Podcasts about jordan it

Al and Codey interview Jordan, the developer of Rusty's Retirement Timings 00:00:00: Theme Tune 00:00:30: Intro 00:01:43: What Have We Been Up To 00:17:26: Game News 00:40:24: Rusty’s Retirement Interview 01:22:47: Outro Links Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Trailer Harvest Hills Release Mika and the Witch’s Mountain Exiting EA Galactic Getaway EA Release Usagi Shima “Chinese New Year” Update Chill Town Roadmap Fields of Mistria Roadmap Webfishing Cat Plush Animal Crossing Aquarium UK Tour Rusty’s Retirement on Steam Rusty’s Retirement Links Contact Al on Mastodon: https://mastodon.scot/@TheScotBot Email Us: https://harvestseason.club/contact/ Transcript (0:00:30) Al: Hello, farmers, and welcome to another episode of The Harvest Season. (0:00:36) Al: My name is Al. (0:00:38) Codey: and I am Cody. (0:00:40) Al: And we’re here today to talk about Cottagecore Games. (0:00:44) Codey: Woo. (0:00:45) Codey: Whoooo! (0:00:46) Al: This episode, we have a very exciting thing. (0:00:49) Al: It’s not often we get an interview, but the first interview of the year this year (0:00:53) Al: is with the developer of 2024’s The Harvest Season game of the year. (0:01:01) Al: Rusty Retirement, Jordan, the developer of Rusty Retirement, (0:01:05) Al: will be joining us later in the episode to talk about the game and many other things. (0:01:12) Codey: Yeah, we talk, we kind of talk about a couple things. (0:01:12) Al: So we talk about stuff, it is, it is mentioned, and some super exciting secret stuff. (0:01:16) Codey: The game is mentioned though. (0:01:18) Codey: Yeah, it is talked about, which will be revealed in this episode. (0:01:27) Al: Yeah. (0:01:31) Al: So if you’re here just to listen to that, you can see the time in the show notes, (0:01:35) Al: or you can click on the chapter in your podcast episode. (0:01:38) Al: But please do stay around as we talk about the news for this week. (0:01:43) Al: And also, Cody, what have you been up to? (0:01:46) Codey: I have been playing Slay the Spire. (0:01:52) Codey: I haven’t been playing it nearly as much, (0:01:54) Codey: but I did finally beat all of the characters (0:02:00) Codey: and beat like the end game once you– (0:02:04) Codey: and like got credits. (0:02:06) Codey: But it doesn’t really ever end, really. (0:02:08) Codey: You just keep playing. (0:02:10) Codey: But it’s fun. (0:02:12) Codey: doing that, doing more PhD studies. (0:02:16) Codey: It’s like starting to hit me now that like, cause I was talking to my advisor (0:02:20) Codey: and he was like, yeah, so if you’re going to defend in or graduate in December, (0:02:24) Codey: you have to defend in October, which means you should have your data done by (0:02:28) Codey: July. And like, I was just like, Oh, oh gosh, it’s all coming up so fast. (0:02:35) Codey: So yeah, it’s starting to hit. (0:02:38) Codey: Um, and also clearly Rusty’s retirement played a hot minute of that by you. (0:02:38) Al: Fair enough, obviously. (0:02:44) Al: Nice. I think last episode I talked about playing Legends Arceus for the second time, (0:02:51) Al: gone through and caught most of the Pokémon, I was nearly done. I have now finished that, (0:02:56) Al: so that’s that’s done. I’ve got my full Pokémon home decks, got the crown on Pokémon home for (0:03:03) Al: for that. And then I decided to do go from (0:03:08) Al: the best Pokemon game to the worst Pokemon game. And I am now playing Brilliant Diamond (0:03:13) Al: and Shining Pearl again. So it hasn’t, I already, I had a save. I had done a Professor Oak challenge. (0:03:24) Al: So I still had that. However, I didn’t finish, I didn’t keep everything. So there was a bunch (0:03:30) Al: of Pokemon I need to catch and breed and stuff, but it wasn’t too hard, except I am now, I (0:03:36) Al: I now need– (0:03:38) Al: Well, two Pokémon lines, one of which is just a version exclusive, (0:03:44) Al: so I’ve been playing through the other game, Pearl, to get that one. (0:03:47) Al: And I’ve almost got it. I’m almost there. (0:03:49) Al: The other one I need is Palkia, so I do need to finish Pearl till the end. (0:03:54) Al: So I do need to play through that game all the way to the end (0:03:58) Al: and get Palkia and be finished with that. (0:04:00) Codey: I’m sorry. That sounds awful (0:04:03) Al: I do– I feel like I don’t know. (0:04:05) Al: I didn’t, I don’t feel like I hate. (0:04:08) Al: the games when I was playing them, but maybe that rose tinted glasses. (0:04:11) Al: Maybe I did when I was playing it, but they are not great. (0:04:13) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:04:19) Al: I do not miss random encounters in the grass. (0:04:23) Al: I mean, that in and of itself, like I don’t, I don’t want that to ever come back. (0:04:28) Al: I know some people like it. (0:04:29) Al: Whatever. (0:04:29) Al: I don’t, please don’t, please don’t bring it back, please. (0:04:35) Al: and obviously just the thing that annoys me. (0:04:38) Al: most about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is the stickiness. Like if you walk next to a wall (0:04:48) Al: you slow down. I just hate that so much because it’s like especially if you’re going through a (0:04:53) Al: cave and it’s like you happen to brush against a rock and suddenly you’re going at snail space. (0:04:59) Al: It’s just I really hate it. I do hate it so much and I feel like those games could have been a lot (0:05:05) Al: a lot better if there’s just been like a few decisions made. (0:05:08) Al: I could have dealt with the fact that it was random encounters in the grass right, (0:05:12) Al: like I would have preferred if they’d done something like Let’s Go right like I think (0:05:12) Codey: Yeah. (0:05:16) Al: Let’s Go is one of my favorite games. So if they’d done something like that I would have (0:05:21) Al: been much preferred it but I can understand why they would want to do like let’s keep let’s bring (0:05:26) Al: back the random encounters because that’s what these games were fine but it’s just all the other (0:05:32) Al: decisions that were made. Yeah, not fun. So (0:05:34) Codey: Yeah, I think that was like why I didn’t get them because if I wanted to play Diamond or Pearl, I would play it first like they didn’t change enough to me to make it worth it. (0:05:46) Al: Yeah, are we past the point now where you can just remake a game? Like, red and blue, (0:06:00) Al: when they were remade into Fire Red and Leaf Cream, I think that needed to happen, right? (0:06:05) Al: To make those games fun. Because those games were so, like, they were obviously really (0:06:10) Al: complicated and difficult for what they were at the time, and they were running on like (0:06:14) Al: of shoes. (0:06:16) Al: The company nearly folded multiple times before they got those games out. (0:06:20) Al: And so I think it makes absolute sense to redo those. (0:06:23) Al: I think HeartGold and SoulSilver, whether you like those games or not, I think did a (0:06:28) Al: lot to those games and made them better in a lot of ways. (0:06:33) Al: I personally really like what they did with Oras. (0:06:36) Al: I liked how they did that in the 3D style. (0:06:43) Al: And then let’s score, I think is. (0:06:46) Al: One of their best, I think it’s their best remake full stop. (0:06:48) Al: I think it’s amazing what they did with it. (0:06:50) Al: They took what was the original games and made it different. (0:06:54) Al: I really like that. (0:06:57) Al: And even if they’d done Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl as Platinum, (0:07:01) Al: I still feel like people would have been like, “But why?” (0:07:04) Al: Right? Because you can use it. (0:07:05) Al: Like a DS is not, DS games don’t feel old, like Game Boy games feel old. (0:07:12) Al: And yeah, some people would prefer to play a Game Boy game (0:07:16) Al: and remake of a Game Boy game. (0:07:17) Al: But a lot of people wouldn’t. (0:07:18) Al: A lot of people would prefer to play a newer game. (0:07:20) Al: But I feel like if you’re looking for a 2D Pokémon game, (0:07:24) Al: go play a 2D Pokémon game. (0:07:26) Al: I don’t think just remaking them as what they are makes sense anymore. (0:07:30) Codey: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that that’s exciting enough to merit people dropping down another $60 or $50 or however much these games cost nowadays. (0:07:44) Al: or 120, if you buy them both, which obviously I would never do. You’d never find me doing that. (0:07:46) Codey: Yeah. No, of course not. No. Yeah, so I don’t… I think that it does a disservice to them to… (0:08:00) Codey: Not try and improve the games with the quality of life features that the fandom clearly needs or at the minimum, like have them be like a setting you can toggle or something. (0:08:14) Codey: So if people want to play the game on hard mode, they can. (0:08:18) Codey: Yeah. (0:08:18) Al: Let’s not get into the debate of hard mode. (0:08:22) Al: Yeah, I think, yeah, I just, it’s not even like Brilliant Diamond and Chime Pearl brought (0:08:30) Al: it up to the best or the most modern 2D games, right? (0:08:34) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:08:34) Al: Like the graphics were better, right? (0:08:37) Al: In my opinion, I know a lot of people didn’t like how it looked, but that’s fine. (0:08:40) Al: If you don’t like how it looked, that’s fine, but it is like more modern looking. (0:08:44) Al: It’s cleaner graphics, et cetera, et cetera, right? (0:08:48) Al: No, it’s not, it didn’t have as many quality of life improvements as even Gen 5 did, one (0:08:54) Codey: Mm hmm. Yeah. (0:08:55) Al: generation later, right? (0:08:58) Al: And so what are you doing if you’re not even going to improve it in that way, right? (0:09:04) Al: And that’s ignoring the stuff that they ignored that they had improved in Platinum. (0:09:09) Al: A Gen 4 game that came out two years later, right? (0:09:14) Al: Like if you’re going to ignore all of those improvements that you have made over the years (0:09:19) Al: don’t bother, but anyway, so yeah, I think I enjoyed the Professor Oak challenge because (0:09:20) Codey: Yeah (0:09:23) Codey: Hard agree (0:09:27) Al: it was very different compared to other ones, like having the grand underground, I think, (0:09:33) Al: was made that more interesting, but anyway, most people don’t care about that sort of (0:09:40) Al: stuff. (0:09:41) Al: So yeah, I’ve been playing through that and I’ll get there eventually. (0:09:44) Al: I’ve taken a break today to do some shiny hunting in Scarlet and Violet. (0:09:48) Al: But once I’ve done this, once I’ve caught Palkia, (0:09:52) Al: the only ones I’ll have left to do are, I don’t have a, (0:09:57) Al: because I’ve been for listeners who are, for new listeners or people who aren’t aware, (0:10:01) Al: I lost almost all of my Pokemon saves two years ago on my Switch. (0:10:05) Al: And I’ve recreated most of them now. (0:10:07) Al: So I have the only one, the only one I say I didn’t lose was my sword, (0:10:14) Al: Pokemon sword, because that was on a different Switch. (0:10:16) Al: because I was running two games at the same time. (0:10:18) Al: And I didn’t really like having to close a game and reopen it. (0:10:22) Al: So I just had two switches running the two games. (0:10:25) Al: So because of that, I managed to keep my sword. (0:10:29) Al: But other than that, I lost everything else. (0:10:31) Al: So all I’ve got left I don’t have is Let’s Go Pikachu and Shield. (0:10:39) Al: I think I have everything else because I’ve got Scarlet and Violet. (0:10:41) Al: I’ve got Legends Arceus. (0:10:44) Al: I’ve got Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl now. (0:10:47) Al: and I’ve got Let’s Go Eevee. (0:10:48) Al: And I’ve obviously got my original sword. (0:10:50) Al: So I think I’ve just got Let’s Go Pikachu to do and sword. (0:10:55) Al: And I will probably, I think I’ll probably do with Let’s Go Pikachu (0:10:58) Al: like I’m doing with Palkia and I’ll just kind of like rush through it (0:11:01) Al: and get it finished and then do the last couple of Pokémon (0:11:03) Al: that I need for the crown on Pokémon Home for those games. (0:11:06) Al: And then I think I will probably at some point, (0:11:11) Al: certainly not before the next Pokémon games that comes out, (0:11:14) Al: maybe at the end of the year or something, (0:11:17) Al: I will probably (0:11:18) Al: do a Professor Oak Challenge in Shield and get that done that way and finish up that (0:11:24) Al: dicks like that. Because that’s the only set of games on the Switch that I haven’t done (0:11:33) Al: a Professor Oak Challenge in because I started it for brilliant time in Shining Pearl. What a game (0:11:40) Al: to start that on. And then I went back and did Let’s Go Pikachu, but I didn’t go back and do (0:11:49) Al: Shield. No, I didn’t go back and do Pikachu because I already had a Pikachu save, (0:11:54) Al: but then I’d lost it, so I did Eevee. