, but something that struck me the other day, I was debugging some production issue—it wasn't a major issue, but it was an issue that had been an ongoing thing for two weeks—and I just wanted to see what change happened those two weeks ago. What was the delta? What made that change happen? And being able to get that information out of Kubernetes and Amazon—and maybe there's some audit logging tools and all this stuff, but it's not entirely clear how to use them, or how to turn them on, and so on. So, that's a really nice, user friendly, and easy to use kind of auditing, and audit trail tools would be really nice. So, that's one wish, I guess, in general: having a curated experience. So, if you start from scratch, and you want to get all of the best practice tools, and you want to get all the functionality out of a cloud infrastructure, there's still a lot of choices to make, and there's a lot of different tools that you need to set up to make them work together, Prometheus, and Grafana, and Kubernetes, and so on. And having a curated out-of-the-box experience that just makes everything work, and you don't have to think about everything, that would be quite nice. So, Kubernetes operators are great, and these CRDs, this metadata you can store and work with inside of Kubernetes is great, but unfortunately they don't play well with the rest of the cloud infrastructure at Amazon, at AWS. Amazon was working on this Amazon operator, which you would be able to configure other AWS resources from inside of the Kubernetes cluster. So, you could have a CRD for an S3 bucket, so you wouldn't need a Terraform. So right now, you can have Helm Charts and similar to manage the Kubernetes side of things, but then you also need Terraform stuff to manage the AWS side of things, but just something thing that unifies this, so you can have a single place for all your infrastructural metadata. That would be nice. And Amazon is working on this, and they open-sourced something like an AWS operator, but I think they actually withdrew it and they are doing something closed-source. I don't know where that project is going. But that would be really nice.Emily: Go back again to this idea of the business of cloud-native. To what extent do you have to talk about this with business stakeholders? What are those conversations look like?Jon: A Cash App, we usually do not pull in product and business people in these conversations, I think, except when it comes to cost [laughs] and budgeting. But they think more in terms of features and being able to deliver and have teams be able to execute independently, and so on. And our hope is that we can construct an infrastructure that provides these capabilities to our business side. So, it's almost like a black box. They don't know what's inside. We are responsible for figuring out how to give it to them, but they don't always know exactly what's inside of the box.Emily: Excellent. The last question is if there's an engineering tool you can't live without?Jon: I would say all of the JetBrains IDEs for development. I've been using those for maybe 20 years, and they keep on delivering new tools, and I just love them all.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining.Jon: Thanks for inviting me to speak on the podcast.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Jon explores the nuances of CRO and explains why it can be so difficult to take a DIY approach with it. He also offers a few tips for those just starting out to improve your CRO without spending a whole lot. [The Mom Test book]: (https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742/ref=sr11) For more CRO help visit The Good: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Hello, Jon. Jon: Hey, Ryan. How are you today? Ryan: I am doing well. Excited to get educated today by you, on some areas that I have very little knowledge. It's exciting, the world of CRO. When you see the results on my side... I get to see the results of what you do, but I don't conceptually understand it well. So today, I really wanted to dive into the weeds with you about conversion rate optimization, and help our listeners get a better understanding of just what you're going to need to do to help execute some CRO. And then, as we live in this DIY world... I can't tell you how many Pinterest things I see, or YouTube things I see, that I try to execute, and it just, God, doesn't quite turn out the way I want to. Especially when I'm cooking, all the recipes I find on Pinterest, just man, the pictures look so great and then my finished product is not great. Ryan: I own a few businesses. Logical Position does a lot of advising on best practices in improving conversion rates, but I wouldn't call what I do on my own sites or what we do at LP to kind of advise clients as conversion rate optimization. So from your perspective, as an expert in CRO, isn't it easy to just watch a YouTube video or find a Pinterest article on CRO and just do something and watch the conversion rate on your site increase? Jon: Well, I think that, just like anything else, right... Like you mentioned Pinterest or YouTube videos, how many times did you watch these videos and it had not turn out like you had wanted, right? Ryan: Yeah, most of the time. Jon: Yeah. I think, it's probably not too dissimilar. Now, look, there's a lot that somebody can do on their own to help improve their conversion rates. Is that technically and truly full conversion rate optimization? No, of course not. But there's a lot that people can do out there, and should be doing, and should be thinking about. I think that... Look, is it easy to do everything yourself? No. Could you focus on one or two areas and do very well? Yeah, maybe. Jon: But I think the biggest challenge I have, is we see this all the time at The Good. People come to us and they say, "Hey, I have one staff member I hired who's a conversion optimization specialist, but it's just not moving the needle in the way that I would like. We're not seeing the return on that salary spend or that contractor spend." The problem is that, and we've proven this out over 11 years now, you really need to have a team with a whole bunch of specialists, and it's impossible for one person to be expert in all of the areas that you need for conversion optimization. Ryan: What I'm kind of understanding is there is a conceptual difference between CRO, or conversion rate optimization, and, maybe what I would call CRI, conversion rate improvement. They're not necessarily the same thing. I can [inaudible 00:03:21] can change a button and improve our conversion rate, but that's not actually conversion rate optimization. Jon: I think we just came up with a new term and I love it, CRI versus CRO. That's awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Okay. Yes. Now, here's how you can do improvements, go out and get these tool sets that all talk about doing an optimization or improving your conversion rate. There's tools out there that can help improve your conversion rate, but they're not going to get to the level that a customized program with a team of experts can do for you. So you think about all those tools like Privy, or there's Hotjar, or Crazy Egg, or... I could go on and on, right? There's tons of these tools out there that each provide a little nugget of conversion rate improvement, but they're not truly doing full optimization, right? Jon: If you're really going to optimize anything, it needs to be a scientific process of optimization. It's not just a make these changes and you're done. It needs to be the ongoing iterative improvements where you're making incremental gains, month over month, that compound and grow. That's where the big numbers are going to happen and the massive results are. I mean, you look at this and maybe this might feel daunting to the entrepreneur who's doing a $100,000 on their site right now. But Amazon has a team, a massive team. Last I heard, it was well over a hundred, doing nothing but optimizing the Amazon experience. Ryan: Holy smokes. Jon: So you think about that, and you're like, "Man, I'm at a huge disadvantage here." But the reality is, they're looking at every little data point. That team has a wide range of people doing different items, you have data scientists to analyze all the data coming back. You have test developers to build out all the tests. You have conversion strategists who can help you to better understand what should be tested. You have experts in user testing, those people who speak to your consumers and understand how to get information out of their heads about what they're thinking. Jon: So you have all of these other types of roles that exist that can combine, be like the Avengers, right? But individually, if you just have the Hulk out there or... I'm not a huge comic book guy. Maybe I'm mixing up my worlds here. But, I would say individually, they're not going to be as great as they would be all together. Ryan: Interesting. So almost in putting it in terms I can quickly relate to would be PPC optimization. You can know conceptually that I really do need to be putting negative keywords into my account to eliminate some waste, but there's a lot more to that, and there's a lot more specialist in the die that I operate in so often. But also, as I'm looking at all the accounts we work in, the way we operate is very different on somebody that sells $50,000 CNC machines versus a five-dollar mug on their website. Jon: Exactly. We talked about this a little bit at one of our recent episodes, where I was interviewing you and I admitted to how I had a button checked in our ads account and it cost me $2,000 that I didn't need to spend. Ryan: That was a fun one. Jon: Right. But here's the thing, I thought I was doing the right thing by letting Google manage that. And it just kept bidding me up, bidding me up, bidding me up until I spent all this money. Where an expert who's in it every day would know, "Hey, on the surface level, I get why you would want Google to own that and optimize that for you. But the reality here, is there's a much better path ahead if you have experience here." I think that's where it really comes in, is having that experience and it means that you can rely on the tool, right, and you could just have a whole bunch of tools. The challenge is going to be, that you're not going to see the gains that you would if you work with somebody who does nothing but optimization and has a team centered around that. Jon: Think of it this way. I spent 2,000 extra dollars I didn't need to spend because I misused the tool, right? I could have spent that $2,000 with an expert who maybe could have generated me an extra $5,000. That would have been a massive return on my investment, by making the investment there, as opposed to clicking a button that I was trying to take the cheap way out, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I guess, in the e-commerce space, we have some very major players like Amazon, a hundred people or more on their conversion rate optimization team. Shopify has a million businesses utilizing their platform. And I assume, again that's an assumption so nobody quote me, but I assume they have an internal CRO team to a degree, because the more conversions they get, the more people use Shopify and the more money they make on the payment processing. Ryan: So with all of these major platforms having so much influence, do you ever think it's possible that we fast forward five years and all of us just are so trained in Amazon and clicking this to get this, or Shopify clicking this to get this, that it's almost standard like across e-com. Like checkout, I expect this, I do this, and there's very little optimization beyond that. Jon: I hope that we get to that point, I don't think we will. Now, here's why I hope, because... I've mentioned this book a hundred times, that's called Don't Make Me Think, right? The whole premise is that we have conventions as internet users that we've become akin to that we know and we like, and it makes the internet easier to use if everybody follows those conventions, so I don't have to think about it, right? Anytime you change that convention, you're making the user of your site think. And that delays them converting. It makes them frustrated. They bounce. They leave. They desert, whatever you want to call it. Jon: I hope we get to the point where there's a standard here, but I can promise you we never will. Now, here's why, they can standardize things like checkout, right? Shopify has done a wonderful job with this and this is where their optimization team internally would come in, where they are optimizing the checkout experience. However, if you go to a Shopify site and they have a custom theme and it's branded, you wouldn't even know it's on Shopify until you got to that checkout and then you know it's a Shopify checkout, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: And here's the thing... So there is so much to optimize beyond that. We're never in on the internet. And I hope we get to the point where things are standardized, but I never hope we get to the point where the internet just becomes this big gray area of everything being the same. Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Then it's not going to be cool. We're taking the branding out of the internet, which is part of what makes it really fun, is to go to a brand's website and get a feel for that brand, have an understanding of what their value proposition is. I hope we don't get to something where every website is just black text on white screen, with blue links, and the navs all look exactly the same, et cetera. I do think it's important that some things are standardized and some usability aspects of websites are standardized. I think that's important and we're making strides to that, but there's always going to be that brand pool. And it's going to be a push against that standard experience that makes people think a little bit. Jon: I really don't know how the experience, if you will, is going to be that much better over time. But I do think, if you're a small shop and you're using a BigCommerce or a Shopify, yes, use their default checkouts because they're pretty good. But you're going to get to a point where you're noticing some checkout cart abandonment, and you want to improve those metrics. And at that point, you're going to want to start to optimize those a little bit. That's when you move up to something like Shopify Plus, where you're paying a little more every month, but you get the ability to customize your checkout. And then you can start adding in some additional tools, you can start looking at moving some fields around, asking for less information if you're not using it or don't need it. Jon: And then on BigCommerce, one of the big things about BigCommerce is the customization that you can do with the platform. So their checkout, out of the box, if you're a BigCommerce subscriber, you can alter that, which is great. It gives you a rope to kind of hurt yourself with a little bit there. But in time, it can... If you're a smaller brand, you want to start using some of these tools, you have that capability. Ryan: For some of those bigger companies on BigCommerce, you can use something like a Bolt that is really focused on one thing only, and that's streamlining that process. Jon: I'm glad you brought up Bolt, because that's a great example of how they can take something that we just spent five minutes discussing as a standardized experience, and they've made it better. That's a great example, where there's always going to be room for improvement. How bolt has even done that, is they focused on reducing risk, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: So you're able to ask less information of the consumer, than you would on the standard Shopify checkout. That means you're going to convert higher, but you don't have to eat the risk of the fraudulent transactions as part of that, right? So you have