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Point is, I suspect by the middle (0:12:03) Al: of February, I will only have one Pokémon game not finished and that’ll be Shield and (0:12:12) Al: that’ll be the only Pokédex I don’t have finished on home as well. But I’ll get to that eventually. (0:12:16) Al: There’s no rush. (0:12:17) Codey: So, so I have a question. (0:12:19) Al: Yes, go for it. Yes, my secret is I don’t work. (0:12:20) Codey: Do you sleep? (0:12:23) Codey: I don’t believe you. (0:12:27) Codey: Oh, that worked. (0:12:28) Codey: That’s, that’s fair. (0:12:30) Al: Or if you are my employer, please don’t listen to this. The secret is that obviously the ADHD (0:12:35) Codey: Yeah. (0:12:38) Al: allows me to do like a week’s worth in like a day. And then I spend the rest of the time feeling (0:12:41) Codey: Yep. (0:12:43) Al: guilty that I’m not doing anything because my brain can’t, but it then distracts me. (0:12:45) Codey: Yep. (0:12:47) Codey: Yep, that’s where I am, too. (0:12:52) Codey: But that is part of working with neurodivergence. (0:12:59) Codey: So yeah, that’s actually, I’m doing a conference in November, and (0:12:59) Al: Yeah, weeeeeeee. (0:13:04) Codey: I’m going to try and have a symposium in that conference for, (0:13:08) Codey: it’s an entomology conference. (0:13:10) Codey: I want a symposium specifically on neurodivergence and why, and (0:13:14) Codey: and how to accommodate for… (0:13:17) Codey: people that work in your in your area or group or whatever university (0:13:22) Codey: accommodate for students and faculty that have neurodivergences versus like (0:13:27) Codey: just trying to make them conform because that is very left hand of left hand right (0:13:35) Codey: hand of people so that’s what we’ve been up to oh my gosh he doesn’t sleep you (0:13:38) Al: Oh, oh, wait, no, I’m not finished yet. (0:13:43) Al: I’ve been playing Harvest Moon Home Sweet Home. (0:13:45) Codey: guys I don’t believe it (0:13:47) Al: I’ve not been doing this very much, (0:13:49) Al: because I’ve just been doing like a day or two every day, (0:13:54) Al: which only takes like five or 10 minutes. (0:13:56) Al: But I’m trying to play these games like some people play (0:13:58) Al: them and just playing a little bit every day. (0:14:00) Al: And it’s been so much better with the controller support. (0:14:02) Al: I can actually play it now. (0:14:04) Codey: But can you save it the right way? (0:14:06) Codey: Bye. (0:14:08) Al: It doesn’t seem to work properly in so much as it saves fine, (0:14:12) Al: and it seems to be saving fine. (0:14:14) Al: And it seems like it loads when I go on. (0:14:16) Al: So I’m using it on my iPad, and I play it on my iPad, (0:14:19) Al: and it all seems to work. (0:14:20) Al: And I close the app, and I open up, and it all works fine. (0:14:22) Al: And then I go on to my Mac, and I open it up, and it says, (0:14:25) Al: oh, you’ve got new data. (0:14:26) Al: Do you want to download this? (0:14:27) Al: You go, yes, I’ll take the new data. (0:14:29) Al: And it shows the right thing on there. (0:14:31) Al: It says I’m at spring 23, year one, (0:14:34) Al: and I’ve got this much money, blah, blah, blah. (0:14:36) Al: And then you click on it, and then you actually (0:14:38) Al: get the game, and you’re back on spring one, (0:14:41) Al: and you have nothing. (0:14:42) Al: And the best thing about it is the save (0:14:44) Al: is completely mucked up in so much as there are no people. (0:14:46) Codey: Mm hmm. That sounds lovely, actually. (0:14:48) Al: People don’t exist in the game. (0:14:50) Al: There are no NPCs, and there’s nothing you can do. (0:14:53) Al: You just walk around and do nothing. (0:14:56) Al: It’s– it’s an autistic paradise. (0:15:02) Codey: That’s my kind of farming. (0:15:05) Al: Um. (0:15:06) Codey: Just give me give me all the tasks to do without the social interaction. (0:15:14) Al: So yeah, I can still only play on my iPad, (0:15:17) Al: which I do want the cloud save, (0:15:19) Al: and that would probably, (0:15:20) Al: I’d probably play it more if I had the cloud save, (0:15:22) Al: but the controller support means (0:15:24) Al: that I’m actually playing it. (0:15:26) Al: So, yeah. (0:15:29) Al: So that’s why I’ve been up to, (0:15:30) Al: I’ve also been thinking about the Switch 2. (0:15:32) Al: I don’t know if you’ve been thinking (0:15:33) Al: about the Switch 2 at all. (0:15:34) Codey: Nope. I don’t play my Switch that often, like at all. I know that I am going to play it. (0:15:35) Al: No, that’s fine. (0:15:37) Al: I’m excited for the Switch too. (0:15:38) Al: Hmm. (0:15:44) Codey: I’m going to play the Zelda games eventually, right? And then I enjoy having it for if I (0:15:50) Codey: want to play anything, but Xbox Game Pass has all I really need right now. And no, no, (0:15:57) Al: did you get did you get us a steam decadent Oh sad come on Jeff by the (0:16:03) Codey: I did not. (0:16:04) Codey: I am unloved no we yeah he was like still deciding if he wanted to do it or not he (0:16:13) Codey: actually did just get a raise so yeah maybe I’ll like walk by his phone and do that whole (0:16:16) Al: There you go. Perfect. (0:16:22) Codey: like steam deck like whisper into his phone so that his algorithm will start picking up (0:16:27) Codey: like ads first yeah. (0:16:28) Al: or we can get your is is it your neighbor Micah is it Micah can go in when Jeff moves (0:16:34) Al: in and get Micah to go and talk to him hint are you listening Micah you can we can we (0:16:35) Codey: Uh-huh does Micah have one I can’t remember I don’t know but yeah no my neighbor I’m wondering (0:16:46) Al: confusing Micah’s again I have no idea I don’t think that’s relevant to whether or not he (0:16:50) Codey: if he has a steam deck yeah oh true true true true yeah Micah when we have like a Jeff moved (0:16:55) Al: can convince Jeff to buy U.S.D. (0:17:03) Codey: and party. (0:17:04) Al: Yeah. Yeah, I heard it. I heard it on the podcast. (0:17:04) Codey: Um, you should be like, man, Cody really like was excited about (0:17:08) Codey: possibly because Jeff doesn’t, because Jeff does not listen to this. (0:17:15) Al: I guessed, I guessed. (0:17:18) Codey: Yeah, for sure. (0:17:19) Al: All right. Well, I’m excited about the switch too. And I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about it in (0:17:23) Al: the future, even though they’ve not really said anything yet. But all right, should we talk about (0:17:28) Al: the news? First up, we have Rune Factory Guardian. (0:17:29) Codey: Sure. (0:17:34) Al: So, first of all, they’ve announced that it’s coming out on the 30th of May. (0:17:39) Codey: Woo. (0:17:40) Codey: Something. (0:17:44) Al: So, there we go. That’s the thing. They’ve given a bunch of information on the new features. (0:17:52) Al: So, it has a village building thing, which is, I think, quite cool. In the trailer, (0:17:58) Al: you see them placing buildings and stuff and that. (0:18:04) Al: That’s cool. I quite like that idea because I get all the previous Rune Factory games have been like, (0:18:09) Al: “Here is an existing village. Go and interact with it.” Whereas this seems to be like you’re (0:18:14) Al: building up a village from small as you do the rest of things as well, which is a fun addition. (0:18:20) Codey: Yeah, I got the vibe that you’re like going through an area that has been like devastated and you’re helping to like rebuild (0:18:28) Al: Yeah, but that’s cool. Because if the whole point of Rune Factory is, it’s what if farming (0:18:38) Al: game plus adventure, I feel like adding in Village Building to that is a good logical (0:18:45) Al: continuation of that. (0:18:46) Codey: Yeah, going elsewhere, spreading your farming knowledge to the masses. (0:18:52) Al: The rest of it seems pretty similar to previous Rune Factory games, your combat and stuff (0:18:59) Al: like that. (0:19:00) Al: There maybe seem to be a bit more in terms of what’s the word I’m looking for, the movement. (0:19:06) Al: You seem to be able to glide on wind and stuff like that that I haven’t experienced in the (0:19:12) Al: previous games, which is a fun addition, making it more Breath of the Wildy, I guess. (0:19:19) Al: And there’s also 16 romanceables in this game. (0:19:22) Al: Get your waifu or husbandu. (0:19:25) Codey: Has a bundle I think it’s Joe (0:19:31) Codey: Yeah, never played a room factory game so I don’t have much (0:19:34) Al: Probably never going to. (0:19:37) Codey: Probs not (0:19:40) Codey: But I mean it looks the village building aspect I really do like like the idea of (0:19:47) Codey: going through an area and like helping to rebuild and restore peace and (0:19:52) Codey: maybe like you can set up farms and then you (0:19:55) Codey: find someone who can farm it and then you (0:19:57) Codey: move on. So it’s like you are creating the (0:19:59) Codey: farms and that kind of stuff and creating the (0:20:03) Codey: little societies. But then you get to disappear (0:20:06) Codey: into the ether. (0:20:07) Al: Is this going to be a, this is going to be the third run factor in a row where I go, (0:20:10) Al: “Ooh, I could, I could, maybe I’ll like this.” (0:20:13) Al: And then I play it and go, “Eh, it’s not really for me.” (0:20:16) Codey: Okay, maybe maybe the village maybe the village thing will be not will will make it change, (0:20:16) Al: Isn’t it? (0:20:17) Al: It’s going to, it’s going to happen again, isn’t it? (0:20:20) Al: Cause I’m getting that feeling. (0:20:27) Codey: maybe you will enjoy. We’re going to be optimistic here, because you’re going to have to play it. So (0:20:28) Al: Yeah, no one’s making me. (0:20:38) Codey: I am promising at this because I make the promises in this hostel. (0:20:46) Codey: Yeah, if you you can only marry. Yeah. (0:20:48) Al: What I didn’t notice is there didn’t seem to be anything about whether the romanceables (0:20:56) Al: are segregated. Oh dear. You know what I mean? Whether you can romance anyone or not. It (0:21:06) Al: does look like… I’m not seeing anything… I can’t remember five, but before five it (0:21:09) Codey: What has it been in all the previous games? (0:21:15) Al: It was definitely only… (0:21:18) Al: opposite gender. But I can’t remember what five did. However, obviously, that was also an issue (0:21:24) Al: for Story of Seasons and is no longer an issue for Story of Seasons and it’s the same company. (0:21:29) Al: So I would hope that now it will allow you to romance any character, but who knows? We’ll see. (0:21:39) Codey: We live in a society. (0:21:41) Codey: Thank you. (0:21:45) Al: It is $60. (0:21:48) Al: euros or 42 pounds. (0:21:50) Al: That is pretty cheap here. (0:21:52) Codey: What why why did you guys like pay a premium to like your government paid a (0:21:53) Al: I don’t know why it’s cheaper here than not though, I don’t know. (0:22:02) Codey: premium so they could get it for cheaper. (0:22:05) Al: The limited edition is $100 or 66 pounds and 66 pence. (0:22:10) Al: What a weird… (0:22:11) Codey: What the heck? (0:22:11) Al: Why is this such a weird number? (0:22:15) Al: it’s interesting. So the standard way. (0:22:18) Al: One. So this is for switch physical is (0:22:18) Codey: Uh huh. (0:22:21) Al: fifty nine ninety nine dollars forty one sixty six pounds or forty nine ninety nine euros. (0:22:27) Al: Right. So I would think maybe it was just (0:22:29) Al: auto-converted if it weren’t for the fact that the euros was a sensible one as well. (0:22:33) Al: So that’s weird. (0:22:34) Al: But then you go on to the limited edition one, which is nine ninety nine ninety nine (0:22:40) Al: dollars sixty six sixty six pounds or eighty three thirty two euros. (0:22:43) Codey: I mean, is it, do you guys have like a tax or something like a tariff on them that that (0:22:48) Al: What is with these numbers? (0:22:51) Al: So confused. (0:22:56) Al: Yeah, but. (0:22:58) Codey: would counteract? (0:23:00) Al: I mean, not if if so, it would be the case on every game, right? (0:23:06) Codey: Well, but maybe they’re like doing you a solid, like this company is like, we know, we know that (0:23:09) Al: Well, not rounding up. (0:23:11) Codey: you have to pay out your nose for shipping. So we’re just going to make the cost cheaper. (0:23:20) Codey: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m just trying to grasp the straws because that’s a little bizarre. (0:23:20) Al: if amazon has the the limited edition for 80 and the standard for 45 which I think was (0:23:24) Codey: Seems like a typo. (0:23:35) Al: the limited edition was more expensive yeah that was like 20 quid more for the limited edition (0:23:35) Codey: the euro prices. (0:23:41) Al: and three pounds more for the oh it’s very confusing what is happening here (0:23:46) Codey: There’s no logic in this place. (0:23:49) Al: I think these must. (0:23:50) Al: be auto translated like auto thing made because I can’t even find I can’t even find (0:23:59) Al: that number anywhere on any shop so I’m just going to ignore it I’m in all right anyway (0:24:03) Codey: Are they trying to say that this is the devil’s game? (0:24:11) Al: there’s that you can go pre-order it now if you want to go go go buy the game if you want (0:24:15) Al: it or if you’re me um next we have harvest hills uh have announced (0:24:15) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:24:20) Al: they’re out now uh I don’t think we got previous notice of this coming out on this date because (0:24:26) Al: I didn’t have it down as that so they’ve just it’s out shadow drop they go (0:24:30) Codey: Yep, that’s the way to do it (0:24:33) Al: um trying to decide if I wanted to play this game or not uh it looks nice it’s nice graphics (0:24:41) Al: but oh no they did announce their release date I just missed it they released it on Christmas eve (0:24:47) Al: I don’t think this had an early access, so this is just… (0:24:52) Codey: Yeah, no, this one was one that I was interested in because of the beehives looking actually like beehives. (0:24:58) Al: Oh yes, oh yes. Oh, it’s cheap. Five quid, that’s wild. Okay, okay. (0:25:00) Codey: And I’m really, yeah, it’s only like $5. (0:25:07) Codey: Okay, the final the final question, can it be played on Mac? Nope. Sorry, y’all. (0:25:12) Al: Oh, but it can on Steam Deck. I’d say it’s unknown compatibility on Steam Deck, but (0:25:17) Codey: Well, I (0:25:20) Al: I suspect it’ll be fine on Steam Deck, because it has controller support. (0:25:22) Codey: It does look really cute, cool. (0:25:24) Al: Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So if you want that game, go play it. Mika. (0:25:28) Al: Which is mountain have announced that their non early access release is coming on the 22nd (0:25:35) Al: of January. What I’m a little bit confused by is that they’ve said that the third update is coming (0:25:44) Al: in the coming weeks. So this seems to be leaving early access without an update. (0:25:50) Al: Like they’re just going, Oh, it’s not early access anymore. But this is this is they’ve been weird (0:25:56) Al: about this since the beginning, right? Because I… (0:25:58) Al: Still don’t understand why they ever put this out in Early Access, (0:26:01) Al: because it wasn’t Early Access. They just added extra content after the fact. (0:26:04) Al: And now they’re releasing their non-Early Access version before the final update. (0:26:10) Codey: I mean, that seems pretty par for the course, given that Coral Island did a lot of the same stuff. (0:26:11) Al: Weird. Weird. What are they doing over there? (0:26:19) Al: - Well, yeah, I mean, I feel like “Mika and the Witch’s Mountain” was more complete on (0:26:23) Codey: Yeah. (0:26:23) Al: its early access release than “Coral Island” was on its 1.0 release. I don’t know, weird, (0:26:28) Codey: Yeah, that’s