options. And I think that there's always going to be room for improvement, I really do. Ryan: Well, I think it's also at this exact juncture to remind people, as I constantly had to be reminded, that conversion rate optimization is not checkout optimization. There is every step before, and I think this was a couple episodes ago, and a couple of steps after the fact of checkout, that conversion rate optimization plays. Jon: Yeah. [Crosstalk 00:13:39]... Ryan: So, often we as e-com companies and business owners focus, "Oh, I got to get people to check out, and then it's done." [inaudible 00:13:45] is over. But there's that huge process. Jon: Right. Yeah. We've talked about this a few times where... What happens when somebody gets to your site? What's their intention when they're there? All the way through what happens after they check out, how do you optimize post purchase checkout? And I think there's so much that can be done there. Again, very likely that it will never end in opportunities for optimization here. Ryan: Not every company is in a position to be able to start the full CRO agency or hire enough people to fully optimize their entire funnel of conversion, before and after giving the business money. Are there certain areas of CRO, outside of maybe just getting a Privy or a Hotjar or any of those other tools, that they can be doing something that would get them going towards official CRO? Like you've got to be able to grow the brand into a size to be able to afford a CRO agency or employees. So outside of just the tools, what... Is there AB test they can be doing? I mean, what does that look like for the e-commerce business owner doing a hundred thousand a year? Jon: Well, I think that most likely, you're not going to want to even dive as deep as doing something like AB testing, because you don't have enough traffic to prove those out, it's not going to be a good return on your time or funds investment. Jon: Now, what I would recommend here is two-fold. One, start tracking some data. This is not complicated, but it will help you later just to have more timeline of data. Go into Google Analytics, turn on things like enhanced e-commerce, set up some additional dashboards. Just Google e-commerce analytics dashboards, you'll find a bunch of great ways to set that up so you start tracking some good data, okay? There's a easy checklist to follow there. Jon: Now, other thing is start tracking user engagement. How do I mean that? Well, go sign up for Hotjar, it's $9, right, per month. Just sign up, go, and what you can do is you can start understanding how people are engaging with the content of your site. And I promise you, if you just spend one hour a week reviewing that data, you will learn where challenges are on your site, with things that you think you can do yourself that will improve conversion rates. Jon: Are you going to see massive gains? No, but I think if you're in the situation where you have more time than you have money, as you're growing your business and you're starting out, spending that hour to better understand your consumers yourself will help you find a better product-market fit, it will help you to improve your website overall. And as you continue to grow, you're already building that culture within yourself and your company with your team, as it grows, of understanding how consumers use your website and what data you should be looking at. Jon: If you just go out and you start talking to consumers, take a laptop, go to your local mall, or, I don't care, bar, doesn't really matter. Wherever your consumers hang out, right? Go to the coffee shop. Sit at the Starbucks and just say, "Hey, can I buy you a coffee, if you give me five minutes of your time, while they make your coffee. You're just going to be standing there anyways. I'll buy you a coffee. While they make it, I want you to use my website. I'm going to ask you to complete a task, and I'm just going to watch you do that. I just want you to tell me what you're thinking as you go through those steps." You will be amazed at what you learn. And all it takes is five, 10 minutes of someone's time and the cost of a coffee. So anybody of any size can do this. Jon: Now, you don't have to just be there all day, either. Do this for a couple hours. Get under 10 participants, and I promise you, you will walk away with a laundry list of improvements that you can make to your website. So if you don't- Ryan: It's almost like gorilla marketing in its purest form. Like, "You've never heard of my business before, I'm going to buy you a coffee and you're going to see it." Jon: Yeah. You're not trying to sell them anything, right? You're just trying to understand how they're using your website so that you can take that data and improve. The idea here is that you're getting an understanding of somebody who is a new to file customer, somebody who's never been to your website before. You're walking away with an understanding of what their first impressions of your site and the experience on your site. So the navigation, the funnel, how they find the right products, what they think of the content, right? All of those things are what you're looking for. You're not necessarily saying, "Hey, I want to introduce you to my business, so you buy something," because then they're not going to really have a great understanding. Jon: Now, there's an amazing book out there. It's called The Mom Test. You can get it on Amazon. It's 20 bucks or something. It's amazing. The Mom Test, we'll have our producer put it in the show notes. The Mom Test, it's got a pink cover, it looks like it's a not really helpful book, but I will promise you that it is amazing. The whole thing about this book, is that it gives you an outline of how to ask the right questions about your product and your website to get customer feedback, so that you're not asking them leading questions, that they're only going to give you positive feedback. Jon: So why is it called The Mom Test? Because this should be questions that you can ask your mom where you're going to get good feedback, not where you're going to get the mom feedback of, "Oh, honey, that website is awesome. Yeah, of course it's beautiful, you built it. This is the most usable website I've ever had." No. You want somebody, even your mom, to give you the best feedback about how to improve your product and what they actually think. That's where it gets important. So asking the right question is really the key here, but that's something that 150 page book can teach you, and you're not going to be expert right away. But again, going back to where we started this conversation, that is just one small item that you need to learn and master out of the whole range of conversion optimization. That's why it gets really hard to do CRO versus CRI. Ryan: We have to trademark that. Nobody think. I want to go back, really quick though, to a point you made about traffic being too low for CRO, because I know you have this conversation constantly. And then I get to talk to some of these people because their traffic's too low for CRO. But it crosses the minds of most business owners, as they're starting up, "Hey, I'm getting traffic to my site. And it's converting at," I'm going to make it up "1%. If I just made that go from 1% to 2%, I would double my revenue and I didn't even have to work on increasing traffic, which may be is a struggle for me or I've got really big competitors." Ryan: All that is true, but sometimes that time and energy should probably be spent more on getting, maybe, more appropriate traffic or figuring out what traffic is coming and is not converting. But how do you have that conversation on the front end? Because I usually get it from you, at least, after you've already had some kind of conversation around, you just need more traffic. What insights would you give to people in that scenario? Jon: Well, I think, there's a couple of things you have to really consider before you're going to deep dive into optimization. The first is, have you found product-market fit, right? So is anybody, A, interested in your product and, B, are they going to buy it because it's solving a pain they actually have? It's one thing to get people to your site, but if the product isn't really hitting with the market, then you are going to waste your money. You can optimize and have the best funnel and the best site ever, but if it's really just not something people want or need, then you've wasted your money, right? So that's the first thing. Jon: Now, a great way to determine that and the way that I usually determine it, because it's really quick and it's something most people know if they're running or managing an e-com site, is number of unique monthly users to your site. Because here's the thing, if you've generated enough traffic, that means people are interested. And if you're able to drive traffic with ads, where you're spending at a sustainable level, that means people have a pain point and they're actually willing to click on an ad to solve that pain. That kind of proves it out, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: Now, what's that level? I generally want to see about 50,000 unique users per month before you're going to start doing true optimization. That's actually a pretty low number. It might feel like a mountain for some people, but if you've gotten to 50,000 per month... I mean, think about that, that's 12,500 per week, it's really not that many, right? Jon: The idea here is that you are able to drive enough people to your site, that you can start making scientifically-backed decisions. That's really where you're going to find those gains because you're no longer relying on what you think is best, or those 10 people you interviewed at Starbucks. Now, you're starting to get in mass enough data that you can prove stuff out to where it's statistically relevant. Ryan: That's a great insight, I think, on just a number, but also, I think, on market fit. I talked to so many startup businesses throughout the course of my day, weeks, months, but so many entrepreneurs come up with a really cool product that they just love, but unfortunately they have no idea who their market is or who they really think is going to buy. They have an idea like, "Oh, I really thought this company was going to buy it." But if you've created a product that hasn't existed before, nobody's searching for it. Or they're maybe searching for a problem, but getting a shopping ad to show appropriately, that image may not solve or cause them to take that click. So it becomes a much deeper conversation of, what are you going to do to get this into market? Not necessarily start by optimizing your site. It's, you've got to really find that fit, whether you go to social, whether you go to Google for that, whether you go to retail for that. Jon: Yep. That's exactly it. Conversion optimization is usually step two, right? So first step is... I would say step zero, is find product-market fit, right? Then step one is drive traffic. Then step two is, once you've proven those out, you want to start getting a higher ROAS or return on ad spend. At that point, that's when conversion optimization can help get you to that next level. And I say this all the time, Ryan, when... Jon: We have dozens of clients that share both Logical Position and The Good as partners and vendors. What we find, and I say this all the time, is when you have a company like LP that can really drive qualified traffic and you have a company like The Good that can help you convert that traffic at a high level, it is like adding fuel to a fire because it just accelerates things. And it really starts to show that you can start making a living off of your website, or take it to that next level that you never thought was possible. Jon: That's really where the gains can come in is, at that level, after you found product-market fit, you're driving some traffic, now you really want to take it to the next level. And then it becomes this great circle of, "Hey, you got your conversion rate up. Now, you have more money to spend on driving more traffic. And then you take that funds from the sales you're getting there, you reinvest it in additional optimization." You just keep going in that circle and it continues to compound that growth over time. Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It makes entrepreneurs, startups, even existing business owners nervous when you start talking about paying for traffic, but the value there, even if you're doing that to get to the point where you can use CRO, is you get the insight into the intent of that visitor. If you're just focusing on organic traffic, that's great by the way. We've already mentioned in this podcast before, there is no such thing as free traffic. You're going to pay for all of it in time, money, energy. But when you're using Google Analytics, you don't get the insight of what did they actually search when they came to my site, when they came through an organic link, or they came direct to my site. I don't know how they got... I don't know why they got my link, or they knew my website. Ryan: But if they're using paid search, you get all this really cool data of saying, "Hey, they searched specifically for this, clicked on my ad, went exactly to this page where I sent them, and they either took the action I wanted or didn't." So I can get a lot more of those insights. And you can even get... If you are paying for it, because obviously Google is a for-profit organization, if you do pay for clicks on Google Ads, you can use Google search console to connect Google Analytics and Google Ads, and you will actually get the search queries on your organic traffic, and see how that is operating and what that search intent is, and where you're ranking. That'll actually give you real average ranking for an organic query. Phenomenal data. But again, you have to pay for it by utilizing the Google Ads platform. Ryan: So some business owners out there that are listening, you do have to take the leap and actually pay for some traffic to get some of these insights that let you figure out where your market fit may be or may not be. And it becomes exciting, but also challenging. And so I will put an asterisk by that, that Google does have a great product for starting up and getting your business going. A lot of their smart campaigns, smart shopping can be very powerful to get a business up and running on Google shopping, unfortunately, you don't get that search query data. That becomes problematic when you're really trying to figure out your intent or what you're actually showing for on Google that is becoming so valuable and why your business is growing. So just be aware of that, that you may actually have to do some more manual work in there, but, man, there's a lot of opportunity. Jon: I didn't even know about that one. So now, I don't have to get the... What is that message that shows up in Google Analytics now? It always says something about like not found or... Ryan: Not provided. Jon: Thank you. Yeah. Ryan: That came about 10 years ago. It was great for Google because you're forcing people to pay for it, I get it. That data does exist though, you just have to pay. Jon: Yep. Well, that's good to know. Ryan, this has been a great conversation. Are there any other questions that I can answer for you on how to do CRO DIY? Ryan: No, I've just got to go get some things on my website so I can get to the level that I can pay you to take my CRO to the next level. Jon: Well, I know you and I know you've already found product-market fit on all of these, so drive that traffic, which you're expert at, and then I can come back and help you convert, and we can go from there. Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for enlightening me and helping me figure out some of these details of CRO that I didn't know, so that I'm not just doing CRI all the time. Jon: Go trademark that right away. Ryan: Thanks, Jon. Jon: Thanks, Ryan.

If you walked out the door for a month, would the business you started survive? Would it still operate? Do you have the right people in the right roles? Today, Jason Hull and John Ray of DoorGrow discuss the problem of premature expansion in property management. What is the best way to see consistent, comfortable growth? You’ll Learn... [03:25] Plateau vs. Premature Expansion: Buy new business, location, or expand to make more money: [04:33] Debunking New Market Myths: Easier, less work, and shortcut to growth. [07:20] Duplication: Split energy leads to struggling to successfully do double the work. [08:43] Clone Your Competitor: Takes 10 people to duplicate tasks and do them better.  [13:00] New Locations: Avoid burnout by building a team and support to be scalable. [15:21] Processes: If employee leaves, document tasks to prevent disconnect. [22:55] Expansion: Continue to grow in the same, new, or additional location? . [24:20] Systems: Plan and set monthly and annual growth targets, goals, and more. [31:15] Process Documentation: Who does what and how to do what they do. Tweetables What is the best strategy to see consistent, comfortable growth? Entrepreneurs: Build the business you want, not what you can. Success: Strive for pie in the sky dreams or a pile of manure?  Resources Rent Manager AppFolio Iceberg Report Tony Robbins Process Street DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: How dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah, it would be totally fine,” maybe then it’s time to open up a new location because that means you have things really dialed in, you’ve got the right people. Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I’m hanging out here with someone else from DoorGrow, Jon Ray. Jon: Thanks for having me, we’re a part of the DoorGrow growth hacker team. Jason: We were sitting and I’m thinking, “What can we talk about?” The topic that I wanted to talk about is a common problem that I see come up. I coined a phrase for it and I don’t know that anybody else has ever talked about this phrase, but this is just what I felt like calling it. Our topic today is premature expansion in property management. Jon: Premature expansion, tell us about it, Jason. I’ll preface it by saying I’ve been talking to a lot of our seed hackers, a lot of property managers that are a part of the Facebook group. Ultimately, everybody is trying to figure out what is the best way to seek consistent, comfortable growth. One of the things that has come up on a recurring basis on these calls is that as people are thinking about the various strategies that are available to them for growth—especially at some kind of an accelerated pace over what they’re doing—oftentimes there is a consideration if not an outward movement towards moving into another market.  As you and I were talking about that that can sometimes be a great strategy, but sometimes it can be an absolute failing strategy. Premature expansion is basically your term and how you’re packaging that concept of when that kind of expansion into another market may not be the best strategy. Can you talk about in more detail on how somebody should be thinking about whether or not they should move into another marketplace? Jason: There’s a lot that goes into deciding whether to move into a new marketplace, or premature expansion could be even buying a new business, or a new location. It's any sort of expansion. Usually, the motivation behind it is they want to grow, they want to make more money. Their challenge is that sometimes it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. The most common scenario—one of the most—is somebody will come in and they’ll say, “Hey, we want to buy another property management company in another market,” or “We’re going to open up a new office in another new market.”  Usually, when I ask them why, they feel like they’ve hit a plateau in their growth in their current market. This is usually what’s fueling this. They feel stuck. They were doing something that was working, they usually get to maybe the 200-400 door range and what I call the second sandtrap. Once they get into that space, they think, “Well, we got this far in this location. We’re hitting a limit or a plateau. Let’s just go duplicate that effort and do it somewhere else.” It makes sense on the surface. It sounds so easy like, “We did it here. Maybe we tap this out. Maybe now it’s time to go to a new market.” I think there’s a lot of myths that drive that. One myth is that it’s going to be easier in another market, in the second market it will be easier. That’s almost never, ever, ever the case. The second location is always more difficult. It’s more difficult to manage, it’s more difficult to maintain. If you have a second office, you’re going to need a second set of staff. It’s just harder. It might mean that you’re doing double the amount of work as an entrepreneur trying to run two locations. Also, they think, “What worked here,” I think that’s a myth, “What worked in our first location to get us to this point might work there.”  If they’ve been in business for maybe 10 years, and they played this pay-per-click game in the beginning, or they were doing all property management leads in the beginning, and that stuff has shifted, and it's not as easy. Things have shifted and changed, but they're thinking, “Well, we got this far. Let's just go do what we're doing now over here. Maybe it will grow just as fast.” They run into some problems because fundamentally, what used to work may not be working.  Another myth is that it's some sort of shortcut to growth, and it's not really a shortcut. There's a lot of challenges and difficulties. What's easier than opening up a new location, and then trying to add more doors, and to build out basically a whole another company, essentially, is to grow where you're at. That's far easier.  A lot of times, when I ask them, here's the golden question to ask yourself if you're a person listening to this thinking, “I want to expand. Let's open up and go into a new city.” First of all, you need to ask yourself, do you really want to be there? Do you want to drive out there? Do you want your team to be taking trips out there? Does that feel comfortable to you? Because ultimately, you can build a business that you want to have. It doesn't have to be the business that you can do. That's a big temptation we make as entrepreneurs is we build the business we can’t. “Oh, well we can do this. I can add this service. We can do that.” Then we get scattered. We end up diluting our effectiveness.  In the case of premature expansion, they open up a second market. What inevitably I see happen—almost every time—is their first primary location starts to suffer and struggle, and they start to lose those doors, and customer service levels drop, and there are challenges, and they're having a more difficult time running both. Things have to be incredibly well dialed in in order to do that, to make that work. Jon: Ultimately, what you're talking about here is this concept of duplication. We all wish that we could duplicate ourselves so that we could do twice as much work. In entrepreneurship—in order to successfully duplicate yourself—there are some certain things that have to happen. Otherwise, that duplication just looks like split energy, and then neither of the parts are getting as much as the first whole. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what it looks like to successfully duplicate yourself.  When I was running teams at Google, and when we were thinking about whether we were going to expand into a new marketplace, we wanted to make sure that we had maximized our efforts in the current city that we were in as much as humanly possible, and we wanted to make sure that we had templatized all of our processes so that the management wasn't directly involved in the success of the business. They were guiding strategy and vision, but they weren't operationally necessary other than that high-level guidance. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that would look like in a property management business, and how somebody should think about that concept of duplication. Jason: I love what you're saying about what they would do at Google. It makes a lot of sense. What I've seen is in my experience in helping hundreds—maybe even thousands of entrepreneurs—is there's always this myth that if I could just clone myself, all my hopes and dreams would come true. I know all this stuff, I can do all this stuff, and then all my hopes and dreams would come true.  Let me tell you from experience what it took to duplicate myself, because I pretty much got somebody to do every single role that I used to do in the business, and it takes probably about ten people. That's my experience. It takes about ten people to duplicate yourself. You're never going to find that one person that can do it all. If you do, they're going to become your new competitor, or they're going to go start their own business, or they're going to leave you after they realize that they can probably do stuff better than you, just like you probably figured out back when you were working for somebody. You’re like, “I could do this better.”  That's the e-myth—that's the entrepreneur myth. That's what everybody wants to do. They're like, “I could do this.” A lot of business owners that are running businesses now they used to work for somebody, and they're like. “I could do this.” Then they'd start learning that they need to become an accountant, and they need to become a graphic designer, and they need to become whatever. Whatever all the different roles are and the different hats that you wear.  Just like that in a property management business, if you're going to expand into any market, you have to realize which hats are you still wearing, which seats are you still sitting in on this bus that's the business? If you're managing, and you're acting as BDM, and you're acting as the property manager, or maintenance coordinator, or any of these operationally tactical, critical roles, then the challenge is you go into the market, your life's going to become twice as hard with another location. There's that momentum and that inertia in getting something new going.  Training one new person makes your life twice as hard. If you're going to build out a new team there, if you're going to build out maybe a satellite staff, it's still a lot more work to get that all built up. That's why if you don't have high leverage when it comes to systems, high leverage when it comes to the process—I think maybe that's a good question to ask yourself is: how dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah. It’d be totally fine,” maybe then it's time to open up a new location because that means you have things really well dialed in, you've got the right people.  The question is also connected to that: if you lost any single team member—think of who you think is the most critical person on your team—if they killed over and died—god forbid—or they left your business, or they went to work for a competitor, or they went to start their own property management business, how quickly would you be able to get back up to speed? Do you have all their processes defined? Do you know what they're doing? Do you know what they do on a day-to-day basis? Do you feel like somebody else could step into that role very easily because everything's documented? If not, opening up into a second location is dangerous because you're not going to have all those things dialed in.  Ultimately, overwhelm is going to set in. This is the big thing for us entrepreneurs. We operate, basically, at two speeds. It's like we're in momentum, we’re on fire, and we feel alive, or we're in a state of overwhelm feeling stuck, and frustrated, and stressed. If you're already feeling stressed, and stuck, and frustrated, that's probably not the time to go heap more on to your plate. Jon: Just playing devil's advocate because I think a lot of the people that I talk to in the property management space that are considering this move are like, “Well, that may be accurate advice for most people, but I'm better than most people. I was able to bootstrap where I'm at now, and I was able to scrap it altogether, and I didn’t document all of these processes. Why can't I do the same thing for a second location?”  Maybe you can talk a little bit to me, and explain to me why it's different from the second location? Because it is true that you can figure things out when you're physically there in person, but as you start to satellite out, it's a different kind of mentality that you have to take, and the bootstrapping method doesn't work so well. Can you talk about why that is? Jason: When you open up a business—just through sheer will of force and just personality—if somebody can sell, and somebody is driven, they can create a business. They can probably even get it up to about $1 million in revenue annually just through that. But beyond that, you have to have a team. In property management, you're going to probably need a team long before you hit that amount in revenue, and you need support. Otherwise, it's just not scalable. You're going to start to burn out really quickly. This is why we see so many people get stuck in the first sandtrap, which is about 50 or 60 units. It's the solopreneur. They'll get stuck there.  If you're at the place where you're at about 200-400 units you probably got some team members, you probably at least have a maintenance coordinator, maybe a property manager, somebody helping with showings. You got some pieces in place. You've gotten that off your plate. That doesn't mean now you could go up and open up a whole new location because still, tons of things are still relying on you. Just pay attention. If your team members are coming into your office, or texting you throughout the day, then you are a bottleneck in your business already. You will be even a bigger bottleneck.  My entire team, we're virtual. If you bring on people that are at a remote office, they're not going to be able to get their questions answered quickly, they're not going to have the support that they need, you need to live there for at least 90 days so everybody's on board with it, systems are in place, and be able to do that. That's possible to build that up, but that means you need everything really well dialed in so that stuff doesn't just gravitate towards chaos. There needs to be protections in place so that you can ensure that people are doing what needs to be done. Jon: I want to unpack that word systems and really the phrase systems and processes because I think a lot of people—at least in the calls that I'm having with property managers—when I say systems and processes they're like, “Oh, yeah. Well, we're already on that folio. We already have a rent manager.” That's actually not what you're talking about. Can you unpack that a little bit? Jason: When it comes to processes you need to have—here's the way I look at it, if somebody on your team quit, fired, or died, or whatever, that means somebody else could step in, they could read a process, they would know exactly how to do it, and they'd be able to figure it out. If all the processes exist in that person's head and your head, then I'll tell you what, there's a massive gap usually, or significant gaps between what you think they're doing, and what they think they should be doing. There always is because it's all just in their head.  We know internally at DoorGrow that this happens, and we have processes documented. There’s still a disconnect sometimes. One team member thinks, “Well, this is how I've been doing it. I think this is how it's supposed to be done.” We have it documented, which is it might even be a little bit different because sometimes people don't refer to the documentation all the time. Then there's what the visionary or the entrepreneur thinks should be done all the time, and the team's documented, or decided it's being done differently. These things are in constant negotiations that need to be brought together.  You can collapse time on that by having processes that people have to actually follow, like you have to actually mark it off and complete it. There's a checklist that they're signing off on that they're actually doing so that there's some accountability that they followed those steps. There needs to be accountability in place because most people—just like learning to drive a car, you maybe read a manual once, took a test, passed the test, maybe the first few times you drove you we're checking your mirrors all the time, and making sure nothing was going on around the car. Now you just get in and you just do it. You're probably skipping a bunch of steps you thought you needed to do in the beginning. Over time, maybe you start to skip other steps. Some drivers don't turn on their blinkers when they're changing lanes. They’re like, “People will figure it out around me.” They just don't do these things, so they're not following the process. They're breaking the law.  