fair. (0:26:33) Al: confused, whatever. Why they didn’t go, “Oh, this is now out of early access” with their (0:26:38) Al: second content update, because the third content update is extra stuff that they’d want to (0:26:44) Al: add but wasn’t originally promised and so why they didn’t go or the second up (0:26:49) Al: it is the non-early access release okay great fine done but they didn’t do that they’ve gone (0:26:55) Al: no this random date a few weeks before the final update that doesn’t have an actual update (0:27:02) Al: that is the non-early access version (0:27:04) Codey: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don’t know is this this is the one where they’re gonna do they’re gonna add dungeons, right? (0:27:11) Al: yes correct (0:27:11) Codey: Yeah, cuz it says into the mount gone (0:27:14) Codey: uh (0:27:15) Al: Yeah, this is the time if you played the game before and you haven’t played. (0:27:19) Al: either of the content updates this will be the time to play it because I believe this is the (0:27:23) Al: final update and yeah it has a lot of extra content whereas the previous ones they were fun (0:27:30) Al: they do look fun but they were kind of small things it was like here’s a minigame here’s (0:27:35) Al: an extra collectible whereas this is yeah here are dungeons that you can go into much bigger. (0:27:40) Codey: Mm-hmm. Yeah, cool (0:27:42) Al: Galactic getaway they have announced that their early access comes out in March (0:27:48) Codey: Sorry, I just reread my comment and didn’t even realize it was a pun. (0:27:53) Al: Yeah (0:27:55) Al: You (0:27:57) Codey: So I wrote, how are they getting away with this? (0:28:01) Codey: And it’s galactic getaway. (0:28:04) Codey: So what I was referring to, I almost typed it out, but I wanted it to be like a secret. (0:28:09) Codey: When I look at this like Kickstarter picture that they have, the little robot is clearly (0:28:18) Codey: WALL-E with like a headset on and the dog looks kind of like Doug from up. (0:28:18) Al: Okay, bye. (0:28:27) Codey: And then the spaceship in the back left looks like Stitch’s spaceship from Leelo and Stitch. (0:28:34) Codey: So they’re just, the getaway part of this is that they’re getting away with not being (0:28:38) Codey: sued by Disney, I think. (0:28:38) Al: Right. Okay. So a couple of things. One, I don’t get the spaceship one. It doesn’t look (0:28:41) Codey: Okay. (0:28:44) Al: in it. Oh, no, I see. I know. I see. You mean that one. And I feel like I can see what you’re (0:28:51) Al: getting, what you’re coming, where you’re coming from, but they’re all pretty generic anyway, (0:28:56) Al: right? Like Eve is a pretty like generic looking robot. Doug is a dog, right? Like there’s only (0:29:01) Codey: Yeah, this is the we have Eve at home. (0:29:04) Codey: Uh-huh. (0:29:07) Al: so many dogs that the. (0:29:09) Al: And the spaceship is a red spaceship it it doesn’t even. (0:29:14) Codey: And the watering can has a star on it, like in, uh, I look at, I’m, the more I look someone (0:29:15) Al: Like it doesn’t even have the exact same design. (0:29:19) Al: Oh, come on. (0:29:22) Al: Come on. (0:29:28) Codey: in the background has buns like in, uh, Star Wars. No, I just, that like the, the picture. (0:29:34) Al: The robot is your biggest argument, I see why you’re saying that and I understand what you’re coming from, however, it’s a pretty generic looking robot shape, I think, personally. (0:29:51) Codey: But no, I, I just, I noticed that and I was like, Oh wow. (0:29:55) Codey: But yeah, I don’t know. (0:29:57) Codey: I’d like to see, uh, more stuff about this game. (0:30:00) Codey: I mean, they’ve, they’re going to add, they’re fixing the creatures, the (0:30:04) Codey: farming, the crafting, the mini games, um, and early access in March, 2025. (0:30:11) Codey: So, oh, woo. (0:30:15) Al: Usagi Shima have announced that they have a Chinese New Year update out now with one (0:30:21) Al: very important thing. Would you like to mention it? Yeah, you can give a costume to your bun (0:30:22) Codey: Uh, lion… lion dancing. (0:30:29) Al: to make it look like a… See, I thought these were dragons. I know it says lion, but I feel (0:30:33) Codey: No, they’re quick. Yeah. Have you ever seen lion dancing? Have you ever seen lion dancing? (0:30:35) Al: like it’s the Chinese New Year dragon, isn’t it? No, from a traditional saying. (0:30:43) Codey: I had um, I had a woman. Yeah, no, they’re lions. Um, there were a couple people in my high school (0:30:45) Al: Those are really, those are meant to be lions. I thought they were dragons. They don’t look (0:30:53) Al: anything like lions. (0:30:56) Codey: that uh were lion dancers and so they would do um in all the (0:31:03) Codey: like assemblies. They’d have a lion dancing part to the assembly. It was really cool. (0:31:10) Codey: Oh, that’s that was a big jump that I had to make. So you said this is a costume? (0:31:16) Al: So there’s a costume and there’s a minigame. You maybe have to do the minigame to get the costume, (0:31:21) Al: I’m not sure. Yeah, you jump over buns, some of which are in the costume. (0:31:22) Codey: Is the minigame the jumping? (0:31:29) Codey: Well, I just jumped over a plant and then lost to a mushroom, so. (0:31:33) Al: Oh, OK, so it’s more than buns that you jump over. Fair enough. (0:31:36) Codey: But that’s exciting. (0:31:39) Al: Yeah, if you love this game, it’s another update and with stuff for you to do. (0:31:40) Codey: I haven’t played this game in a while. (0:31:45) Codey: And it’s still cute. (0:31:47) Al: Yes, if you liked the game before, you’ll probably like this update. Let’s be honest. (0:31:50) Codey: you will continue the (0:31:52) Codey: liking shall continue. (0:31:54) Al: Yeah, for sure. (0:31:56) Al: Chill Town have announced their upcoming updates, 0.9 and 1.0. They’ve given some details on them. (0:32:04) Al: It’s mostly 0.9, like right at the end of the post to go, (0:32:10) Al: “Oh, and by the way, there will be festivals. That’s coming in 1.0.” (0:32:15) Codey: Yep, they talk about how they have sprinting, which I thought folks might like given that, (0:32:16) Al: But the rest of it seems to be 0.9. (0:32:28) Codey: you know, the issue was that you had to run across the map, right? That was something (0:32:32) Codey: folks were complaining about when they played it. So maybe being able to run faster will (0:32:37) Codey: alleviate some of that. But the more important thing is that they lied to me in that steam (0:32:45) Codey: that says that there’s a nature exhibit with it that you can fill with insects. But I saw no insects. (0:32:50) Codey: So that’s all they haven’t. But like, you can’t mention that without showing an insect or two, (0:32:51) Al: Maybe they’ve just not put any in yet (0:32:59) Codey: as like an example. They don’t, they, they literally just, they just walk through it’s as (0:33:02) Al: Don’t think they show anything in that they just it’s like completely empty (0:33:08) Codey: if an animal crossing or coral island or whatever, like you just walk through the part of the museum (0:33:13) Codey: in which the insects are supposed to be. (0:33:15) Codey: I was like waiting, I’m like, is there going to be like a butterfly that lies out? (0:33:16) Al: Yeah, very weird. (0:33:27) Codey: Um, yeah, I was, I was really excited to see insects and then there weren’t any, but that’s (0:33:33) Codey: okay. (0:33:34) Codey: Something to look forward to. (0:33:34) Al: Wooo! (0:33:37) Al: Fields of Mystery app have announced their next update, the second major update coming in March. (0:33:46) Al: It adds a new villager, some additional dialogue and schedules for the NPCs. (0:33:54) Al: More unlocks in the mines, which is important. I need to get further down those mines, (0:34:01) Codey: Yep. Yep. (0:34:01) Al: Although I need to I need to not play this (0:34:05) Al: yet. I need to not go into the cut zone. I think I need to wait for more updates, (0:34:10) Al: otherwise I’ll just end up burning out before the end of it. New areas in the town, additional (0:34:17) Al: requests, more museum stuff, new festival, just yeah. Oh the farmland expansion is added. Oh yes. (0:34:27) Al: Gotta get a bigger farm. Do I need a bigger farm? No I do not. Sprinklers! Yes! Finally! Adding (0:34:30) Codey: But you can. (0:34:34) Al: sprinklers and an auto petter. This is getting good. This game’s getting good. It was already (0:34:43) Al: good. It’s getting even better. They’ve also listed a bunch of stuff that’s coming in future (0:34:48) Al: updates but they just they say in no particular order. Just like here are things that we’re (0:34:50) Codey: But, but the automation is the most important. (0:34:53) Al: thinking about. Oh yes. Gotta love it. Also in-game time adjustment options, which is something that (0:35:03) Al: that always sounds like a good idea. (0:35:07) Codey: I mean people probably use it because they want to like skip forward to something or (0:35:12) Codey: other or skip back possibly if they missed a festival or something. (0:35:16) Al: Yeah. All right. And finally, finally, second, finally, next, next we have (0:35:24) Codey: But penultimate final. (0:35:30) Al: just an ultimate. You don’t need to add on the final one to the end. (0:35:35) Al: Next, we have webfishing have released a plush of their main character, the cat, (0:35:43) Al: on Makeship. So if you want that, and it’s funded, it’s out. (0:35:47) Codey: Uh-huh (0:35:47) Al: Definitely happening. So if you want it, go get it. (0:35:51) Codey: Yep, it is $29.99 and most importantly that Al did not mention is that it is holding a salmon (0:36:00) Al: for sure it’s very cute I don’t need (0:36:01) Codey: That’s the most important part (0:36:05) Codey: No, but wait, do you what if you don’t get it and then you want it later? (0:36:10) Al: So Craig, my youngest, is really into Astrobok recently, right? (0:36:12) Codey: Uh-huh (0:36:14) Codey: Okay (0:36:15) Al: Like obsessed with it. (0:36:17) Al: He’s been playing it a couple of hours most days of the week. (0:36:17) Codey: You (0:36:20) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:36:21) Al: He is, and he’s getting really good at it, right? (0:36:22) Codey: Mm-hmm. (0:36:23) Al: This is his first proper game that he’s played. (0:36:26) Al: Like he’s done a couple of bits here and there, (0:36:28) Al: but he’s not really like been playing them properly. (0:36:31) Al: But this is, he’s like doing most of it. (0:36:33) Al: There’s a few times where he’s like, can you help me with this? (0:36:35) Al: Because it’s too difficult, but he’s getting really good at it. (0:36:38) Al: like from it’s been like three weeks. (0:36:40) Al: or something and from the start till now he’s improved so much but he’s absolutely obsessed (0:36:46) Al: with it so much that we we just ordered the astrobot plush and that should be arriving (0:36:49) Codey: Oh. (0:36:51) Al: the day this episode comes out so he is very excited about that. (0:36:54) Codey: So if I hear a squeal from around the world of excitement. (0:36:59) Codey: Cool. (0:36:59) Al: Yeah finally we have information on a new Animal Crossing aquarium tour this time in the UK. We’ll (0:37:07) Al: We’ll come back to that word in a minute. (0:37:10) Al: I believe they did this in Japan and a few other places. (0:37:14) Al: I feel like I said about it in Canada and America, maybe as well. (0:37:18) Al: There’s a few. (0:37:19) Al: Anyway, it’s coming to the UK as well in collaboration with Sea Life UK. (0:37:23) Al: Now, I say UK because it is very much a tiny, tiny portion of one part of the UK. (0:37:32) Al: It’s like four different cities that are like half an hour to travel between each other. (0:37:40) Al: It is like a pathetically small amount, and you might go, “Oh, well, it’s because it’s (0:37:45) Al: Sea Life. (0:37:46) Al: It’s a specific company, and they don’t have any other place. (0:37:49) Al: They do. (0:37:50) Al: They have one in Scotland, and they didn’t do it there. (0:37:52) Codey: Well, yeah, they don’t want to do that, right? (0:37:53) Al: Thank you very much.” (0:37:53) Al: Don’t call it a UK tour if it’s just England. (0:37:57) Al: It’s an England tour, but like saying a US tour, and it’s just New York. (0:38:02) Codey: Yeah, just New York and Los Angeles. (0:38:02) Al: Go away. (0:38:05) Al: It’s a Europe tour, European tour. (0:38:10) Al: I’m annoyed. (0:38:10) Codey: Yeah, I guess I don’t really understand like what this is, (0:38:14) Al: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I believe so. (0:38:15) Codey: like, will there just be characters around? (0:38:20) Codey: Around. (0:38:24) Al: There’s activities as well. (0:38:25) Al: I think they have the stamp thing that they do in the game, so it says, “Visitors will (0:38:31) Al: be able to collect character stamps, discover many interesting facts about the inhabitants (0:38:35) Al: of Sea Life, and meet with Tom Nook and Isabel. (0:38:38) Al: at the end of the visit fans will be able to purchase. (0:38:40) Al: Animal Crossing New Horizons merchandise, of course they will, at the Aquarium store. (0:38:44) Codey: What villager would have to be included in either the merchandise or the stamp thing for you to go? (0:38:54) Al: or for me to travel all the way down to, I think Manchester is the closest one, (0:38:59) Al: which would be a, I think it’s a five hour drive for me, which is not insignificant. (0:39:08) Al: I know it means nothing to Americans who will drive five hours for dinner. (0:39:16) Al: I don’t think there is someone, I don’t really think so, like, (0:39:19) Codey: I would think, so if this was in New York or DC, which are like a three to five hour drive from (0:39:24) Codey: where I am, if Blue Bear was in there, Blue Bear is my favorite. (0:39:30) Al: Yeah, I just don’t think… I think it would be… I would drive two hours to go to this, (0:39:37) Al: I think. That’s how far I would drive to get to this. Coincidentally, about the time it (0:39:41) Al: takes to leave Scotland. I would drive two hours to this. I don’t think there’s anything (0:39:49) Al: realistically that would make me drive five hours. I don’t think I could do that. That’s (0:39:56) Al: too far. Especially considering we have an (0:40:00) Al: aquarium five minutes from us that we have a season pass to. So I would be paying to travel (0:40:08) Al: five hours to then pay to get into an aquarium when I have a season pass to an aquarium next to (0:40:14) Al: me. That doesn’t feel the most sensible situation, right? Oh, we do. All right, that is the news. (0:40:18) Codey: We have an aquarium at home. (0:40:25) Al: So next we will be going into our interview with Jordan, the developer of (0:40:30) Al: overseas retirement. We recorded that at a different time. So if it sounds different, (0:40:36) Al: that’s why. I hope you enjoy the interview. (0:40:38) Al: Weeee! (0:40:39) Al: Woo! (0:40:39) Al: Woo! (0:40:48) Al: Okay, we are now back with the developer of Rusty’s retirement, which just to remind listeners (0:40:56) Al: was the winner of the Harvest Seasons Game of the Year last year. (0:41:01) Al: Hello, welcome to the podcast, what is your name and what are your pronouns? (0:41:06) Jordan: Hiya. My name is Jordan, he/him. Yeah, I’m the developer of Rusty’s retirement, and also a smaller, lesser-known metroidvania called Hyekuda Robot, which is in the same universe as Rusty, actually, if you didn’t know that. A little bit of lore for you. (0:41:24) Al: I did not know that and I do like metroidvanias, maybe I’ll look at that at some point. (0:41:30) Codey: wait it’s a metroid haiku as in haiku the helper of russey (0:41:35) Jordan: Yep (0:41:37) Codey: he metroid what okay continue I have questions (0:41:41) Al: Well, good thing that you have questions because this is an interview, so I guess we’ll start (0:41:48) Al: off with a couple of easy questions. What is your history with games, just in general? (0:41:54) Al: What did you play when you were young? How did you get to where you are with games? (0:41:59) Jordan: Yeah, so I think my sort of gaming journey, let’s say, started when I was little, (0:42:08) Jordan: and I can’t remember the age exactly, but it was when Game Boy Color came out, (0:42:13) Jordan: because that was my first console that I ever got. And I just have super fond memories of playing (0:42:21) Jordan: Pokemon Gold on the Game Boy Color. So yeah, after that, and it was just like all the game. (0:42:29) Jordan: Boy stuff, Game Boy SP, Game Boy SP Advance, all of those ones. Nintendo DS when it came out, (0:42:39) Jordan: you know, all that sort of stuff. And then eventually I got like a PlayStation, I think. (0:42:44) Jordan: So I played like typical PlayStation games like GTA and stuff when I was definitely not age (0:42:51) Jordan: appropriate to play GTA, but still pretty fun times. So yeah, just sort of a mix, but it definitely (0:42:59) Jordan: with Game Boy and Game Boy Color. (0:43:01) Al: Yeah, fair enough. What was your starter in in Pokemon gold? (0:43:04) Jordan: Oh, I think it was the crocodile looking guy. Yes, that’s the one. (0:43:09) Al: Totodile. Yeah, good one. Good one. You’re in good company because we are both also Pokemon fans. (0:43:16) Codey: Mm-hmm (0:43:16) Al: I’ve been doing a lot of Pokemon recently. (0:43:20) Jordan: Yeah, I even I even actually bought because they did this remaster edition of like heart (0:43:25) Jordan: gold or something for like at the time I didn’t have a DS, I think it broke or I was only using (0:43:33) Jordan: my cousins or something like that. So I literally went out and bought a DS just so I could buy (0:43:39) Jordan: Pokemon Heart Gold. And that was like the only game I had for it. That was it. (0:43:44) Al: Yeah, I was actually the same because I dropped out of Pokémon after Gen 2 and came back (0:43:50) Al: for HeartGold SoulSilver. And I didn’t have a DS either, but my mum had a DS for brain (0:43:55) Al: training games. And so I was like, “Can I use your DS, please?” I used her DS and played (0:44:02) Al: HeartGold SoulSilver. I then got my own DSi for when the black and white came out. It (0:44:08) Al: a good time to jump back in, I think. (0:44:10) Codey: I think everyone had that like break period where they like played and then they stopped (0:44:15) Codey: playing and then they jumped back in, or at least I had that, yeah, yeah. (0:44:18) Jordan: - Yeah, I did as well. (0:44:20) Jordan: After HeartGold, I think I went and played all the DS, (0:44:24) Jordan: Pokemon games that released, (0:44:25) Jordan: like Diamond, Pearl, Sapphire, Ruby, all of those ones. (0:44:30) Al: Fair enough. Rusty’s retirement is obviously a farming game. What is your history with farming (0:44:36) Al: games? When did you because obviously there’s got to be a point where you’re like I’m making (0:44:40) Al: a farming game. So how did you get to that point in enjoying farming games or you know (0:44:46) Al: cottagecore games in general? Wow, okay interesting. (0:44:48) Jordan: I’ve never played a farming game, still to this day, other than Rusty’s retirement. (0:44:58) Codey: - Wild. (0:45:00) Jordan: So I know they exist, I know how they work, and obviously when I landed on Rusty’s retirement, (0:45:09) Jordan: well first of all, let me go back a little bit more. So after my first game, which was (0:45:14) Jordan: haikura robot, the same haikura that appears in Russia’s retirement. (0:45:19) Jordan: I was kind of stuck with what to do because making a Metroidvania was just a massive undertaking, especially to do it solo. (0:45:27) Jordan: Like I did all the art, animations, the coding, and there’s just so much content like you need. (0:45:33) Jordan: There was like 10 or 10 to 15 bosses at the end, you know, it’s just so much work. (0:45:39) Jordan: Like each boss needs their own unique animations, attack patterns, all this sort of stuff. (0:45:45) Jordan: And I was like, vowed to myself that I’m never going to (0:45:48) Jordan: put myself through this again, that I’m going to try and make (0:45:52) Jordan: something smaller and simpler as my next game. But when I (0:45:56) Jordan: finished from Metroidvania, that I didn’t know what to do. So I (0:46:03) Jordan: had this sort of brainwave of, I’m just going to make these (0:46:07) Jordan: sort of small prototypes, spend about two weeks on an idea (0:46:11) Jordan: because, you know, I had a bunch of ideas I wanted to try out, (0:46:15) Jordan: spend about two weeks on each sort of idea. (0:46:18) Jordan: And just test them just to want to see if I could actually do some of this stuff, you know, like some my technical capability isn’t like fantastic. I’m not like a fantastic coder. So some of this stuff is just simply out of my reach, just from a technical standpoint. (0:46:34) Al: You’re not making a 3D Zelda game. (0:46:35) Jordan: And then (0:46:37) Jordan: Yeah, or like, you know, I love strategy games and forex games as well. So like, but those things are like humongous. I would never be able to do something like that. (0:46:47) Jordan: And, and yes. (0:46:48) Jordan: So I just did these prototypes and I made Rusty and funnily, funnily enough. (0:46:55) Jordan: I actually shelved Rusty for like three months because I made it and most (0:47:01) Jordan: of the prototypes I made, and then I showed them on Twitter, right? (0:47:06) Jordan: I showed like, Hey guys, what do you think of this sort of thing? (0:47:10) Jordan: Just to kind of gauge, you know, interest and stuff like this, because I (0:47:14) Jordan: didn’t want to make something that, you know, at the end of the day, (0:47:17) Jordan: nobody wants to play. (0:47:18) Jordan: I was kind of trying to find this balance of like, okay, I’m going to do these (0:47:21) Jordan: ideas that I want to make and find out if I want to make them, but then also (0:47:26) Jordan: show them to people to see if there’s interest because I think if there’s (0:47:28) Jordan: interest, it also kind of motivates you to make it as well. (0:47:31) Jordan: You know, so it’s like this balance. (0:47:34) Jordan: Uh, but for Rusty, I thought, man, this is such a stupid idea. (0:47:38) Jordan: Nobody’s going to want to play this. (0:47:40) Jordan: And I just shelved it for like three months. (0:47:42) Jordan: Uh, but luckily I had commissioned, um, the sprites for. (0:47:48) Jordan: Rusty and they came through and I was thinking, you know, I should at (0:47:52) Jordan: least put sprites in the game now that they’ve done, just see what it looks like. (0:47:56) Jordan: And that’s when I thought, Oh, it was pretty cool. (0:47:58) Jordan: And I should make this into something. (0:48:00) Jordan: But before that, I hadn’t played any farming games or anything like that. (0:48:04) Jordan: But then once I kind of had this rusty idea and I also put it on Twitter (0:48:09) Jordan: and people really liked it, then I started like, uh, researching more (0:48:13) Jordan: into farming games and stuff. (0:48:14) Codey: » Mm-hmm. (0:48:16) Al: if you still not played any. (0:48:16) Jordan: But interestingly enough, I… (0:48:18) Jordan: No, I haven’t, because I was tempted to play Stardew Valley, (0:48:22) Jordan: but I didn’t want to get too influenced by the decisions that were made in that game. (0:48:29) Jordan: Like, I researched enough to know what’s the sort of loop, the core gameplay loop, (0:48:34) Jordan: and understand how that works, but I didn’t want to play it and see exactly how it’s done, (0:48:39) Jordan: because then I felt like it’s just going to influence my decision too much. (0:48:43) Jordan: And that kind of happened with my first game th

Bill -Mike Got Your Wednesday Jumping With Cavs VS Pistons Preview-Cavs PBP Tim Alcorn - Entertainment-Movies From Kevin Carr-Fat Guys At The Movies And ABC News Jason Nathanson - White House Correspondent JON DECKER-keeping a close eye on how the U.S. will be responding to the attack in Jordan - It may sound like science fiction, but a company owned by Elon Musk has successfully planted a chip into a human brain for the first time ever. Why is this important, and what could be coming down the road?-NBC Radio Rory O'Neill - A new study is out that says the time that Americans are spending on social media and scrolling their phones is costing billions-NBC Radio Erin Real

Upcoming Event!How Can Mindfulness Help You Reach Financial Independence?Do you want to reduce money anxiety, but don't know who to trust?Would you like to learn how to set up and manage your own retirement plan?Do you want to know how we create a passive income stream you can't outlive?If yes, join us and learn how to answer the 4 critical financial independence questions:Am I on track for financial independence?What do I need to do to get on track?How do I design a mindful investing portfolio?How do I manage that portfolio and my income over time through changing markets?Learn more: https://courses.mindful.money/financial-independence-bootcampJordan Olmscheid is a ‘girl dad,' husband, Christian, and a small business owner/solopreneur. By day, he runs a one-person (him) cleaning business, where he washes windows and cleans gutters. Jordan also has a very interesting side project, The Wealth Letters, where he collects insights from people of all walks of life on the pursuit of wealth, wisdom & meaning. Today, Jordan joins the show to discuss faith, money's impact on happiness, and what his ultimate goal is for The Wealth Letters.

Dr. Jordan Grumet, or Doc G as he is affectionately known, is a doctor of internal medicine and a hospice care medical director turned financial blogger and author. He has been a financial independence blogger for a decade and hosts the award-winning Earn and Invest Podcast. Today, Dr. Jordan talks about his roots growing up in Evanston, Illinois, what it means to live a regret-free life, and what inspired him to write his book, Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life. Jonathan and Dr. Jordan discuss side hustles, following your passion and the powerful life lessons Dr. Jordan has learned over the years from his hospice patients.

Jackson Singers - Heaven Bound Train Kindly Shepherds - He'll Be Waiting for Me The Soul Stirrers – Jesus Be A Fence Around Me When They Ring Them Golden Bells - Harmonizing Four The Piney Grove Spiritual Singers – Get Back Satan The Bells of Zion – Like A Ship Tossed And Driven Bernice Johnson Reagon - Why Did They Take Us Away? Rev. Robert Ballinger - God Rode In A Windstorm The Meditation Singers – A Change Is Gonna Come Sister Rosetta Tharpe – 99 ½ Won't Do Mello-Tones - Flying Saucers Caravans - God is Good to Me Golden Crowns - You'll Need A Friend Golden West Singers - This Wicked Race Anthony Butler - My God is a Mighty Man Soul Seekers - Something Got a Hold on Me Davis Sisters - I Got a New Home Swan Silvertones - Jesus Won't Deny Me Joseph Spense and the Pindar – I Bid You Goodnight Famous Blue Jay Singers - Shall I Meet You Over Yonder Evening Four - Don't Feel No Ways Tired Stars of Faith - Lord Hear My Pleas Voices of Jordan - It's Getting Late Brooklyn Skyways -I Found the Lord Dixie Hummingbirds - Live on Forever Gospel Harmonettes - Oh My Lord Sons of David - Streets of the City Edna Gallmon Cooke - At the Gate

Jackson Singers - Heaven Bound Train Kindly Shepherds - He'll Be Waiting for Me The Soul Stirrers – Jesus Be A Fence Around Me When They Ring Them Golden Bells - Harmonizing Four The Piney Grove Spiritual Singers – Get Back Satan The Bells of Zion – Like A Ship Tossed And Driven Bernice Johnson Reagon - Why Did They Take Us Away? Rev. Robert Ballinger - God Rode In A Windstorm The Meditation Singers – A Change Is Gonna Come Sister Rosetta Tharpe – 99 ½ Won't Do Mello-Tones - Flying Saucers Caravans - God is Good to Me Golden Crowns - You'll Need A Friend Golden West Singers - This Wicked Race Anthony Butler - My God is a Mighty Man Soul Seekers - Something Got a Hold on Me Davis Sisters - I Got a New Home Swan Silvertones - Jesus Won't Deny Me Joseph Spense and the Pindar – I Bid You Goodnight Famous Blue Jay Singers - Shall I Meet You Over Yonder Evening Four - Don't Feel No Ways Tired Stars of Faith - Lord Hear My Pleas Voices of Jordan - It's Getting Late Brooklyn Skyways -I Found the Lord Dixie Hummingbirds - Live on Forever Gospel Harmonettes - Oh My Lord Sons of David - Streets of the City Edna Gallmon Cooke - At the Gate

Crossing the Jordan- It is consistent with God's character to give His children peace and rest. God promised the children of Israel good things were to come in the promised land if they were faithful and obedient to His word. We can have courage in all circumstances, not because they are always easy, but because God is always good.

About JordanJordan is a self proclaimed “hacker.” Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordansissel 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 “you”—gabyte. Distributed technologies like Kubernetes are great, citation very much needed, because they make it easier to have resilient, scalable, systems. SQL databases haven't kept pace though, certainly not like no SQL databases have like Route 53, the world's greatest database. We're still, other than that, using legacy monolithic databases that require ever growing instances of compute. Sometimes we'll try and bolt them together to make them more resilient and scalable, but let's be honest it never works out well. Consider Yugabyte DB, its a distributed SQL database that solves basically all of this. It is 100% open source, and there's not asterisk next to the “open” on that one. And its designed to be resilient and scalable out of the box so you don't have to charge yourself to death. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, or “postgresqueal” as I insist on pronouncing it, so you can use it right away without having to learn a new language and refactor everything. And you can distribute it wherever your applications take you, from across availability zones to other regions or even other cloud providers should one of those happen to exist. Go to yugabyte.com, thats Y-U-G-A-B-Y-T-E dot com and try their free beta of Yugabyte Cloud, where they host and manage it for you. Or see what the open source project looks like—its effortless distributed SQL for global apps. My thanks to Yu—gabyte for sponsoring this episode.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimize applications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been to a lot of conference talks in my life. I've seen good ones, I've seen terrible ones, and then I've seen the ones that are way worse than that. But we don't tend to think in terms of impact very often, about how conference talks can move the audience.In fact, that's the only purpose of giving a talk ever—to my mind—is you're trying to spark some form of alchemy or shift in the audience and convince them to do something. Maybe in the banal sense, it's to sign up for something that you're selling, or to go look at your website, or to contribute to a project, or maybe it's to change the way they view things. One of the more transformative talks I've ever seen that shifted my outlook on a lot of things was at [SCALE 00:01:11] in 2012. Person who gave that talk is my guest today, Jordan Sissel, who, among many other things in his career, was the original creator behind logstash, which is the L in ELK Stack. Jordan, thank you for joining me.Jordan: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: I don't know how well you remember those days in 2012. It was the dark times; we thought oh, the world is going to end; that wouldn't happen until 2020. But it was an interesting conference full of a bunch of open-source folks, it was my local conference because I lived in Los Angeles. And it was the thing I looked forward to every year because I would always go and learn something new. I was in the trenches in those days, and I had a bunch of problems that looked an awful lot like other people's problems, and having a hallway track where, “Hey, how are you solving this problem?” Was a big deal. I missed those days in some ways.Jordan: Yeah, SCALE was a particularly good conference. I think I made it twice. Traveling down to LA was infrequent for me, but I always enjoyed how it was a very communal setting. They had dedicated hallway tracks. They had kids tracks, which I thought was great because folks couldn't usually come to conferences if they couldn't bring their kids or they had to take care of that stuff. But having a kids track was great, they had kids presenting. It felt more organic than a lot of other conferences did, and that's kind of what drew me to it initially.Corey: Yeah, it was my local network. It turns out that the Southern California tech community is relatively small, and we all go different lives. And it's LA, let's face it, I lived there for over a decade. Flaking as a way of life. So yeah, well, “Oh, we'll go out and catch dinner. Ooh, have to flake at the last minute.” If you're one of the good people, you tell people you're flaking instead of just no-showing, but it happens.But this was the thing that we would gather and catch up every year. And, “Oh, what have you been doing?” “Wow, you work in that company now? Congratulations, slash, what's wrong with you?” It was fun, just sort of a central sync point. It started off as hanging out with friends.And in those days, I was approaching the idea of, “You know what? I should learn to give a conference talk someday. But let's be clear. People don't give conference talks; legends give conference talks. And one day, I'll be good enough to get on stage and give a talk to my peers at a conference.”Now, the easy, cynical interpretation would be, “Well, but I saw your talk and I figured, hey, any jackhole can get up there. If he can do it, anyone can.” But that's not at all how it wound up impacting me. You were talking about logstash, which let's start there because that's a good entry point. Logstash was transformative for me.Before that, I'd spent a lot of time playing around with syslog, usually rsyslog, but there are other stories here of when a system does something and it spits out logs—ideally—how do you make sure you capture those logs in a reliable way so if you restart a computer, you don't wind up with a gap in your logs? If it's the right computer, it could be a gap in everything's logs while that thing is coming back up. And let's avoid single points of failure and the rest. And I had done all kinds of horrible monstrosities, and someone asked me at one point—Jordan: [laugh]. Guilty.Corey: Yeah. Someone said, “Well, there are a couple of options. Why don't you use Splunk?” And the answer is that I don't have a spare princess lying around that I can ransom back to her kingdom, so I can't afford it. “Okay, what about logstash?” And my answer was, “What's a logstash?” And thus that sound was Pandora's Box creaking open.So, I started playing with it and realized, “Okay, this is interesting.” And I lost track of it because we have demands on our time. Then I was dragged into a session that you gave and you explained what logstash was. I'm not going to do nearly as good of a job as you can on this. What the hell was logstash, for folks who are not screaming at syslog while they first hear of it.Jordan: All right. So, you mentioned rsyslog, and there's—old is often a pejorative of more established projects because I don't think these projects are bad. But rsyslog, syslog-ng, things like that were common to see for me as a sysadmin. But to talk about logstash, we need to go back a little further than 2012. So, the logstash project started—Corey: I disagree because I wasn't aware of it until 2012. Until I become aware of something it doesn't really exist. That's right, I have the object permanence of an infant.Jordan: [laugh].That's fair. And I've always felt like perception is reality, so if someone—this gets into something I like to say, but if someone is having a bad time or someone doesn't know about something, then it might as well not exist. So, logstash as a project started in 2008, 2009. I don't remember when the first commits landed, but it was, gosh, it's more than ten years ago now.But even before that in college, I was fortunate to, through a network of friends, get a job as a sysadmin. And as a sysadmin, you stare at logs a lot to figure out what's going on. And I wanted a more interesting way to process the logs. I had taught myself regular expressions and it wasn't finding joy in it… at all, like pretty much most people, probably. Either they look at regular expressions and just… evacuate with disgust, which is absolutely an appropriate response, or they dive into it and they have to use it for their job.But it wasn't enjoyable, and I found myself repeating stuff a lot. Matching IP addresses, matching strings, URLs, just trying to pull out useful information about what is going on?Corey: Oh, and the timestamp problem, too. One of the things that I think people don't understand who have not played in this space, is that all systems do have logs unless you've really pooched something somewhere—Jordan: Yeah.Corey: —and it shows that at this point in time, this thing happened. As we start talking about multiple computers and distributed systems—but even on the same computer—great, so at this time there was something that showed up in the system log because there was a disk event or something, and at the same time you have application logs that are talking about what the application running is talking about. And that is ideally using a somewhat similar system to do this, but often not. And the way that timestamps are expressed in these are radically different and the way that the log files themselves are structured. One might be timestamp followed by hostname followed by error code.The other one might be hostname followed by a timestamp—in a different format—followed by a copyright notice because a big company got to it followed by the actual event notice, and trying to disambiguate all of these into a standardized form was first obnoxious, and secondly, very important because you want to see the exact chain of events. This also leads to a separate sidebar on making sure that all the clocks are synchronized, but that's a separate story for another time. And that's where you enter the story in many respects.Jordan: Right. So, my thought around what led to logstash is you can take a sysadmin or software IT developer—whatever—expert, and you can sit them in front of a bunch of logs and they can read them and say, “That's the time it happened. That's the user who caused this action. This is the action.” But if you try and abstract and step away, and so you ask how many times did this action happen? When did this user appear? What time did this happen?You start losing the ability to ask those questions without being an expert yourself, or sitting next to an expert and having them be your keyboard. Kind of a phenomenon I call the human keyboard problem where you're speaking to a computer, but someone has to translate for you. And so in around 2004, I was super into Perl. No shocker that I enjoyed—ish. I sort of enjoyed regular expressions, but I was super into Perl, and there was a Perl module called Regexp::Common which is a library of regular expressions to match known things: IP addresses, certain kinds of timestamps, quoted strings, and whatnot.Corey: And this stuff is always challenging because it sounds like oh, an IP address. One of the interview questions I hated the most someone asked me was write a regular expression to detect an IP address. It turns out that to do this correctly, even if you bound it to ipv4 only, the answer takes up multiple lines on a screen.Jordan: Oh, for sure.Corey: It's enormous.Jordan: It's like a full page of—Corey: It is.Jordan: —of code you can't read. And that's one of the things that, it was sort of like standing on the shoulders of the person who came before; it was kind of an epiphany to me.Corey: Yeah. So, I can copy and paste that into my code, but someone who has to maintain that thing after I get fired is going to be, “What the hell is this and what does it do?” It's like it's the blessed artifact that the ancients built it and left it there like it's a Stargate sitting in your code. And it's, “We don't know how it works; we're scared to break it, so we don't even look at that thing directly. We just know that we put nonsense in, an IP address comes out, and let's not touch it, ever again.”Jordan: Exactly. And even to your example, even before you get fired and someone replaces you and looks at your regular expression, the problem I was having was, I would have this library of copy and pasteable things, and then I would find a bug, and edge case. And I would fix that edge case but the other 15 scripts that were using the same way regular expression, I can't even read them anymore because I don't carry that kind of context in my head for all of that syntax. So, you either have to go back and copy and paste and fix all those old regular expressions. Or you just say, “You know what? We're not going to fix the old code. We have a new version of it that works here, but everywhere else this edge case fails.”So, that's one of the things that drew me to the Regexp::Common library in Perl was that it was reusable and things had names. It was, “I want to match an IP address.” You didn't have to memorize that long piece of text to precisely and accurately accept only regular expressions and rejects things that are not. You just said, “Give me the regular expression that matches an IP.” And from that library gave me the idea to write grok.Well, if we could name things, then maybe we could turn that into some kind of data structure, sort of the combination of, “I have a piece of log data, and I as an expert, I know that's an IP address, that's the username, and that's the timestamp.” Well, now I can apply this library of regular expressions that I didn't have to write and hopefully has a unit test suite, and say, now we can pull out instead of that plain piece of text that is hard to read as a non-expert, now I can have a data structure we can format however we want, that non-experts can see. And even experts can just relax and not have to be full experts all the time, using that part of your brain. So, now you can start getting towards answering search-oriented questions. “How many login attempts happened yesterday from this IP address?”Corey: Right. And back then, the way that people would do these things was Elasticsearch. So, that's the thing you shove all your data into in a bunch of different ways and you can run full-text queries on it. And that's great, but now we want to have that stuff actually structured, and that is sort of the magic of logstash—which was used in conjunction with Elasticsearch a lot—and it turns out that typing random SQL queries in the command line is not generally how most business users like to interact with this stuff, seems to be something dashboard-y-like, and the project that folks use for that was Kibana. And ELK Stack became a thing because Elasticsearch in isolation can do a lot but it doesn't get you all the way there for what people were using to look at logs.Jordan: You're right.Corey: And Kibana is also one of the projects that Elastic owned, and at some point, someone looks around, like, “Oh, logstash. People are using that with us an awful lot. How big is the company that built that? Oh, it's an open-source project run by some guy? Can we hire that guy?” And the answer is, “Apparently,” because you wound up working as an Elastic employee for a while.Jordan: Yeah. It was kind of an interesting journey. So, in the beginning of logstash in 2009, I kind of had this picture of how I wanted to solve log processing search challenges. And I broke it down into a couple of parts of visualization—to be clear, I broke it down in my head, not into code, but visualization, kind of exploration, there's the processing and transmission, and then there's storage and search. And I only felt confident really attending to a solution for one of those parts. And I picked log processing partly because I already had a jumpstart from a couple of years prior, working on grok and feeling really comfortable with regular expressions. I don't want to say good because that's—Corey: You heard it here first—Jordan: [laugh].Corey: —we found the person that knows regular expressions. [laugh].Jordan: [laugh]. And logstash was being worked on to solve this problem of taking your data, processing it, and getting it somewhere. That's why logstash has so many outputs, has so many inputs, and lots of filters. And about I think a year into building logstash, I had experimented with storage and search backends, and I never found something that really clicked with me. And I was experimenting with Leucine, and knowing that I could not complete this journey because that the problem space is so large, it would be foolish of me to try to do distributed log stores or anything like that, plus visualization.I just didn't have the skills or the time in the day. I ended up writing a frontend for logstash called logstash-web—naming things is hard—and I wasn't particularly skilled or attentive to that project, and it was more of a very lightweight frontend to solve the visualization, the exploration aspect. And about a year into logstash being alive, I found Elasticsearch. And what clicked with me from being a sysadmin and having worked at large data center companies in the past is I know the logs on a single system are going to quickly outgrow it. So, whatever storage system will accept these logs, it's got to be easy to add new storage.And Elasticsearch first-day promise was it's distributed; you can add more nodes and go about your day. And it fulfilled that promise and I think it still fulfills that promise that if you're going to be processing terabytes of data, yeah, just keep dumping it in there. That's one of the reasons I didn't try and even use MySQL, or Postgres, or other data systems because it didn't seem obvious how to have multiple storage servers collecting this data with those solutions, for me at the time.Corey: It turns out that solving problems like this that are global and universal lead to massive adoption very quickly. I want to get this back a bit before you wound up joining Elastic because you get up on stage and you talked through what this is. And I mentioned at the start of this recording, that it was one of those transformative talks. But let's be clear here, I don't remember 95% of how logstash works. Like, the technology you talked about ten years ago is largely outmoded slash replaced slash outdated today. I assure you, I did not take anything of note whatsoever from your talk regarding regular expressions, I promise. And—Jordan: [laugh]. Good.Corey: But that's not the stuff that was transformative to me. What was, was the way that you talked about these things. And there was the first time I'd ever heard the phrase that if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug. This was 2012. The idea of empathy hadn't really penetrated into the ops and engineering spaces in any meaningful way yet. It was about gatekeeping, it was about, “Read the manual fool”—Jordan: Yes.Corey: —if people had questions. And it was actively user-hostile. And it was something that I found transformative of, forget the technology piece for a second; this is a story about how it could be different. Because logstash was the vehicle to deliver a message that transcended far beyond the boundaries of how to structure your logs, or maybe the other boundaries of regular expressions, I'm never quite sure where those things start and stop. But it was something that was actively transformative where you're on stage as someone who is a recognized authority in the space, and you're getting up there and you're sending an implicit message—both explicitly and by example—of be nice to people; demonstrate empathy. And that left a hell of an impact. And—Jordan: Thank you.Corey: I wound up doing a spot check just now, and I wound up looking at this and sure enough, early in 2013, I wound up committing—it's still in the history of the changelog for logstash because it's open-source—I committed two pull requests and minutes apart, two submissions—I don't know if pull requests were even a thing back then—but it wound up in the log. Because another project you were renowned for was fpm: Effing Package Manager if I'm—is that what the acronym stands for, or am I misremembering?Jordan: [laugh]. We'll go with that. I'm sure, vulgar viewers will know what the F stands for, but you don't have to say it. It's just Effing Package Management.Corey: Yeah.Jordan: But yeah, I think I really do believe that if a user, especially if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug, and that came from many years of participating at various levels in open-source, where if