You have these things that you want to be followed because it keeps the business safe, it protects you from liability in the business, whatever. Your team members, they're going to gravitate towards skipping steps. They're going to gravitate towards what's easiest. If there aren't checks and balances, and accountability in place, what happens over time is everything's kind of gravitating towards some sort of ease, and some sort of chaos, and you're not really aware of it. Then somebody quits because usually when you look at what they were doing, you're like, “Oh my gosh.” It's usually the person that the entrepreneur thinks is the most critical and essential in the business.  Every time I've had that person on my team that I thought, “If they left, my whole world would fall apart. My business would crumble. It'd be the worst thing ever.” That was always the best person for me to lose. Why? Because what was happening was the reason you feel like they’re so critical is because you have so much uncertainty around what they do. You feel like they're the only one that knows how to do it, and it's their job security they love to maintain. But really, if it can be done by them, it can probably be done by just about anybody that has maybe the right demeanor, and the right personality type for that position, but you need to have those processes documented so they can step in. That’s how I gauge it. Jon: I’ll chime in with as far as efficiency goes, you can keep all the same people, but there's so much mental anguish that happens when something isn't well-defined. Even at DoorGrow, and in many of the businesses that I've worked in, when you go and ask someone what they do in their day-to-day, they feel like that's a subjective question because they feel like they're doing something different, or at least slightly different in every single moment, in every single day. There's so much time and energy that gets wasted when you're constantly having to reanalyze the entire problem, and then make a decision on what the action should be.  When you actually start to document what each person is doing on a regular basis throughout the day, and you look at that from a macro perspective, even within that subjective lens of maybe some things are approached in a different way depending on the scenario, there are very clear processes, tasks, and activities that are being done on a regular basis. If those can be defined, and then clear expectations, and processes can be attached to each of those bullet points, it allows each of your employees to have a better reference point for how to handle certain engagements in the business.  One of the things that creates turnover in a business—in my experience—is that when that level of certainty on what somebody should be doing to be successful in their role is not there, resentment starts to build towards whoever the entrepreneur, or visionary, or guiding light in the business is. That resentment ultimately gets to a boiling point where it's no longer sustainable, and then that results in somebody quitting, or throwing a fit, or making a mistake, or having an accident.  Documenting these processes is one of the best things that you can do to create a level of certainty in each of your employees’ minds so that they can be more successful and more satisfied in their position, which means that retention-wise, you're going to keep your staff longer. Jason: Let's talk about some systems that are required so that your expansion into another market or in general is not premature. Because if it is premature, your operational costs are going to go up significantly. I'll give you an example. I talked to a property management company, and they had 2000 doors. They’re on the East Coast, they had over 20 offices, but only about 2000 doors. It was split among 20 different offices. What their strategy for growth was going and buying up all these little mom-and-pop shops. They would keep those shops intact, they would keep the staff and everything. Their operational costs were ridiculous.  Then there's another client. He had 2000 doors, and he had three locations: two in Utah, one in Idaho. Eventually, became part of the HomeRiver Group. His operational costs were far lower. Same amount of doors, his market was probably even a lower rent market, but he was probably making more money because operationally among those doors, he didn't have 20 offices, 20 buildings to pay the lease, or whatever taxes on, or whatever. All the support staff that goes with each of these offices, all this duplicated stuff.  Here's what I think is essential to take a look at if you're thinking, “Hey, I want to expand into another location.” First thing you ask yourself, would I do it even if I were able to continue to grow here? If I were able to continue to have the doors in this area—where I want it—would I do it? The thing to keep in mind is, according to the Iceberg Report (the last I saw), it was 30% of rental properties are professionally managed, there's 70% in single-family residential at least, there's 70% available potential market share to be created. A lot of people think, “Well, it's impossible to do that,” but if you look at Australia, you've got 80% of single-family residential almost professionally managed. They, at some point, we're probably around where we are, and they've gotten it to 80%. We have so much opportunity there, there's so much blue ocean. Everybody's fighting in the bloody red water. We've talked about them on the show before. The idea that we've run out of options is not always true. It is true if you're playing the game everyone else is playing: SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-lead service. If you're doing those things, it's super competitive because that's what everybody's doing. That is focused on that small existing amount of market share. The people that are already looking for you rather than reaching out and creating new market share, which is what we help our clients focus on. That's one thing to take a look at. The systems that need to be in place. Here are some of the systems that we have in our own business at DoorGrow. One, you need a planning system. Most businesses don't have a plan, they have no planning system. That means you have annual targets, and you have quarterly goals as a company, things to implement, monthly goals. You're not just coming back from every property management conference with a list and chucking a grenade into the middle of the room after pulling the pin and saying, “Hey guys, I'm excited about this. We're going to do all these things.” Everybody goes, “How? We're already maxed out.”  You don't have a system for growth because you don't have a system of planning in the business. If you don't have a planning system, if you can't tell me a realistic annual goal that you're going to hit, if you've been operating in so you think you have a system, and if you've not hit your annual goal for the last year, or two, or three you have a b******* system. It's not real, you’re not hitting your targets. Jon: I want to pause you there and unpack that statement that you made about coming back from the conference with all of these great ideas, and then chunking the grenade in the room, because I do think that happens in every industry but especially property management. Because one, there are so many conferences, and two, it's really easy to get excited about an idea, and then just chunk it on to your staff and say, “Implement this.” When you're talking about a planning system, the way that we do it here in DoorGrow—that I think is really effective—is you're talking about how do we reverse engineer everything on that list and put it in yearly, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments so that we know all of the steps that are required to achieve each bullet point on that vision list that came from the conference.  Jason: If we take it even a step back further—and you're new to the team so you've gotten to see this happen—you'll remember, we go through and we take a look at the business as a whole. Every business has five core functions in the business—something I learned from one of my business coaches, Al Sharpen. This is basically the whole pipeline of the business. The goal of the business is to make money, that's how it is successful. Then it also needs some sort of purpose besides just making money.  Those things drive everything that we do. We take a look at these five core functions, and we look at each of them, and we figure out where are we deficient, where can we be stronger? It's impossible to be solid on all of them. That's impossible because for example, if you ramp up sales, then your fulfillment side’s going to hit constraints. You’re going to have difficulties as a team. If you're closing a bunch of doors your team's going to have difficulty onboarding all these new clients, for example, so that's going to go down.  Everything's always in flux. The thing to work on is the thing that's weakest. Generally, that's earliest in the sales pipeline. We take a look at that, and we figure out, “All right, what are the things, and what could we do? Then we decide what we will do as a team? Then we figure out what is possible for us to do over the next quarter.” These will all go back to our annual goal, which we have a couple of annual goals, and it's all broken down. We reverse-engineer it from what the business actually needs. If our goal is to focus on lead gen—if we're a property management company—we're not going to go and implement a maintenance coordination software that quarter if that's already going really well. That maybe we’d do that next quarter.  The problem is, businesses don't have a planning system, they don't know how to break this down, and business owners come back. If they do come up with goals they go to some Tony Robbins event, and they're adding extra zeros to the end of everything, and they’re getting super pumped up, and that demoralizes your team because your team, all they hear is, “This is impossible,” and they're losing. There's no way you're going to hit these goals because they're pie in the sky dreams.  We get excited about them as entrepreneurs, but that's not the same for our team. Our team wants to see that we're hitting our numbers every month, not that we, “Oh, well, we missed it this month.” That idea in setting goals that a lot of people will throw out there, which I don't believe is true, is that it's better as a team to aim for the stars than a pile of manure and hit. It's better as a team to aim for the pile of manure and have success. Your team can feel what it's like to win and have momentum. Jon: I just want to make sure that we're making this actionable for people, and give people a clear way to assess whether they're prematurely expanding, or whether expansion maybe is the right step. Jason: It’s a real simple question, do you have a planning system? Can you say with certainty that you have an annual goal that you are confident that your team is going to hit financially? Do you have a quarterly goal that you know what you're doing this quarter, and that you feel pretty confident that you're going to get these quarterly targets implemented? Do you feel confident that your team can hit the 30-day goals that are going to help create those quarterly targets? Does your team know what they're doing every single week relevant to those 30-day goals? If the answer isn't yes to all of that, then you're just operating with the shotgun approach, and your team feels confused, they're concerned, they don't know where the company is going, so they can't really help you get there.  Everybody at DoorGrow is aligned towards what's going in my goal of revenue, making a difference in the industry, all these things are very clear. We talk about them during every meeting: our whole planning system, what we're doing, even what we're doing on a weekly basis that we meet as a team like we did yesterday. To go over our weekly commitments we checked in, what did you do towards these commitments that you had for last week? Did you get these done? There's this high-level of accountability. That's a planning system. That's one system the business needs. Jon: So far, to analyze whether it's too premature to expand, we’ve got: if you as the entrepreneur walked away from the business, would the business still continue to operate with success? Then we have if you could add the number of doors that you want to add in your existing marketplace without having to go to another locale would you prefer to just add them in your existing marketplace, or is there some other reason for you to want to be in another city. Then do you have a clear planning system where you've got annual, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments that are all being reverse-engineered so your staff can be successful? Really, that's part of operating without you being directly involved in the operations. What else? Jason: The other thing that's essential in the business before you can expand is—we've mentioned this already—you need process documentation. You need a system in the business for finding, and storing, and updating documentation. You need a process system or documentation system in the business that includes job descriptions, org charts. There needs to be clarity as to who's supposed to be doing what and how to do things. That's absolutely critical in a business especially if it's going to scale because once you have a team, there's turnover, there's hiring. These things can derail a business if they're critical roles if you don't have these things in place. Process documentation system is really important.  The software we use is Process Street. Everyone can check out the episode that I did with the founder and CEO of Process Street. We use that as an internal documentation system, and then we also have job descriptions, org charts, these kinds of things. We're going through a process because we've got a jumble routine. When you add a new team member it screws everything up, Jon. Now, my role changes. My job description is different. You're stealing things from me, which I love. Everybody else's job changes a bit too. We're making all these adjustments.  Ashley—my ex-wife—she works for me now, and works in the business, and she's great. She's over some of our operational pieces, you're taking on sales and marketing. These are all things that I used to do, they were my role. Like I said, I used to do every single thing in the business, every single thing. Now we have at least 10 people on the team, and they're all doing something that I used to do. Pretty much all of them are better at it than me. Everyone's better at these things than I am.  Jon: I just want to speak from the perspective of an employee because anytime I've gone into a new business, if it's chaotic, and nobody knows what they're doing, and nobody has clearly defined roles, it is so uncomfortable for a new person to step into that environment. That's why there's a lot of 90-day churn and turnover for new hires because when somebody says, “Yeah, I don't feel like it's a good fit.” What they mean is, “You didn't provide me with the level of certainty that I was looking for in this role.” When everything is clearly defined and documented the way that you've done at DoorGrow, it allows me as a new hire to come in with so much certainty, and I feel like everything is teed up for me to be successful in my position which makes me want to do more in the position. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge in getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Getting started in AR marketing and virtual try-ons can be tricky for enterprise, especially if — like Walmart or Amazon — you’ve got hundreds of thousands of products to model and host. Or, it could be easy, with the help of services like Seek, which hosts 3D content like YouTube hosts videos. CEO and founder Jon Cheney drops in to share the details. Oh, and Alan gets a spaceship. Alan: Thanks for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Jon Cheney from Seek XR. I’m really, really excited to have Jon on the show. We traveled all through China together, pitching to rooms full of Chinese investors. And it’s been an amazing experience. Jon is the CEO and founder of Seek. They’re a leading provider of web-based augmented reality for e-commerce brands. I just found this out about him: he’s a composer as well, for films. SeekView is his web-based product built for e-commerce brands. They’ve won several business competitions, including Pluralsight LIVE, where they won $50,000. They’ve announced some really big partnerships with Walmart and Lego and some other stuff. We’ll get to that. But if you want to learn more about John and the work they’re doing at Seek, it’s seekxr.com. Jon, welcome to the show, my friend. Jon: Thanks so much, Alan. Great to be on the phone with you today. Alan: I’m so excited, man. It’s been a minute since we got to just talk and hang out. We had a great time in China. And since then, you guys have done some amazing work. Talk to me about what you guys are doing. I saw some things from Lego and Walmart. And you’re building 3D visualizers for big companies. What’s going on? Jon: Yeah, man, it’s been quite a journey. Where we are today is way far away from where we started. [chuckles] There’s a lot of people in the XR industry that could probably chime in with similar stories. With this industry that changes so fast, you got to be ready to move with it. But from the very beginning, we’ve had one overarching goal that actually hasn’t changed. We wanted to make augmented reality easier to find and access, and make this a technology that was more accessible. And where we’ve landed is in web-based AR. And there’s obviously hundreds of use cases for web-based AR, but where we really decided to focus is on the e-commerce realm of things. And you’re talking about Walmart, Lego, and those were a couple examples of some of our recent partners. But we’re really focusing on the e-commerce and the retail sector, because there’s just huge benefits when a customer, the end-user is able to use this technology to see a product that they’re considering purchasing. Whether it’s a little Sonos speaker, or a new couch, or a new shoe, or whatever that is, to be able to see it in your space, in your environment, and kind of have all those questions answered that you don’t really know until you get the product, typically. It’s just a huge benefit, and so because of that very obvious benefit, it’s taking off in a big way, and we’re fortunate to work with some of the big, big companies out there at this point. Alan: So you created this web-based AR visualizer. Walk us through, like I’m on a website, I’m scrolling down, I see a product, I’m like, “Man, that’s really cool, but I don’t know if it’s gonna fit my living room.” — maybe it’s a coach, we’ll just use a couch as an example — I don’t know if it’s going to fit. You can press a button, using the camera on the phone, now it’ll project that couch in

Getting started in AR marketing and virtual try-ons can be tricky for enterprise, especially if — like Walmart or Amazon — you’ve got hundreds of thousands of products to model and host. Or, it could be easy, with the help of services like Seek, which hosts 3D content like YouTube hosts videos. CEO and founder Jon Cheney drops in to share the details. Oh, and Alan gets a spaceship. Alan: Thanks for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Jon Cheney from Seek XR. I’m really, really excited to have Jon on the show. We traveled all through China together, pitching to rooms full of Chinese investors. And it’s been an amazing experience. Jon is the CEO and founder of Seek. They’re a leading provider of web-based augmented reality for e-commerce brands. I just found this out about him: he’s a composer as well, for films. SeekView is his web-based product built for e-commerce brands. They’ve won several business competitions, including Pluralsight LIVE, where they won $50,000. They’ve announced some really big partnerships with Walmart and Lego and some other stuff. We’ll get to that. But if you want to learn more about John and the work they’re doing at Seek, it’s seekxr.com. Jon, welcome to the show, my friend. Jon: Thanks so much, Alan. Great to be on the phone with you today. Alan: I’m so excited, man. It’s been a minute since we got to just talk and hang out. We had a great time in China. And since then, you guys have done some amazing work. Talk to me about what you guys are doing. I saw some things from Lego and Walmart. And you’re building 3D visualizers for big companies. What’s going on? Jon: Yeah, man, it’s been quite a journey. Where we are today is way far away from where we started. [chuckles] There’s a lot of people in the XR industry that could probably chime in with similar stories. With this industry that changes so fast, you got to be ready to move with it. But from the very beginning, we’ve had one overarching goal that actually hasn’t changed. We wanted to make augmented reality easier to find and access, and make this a technology that was more accessible. And where we’ve landed is in web-based AR. And there’s obviously hundreds of use cases for web-based AR, but where we really decided to focus is on the e-commerce realm of things. And you’re talking about Walmart, Lego, and those were a couple examples of some of our recent partners. But we’re really focusing on the e-commerce and the retail sector, because there’s just huge benefits when a customer, the end-user is able to use this technology to see a product that they’re considering purchasing. Whether it’s a little Sonos speaker, or a new couch, or a new shoe, or whatever that is, to be able to see it in your space, in your environment, and kind of have all those questions answered that you don’t really know until you get the product, typically. It’s just a huge benefit, and so because of that very obvious benefit, it’s taking off in a big way, and we’re fortunate to work with some of the big, big companies out there at this point. Alan: So you created this web-based AR visualizer. Walk us through, like I’m on a website, I’m scrolling down, I see a product, I’m like, “Man, that’s really cool, but I don’t know if it’s gonna fit my living room.” — maybe it’s a coach, we’ll just use a couch as an example — I don’t know if it’s going to fit. You can press a button, using the camera on the phone, now it’ll project that couch in

I don't think there is a topic we're more passionate yet equally in the dark about as CRO. For every dollar a business spends on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) they get nine back – which is a staggering statistic. You immediately see ROI if you use a CRO expert who is good at what they do. There is an entire user journey that happens with CRO, and those businesses that embark on the journey can massively grow their business quickly. Jon MacDonald is the CEO and founder of The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization firm. The Good uses data science to help brands turn their traffic into customers by tracking everything on their site and using the data they collect to come up with solutions for growth. Some of the world's largest companies convert their website visitors into buyers through their services. Jon is here to talk to about this little known powerhouse toolkit for both buyer and sellers. Episode Highlights: What Jon looks at before starting a CRO project for a client. Where CRO fits in for buyers and sellers in the e-commerce space. The four key areas of data to be looking at to optimize e-commerce conversions. Why CRO gets ignored so often. Helpful dashboard elements for the three types of online businesses: e-commerce, SaaS, content-based sites and how those elements improve business. How microgoals can add incrementally change your flow. What CRO advice Jon has for someone who may be getting ready to sell a business. Where The Good gets their information and what they do with it. AB testing tools Jon recommends for a new business owner getting started. How much time an entrepreneur should spend studying and preparing for a good CRO approach. How CRO practice can increase asset value exponentially for sellers and buyers. The benefit of working with an outsourced CRO team. Transcription: Joe: Mark, one of the things that we see happen often is people—we go to these events that we sponsor, meet some amazing entrepreneurs, and sometimes in little pockets of them you hear people talking about their top line revenue. It's really not what the focus should be. In many cases, it should be about their gross profit, their processes, and what they do to optimize and maximize their bottom line revenue. Because ultimately that's what the value of these businesses are based on. And as I understand you had Jon MacDonald on from The Good talking about CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization and how important it is to drive that up and what a great return on investment that can be. Mark: Yeah, that's right. I don't think that there's a topic I'm more passionate about yet equally horrible at than I am CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization. It's such a phenomenal field and when we look at what you can do using CRO techniques and methodology with a business it's rather remarkable. In fact, Jon quoted me a statistic in here that for every dollar a business invests in conversion rate optimization on average they get $9 back which is really, really amazing. I know that in the past I've hired a conversion rate optimization expert. And they cost a lot of money, right? So I was paying out I think like $2,000 a month. But you know what the first thing they did was? They saved me like $6,000 a month in advertising costs. Joe: That's incredible. Mark: I mean it's a net win. You're immediately seeing an ROI if you have somebody good at what they do. And when we think about CRO oftentimes we think okay we're going to change the color of this button bar, we're going to change the title on this, we're going to increase our sign-ups. What Jon and I talked about quite a bit more is the fact that CRO is much, much bigger than this. There is an entire customer journey, there's an entire user journey here, and there are all sorts of points along the way where this journey can be optimized and can be made more efficient for our clients. I know I've talked to clients in the past who have grown businesses massively by just spending literally years doing this and their traffic doesn't substantially change. But their revenue changes and their bottom line earnings change as well. It's a discipline that most of us ignore; low hanging fruit for almost all of our businesses. We should be doing it. Jon and I got to talk about some of the methodologies that you need to implement in order to really get going with some CRO optimization of any business for that matter. Joe: I think it's going to be a fascinating podcast. I'm going to listen to it myself. Before we jump to that folks be sure to tell us what the movie quote is. Send us a note so we can give you a shout out on the podcast. Alright, let's jump to it. Mark: Jon thanks so much for joining me. Jon: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Mark: If you could can you provide a quick background on yourself to all the listeners? Jon: Sure. So I am CEO and founder of The Good. We are a conversion rate optimization firm. Now what that means is we help brands to convert more of their existing website traffic into customers. So we do that through data science. Helping brands to track every click and movement that's happening on their site and using that data to understand where people are dropping off in the process, why they're not converting, what's engaging and not being engaged with, and how to solve those problems. Mark: That's great. CRO is something of a—I wouldn't say a hobby of mine, I'm not very good at it but it's something that I'm fascinated by. I love the idea of being able to grow and sometimes pretty significantly grow a business without adding more traffic and scrapping forward for that more traffic but basically by improving that customer experience to the point where everything just kind of smoothens out and it just opens up more traffic internally but with the revenue of course; the conversions and everything else. Now in my understanding with your firm you guys have done some work with private equity firms as well that are coming into an acquisition of a web-based company and want to find some of those opportunities. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some of the scenarios that you've looked at there? Jon: Yeah. So typically when you're buying an e-com company the first thing you're looking to do is optimize the return on the investment you've just made. And that's why a lot of folks end up with us. Typically these brands have a lot of traffic coming in already. They're spending a bunch of money to drive traffic to the site but perhaps that's just not converting at the level they'd liked or they're not seeing as high of a ROAs or return on ad spend as they would like to see and they see that that's an opportunity for optimization. And that's typically how we end up starting those conversations. It's not unfamiliar with us. A few brands we've worked with have increased their conversion rates, gotten their ROIs up and then made an exit right after. So it happens on both sides. Brands who are looking to make a purchase and or have made a purchase come into us to help them to kind of optimize a little bit and then also companies who are looking to improve their site and optimize it as they get ready to sell and want to increase the value of their company. Mark: I often think that the CRO portion of a marketing mix is one of the items I think it's ignored the most often and is often one of the lowest bits of hanging fruit. And one of the things I think people forget about; I forget about it myself but CRO actually has kind of a double whammy effect for you, right? I ran an experiment on another business that I owned outside of Quiet Light Brokerage for getting people to sign up and I know my numbers pretty well. I know that every person that signs up even though they're signing up for free the value of that client is about $10, right. So I said okay I want to increase these free sign-ups more. But the result was I did increase the sign-ups, I did increase that conversion rate pretty significantly but the other benefit of that is that my cost of acquisition dropped. So not only was I getting more out of what was being sent to me but my advertising dollars dropped at the same time. And so I had this double effect of seeing an increase in my ROIs on both sides just from focusing on one thing. When you're talking to somebody who is preparing to sell; let's say it's an e-commerce business, what are some of the areas that you start to look to see where can you—what are you sort of tracking at a CRO project? Jon: Well, the first thing is are they tracking the right data? True conversion optimization should not be about going down a checklist of best practices. You can find those and Google those online and I can tell you that really the most effective way to optimize a site is to base it on every click and movement of your specific sites visitors and to make data back decisions on those actions that are being taken. So the best way to do that is to make sure you're tracking the right data. Now, of course, you want to follow GDPR and all of the other privacy regulations that are in place. So all the types of data that you really should be tracking are done in aggregate meaning it's not personally identifiable information. And really you don't need personal identifiable information. But there are really four key areas of data that you should be looking at. The first of course is Analytics. If you're looking to sell you're likely going to have Analytics and the buyer is likely going to dive into those Analytics. So if you're looking at something like Google Analytics out of the box let's be honest here it's meant to help you buy more Google Ads. So it's not that helpful in terms of optimizing your site. Now the best way to do that is to build some dashboards in Google Analytics that are more focused on conversions. And also make sure that you're tracking the right events on your site to get that data in. So that's one of the first places we look. The second pieces of data are interactions on your site in terms of content. So looking at things like heat maps; where are mouse movements happening around the site, click maps where are people clicking on a page, perhaps they're often—we almost always find that people are clicking on things that aren't clickable, and that's a good indicator that they should be. So it could be as simple as that. You know we also want to look at scroll maps; how far down the page are they going. We do eye tracking as well to understand what people are looking at and how long they're looking at that content. Lastly—well third I should say you want to do what's called user testing. So we've just talked about all these quantitative pieces of data that really tell you what people are doing. But it's really hard to get the why behind that from all of that data we just talked about. So user testing comes in and helps us understand why. Now, this is where we send people to the site who match the ideal customer profile and we ask them to complete tasks. And while they're completing those tasks we are recording their screen and their audio and we also have trained these people ahead of time to talk out loud about the experience that they're having. So they're going through a site and they're saying hey I'm trying to find this page and I can't find it in the navigation or understand how to get to that content that I'm looking for, I don't understand what the value proposition is here, or just common struggles that they might be having. And that really kind of coincides with the numerical data to tell us not only what they've done but also why they're doing that and it gives us some context behind that. And we really we do what's called remote unmoderated user testing. And what that is is a software tool we use usertesting.com most often. And what that means is it's a piece of software that lives on their home computer that allows us to collect all this data so they can do it in the comfort of their own environment as opposed to somebody standing over their shoulder. Now we've done both. We've been optimizing sites for over 10 years now and we've done both. And what we found is that we get much better data when its remote unmoderated. The people are comfortable and they don't feel pressure to come up with something on the spot and always be telling us what they're thinking. We just find it naturally happens when it's remote and unmoderated. So that works a lot better. The last piece of data is A-B testing or multivariate testing. This is where you say you have 100 people coming to a site, you can segment those visitors and show 50 the current version of a page or even small change on the site, maybe moving content around on a page, or adjusting some headlines things of that sort. And then you would show 50 the alternate page and you test some metrics out of that to understand which one is doing better; the page that exists or the changes that have been made. And we can get really large tests like changing entire pages or we can go really, really small like just changing one headline and seeing what the differences would be and then stacking a lot of those tests and the variations of those tests to truly understand how to optimize each step of that funnel again based on data. So instead of just guessing and launching those changes with this piece of data you're actually letting the consumer's actions, your specific sites visitor's actions and tell you what should be done to permanently change on your site. Mark: Okay. So I think that explanation was just great. I love the framework that you set up here but I think you just explained why CRO gets ignored so often. And that is there is a lot of stuff to set up here and to configure and I just let's start right at the beginning with Analytics. You're right right out of the box how useful is Analytics. It's interesting. You get to see how many people are coming to your site. You can see what pages are popular and some decent information out of the gate. But really Analytics starts to blossom when you start building dashboards and segments and everything else. But getting into that; I mean that's kind of a discipline in and of itself. Jon: Of course. Mark: I know we could probably talk about this all day and different dashboards for different types of businesses, what are some things that are some useful elements with a dashboard that somebody might want to consider building? And I want to break this up into maybe three different types of sites. And if you don't work with any of these types of sites that's fine, just let me know. But e-commerce would be one, SaaS would be another, and then content-based sites that are really looking more for that user engagement and reading and how much are they digesting the information. So what are some dashboards that you would recommend people look into for each of these? Jon: Well, there's a couple built into Google Analytics that get ignored pretty quickly. On all three of these sites it would be helpful. But the first is page flow. What is the flow that people are taking through the site? And most people ignore this because in Google Analytics the view is one where it shows the funnels but then has lines drawn between them and it looks extremely complicated at first. So most people see that, they get overwhelmed, and they leave and don't really pay attention to the data. But there's so much rich data there you can dive into. And you don't have to do anything other than have the snippet on your site. So it's not requiring you to set anything else up necessarily. So that's a great place to start. For e-com businesses we often find one tidbit; a lot of companies no matter what their size is when they first come to us one of the first things we always check is do they have the e-commerce tracking engaged. It's one button to turn on and off. So many brands don't have that turned on and they lose so much rich data that Google automatically starts sorting through and looking for. So for e-com just having that turned on could be amazing. And it's so easy. Now in terms of metrics that we're looking for on e-commerce conversion rate in terms of to purchase but also what are the other metrics that you're looking for? We call them micro conversions; things that you know people are doing that influence that purchase. Is it signing up for an email? Is it where they visit certain pages on your site? So we know that if they are visiting or even just like a great instance of this is if they're visiting a product detail page but then they click to read more of the user reviews. That's always a great indicator because what we find is consumers who read reviews convert much higher. Because often consumers are going to trust the content that's in reviews much more than what the brand even says about their products because it's coming from people like them. They also; for a clothing site for instance or shoe site, it's really helpful because they will use that to better understand sizing, especially relative sizing. So a medium runs a little larger you're probably going to want a small things of that sort. That's really, really helpful for people who are really there to dive deeper and answer specific questions that are all buying questions. Mark: Let me stop you on that real quick because let's say that you start measuring these micro goals. What does that give you? I mean I would imagine a lot of the people that are taking those actions already have a high user intent. Jon: Right. Mark: In my head I'm thinking okay let's say sizing options, you said I want to increase the number of micro-goals of people checking out the different sizing options. Does that really increase each individual user's intent or you're really just more making the flow easier for those that are already there? Jon: Both. If you're finding that out of 100 visitors that 50 of them are looking at sizing and of that 50, 25 convert you really want to try to influence that metric. So if you know that people are looking for sizing then make that information surface at higher so it's easier to find. Now people only visit websites for two reasons. This is outside of Facebook or anywhere that you're just trying to maybe perhaps spend some time; kill some time. Now they are there because they have a pain or a need and they think that your website can help solve that pain or need. And two once they realize that it can or they believe that it can, they want to do research on how to convert as quickly and easily as possible. And that means that they've done that research and now they're ready to purchase. So you need to make those two things as easy to do as possible. Now it sounds pretty simplistic but understanding as you go deeper on those what people are looking to research and then surfacing that information as high as possible is really important. So making that as easy to find and do that research. So if you know that people who convert always are looking for sizing information but they have to go into the reviews to find it. That's a problem. So instead make it easier for people to understand what size they should wear. And if that's the case they're going to convert much easier. And then when they're ready to convert it'll make that checkout flow, that conversion process as easy as possible. And when you look at lead generation sites which is the second one of this one that you've mentioned, it's the same thing with form completions. We often work with companies who have made it very easy for somebody to come to the site and do research about what particular products or offering that that company has that aligns with their need. But we also see at times the consumers come to the site and they're looking at the home page and the value proposition is not clearly stated. And so how many times have you been to a B2B service page website and you look at it and you said I have no idea what these people do. So that can be a big challenge; just understanding is the consumer in the right place and allowing them to do that research. But then once they get to the form they're asking for a ton of information that isn't really necessary at that first step. So they might be asking how many employees do you have, or what industry are you in; all these things that could have been filtered prior to them filling out a form by just saying this product is best for people who have this many employees, this much revenue, this industry, and things of that sort. So trying to help people understand if they're in the right place and how to convert as quickly and easily as possible can apply to both e-com and lead gen. Mark: That's helpful. Let's go on to one of the other ones here and that's the scroll maps and click data. A, where do you get this sort of information? Do you have any servers that you recommend? And then B, once you get in what do you do with this information once you start to get it? Jon: Yeah. So Hotjar is likely your best fit. Now there are tons of different heat mapping softwares out there right now. Crazy Egg is another good one. There's a few of us who—we find Hotjar has the most reliable data and also for the cost has the best benefits. So I believe it's about $9 a month and it's totally worth the data you get back for $9; easily a large return on your investment there. Now, what should you do with that data? Well, Hotjar will let you track again all the mass movements that happen on your site and give you a heat map of those. Now for those people who aren't familiar with the heat map it just shows you from red to—and then cools off from there; so red, yellow, green, blue, and then the lack of colors where people didn't use their mouse at all on a page. So it allows you to really look at that and say where are people interacting. Now, a quick tidbit on this; on desktop, your eye will follow your cursor. So heat mapping is not so much about the cursor movement as it is about a good indicator of where people are looking and what they're engaging with on your page. Understanding just where a cursor is going on a page is not as helpful. So that's a better way we think to look at it is what content are people engaging with. And that's what's really helpful there. Now, what can you do with that data? Perhaps you find that there is a piece of data that you had found earlier that people really engage with every single time they purchase. Well it's really helpful to surface that content up higher on the page and then track whether or not people are engaging with that over time; so testing that by understanding what content to engage and moving that content to a different area of the page and then looking at the heat map to see if it's being engaged with. Mark: So let's move on then to A-B testing and this is a personal pet peeve of mine because all the tools out there just feel—at least that I've used feel expensive and kind of shoddy and maybe I'm not using them right. Are there tools that you particularly recommend? What do you think about let's say Google Optimize as a free option there? And we'll start with that. I would also like to get into setting up experiments that actually make sense. Jon: Right, of course. Mark: Let's talk first about the tools. Jon: So there are a numerous number of tools for optimization as you mentioned. It's pretty common now to try to sell a whole optimization platform; so one tool that can do everything. The great thing about Google Optimize is that it doesn't do that. It focuses just on running those tests. And it also integrates extremely well with Analytics so you can pull segments out of Analytics that you've set up and run tests just for those segments. Now it is free and it does have some limitations in the sense that you can run a limited number of tests at the same time. There are some ways to get around that. I would be happy to chat about that with anybody at some point but really the idea here is Google Optimize has come a really long way over the past year. It has in terms of pure testing the same functionality as a platform like VWO or Visual Website Optimizer which is another one that I would tend to recommend if you want to get over the number of tests limit that Optimize has VWO is a great tool. It works extremely well for the testing side. It has a whole bunch of other functionality that at The Good we don't typically use. But if you're looking for a full platform it could be okay. And then if you're in the enterprise space Optimizely is really the gold standard. They were the first really solid tool. They made a shift about two years ago to focus exclusively on the enterprise side. So we still have some clients that are on their legacy plans from five to six years ago that are paying 200 bucks a month. They don't offer anything like that anymore. It's now probably closer to 10,000 a month just for their platform. But if you are looking to optimize every experience; your mobile experience, and your app experience, and your desktop or web experience as well Optimizely is really where you'd want to play. But you need to have the budget and the traffic levels especially. This is another thing and I think most companies tend to want to jump into running testing but they don't have enough traffic to do it. And they sign up for something like VWO and start paying the fees for the platform and they aren't seeing the results very quickly. That's where it can get frustrating. You really need to make sure you have enough traffic to be able to see statistically significant results in a meaningful timeframe to get the return on that investment. Mark: What would you recommend for sites that have low traffic amounts? Jon: I would recommend playing around with Google Optimize but running bigger tests. So what do I mean by bigger tests? Try changing an entire page content; don't just change one piece of content on a page. So the bigger the test the quicker you're typically going to see some results positive or negative. Now it's hard to get fine-grained but testing even bigger tests like that you will see increases in the key metrics that you should be tracking like conversion rate, average order value, things of that sort that really are going to drive impactful meaningful improvement for your brand. Mark: Yeah, that's great. I've noticed the same thing in the testing that I've done there where—and this leads to the next segment that I wanted to talk about that and that is saying that meaningful tests where the whole sale page changes. I just ran a test on another business I own where we did a whole sale page difference and the lift was significant. It was almost definitely the conversion rate on a completely different page design. When you're setting up a new test especially if you're coming in cold and say that you bought a business and you're now working on different ways to be able to grow that business that you just acquired, where are some places that you would typically start with testing? Let's assume that there is enough traffic there to be able to run more of this fine-grained sort of tests. Would you recommend some of these bigger tests to begin with or maybe a more nuanced approach? Jon: I would typically recommend a little more nuanced approach that is based on the results from that user testing. So by starting; I mentioned four areas and I mentioned the A-B testing last because the other three are really going to help you determine what you should be testing. And that's almost as important as running tests at all. So if you are going; there are so many brands that we see that just sign up for these platforms to run tests and start running tests and they just randomly cherry pick ideas to run but they don't have any hypotheses behind them or data to back those up. So really again understanding the data has to come first so that you can make some data back decisions about what to test. Now, what's going to be impactful? I'll tell you that if you start reading general articles online about testing the first thing they're going to say is things like button colors, or maybe a headline change, or image change. Those very rarely actually move the needle. So you need to find that balance between a whole site or a page change and changing one small element on the page because it's in the middle where you're really going to see the results. But also the best way to be thinking about this is the testing needs to be a three or six-month plan. So that doesn't mean that you should expect one test to run that long but you should be thinking okay I'm running this test to make what learning do I want out of that test; positive or negative change? That's fine but you should always be learning something. In fact when a test doesn't have the outcome that we want here at The Good or that we were expecting I should say we don't call it a failure; we call it a learner. Because we're always learning something out of that. That will influence what the next test is that we want to run. And then you continue to stair step that. Conversion optimization should really be thought of as an iterative compounding effect over time. There's nothing that you're going to change on your site that is going to double your conversion rate overnight short of massive discounting. And I just call that margin drain. That's not an optimization. So you really want to be thinking about this in small incremental gains. That each test is going to help you get that will have a compounding effect over those three to six months. And so impactful tests are ones that you know are building the foundation for a larger change that you would like to see. Mark: Talking to about this it seems so clear that you're setting this up into almost two distinct steps, right? The bulk of what you suggest of these four suggestions really relies and rests first on having good data and a good data framework for understanding your site and your business and knowing what sort of metrics you want. And once those metrics are set up then you can take a look and say okay well let's look at this or what would happen if we were to change this micro goal? Does this micro goal really have a correlation with revenue or is it just something that we're kind of seeing right now? Maybe there is no correlative effect. Maybe we can increase a micro goal and it doesn't change anything at all. But I think the challenge then becomes not necessarily how do you run a really great A-B test but how do you set up a really good framework of data and data collection and those dashboards as well. What advice would you give to an entrepreneur who's thinking about their business and saying okay I know I need to get data on my business, I know I have Analytics set up maybe I turn on the e-commerce tracking but I've not ever created segments. I don't really know how to use segments; 10,000-foot view, what's a way that we can instruct the entrepreneur here to just start understanding what they need to start setting up for a good data framework? Jon: Well I mentioned the other three areas besides A-B testing and you don't have to go super deep on those. I know there's—you could. As you mentioned earlier we could spend a whole hour just talking about each of those individually perhaps. I think you need to start somewhere but just having that data tracking in place and then paying attention to it; look at it once a week spend; set an hour side on your calendar, just spend an hour once a week looking at that data. You will start to see trends. You will start to see things that help you to better understand how people are engaging with your website. And just giving that that hour per week will put you miles ahead of the competition because you're going to start to see those trends and the actions that people are taking on your site. And you'll start to have empathy for how they use your site. Now I often like to say that it's really hard to read the label from inside the jar. So many site owners or brands or e-com managers what they do is they build the site and all the content and the navigation for them because they know the product. But what happens if somebody comes in via Google to search in a topic. Google thought that site might be the best answer they send them there. They're missing all of that knowledge about the products they sell. So when they go to the navigation and if it's not set up appropriately the consumer has no idea what they're looking at or how to figure out what product is the best one for them. So that's another way that user testing can really kind of help. It's brief empathy for the end user and helps you see it from that perspective as opposed to somebody who built the site or is on the site every single day. So I think two things; one, just have the data and look at it and you'll start to build up that empathy. And that's really going to help you understand what you should test and where you should go from there. Then secondly you can really start to dive deeper. You can then say oh I want to run scroll tracking on these pages because I'm finding that people aren't reading this type of content that's further down the page and I want to verify that. So you start to post questions. It's not about the data; it's really about asking the right questions once you have that data in place. Mark: You're echoing exactly what I heard at Traffic & Conversion this past year. I went to a CRO talk and one of the bits of advice that he gave was to start with the questions that you want answered because then the reports will build themselves. If your question is how many people are signing up for this email list and then taking a second action well now you know the report that you need to build there is a report that shows just that information. The other thing that you're saying that I think is fantastic and this is the trend in marketing in 2019 and frankly it started I think as early as 2017 and has been building steam and that is this personalization; both of the user experience but also in the way that we think as far as marketers and the internet is no longer just a big cold faceless place. Let's start putting a face to those numbers that we're seeing in Analytics and understand those are real people, real eyeballs and what is their experience like. And what you said you have some empathy for the user and what they're going through because then you can start asking those questions and building the reports. And then once you build the reports, you've answered the questions, now you can start forming the thesis of okay this is what we're seeing as far as the answer to this question. Now finally once we get all this in place lets A-B test. Does that summarize it? Jon: Yes; very, very well. Mark: Awesome. Alright, let's talk about wins. Jon: Yes. Mark: I could do your job. Jon: I'm looking forward to it. Mark: I know that for a fact. Let's talk about wins. Let's talk about some of the—without getting and divulging clients or anything like that, let's talk about this is what you want to put on your site as far as the testimonial because it's eye-popping and then also the realistic sort of wins that you would see say over six to 12 months from a CRO campaign. Jon: Yeah. You know on average we see about a 9:1 return on investment. So for every dollar that's put into conversion optimization on average, you're going to see about a $9 increase in revenue. Now there is not one single metric that you can do that's going to have a bigger impact on your site than focusing on conversions. But I think the industry of conversion rate optimization gets shoehorned often into that one factor which is conversion. We've talked about a lot of different metrics today that really need to be improved and optimized and that all goes back into conversion optimization as a whole. Of course, average order value, cart abandonment rate, we talked a lot about ROAs and return on investment of ad spend. I think in a lot of that is what needs to happen there. Now specific wins, I have a bunch of case studies up on our site. They're public so I'm happy to talk about some of those. For instance, Easton Baseball; if you don't know who Easton Baseball is they make aluminum baseball bats mainly and softball bats. About 99% of college swings are done with an Easton baseball bat. They pretty much own baseball bats for Little League. And if you're a Little League player you're going to use one of their bats. Now, having empathy for the consumer; what we found when we came into their site was you go to their product page and it would be a wall of bats. Now if you imagine what a bat looks like online and you see a whole bunch of them. You have no idea what the differences are, right? And they're just maybe different colors but you really don't know because you can't feel the weight difference or really see how the size differences of the bats online that well. And especially if you're a parent with a kid in Little League, you have no idea what bat you should be buying. And we did a bunch of user research and what we found was that consumers were coming to the site to buy a bat for their kid and they would buy the bat take it to practice and had spent a couple of hundred dollars on this bat and then the umpire tells them they're not allowed to swing with that bat. Now the reason is that all these different Little Leagues have certifications for their bats and if their bat does not have that certification stamp on it you can't use it. Also, either your kid swings for the fences or he's just trying to get on base. And there are different types of hitters, and different bats fit with different types of hitters. There are also different price points that parents want to spend. So there's some that might want to spend $100, some are willing to spend 500. It really varies. Using just those three metrics what we found was that so many parents are buying the wrong bats that they were getting frustrated and there was a high return rate. They were calling customer service quite a bit. Well, what we did after learning all of that is we built up bat finder. So instead of having parents navigate through all these bats and look at all of them and spend time trying to figure that out, they simply just answer three questions and those three questions kicked out three or four bats for them. And so these are the ones you should really look at. Now once you got to those bat pages they often had; Easton had put in a ton of technical terms that were branded around what the bats did. So I can't remember the names exactly but instead of just saying this bat reduces sting because with an aluminum bat if you hit it really well and you're hitting for the fences you can sting your hands really bad. And Easton has some wonderful technology that eliminated that bat sting and still let you get the great pop of the bat to hit it over the fence for a home run. Well, what we found was they had branded that term instead of just saying it reduces bat sting they came up with some random term for that. And consumers didn't know what it meant. So we helped them solve that problem. And that was found through user testing and just having empathy for what the consumer is going through. So we fixed those two things on their site and they saw over 600% increase in revenue year over year and their conversion rates skyrocketed. I think it was 187%. And you know when you think about it just having a little bit of empathy and making those two small changes can have such a big impact. And that's really what conversion rate is about. It's understanding what people are doing, what they're not doing, and how they're engaging, and using that data to then inform what should be changed and tested on a site. Mark: Yeah. And just to put this in terms of acquisitions; bringing it back to really the subject of this podcast here, I want people to think about this in terms of what I mentioned earlier on the podcast. If you're seeing a 600% increase in your revenue which is phenomenal you're also seeing a reduction in your cost of advertising to acquire a client which means your bottom line margin is actually probably improving more than that 600%. And that's an assumption on my part. But let's for the sake of argument just say that it also is increasing by 600% at a minimum, it might be even increasing more. And now you're taking the multiple approach of maybe for an e-commerce business 3, 3.5, maybe 4 and you can start seeing how much you're growing the asset value of a business that you own; maybe you acquired or you're preparing to sell. You are seeing significant gains in that asset value of what you're hanging onto to the point where the numbers really become kind of silly to even say it because it doesn't sound believable. But that's the low hanging fruit of CRO is the money that you said 9:1 investment to payback ratio. That's phenomenal and for preparing to sell or buying and trying to grow a business asset value you're not only getting that 9:1 you're getting the multiple on top of that as well. That's phenomenal. Jon: Yeah. And I've specifically mentioned Easton because it's a public knowledge but after about 18 months to two years after we helped them optimize their site and then moved in and help them optimize their mobile as well for even larger gains there they did sell to another private equity firm and had a very good return on their investment there overall and that was almost entirely fueled by the digital side and the effort they'd all put in there. Mark: That's awesome. Where can people learn more about you and more about your company? Jon: Sure. Yeah. So The Good you can find us online at TheGood.com. That's just TheGood.com and you can sign up for our insights there. So if you liked a lot of the tidbits and helpful tactics I talked about today we do produce one great article per week about learning. There are no sales pitches involved it's truly just educational content about conversion optimization; things that you can take home and do to your site and start thinking in this way. We fully recognize that it is really hard for one person to have all of the skill sets at their company to do conversion optimization. I think you talked about this earlier when you said hey you just mentioned all these things and that's the challenge most people have around optimization. It's true. It's really hard for one person to do all of that. And so we try to help educate as much as we can around all of this type of things. But TheGood.com is the best way to get a hold of us. Feel free to email me directly if you have questions. I'm happy to answer questions that come my way it's just jon@thegood.com. And I do try to read and respond to every email. So I will do my best. Mark: Yeah. That's great. And as far as the task list, I mean you're exactly right. The fact is CRO is a mix of being somewhat of a data scientist and there's also a technical side to it as well being able to get all the integrations right and then there's also the creative side as well to understand how to really understand the user testing and how that empathy and then be creative with the tests and ask the right questions. It's very difficult to find somebody who can master all three of those skills and those abilities. So working with an outsourced team; I think CRO is one of those things where doing it alone is probably not the best approach unless you're just really, really some sort of a renaissance man who can have these multiple disciplines. Thank you so much for coming on Jon. This has been an awesome discussion I'd begin maybe because I just love CRO but I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of the tips. Jon: Well, thank you so much for having me, Mark. I really do appreciate it. Links and Resources: The Good Jon's Email Hotjar Optimizely

Jon Drew shows us how he's been using the internet to grow his downline...   I'm very excited and privileged to have a complete rock star!    Honestly, you’re in for a treat.   I recommend you get a piece of paper out and take notes.   I've really enjoyed watching the story and the journey of our guest today and it’s an honor to have him on.    Welcome to the show Jon. Thanks for being on man.   WELCOME SECRET MLM HACKS STUDENT, JON   Jon:    Hey, thanks for having me. Pumped, excited for this all week.   Steve:    It's pretty awesome.   Jon:    Let's do it.   Steve:    You came into the the Secret MLM Hacks group and started using the stuff. Then all of a sudden I started seeing you in pictures on stages and you're a celebrity now man.   Jon:    Living the dream.   Steve:    It's crazy. What were you doing in that picture?   Jon:    I got recognized by my company as a top 50 income runner. it was in my second year and I was up there and I made it in.    I was number 50 working my way up, but it was a huge honor. So that was cool. That was probably the best moment of my professional life. It was awesome.   Steve:    Dude, that's so awesome. That's so cool. How long have you been in MLM?   Jon:    Almost three years now.   Steve:    Three years now. That's cool.   I guess backstory, how'd you get into it? What made you get into it at all?   FROM CORPORATE AMERICA TO SECRET MLM HACKS   Jon:    I was a certified public accountant. I had done that for a few years out of college. So I started off the normal path. I didn't think I'd end up here.    But I did that and I learned a lot in the corporate world... But I also learned that it wasn't for me long term.    Got a lot of promotions. I worked hard.    Every time I got that carrot on the stick and the money didn't always come with the promotion.    I'd be doing the job but wouldn't be getting paid for it. And after a few years of that, I kind of crushed myself.    I got so obsessed with trying to force it to happen, that I worked myself almost into the grave. It was crazy.   I was the guy that was crazy enough to jump into an MLM that was not available in my own state.    So, no family and friends. That thing you're supposed to do. Those weren't available and I was crazy enough, and I don't recommend this necessarily, but I went full time in it a few months in.    I went feet to fire and I think that's part of why it went well. It forced me to go learn what you're talking about on Secret MLM Hacks.   Steve:    What happened when you did that? I'm sure everyone condones your behavior.   USING THE INTERNET TO GROW YOUR DOWNLINE   Jon:    You get the haters on one side. And there was curiosity. I can say there was some curiosity on their side, but there was no path.    My upline didn't really get what I was trying to do.    It was hard to be the one person to be like, "I'm going to make this happen. I want to make this happen."    Being part of the community, being into Secret MLM Hacks, following what you were doing, what other people out there building online, that's what kept me going.    I needed that tribe to cling onto because I didn't have it in my own company.    I had a lot of great friends, but not to keep me motivated on this path of what I wanted to do and the way I wanted to do it.   Steve:    It's not like we're throwing rocks at the man or we’re anti upline. Neither of us are that way at all.    But the internet's here and there's not that much training out there when it comes to how to use MLM online.   What's been most helpful to you so far about it?   Jon: PUBLISHING - 100%.   Steve: Right! I'm not gonna lie, man. I'm sorry. I just totally cut you off, but I'm just EXCITED about this.    I got on iTunes and looked at  the MLM category. And I saw my show and I saw other people's shows... And all of a sudden I see yours right there. And I was like, "Oh my gosh."    I’m sorry. I just interrupted you.   HOW PUBLISHING HELPED MY BUSINESS EXPLODE   Jon: It's been huge for my business. If you listen to the very first episode I did, I modeled it off of how you did yours.    The very beginning where you say, "I'm going to swear," and I did something similar.    I said, "I have a confession to make."   And my buddy who listens to your show, he goes, "Oh, you totally just ripped that off."   I was like, "It's just one line. Come on."    I needed that icebreaker to get it going, but that podcast has directly and indirectly done more for me than anything else.   People reach out. Someone reached out to me this morning. "I really want to connect because of the podcast."   People want that immediate gratification. Like, "Oh, I started my podcast. It's been a month and no one joined my team yet." It's like, "That's not how it works."    It's those connections that leads to something else. Someone might ask you to do an interview.    Interviewing on this show is such an honor for me. And that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gone and put things into action.    Publishing - 100% - and the confidence you get from doing it.   I started with the podcast I then went into Facebook Live. Those have been the two big things I did that have really grown everything.    I'll tell you right now, when I got to that unit in Secret MLM Hacks where you said that, "We're going to have to publish," that was the closest I ever was to quitting.   I was like, "Nope. I'm not doing it."    OVERCOMING MY FEAR OF PUBLISHING   I remember, I was up in bed that night, heart racing, and I go, "I can't do that." I go, "I'll do everything else he's saying. I'll make these funnels. They'll look awesome. People will come to my page and they'll buy from me. Wait a minute, I got to go on camera? I got to get on a mic? No way. Not this guy. Not this introvert."   It's funny how that happens. We all end up in a totally different place.    Publishing, all day, every day. That's what got me there for sure.   Steve: That's so funny. That's the thing that I also said I would never do. "I'm never going to publish. No way. Not going to be a talking head."   What got you over that hurdle? That's a big deal for most people. It's the scariest thing that I tell them to go do.   Jon: I had to. Honestly, I sat down and I said, "What would you rather do Jon?"    "Do you want to go back to a world you know you didn't like? Where you can't go out there and use your energy to get that unlimited return because you like doing this? Or do you want to let your fears get the better of you?"   I picked the option of get over my fears and just go and try.   And I found that I really liked doing audio and then I warmed up to video.    The confidence that audio gave me then gave me the confidence to do video.    Then I found that I loved doing video, which is so weird. I even train my team on video.    That's what really got me going. It was that stepping stone, that gradual process.   MARKETING IS THE CORE OF SECRET MLM HACKS   Steve: That's so awesome. So it's just piece by piece, not taken all at once. I have to agree.   I would not have done video from the get go because then you need to entertain the camera as well as get across what you're saying. It's a lot.    Just doing audio at first was the way I had to do it.    What's happened to your own teams and down lines as a result of you, not only publishing, but everything else you've learned inside Secret MLM Hacks?   Jon: It was the marketing, the core of the training.    And if I can just give you applaud while I'm on here. Honestly, it's underrated. People want the funnels and they want the specific instructions. But it's the overall marketing education.    That was worth the whole class alone because that's what I teach my team. I've taken different things and I put my own spin on them. I started with what you taught.   I found what worked well for my team. Every company is different. We just have one product. It's a little bit different.    I twisted a few things and then I tweaked them to use them on Facebook. The core of the marketing training is what duplicated in my team.    It gave them confidence to see several of us having success. That made them want to go out there and duplicate it.    Nothing's a magic pill.    When I joined Secret MLM Hacks, I had some success, but I was stuck. I was stuck in a box and I had a few hundred people in my down line.    Right now I have over 2,700 just a year later.   MLM AND THE INTERNET IS MAGICAL   Steve: That's awesome.   Jon: Almost 7,000 customers. And we're trying to scale now, finally.   Now I'm finally like, "I get it. I see the picture."    It can change lives and people just have to be willing to give it time.   It's not 30 days, not 60 days. What I found is, after about 90 days, I finally got that gratification of having some results.    I gave it another 90 days and the thing took off like a rocket.   Steve:    That's so funny. Somebody reached out to me once and they said, "Steve, what ROI can you guarantee that I will get from this course?"    And I was like, "I don't know you and I would never do the displeasure and the dishonor."   He's like, "You can't give me an ROI guarantee."    I said, "Absolutely not. Nor would I ever dare. I don't know how hard you work."    It's not a magic pill, but it's way better than the old school ways.    So you went from a couple of hundred to 2,700 people and that's amazing. I mean, 7,000 customers… GEEZ!   It's safe to say, this is your full time thing now?   MLM AND THE INTERNET AS A FULL TIME BUSINESS   Jon: Yeah. This has been full time now for a couple of years. And it's just going up and up and up.    I've been able to retire my wife this year. She's worked retail for a decade. She's going to be done.    Residual income covers everything in our life. It's truly amazing and we still have a long way we want to go.    I have a lot of goals I want to achieve but now I want to help more people get there.    My team has over 20 people now full time and a lot of that is from this stuff because it gives them a platform.   What's funny is, people are trying to figure out what's going on. Because a lot of us were making those producers trips and everything. I'm going to Costa Rica in a week.   It's gonna be amazing. And people are like, "How is this happening?"   They're looking at where we live and my whole team is in dead areas. No one can sell to family and friends and we're crushing it.    People are like, "How are you doing it?"   I'm like, "This thing, the cell phone, the Internet. That's what we're doing."   We're connecting with people online and we're following the system.   Steve:    That's so cool. You're recruiting like crazy and then afterwards you teach them how to do the same things you are, which is awesome.    Walking them through how to go sell and make more customers after that.    Jon: Yup. Customers are king. I teach them how to get a lot of customers and I say, "You'll be attractive to work with if you can help people."    Customers are to what's going to get you paid, right?   HOW TO USE THE INTERNET TO GROW YOUR DOWNLINE   Steve:    Yeah.   Jon: And I’m like, "If you can learn how to do that, and I'll teach you everything I know on that, then we'll go out there and duplicate and build a team."    That's what I found has been really effective.    Like many things, you have to go through a lot and you'll eventually get those few. And those are going to be your good friends too.    You bond with people in this industry so well because we all fight through the, "It's a pyramid scheme." And, "It's a scam."   SCAM in all capitals everyone's favorite thing nowadays.    And we all fight through those waters together to become successful. You make really good relationships with people in this too.    That's one of the things I really like about it. I feel like I got some friends for life that I met through the internet doing my MLM.    Now we know each other, each other's families. There's power to that for sure.   Steve:    Oh definitely. One of the things that people will say to me when they're hesitant of using the internet is, "Steve. I'm not a coder. I'm not a programmer. I'm not techie."   What would you say to that?   EXCUSES ABOUT MLM AND THE INTERNET   Jon: I would say, "You don't need any of that."    Have they not seen ClickFunnels. You don't have to know how to code.    You need to learn how to market. That's what you gotta do.    If they come to me and they're like, "Jon, I want to be successful like you, but I'm not willing to publish. I'm not willing to learn marketing."    Then, "Okay, you're probably not going to be successful in the way that I have."    But if they come to me and say, "Jon, I need to be a coder. I need to be able to program. I need to be able to build stuff."   I don't know a line of code. I wouldn't know where to start other than knowing that it's a thing that exists.   Steve:    Me either.   Jon: I use the services provided and it's so easy. Anybody can do that.   Steve:    It's drag and drop.    Jon: Point and click. Microphone. To get my podcast started, I don't even think I spent more than $150 total.    Steve:    Which was on the mic.   Jon: Exactly. It's a microphone.   That's it. And you're good to go. That's what I tell people. They see me reinvesting in my business. They go, "I don't have that kind of money."    I was like, "Do you think I did?" You probably didn't either when you first started.    That's why you bootstrapped it. Like you're Funnel Hacking Live story. I share those kinds of stories with people because that's what they need to hear.    That's what I find is the biggest false belief.    In reality, it was not a pretty process. I was scared and it took a lot to do that. I'm like, "You'll get there too, but you gotta jump. You gotta jump."   THE COMMUNITY WITHIN SECRET MLM HACKS   Steve:    No, absolutely. Absolutely.    How is it that you've been able to go and train other people on how to do this?    Jon: Community groups. Similar to how you created a community for all of us to interact.   I found that creating a community, I'm really partial to Facebook groups just because I think that's the place most people congregate.    You can pull the stragglers in and I just get them all in there. Then you create a system like the way units are created or some sort of system to train. Keep them plugged in and keep them around all the success going on.    You've got to make them want to duplicate. I repurposed a lot of the training that you gave us. I did it back in my own videos, let them connect with me.   But you know what happened? None of them use it at first. I'm like, "This was the big brain moment."   Like, "This is the thing that changed everything for me. What do you mean you guys aren't interested in this?"   That made me feel nuts. Like, "Am I the only one that gets how big of a deal this stuff is that we're doing, how big of a breakthrough?"   I found later, if I couldn't connect them to what the outcome could be or why they'd want to do it, it didn't matter how good the training was.    Once I figured out how to surround them with, "This person promoted, this person promoted. Congratulations. Look at these things these people are doing."    Then they were like, "How are they doing it?”    “Okay, well go get the marketing training. Now go watch the stuff we made."   That was the wall I faced in between learning this and having the results for six months.   WHERE WILL MLM AND THE INTERNET TAKE YOU?   Steve:    What does the next little while look like for you then?    What are you working on now?   Jon: Right now what I'm trying to do is get some of my team leaders to do their publishing.   I'm trying to get some of my top level people to get out there and do a podcast or do a weekly Facebook Live series.    There's so many great ways to do social and get out there and build their audience.    It's not just myself. I have myself and one other person that do a lot. Everyone else is still on the fence. They're a little nervous.    They're having success, butI can see they're going to get stuck or maybe they're starting to.    And I'm like, "This is how you get unstuck."    We're ready to scale it big.   Steve:    Any parting advice you have for anybody who's like, "Does the internet plus MLM actually work?"   DON’T MISS OUT ON UTILIZING MLM AND THE INTERNET   Jon: My parting advice is just get in with it.    Some people are always going to be skeptical to MLM, direct selling, whatever you want to call it.    With the way things are decentralizing, more people are doing what I did. Leaving a career to go do this. To go build this magical internet business that people don't quite understand at first.   Social marketing is also on the rise like crazy and we're riding both at the same time.    The people who are riding the network marketing and social marketing over the next 10 years, I believe, and I know I'm not the only one, that is going to explode and it already is.    With the way things are heading, it's only going to put us at a bigger advantage because people don't want to do things the traditional way as much anymore.   I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm not saying I have a problem with it. I'm just saying that top producers are very active, they're publishing, they're on social, they're using the internet.    If you choose not to, then you're already behind right now. In three years, your chance at making producers trips and being onstage is going to be really slim because people are blowing up right now.    You can reach anybody, anywhere, truly.   USE THE INTERNET TO GROW YOUR DOWNLINE   Steve:    So true. It's totally possible to blow it up the old way. It's just not very probable, which means it's crazy risky.    You can't measure it. It's not a likely success.   Jon: It's harder to duplicate.   Steve:    It really is. And you can't go back and train everybody. I'm trying to not be offensive to anybody reading this.   Jon: You're safe here.   Steve:    You go from being a business coach to a life coach because the quality of individual that you go and grab, not to judge their self worth, but their readiness to actually perform.   You start grabbing people who are just not ready or in a place where they can take action.    Totally agree with that. Dude, thanks for being on. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.   Jon: Thanks for having me.   Steve:    You're kind of a celebrity now man. You're all over the place.    There's many of you guys from Secret MLM Hacks that are out wrecking the stage and I love it.    Thanks for taking the time to catch up and share it.   Jon: Any time. Happy to be here, Steve.   Steve:    What's your podcast?    Jon: My podcast is called MLM Automation Radio.   START PUBLISHING IN THE MLM SPACE    I talk about a lot of the same stuff and I get a lot of listeners that reference you. They don't know that I was a student in your class.   They go, "Have you listened to Secret MLM Hacks?" Like, "You guys seem to have a lot of the same ideas."    I'm like, "Well, that's where I learned a lot of ideas from."    You guys could check that out,  MLM Automation Radio. I have a lot of new content coming out this year. I'm doing a big revamp right now, going to give away some new stuff. Definitely check it out.   I know it's tough to find people to pitch after your warm market dries up, right?    That moment when you finally run out of family and friends to pitch. I don't see many up lines teaching legitimate lead strategies today.    After years of being a lead funnel builder online I got sick of the garbage strategies most MLMs have been teaching their recruits for decades.   Whether you simply want more leads to pitch or an automated MLM funnel, head over to secretmlmhacks.com and join the next FREE training.   There you're gonna learn the hidden revenue model that only the top MLMers have been using to get paid regardless if you join them.   Learn the 3-step system I use to auto recruit my downline of big producers WITHOUT friends or family even knowing that I'm in MLM.    If you want to do the same for yourself, head over to secretmlmhacks.com.   Again that’s secretmlmhacks.com.