you came at it with a tinkerer's or a hacker's mindset and you think, “This project is great. I would like it to do one additional thing, and I would like to talk to someone about how to make it do that one additional thing.” And you go find the owners or the maintainers of that project, and you come in with gusto and energy, and you describe what you want to do and, first, they say, “What you want to do is not possible.” They don't even say they don't want to do it; they frame the whole universe against you. “It's not possible. Why would you want to do that? If you want to make that, do it yourself.”You know, none of these things are an extended hand, a lowered ladder, an open door, none of those. It's always, “You're bothering me. Go away. Please read the documentation and see where we clearly”—which they don't—“Document that this is not a thing we're interested in.” And I came to the conclusion that any future open-source or collaborative work that I worked on, it's got to be from a place where, “You're welcome, and whatever contributions or participation levels you choose, are okay. And if you have an idea, let's talk about it. If you're having a bad time, let's figure out how to solve it.”Maybe the solution is we point you in the right direction to the documentation, if documentation exists; maybe we find a bug that we need to fix. The idea that the way to build communities is through kindness and collaboration, not through walls or gatekeeping or just being rude. And I really do think that's one of the reasons logstash became so successful. I mean, any particular technology could have succeeded in the space that logstash did, but I believe that it did so because of that one piece of framework where if a new user has a bad time, it's a bug. Because to me, that opens the door to say, “Yeah, you know what? Some of the code I write is not going to be good. Or, the thing you want to do is undocumented. Or the documentation is out of date. It told you a lie and you followed the documentation and it misled you because it's incorrect.”We can fix that. Maybe we don't have time to fix it right now. Maybe there's no one around to fix it, but we can at least say, “You know what? That information is incorrect, and I'm sorry you were misled. Come on into the community and we'll figure it out.” And one of the patterns I know is, on the IRC channel, which is where the logstash real-time community chat… I don't know how to describe that.Corey: No, it was on freenode. That's part of the reason I felt okay, talking to you. At that point. I was volunteer network staff. This is before freenode turned into basically a haven for Nazis this past year.Jordan: Yeah. It was still called lilo… lilonet [crosstalk 00:20:20]—Corey: No, the open freenode network, that predates me. This was—yeah, lilo—Jordan: Okay.Corey: —died about six years prior. But—Jordan: Oh, all right.Corey: Freenode's been around a long time. What make this thing work was that I was network staff, and that means that I had a bit of perceived authority—it's a chat room; not really—but it was one of those things where it was at least, “Okay, this is not just some sketchy drive-by rando,” which I very much was, but I didn't present that way, so I could strike up conversations. But with you talking about this stuff, I never needed to be that person. It was just if someone wants to pitch in on this, great; more hands make lighter work. Sure.Jordan: Yeah, for sure.Corey: And for me, the interesting part is not even around the logstash aspects so much; it's your other project, fbm. Well, one of your other projects. Back in 2012, that was an interesting year for me. Another area that got very near and dear to my heart in open-source world was the SaltStack project; I was contributor number 15. And I didn't know how Python worked. Not that I do now, but I can fake it better now.And Tom Hatch, the guy that ran the project before it was a company was famous for this where I could send in horrifying levels of code, and every time he would merge it in and then ten minutes later, there would be another patch that comes in that fixes all bugs I just introduced and it was just such a warm onboarding. I'm not suggesting that approach and I'm not saying it's scalable, but I started contributing. And I became the first Debian and Ubuntu packager for SaltStack, which was great. And I did a terrible job at it because—let me explain. I don't know if it's any better now, but back in those days, there were multiple documentation sources on the proper way to package software.They were all contradictory with each other, there was no guidance as to when to follow each one, there was never a, “You know nothing about packaging; here's what you need to know, step-by-step,” and when you get it wrong, they yell at you. And it turns out that the best practice then to get it formally accepted upstream—which is what I did—is do a crap-ass job, and then you'll wind up with a grownup coming in, like, “This is awful. Move.” And then they'll fix it and yell at you, and gatekeep like hell, and then you have a package that works and gets accepted upstream because the magic incantation has been said somewhere. And what I loved about fpm was that I could take any random repo or any source tarball or anything I wanted, run it through with a single command, and it would wind up building out a RPM and a Deb file—and I don't know what else it's supported; those are the ones I cared about—that I could then install on a system. I put in a repo and add that to a sources list on systems, and get to automatically install so I could use configuration management—like SaltStack—to wind up installing custom local packages. And oh, my God, did the packaging communities for multiple different distros hate you—Jordan: Yep.Corey: —and specifically what you had built because this was not the proper way to package. How dare you solve an actual business problem someone has instead of forcing them to go to packaging school where the address is secret, and you have to learn that. It was awful. It was the clearest example that I can come up with of gatekeeping, and then you're coming up with fbm which gets rid of user pain, and I realized that in that fight between the church of orthodoxy of, “This is how it should be done,” and the, “You're having a problem; here's a tool that makes it simple,” I know exactly what side of that line I wanted to be on. And I hadn't always been previously, and that is what clarified it for me.Jordan: Yeah, fbm was a really delightful enjoyment for me to build. The origins of that was I worked at a company and they were all… I think, at that time, we were RPM-based, and then as folks tend to do, I bounced around between jobs almost every year, so I went from one place that—Corey: Hey, it's me.Jordan: [laugh]. Right? And there's absolutely nothing wrong with leaving every year or staying longer. It's just whatever progresses your career in the way that you want and keeps you safe and your family safe. But we were using RPM and we were building packages already not following the orthodoxy.A lot of times if you ask someone how to build a package for Fedora, they'll point you at the Maximum RPM book, and that's… a lot of pages, and honestly, I'm not going to sit down and read it. I just want to take a bunch of files, name it, and install it on 30 machines with Puppet. And that's what we were doing. Cue one year later, I moved to a new company, and we were using Debian packages. And they're the same thing.What struck me is they are identical. It's a bunch of files—and don't pedant me about this—it's a bunch of files with a name, with some other sometimes useful metadata, like other names that you might depend on. And I really didn't find it enjoyable to transfer my knowledge of how to build RPMs, and the tooling and the structures and the syntaxes, to building Debian packages. And this was not for greater publication; this was I have a bunch of internal applications I needed to package and deploy with, at the time it was Puppet. And it wasn't fun.So, I did what we did with grok which was codify that knowledge to reduce the burden. And after a few, probably a year or so of that, it really dawned on me that a generality is all packaging formats are largely solving the same problem and I wanted to build something that was solving problems for folks like you and me: sysadmins, who were handed a pile of code and they needed to get it into production. And I wasn't interested in formalities or appeasing any priesthoods or orthodoxies about what really—you know, “You should really shine your package with this special wax,” kind of thing. Because all of the documentation for Debian packages, Fedora packages are often dedicated to those projects. You're going to submit a package to Fedora so that the rest of the world can use it on Fedora. That wasn't my use case.Corey: Right. I built a thing and a thing that I built is awesome and I want the world to use it, so now I have to go to packaging school? Not just once but twice—Jordan: Right.Corey: —and possibly more. That's awful.Jordan: Or more. Yeah. And it's tough.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: And this gets back to what I found of—it was rare that I could find a way to contribute to something meaningfully, and I was using logstash after your talk, I'd started using it and rolling it out somewhere, and I discovered that there wasn't a Debian package for it—the environment I was in at that time—or Ubuntu package, and, “Hey Jordan, are you the guy that wrote fpm and there isn't a package here?” And the thing is is that you would never frame it this way, but the answer was, of course, “Pull requests welcome,” which is often an invitation to do free volunteer work for companies, but this was an open-source project that was not backed by a publicly-traded company; it was some guy. And of course, I'll pitch in on that. And I checked the commit log on this for what it is that I see, and sure enough, I have two commits. The first one was on Sunday night in February of 2013, and my commit message was, “Initial packaging work for Deb building.” And sure enough, there's a bunch of files I put up there and that's great. And my second and last commit was 12 minutes later saying, “Remove large binary because I'm foolish.” Yeah.Jordan: Was that you? [laugh].Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm sure—yeah, it was great. I didn't know how Git worked back then. I'm sure it's still in the history there. I wonder how big that binary is, and exactly how much I have screwed people over in the last decade since.Jordan: I've noticed this over time. And every now and then you'd be—I would be or someone would be on a slow internet connection—which again, is something that we need to optimize for, or at least be aware of and help where we can—someone would be cloning logstash on an airplane or something like that, or rural setting, and they would say, “It gets stuck at 76% for, like, ten minutes.” And you would go back and dust off your tome of how to use Git because it's very difficult piece of software to use, and you would find this one blob and I never even looked at it who committed it or whatever, but it was like I think it was 80 Megs of a JAR file or a Debian package that was [unintelligible 00:28:31] logstash release. And… [laugh] it's such a small world that you're like, yep, that was me.Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's check this just for fun here. To be clear, the entire repository right now is 167 Megs, so that file that I had up there for all of 13 minutes lives indelibly in Git history, and it is fully half of the size—Jordan: Yep.Corey: —of the entirety of the logstash project. All right, then. I didn't realize this was one of those confess your sins episodes, but here we are.Jordan: Look, sometimes we put flags on the moon, sometimes we put big files in git. You could just for posterity, we could go back and edit the history and remove that, but it never became important to do it, it wasn't loud, people weren't upset enough by it, or it didn't come up enough to say, “You know what? This is a big file.” So, it's there. You left your mark.Corey: You know, we take what we can get. It's an odd time. I'll have to do some digging around; I'm sure I'll tweet about this as soon as I get a bit more data on it, but I wonder how often people have had frustration caused by that. There's no ill intent here, to be very clear, but it was instead, I didn't know how Git worked very well. I didn't know what I was doing in a lot of respects, and sure enough in the fullness of time, some condescending package people came in and actually made this right.And there is a reasonable, responsible package now because, surprise, of course there is. But I wonder how much inadvertent pain I caused people by that ridiculous commit. And it's the idea of impact and how this stuff works. I'm not happy that people are on a plane with a slow connection had a wait an extra minute or two to download that nonsense. It's one of those things that is, oops. I feel like a bit of a heel for that, not for not knowing something, but for causing harm to folks. Intent doesn't outweigh impact. There is a lesson in there for it.Jordan: Agreed. On that example, I think one of the things… code is not the most important thing I can contribute to a project, even though I feel very confident in my skills in programming in a variety of environments. I think the number one thing I can do is listen and look for sources of pain. And people would come in and say, “I can't get this to work.” And we would work together and figure out how to make it work for their use case, and that could result in a new feature, a bug fix, or some documentation improvements, or a blog post, or something like that.And I think in this case, I don't really recall any amount of noise for someone saying, “Cloning the Git repository is just a pain in the butt.” And I think a lot of that is because either the people who would be negatively impacted by that weren't doing that use case, they were downloading the releases, which were as small as we can possibly get them, or they were editing files using the GitHub online edit the file thing, which is a totally acceptable, it's perfectly fine way to do things in Git. So, I don't remember anyone complaining about that particular file size issue. The Elasticsearch repository is massive and I don't think it even has binaries. It just has so much more—Corey: Someone accidentally committed their entire production test data set at one point and oops-a-doozy. Yeah, it's not the most egregious harm I've ever caused—Jordan: Yeah.Corey: —but it's there. The thing that, I guess, resonates with me and still does is the lessons I learned from you, I could sum them up as being not just empathy-driven—because that's the easy answer—but the other layers were that you didn't need to be the world's greatest expert in a thing in order to credibly give a conference talk. To be clear, you were miles ahead of me and still are in a lot of different areas—Jordan: Thanks.Corey: —and that's fine. But you don't need to be the—like, you are not the world's greatest expert on empathy, but that's what I took from the talk and that's what it was about. It also taught me that things you can pick up from talks—and other means—there are things you can talk about in terms of technology and there are things you can talk about in terms of people, and the things about people do not have expiration dates in the same way that technology does. And if I'm going to be remembered for impact on people versus impact on technology, for me, there's no contest. And you forced me to really think about a lot of those things that it started my path to, I guess, becoming a public speaker and then later all the rest that followed, like this podcast, the nonsense on Twitter, and all the rest. So, it is, I guess, we can lay the responsibility for all that at your feet. Enjoy the hate mail.Jordan: Uhh, my email address is now closed. I'm sorry.Corey: Exactly.Jordan: Well, I appreciate the kind words.Corey: We'll get letters on this one.Jordan: [laugh].Corey: It's the impact that people have, and someti—I don't think you knew at the time that that's the impact you were having. It matters.Jordan: I agree. I think a lot of it came from how do I want to experience this? And it was much later that it became something that was really outside of me, in the sense that it was building communities. One of the things I learned shortly after—or even just before—joining Elastic was how many folks were looking to solve a problem, found logstash, became a participant in the community, and that participation could just be anything, just hanging out on IRC, on the mailing list, whatever, and the next step for them was to get a better paying job in an environment they enjoyed that helped them take the next step in their career. Some of those people came to work with me at Elastic; some of them started to work on the logstash team at some point they decided because a lot of logstash users were sysadmins.And on the logstash team, we were all developers; we weren't sysadmins, there was nothing to operate. And a lot of folks would come on board and they were like, “You know what? I'm not enjoying writing Ruby for my job.” And they could take the next step to transition to the support team or the sales engineer team, or cloud operations team at Elastic. So, it was really, like you mentioned, it has nothing to do with the technology of—to me—why these projects are important.They became an amplifier and a hand to pull people up to go the next step they need to go. And on the way maybe they can make a positive impact in the communities they participate in. If those happen to be fpm or logstash, that's great, but I think I want folks to see that technology doesn't have to be a grind of getting through gatekeepers, meeting artificial barriers, and things like that.Corey: The thing that I took, too, is that I gave a talk in 2015 or'16, which is strangely appropriate now: “Terrible ideas in Git.” And yes, checking large binaries in is one of the terrible ideas I talk about. It's Git through counter-example. And around that time, I also gave a talk for a while on how to handle a job interview and advance your career. Only one of those talks has resulted in people approaching me even years later saying that what I did had changed aspects of their life. It wasn't the Git one. And that's the impact it comes down to. That is the change that I wanted to start having because I saw someone else do it and realized, you know, maybe I could possibly be that good someday. Well, I'd like to think I made it, on some level.Jordan: [laugh]. I'm proud of the impact you've made. And I agree with you, it is about people. Even with fpm where I was very selfishly tickling my own itch, I don't want to remember all of this stuff and I also enjoy operating outside of the boundaries of a church or whatever the priesthoods that say, “This is how you must do a thing,” I knew there was a lot of folks who worked at jobs and they didn't have authority, and they had to deploy something, and they knew if they could just package it into a Debian format, or an RPM format, or whatever they needed to do, they could get it deployed and it would make their lives easier. Well, they didn't have the time or the energy or the support in order to learn how to do that and fpm brought them that success where you can say, “Here's a bunch of files; here's a name, poof, you have a package for whatever format you want.”Where I found fpm really take off is when Gem and Python and Node.js support were added. The sysadmins were kind of sandwiched in between—in two impossible worlds where they are only authorized to deploy a certain package format, but all of their internal application developer teams were using Node.js and newer technologies, and all of those package formats were not permitted by whoever had the authority to permit those things at their job. But now they had a tool that said, “You know what? We can just take that thing, we'll take Django and Python, and we'll make it an RPM and we won't have to think a lot about it.”And that really, I think—to me, my hope was that it de-stresses that sort of work environment where you're not having to do three weeks of brand new work every time someone releases something internally in your company; you can just run a script that you wrote a month ago and maintain it as you go.Corey: Wouldn't that be something?Jordan: [laugh]. Ideally, ideally.Corey: Jordan, I want to thank you for not only the stuff you did ten years ago, but also the stuff you just said now. If people want to learn more about you, how you view the world, see what you're up to these days, where can they find you?Jordan: I'm mostly active on Twitter, at @jordansissel, all one word. Mostly these days, I post repair stuff I do on the house. I'm a stay-at-home full0 time dad these days, and… I'm still doing maintenance on the projects that need maintenance, like fpm or xdotool, so if you're one of those users, I hope you're happy. If you're not happy, please reach out and we'll figure out what the next steps can be. But yeah. If you like bugs, especially spiders—or if you don't like spiders and you want to like spiders, check me out on Twitter. I'm often posting macro photos, close-up photos of butterflies, bees, spiders, and the like.Corey: And we will, of course, throw links to that in the [show notes 00:38:10]. Jordan, thank you so much for your time today. It's appreciated.Jordan: Thank you, Corey. It's good talking to you.Corey: Jordan Sissel, founder of logstash and currently, blissfully, not working on a particular corporate job. I envy him, some days. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment in which you have also embedded a large binary.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. 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How To Find A Business Coach Or Mentor with Jordan Montgomery. My discussion with Jordan involved learning about the various types of performance coaches, the styles, how can someone benefit from a coach and why you would need/want one. I enjoyed this honest conversation with Jordan, his ideas and how well he spoke and conveyed his ideas and message. There's a good chance a performance coach could really improve so many things in your life, that it's worth looking into for sure. Thanks for listening! Joe #thejoecostelloshow #montgomerycompanies #performancecoach Jordan Montgomery Owner - Montgomery Companies Website: https://www.montgomerycompanies.com/ Instagram: @jordanmmontgomery Facebook: @montgomerycompanies LinkedIn: @jordanmmontgomery Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. 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Jordan: So Joe: So Jordan: I live in Iowa Joe: The stage Jordan: City, Joe: Is Jordan: Iowa, Joe: Yours. Jordan: Actually just outside of Iowa City and a little small town called Tiffin with my wife Ashley and our three daughters. My wife today runs the business. I run my mouth. We have a full scale coaching and consulting firm, Montgomery Companies. We have several coaching partners, and today we serve several thousand coaching clients. Those clients range from professional athletes to entrepreneurs and salespeople. We do work with some executive leaders at some larger firms. And I just have a blast getting to do what I do. And I meet some really interesting people. We get to help people think more deeply about who they are and where they're headed. And ultimately you get to help people live into who they were created to be. And it's a tremendous blessing. So I had a career in the financial services business, allowed me to pivot into this world pretty open about my professional journey. But at the end of the day, I graduated college 2010 and University of Iowa spent the last 11 years really building a skill set that's allowed us to build a business around coaching, consulting and leading people. So that's kind of the short version of my story. Obviously, there's a lot of twists and turns and gods provide a lot of grace. Jordan: Certainly I've been thankful to be around a lot of the right people. But if you're asking me the short version on how I got to where I'm at today, that's the the short version on Jordan Montgomery. Yeah, I think my dad, at the end of the day, my dad was a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I wanted to model that. I wanted to be a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I think as a driven type, a young man living in America, I kind of fight that every day. I mean, at the other day, like my wife and my kids are my top priority. But if I say they're my top priority, then that needs to show up in my calendar and that needs to be reflected in how I spend my time. And I want to be respected the most by people who know me the best. And that means that I'm a father first. I'm a husband first. I'm leading my family well. And if I lead inside the walls of my home, then I think I can lead in other areas of my life Joe: Cool. Jordan: As well. But Joe: So Jordan: I just didn't want to be Joe: First Jordan: The guy Joe: Of Jordan: That Joe: All, I love the part Jordan: Built Joe: Where you Jordan: Something Joe: Said Jordan: Professionally Joe: That because your father Jordan: But Joe: Was Jordan: Then Joe: Able Jordan: Sacrificed Joe: To make it, Jordan: Or Joe: You Jordan: Compromised Joe: Gravitated Jordan: In really other Joe: Towards Jordan: Important Joe: That Jordan: Areas Joe: Feeling Jordan: Of life. 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Not a lot of people have said that in the past on the show when they when they said, oh, I became an entrepreneur because and it was all of these other reasons. But to actually associate it with your father sitting on the sidelines, watching you play sports and concert or whatever it might be, that was really cool. Jordan: Well, and I'll say this to Joe, because there are some entrepreneurs listening that maybe don't have that flexibility, like maybe you're truly in a situation where you've got a team or your businesses in an industry that requires you to work certain hours or whatever. So that's not a shame or guilt. Anyone who's working really hard to provide, because at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are called to work longer hours is just part of the deal. So if you're in that grind right now, here's what I'd encourage you with, is somebody that's going to change and the reason that you're doing what you're doing right now, the reason that you're working as hard as you're working right now is to have the flexibility and the autonomy. And, you know, I also wasn't there for my dad's early years. Like, I missed you know, I was born when my dad was eight to 10 years into being an entrepreneur. So he earned that flexibility. So let's just not forget that that flexibility is earned. And that looks different for every entrepreneur based on the industry Joe: Yeah, that Jordan: That Joe: Was Jordan: You're Joe: Really Jordan: In Joe: Cool, and I Jordan: And Joe: Came Jordan: This Joe: From Jordan: Stage Joe: An entrepreneurial Jordan: Of Joe: Family as well. Jordan: The business Joe: The Jordan: That Joe: Unfortunate Jordan: You're in. Joe: Thing for Jordan: So Joe: Me is that Jordan: I think Joe: My Jordan: That's Joe: Father Jordan: Important to Joe: Could Jordan: Underscore. Joe: Not attend most of my stuff. So when you said it, it kind of hit home and I hold nothing. He's passed on at this point. But I never held a grudge because he just he worked his butt off and and just to provide and create something great. So it never struck me the other way. It wasn't Jordan: Yeah. Joe: Like I was resentful over it. But I just love the way you framed that whole thing. That was really cool. Jordan: Well, yeah, you know, I just I fell in love with sports at a really early age. I just love competition. I loved competing. I love watching other people compete. I love the atmosphere. I love the energy that goes into a sports competition. I'm still the guy, Joe. Like, I will watch one shining moment at the end of the final four for those who are familiar with that show. I cry every year when I watch that one shining, but that little three minute clip. And I think part of the reason I get emotional about that as you watch young people get emotional over competition. And I just loved the rush of competition. I loved watching people give their all to a very specific activity, blood, sweat and tears. And Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jordan: So Joe: I totally Jordan: I just fell Joe: Agree Jordan: In love with sports Joe: And Jordan: At a young Joe: I'm Jordan: Age. Joe: Still Jordan: I played Joe: Working Jordan: Sports Joe: Like Jordan: All the way Joe: Crazy, Jordan: Through high school. Joe: But Jordan: I did Joe: It's Jordan: Not compete Joe: Just Jordan: In college. Joe: Because Jordan: And Joe: I Jordan: It's something Joe: Don't Jordan: That's Joe: Say no Jordan: Kind Joe: And Jordan: Of Joe: I Jordan: Interesting Joe: Just keep Jordan: About Joe: Adding Jordan: My story Joe: More and more Jordan: And background. Joe: To my plate. 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Joe: Or to Jordan: You Joe: Me, Jordan: Know, Joe: You looked Jordan: At the Joe: Like Jordan: End of the Joe: You Jordan: Day, Joe: Were a football Jordan: I think Joe: Player. Jordan: It athletes Joe: I was like, maybe Jordan: In a really Joe: He played Jordan: Unique Joe: For Jordan: World Joe: The Hawkeyes. Jordan: Where they Joe: I Jordan: Give Joe: Don't Jordan: So Joe: Know. Jordan: Much of their time for such a really, really small window of competition. You know, you think a lot like the average NFL athlete will compete for less than two hours, whistle to whistle over the course of a season. But they can be literally all year round and they'll get paid, graded and evaluated for what they do inside of two hours. All year long, but it's kind of a metaphor for it for all of us, right, because the reality is each one of us is practicing for little moments, for small moments. Some of them we can predict, some of them we can't. But you get paid and your best to show you get paid really, really, really well to be prepared Joe: Hmm. Jordan: In small little windows of time. And so I developed the sort of fascination or obsession with helping athletes prepare and be at their best when that small window of opportunity presents itself and, you know, your clutch, your clutch when you can show up and do normal things. In an abnormal times, so like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, you know, they're considered clutch because at the end of the day, they could show up normal. They could just be who they were because they had practiced so much in the most important windows of time. And it's a really interesting metaphor that we can apply to all of life. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's it's a pursuit of excellence, right, and you know, I'm reading a book right now by Tim Grover, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, and it's called Winning. 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And it's just to live on the edge of not knowing if you're playing or you're sitting each day and who's who's looking for your spot and the work so hard and give up so much from a really young age all the way through. It's unbelievable. You know, and I watch certain friends here in Arizona, believe it or not, Arizona has got a very big hockey base. You know, like fans love hockey. And there's a lot of kids that come here, play hockey, play on the farm team of the coyotes or and we've had friends that had their kids just go through all in hockey. Moms and dads have the worst it's the worst schedule I've ever seen. And to go all the way to the very end and be on the farm team and never get called up. And I can't even imagine that it's just grueling. Jordan: Yeah, well, you know, there's there's a lot that goes into speaking, right, speaking as an art form, and in today's world, attention is currency. So something we think about a lot and the keynote speaking world is you've got Joe: Mm Jordan: To Joe: Hmm. Jordan: Keep people's attention. And if you can't, you're out, you're done. You'll never be the really high demand keynote speaker if you don't know how to keep somebody's attention. So there's multiple ways that we do that. One of the ways that we keep people's attention is through story. It's a story sell facts, tell. When you get really good Joe: Yeah, Jordan: At telling stories, Joe: Yeah, I Jordan: You keep Joe: Agree. Jordan: People's attention. Joe: Ok, Jordan: In Joe: So Jordan: Fact, Joe: Enough about sports. 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And then the other thing I think about is being really you centered in the message being you centered. So I'm going to use two people's names. I'm going to pick people out in the crowd. I'm going to touch people, maybe even on the shoulder or the arm as I'm speaking. And I'm going to move through the crowd. And so much of communication is nonverbal, right? 90 percent is nonverbal. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it's also not what you say. It's what people hear and it's what they remember. Maya Angelou famously said it's not what you say that people remember. It's how you make them feel. And so I try to stay really in tune with how I make people feel. A lot of that is my energy, my body language. It's you focus communication, it's telling stories, and it's the difference between connecting and communicating. So if you're listening and you're thinking about your communication style or maybe you want to develop your craft as a keynote speaker, those are a few things that you could consider. Jordan: And I'll say this to Joe. I'm a long way away from where I want to be. I got a long way to go. So those are things that I think about repetitiously. And I get obsessed with the practice of my craft. And I'm evaluating and observing high level keynote speakers. You know, how do they move? What do they say? What do they not say? You know, their pace, their tonality, the way that they tell stories, their presence. Yeah, those are all things that I'm paying attention to. So I appreciate your kind words. I think communication as an art form is no different than playing an instrument or doing a dance. And for anybody that's in sales, for any entrepreneur, if you're not taking that seriously as you develop and grow your business, that's something to really consider and think about. Because whether you're speaking to an audience of one hundred or a thousand or an audience of five or ten, you're in the human connection business before you're in the construction business or before you're in the marketing business or financial planning business or real estate business. We've got to remember that the human connection is at the center of everything that we do. Well, thank you. It's kind of you to say. I did and I went to school for interdepartmental studies, which is a fancy way to cover recreational management, so I literally wanted to go to school, have a great social experience, and then start a business and the fitness world. Jordan: That was kind of my dream. And so I took some entrepreneurial courses, got a degree in recreation management, fell into finance and in two things were true. I didn't want to have a boss, so I went to work for myself and I wanted to create my own schedule that that was it. I want to call my shots, create my own schedule. But I didn't have any money and I didn't have any experience. And so I fell into financial services because it allowed me to be in business for myself, but not by myself. So I had a great support system. It was kind of like a franchise model, had a lot of success in that world at an early stage, had a big event in my life in twenty fifteen that really have me thinking about my future in a deeper way. And then I decided to pivot into sort of the consulting and coaching world making financial planning, kind of our kind of our core client. And so in a very early stage in a coaching business, financial advisers were some of our first clients by way of my background in the financial planning world. Joe: Yeah, and you do it incredibly well, my friend. So thank you. So let's just backtrack really quickly so that I can get the progression from college into starting this company. So did you go to school for finance? Jordan: I think it's so true Joe: Ok. Jordan: In life and in business, definitely in entrepreneurship, where we're leading people, that more is caught than taught. Joe: Ok. Jordan: And so nobody really taught me how to coach. But I watched other people coach and I watched other people in my industry that do what I'm doing now, do it at a really high level. And again, I paid attention to quality of life. I paid attention to the relationships. I paid attention to the way that they manage their decisions and manage their time. And I thought, you know, I want to do that. I think I can do that. And I actually did it in tandem with my own financial planning. And so I started sort of coaching on the side and I had really been coaching all the while I was in financial planning and some aspect working with clients. But I also started getting asked to speak and do workshops. And so I sort of fell in love with that work, Joe. But the reality is I had a couple of mentors. I had some key people in my life that had done that work in a really high level. One of those people is a guy by the name of Ben Newman. Another guy is John Wright Senior. And they both had Joe: How did Jordan: Big Joe: Coaching Jordan: Coaching Joe: Catch your Jordan: Practices Joe: Eye, or Jordan: Working with Joe: Was it because Jordan: Professional Joe: You were Jordan: Athletes Joe: Just taking Jordan: And Fortune Joe: From Jordan: 500 Joe: Your Jordan: Executive Joe: Love of Jordan: Leaders. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: Being a coach? Right. Jordan: I just Joe: I Jordan: Admired Joe: Mean, just Jordan: The work. Joe: Taking Jordan: I thought, Joe: That, Jordan: You know, Joe: But Jordan: I think Joe: Now Jordan: I Joe: Saying, Jordan: Can Joe: Ok, Jordan: Do that. Joe: Wait, Jordan: I got a lot to learn, Joe: I want Jordan: But Joe: To do a little Jordan: I'll Joe: Bit Jordan: Learn Joe: Of that Jordan: As I Joe: With Jordan: Go. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: People. I want to do that with Jordan: Just Joe: Entrepreneurs. Jordan: Like you or any Joe: I want Jordan: Other Joe: To do Jordan: Entrepreneur, Joe: It with Jordan: You Joe: With Jordan: Kind Joe: Business Jordan: Of dive headfirst Joe: People. Jordan: And just Joe: I mean, Jordan: Hope Joe: What Jordan: It works Joe: Made Jordan: Out. Joe: You Jordan: So Joe: Wake up one day and Jordan: Our Joe: Say, Jordan: Business Joe: Yeah, Jordan: Grew Joe: I Jordan: Rapidly, Joe: Want to do coaching and Jordan: By Joe: I Jordan: God's Joe: Want to Jordan: Grace, Joe: Do it Jordan: Into Joe: In Jordan: The help Joe: This Jordan: Of a lot Joe: Form? Jordan: Of good people. And I woke up one day and I thought, you know what? I could leave my financial planning business based on what we built in the coaching business. And then we started to add more partners and multiply our efforts through other people. And that's when it really starts to get financed, when you can impact the world or you can impact the world around you through the people that work with you. So virtually everybody on our team right now, with the exception of maybe two to three people there in the coaching business, so their coaching partners, so they're leading, they're doing coaching and consulting work, either individual coaching group, coaching, keynote speaking, they're all contracted out. So some of them have five clients, some of them have 30 clients. We have a couple that have just a couple of clients and they're all sort of specialized. So we have some former professional athletes. We have some people that came from the ministry world. So they're actually pastors or they have been pastors. And then we have some people in the world of sales. We have some real estate agents and financial advisers. Some of them are very technical. Somebody might say a more motivational, but all of them are for hire as coaching partners. It's my job to lead them and make sure that they're getting what they need from a content standpoint and also just keeping them connected to to a vision and and keeping them connected to our company. But we're having a ton of fun. I mean, it's it's awesome to be on a team. It's fun to be a part of something that's bigger than just me. And, you know, each one of them is unique in terms of what they bring to the table. Joe: So that's a great segue because you do have a fairly Jordan: You Joe: Sizable Jordan: Know, what's Joe: Team. Jordan: Most important Joe: So Jordan: To us, Joe, Joe: What Jordan: Is that Joe: Do those Jordan: We all Joe: Team Jordan: Have Joe: Members Jordan: Similar Joe: Do Jordan: Values, Joe: For you? Jordan: So I want to give people the freedom and flexibility to be autonomous and how they work with clients. And so I've never told somebody, hey, here's the five step plan. Here's exactly what you have to do. Now, I'll make some general suggestions about the way that we lead people and care for people. But at the end of the day, most of the people that are on our coaching platform have been wildly successful in other arenas. And so they've been leading. They've been coaching. They've been training and developing people. So I think we're aligned in terms of our values. But beyond that, I want them to really operate in their true giftedness. And for some of them, that giftedness is in listening. You know, for some of them, it's in the world of neuroscience. You know, they just really understand how the brain works for others. They're just big on accountability, the kind like the bulldog that's in your face. It's really intense and motivational. So we want people to be who they are. We want them to have strong values, which for us means their faith filled and family oriented. And if they're faith filled, family oriented, others focus. They're usually a good fit for our coaching Joe: Did Jordan: Practice. Joe: They follow Jordan: And then, of course, Joe: A Jordan: There Joe: Certain Jordan: Are some other criteria Joe: Structure Jordan: That we want to Joe: That Jordan: Vet Joe: You Jordan: Out. Joe: Have Jordan: But Joe: Set up Jordan: That's Joe: So Jordan: A that's Joe: That Jordan: A good question. Joe: When someone hires one of those people, they know that if they're getting the quality of the Montgomery companies coach and there's a certain structure formula, something like that? The. Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's that's very true of of our team, I think we're well positioned to help just about anybody in any industry with any problem. You know, there's a few that we would say, hey, we're not not licensed to do that. We're not going to dive into that space. But for the most part, if it is in the world of performance sales and driving results, there's somebody on our team that can handle the issue of the opportunity. Yes, so there's really two components to coaching for us and our business model, one is group coaching and one individual coaching, and those are obviously very separate. If I'm working with an individual client and we're talking about the phases of coaching or how I work with a client, first is discovery. So the answers you get are only as good as the questions that you ask. And people don't care how Joe: Cool. Jordan: Much you know Joe: Well, Jordan: Until Joe: I Jordan: They Joe: Just Jordan: Know that you care. Joe: It's important Jordan: And Joe: Because Jordan: To Joe: I Jordan: Us, Joe: When Jordan: It's Joe: I Jordan: A Joe: Went Jordan: Relationship. Joe: And looked at the website, I was like, Jordan: And Joe: This Jordan: So Joe: Is this Jordan: I Joe: Is Jordan: Always Joe: Cool. Jordan: Tell Joe: You Jordan: People, Joe: Have a Jordan: Hey, Joe: Really Jordan: I'm Joe: Cool team Jordan: A coach, Joe: Around Jordan: Which means Joe: You. And Jordan: I'm Joe: I Jordan: Going Joe: Wanted Jordan: To hold Joe: To Jordan: You Joe: Find Jordan: Accountable. Joe: Out if there Jordan: I'm Joe: Was Jordan: Going Joe: A variety Jordan: To share ideas Joe: In Jordan: Where to talk about Joe: What Jordan: Concepts Joe: They Jordan: And strategy, Joe: Coach on Jordan: Just Joe: Which Jordan: Like Joe: You Jordan: Any Joe: Answered Jordan: Coach Joe: That question. They Jordan: Would. Joe: Do. You have people that Jordan: The Joe: Specialize Jordan: Difference Joe: In Jordan: In Joe: All Jordan: Our Joe: Sorts Jordan: Approach, Joe: Of things. Jordan: I Joe: So Jordan: Think, is Joe: It's Jordan: That Joe: Great Jordan: I'm also Joe: That Jordan: A Joe: If Jordan: Strategic Joe: Someone Jordan: Partner. Joe: Loves working with you for all Jordan: And so Joe: The reasons Jordan: If I sign Joe: That Jordan: Up Joe: They Jordan: To work Joe: Love Jordan: With a client, Joe: To work with you, they Jordan: What Joe: Can Jordan: That means Joe: Get Jordan: Is Joe: Basically whatever Jordan: I'm going Joe: They Jordan: To advocate, Joe: Need under one roof, Jordan: I'm going Joe: Which Jordan: To support, Joe: Is cool. It's Jordan: I'm Joe: Not Jordan: Going Joe: Like Jordan: To connect Joe: You do. It's not one Jordan: And Joe: Dimensional Jordan: I'm going to highlight Joe: In any Jordan: And spotlight Joe: Any way, Jordan: Who Joe: Shape Jordan: You Joe: Or form. Jordan: Are and what you do. That means that my network is your network. It means if you want to speak engaged, we're going to help you with that. If you need marketing help or we're going to help you with that. If I need to get you connected to another leader, I'm going to help you with that. If we need help, you track down a client or prospect, I'm going to help you with that. So it's our approach is a little bit different that way. It's it's heavily based around relationship. The relationship has to start with Joe: All right, Jordan: Discovery. Joe: Cool. So let's talk about Jordan: One of my Joe: The Jordan: Other Joe: Coaching Jordan: Beliefs, Joe, is Joe: Part Jordan: That if Joe: Of it, Jordan: I'm working Joe: And Jordan: With a client, Joe: If Jordan: It's always Joe: You can go through Jordan: 100 percent Joe: And tell Jordan: Of the time, Joe: Me the Jordan: Their time, not Joe: Different Jordan: Mine. Joe: Types Jordan: Which Joe: Of Jordan: Means Joe: Services Jordan: I've got to Joe: That Jordan: Deal Joe: You Jordan: With Joe: Have Jordan: The issues, Joe: For the coaching Jordan: The Joe: Piece Jordan: Opportunities Joe: Of. Jordan: And the challenges that are most present for them right away before I try to drive my agenda. So if I show up to the call and I say, hey, Joe, here's three things I want to talk about today. Here's the here's the new approach to closing a sale or here's the new approach to the discovery process or whatever. And I find out that your dog just died or that you just lost the key employee or that your house just burned down. But I'm using really dramatic examples. But anyway, the point, is there something else on your mind? I'm missing it. I'm not know I've failed to connect with you, and candidly, I failed to lead you. So the first question I asked to all of our coaching clients and a coaching meeting, and they would tell you, this is not to say, hey, Joe, how do we create space to discuss and talk about the things that are most pressing, interesting and relevant for you today? I want to start there and then we'll recap and we'll talk about some of the stuff that we've talked about the past. I'm always, you know, forcing accountability. So we're we're bringing things to the forefront. Did you do X, Y and Z to do that or Yapp with that? But we addressed the issues that are most present. And then I'm always trying to share ideas and concepts that I feel like are relevant to them based on the seasonal life there in industry they're in or what they've said that they needed help with. Conversations tend to be fairly organic because, again, it's it's a relationship. And, you know, people open up to us about all kinds of stuff, their marriage, their finances, their friendships, their their problems that go way beyond their professional life. Jordan: So I appreciate the question. I don't know if I if I answered it exactly. But to give you a window into our world and how we work with people, that that's sort of our our process and style. You know, right now we work with such a wide range of people, Joe, so I'm not as concerned about like industry or niche. Here's what I what I'm really concerned with this character traits. So they've got to be values oriented, right? They got to care. They're going to be a decent person. In other words, if they just want to go make all the money in the world, they don't want to leave their family. I'm probably not a good fit. I'm going to challenge them on their values and lead in their family and growing in their faith. And that's part of who I am. But that's not for everybody. But so we're probably not a good fit if that's not part of who they are. And then the second thing that I would tell you is they got to be open minded. They have to be willing to learn. They have to be somebody that enjoys new information and new ways of thinking. A new perspective, fresh perspective. Right. Doesn't mean that I'm always right or my perspective is the right perspective. It just means that they're willing to listen right there. They're willing to hear and then they're willing to be challenged. So they want somebody to ask them the tough questions and share the truth and mix even said it best. You said average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, great players want the truth. I want people that want the truth. I want people that really want to be challenged. Joe: Great. Jordan: They've Joe: So Jordan: Got Joe: Before Jordan: An open Joe: We Jordan: Mind Joe: Move to Jordan: And they have strong Joe: A Jordan: Values. Joe: Group coaching piece Jordan: And Joe: Of it, Jordan: If they've Joe: Because Jordan: Got those Joe: We just Jordan: Three Joe: Talked Jordan: Things, Joe: About the one on Jordan: They're Joe: One. Jordan: Usually a good fit for Joe: What's Jordan: Our coaching Joe: Your sweet Jordan: Practice. Joe: Spot? Who who are the people that you feel you work best with or can can help the best. Jordan: So the group coaches typically kind of a one hour session, we try to kind of meet people where they're at. So I work with organizations, as do our partners, to figure out, hey, what really do you need? What's the right time frame? What's the right size? I'd love to tell you that we've got, like, this specific program. It's cookie cutter. It's not. But that's by design. We really want to be a partner and meet people where they're at. So sometimes it's a small as is five people. I've got one group right now, 60, which I think is a little too big. What's important to us is that that's it's intimate or as intimate as it can be where people really feel like, you know, them. And and so we call on people. I try to get to know everybody by name and remember little facts about who they are and what's important to them. It's highly interactive. So I'm calling on people throughout the session. Usually I'm delivering 30 minutes of content or 30 minutes of discussion. We challenge challenge on the spot. I have other people challenge each other. I always say this in our group coaching program that where you sit determines what you see and you see something different than everybody else's and different is valuable. And so what that means is your voice matters because whether you're the most experienced person on the call are the least experienced person on the call, you see something that nobody else in the organization sees. And so we need your voice. We need your perspective, because you've got a different perspective than everybody else. So, Johnny, that sits at the front desk, that's the director of First Impressions, has some really valuable Joe: Awesome, Jordan: Perspective Joe: I Jordan: Because Joe: Love Jordan: Johnny Joe: That. OK, cool. Jordan: Sees Joe: So Jordan: Something Joe: The group Jordan: That Sarah, Joe: Coaching, Jordan: The CEO, Joe: What does that entail? Jordan: Doesn't see. And so we really just try to foster conversation, encourage people and empower people to share and speak up and then deliver content that's inclusive and relevant to the group. Yes, so much of our business is virtual, it just kind of always has been and most a lot of our clients aren't local. So they're you know, they're kind of spread out. We have people all over the US. I'm pretty used to Zoom calls and phone calls, and I speak a lot. Right. So keynote speaking is live often, but we still do virtual keynotes as well. So it's a good mixture, I would say, in so many ways covid changed our business. I was always willing to do things virtually, but I think a lot of companies weren't until they realized like, hey, we can do it this way. And so for me, as a person with a young family, it allowed me to stay at home and I didn't have to. I wasn't on a plane twice a week sleeping in a hotel. So so covid in some ways I'd be careful how I say this, because it was a really difficult time for a lot of people for our business. It actually affected my day to day rhythm or quality of life and I think a positive way and allowed me to be more present with my family. So it's a good mix of both. But I would say the pandemic certainly forced it to be more virtual. Joe: The coaching business, covid or not covid, were you doing live coaching up until that point and now a lot of Jordan: Yeah, Joe: It has shifted Jordan: I would say Joe: Onto Jordan: A good Joe: Like Zoom Jordan: Portion Joe: Calls and things Jordan: Of Joe: Like Jordan: Our Joe: That, Jordan: Clients Joe: Or Jordan: Are either Joe: How your Jordan: In Joe: Business Jordan: Sales or entrepreneurs, Joe: Today and what's Jordan: You know, Joe: The Jordan: So Joe: Mixture Jordan: There Joe: Of live Jordan: In fact, Joe: Versus Jordan: I would say it's Joe: Online? Jordan: Probably 80 percent of our business, either business owners or they're in sales and then there's maybe 20 percent that are in the world of executive leadership or sports. So that's kind of a mix of our business. When I say executive leadership, they're a leader in some sort of a corporate setting, but it's starting to change more every day. Like we work. I work right now with a group of physicians. We've got a gal that owns a very successful cosmetology clinic. So her whole thing is cosmetology Joe: Yep. Jordan: And she's been wildly successful and real estate agents and financial advisors and and college athletes and pro athletes. And so it's a it's a it's a wide range of people. Joe: Perfect out of the clients that you have, what is the percentage of general corporations, then entrepreneurs and then sports related? OK. Awesome. OK, we're closing in on the amount of time that I have you for, which is unfortunate because I love talking with you and I love your approach. 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First of all, have 20 years of experience, a team of 20 people there doing tens of millions of dollars revenue, that they're very successful. And so they hire us. They hire me to come in and do coaching work with them. And every one of them has sort of a different set of needs. But one of the things that we always talk about, at least on some level, is our communication style. Right, because they're in sales and they're communicating all day, every day for a living. So I challenge this financial advisor. Usually within the first few meetings, I'll say, hey, I want you to send me your approach language, which is really their what they say to engage a client and conversation. So it's a first time meeting and this is the first five minutes of sort of the introductory meeting. And I can I can feel their energy when I when I challenge them and I say, I want you to send me that communication. Their energy is like at a negative to. Right, they're thinking you're going to bill me X for coaching, I've been doing this for 20 years, like what I don't need is help on the basics of what I say. And, you know, I can just feel that just not really excited about that. Jordan: But I challenge him. I say I think this is a really important part of our work together. It helps me understand who you are and how you're showing up for people. So send that over when you get some time. So they send it over and it's not going to have all the answers. But I'm willing to listen to it repeatedly. Our team listens to it repeatedly. And then we give them an analysis. We give them feedback. The energy level, when we give them feedback, goes from a negative two to a 10. Every single time. Because they do not know what they do not know. And I just had a guy the other day, I said, OK, so when the first two minutes of your communication, you said the word thirty seven times. Did you know that? You know, hey, the way that you show up, did you know that you use me focused conversation? Over and over, you are literally saying I my, me repeatedly. And you were doing it for 20 years and nobody has ever told you that you're doing it, and that's a shame because you would connect with people and a deeper and more meaningful way because you would be able to drive better results. You would have more purposeful conversation if you could just make that one small tweak. Jordan: You know, we could end the conversation at the cozy relationship right there, and the time that we had spent together would have been massively impactful. Again, not because I have all the answers, but because I'm willing to listen, give real feedback and press in on blind spots that we all have. And the last thing I'll say is people need to be encouraged. You know, people will go farther than they think they can when someone else thinks they can, period. And I don't care for the most successful person, the least successful person, the most experienced, the least experienced. I'm working with a guy the other day, Fortune 500, executive leader, big time leader of people. They had a record breaking year at the firm. Unbelievable year. This guy is in charge of literally hundreds of direct reports. And I asked him in a conversation, I just said, hey, how many people told you over this past fiscal year? So you just wrapped up the year. How many people told you? Good job. And he says, well, like, what do you mean? I said, you know what I mean? Like e-mails, texts, phone calls. Like how many people reached out to you said, hey, good job, great you. And he said, Zira. Zero people had picked up the phone and sent a text instead of an email, so the point is this job that I've worked with, this guy named John. Jordan: So the point is this, John, that you need to be encouraged. You need somebody to point out what you're doing. Well. You need somebody to touch your heart and remind you of who God made you to be and all of the natural God given giftedness that's inside of you. And I just want to share with you it's an honor to be able to do that for you and with you. But let me let me help you see what I see. Let's look back at the last 12 months. Here's what you've achieved. In that moment, I think I think when you step into somebody's life in that way, you're a lid lifter and you do it authentically and you help them see more and you help them see before. Man, I think you're in a position of strength relationally. And I think that person at that moment realizes that that relationship means more than they ever realized. So there's a lot that we can say about coaching. But I think, Joe, when you touch somebody's heart, when you appreciate people for who they are, when you point out their God given gift A. and when you deliver the truth and love and you point out the blindspots, you can be a world class coach and it has nothing to do with what you know, it's all about. Jordan: You show up and serve people. Well, that's just my answer. I don't know if it's the right answer by anybody else's standard, but in my world, it's the way that I try to live each and every day with the people that we serve. I love it. Yeah, so here's what I'd say, we do a lot of work through social media, so Instagram is probably where I'm most active. I'm Jordan and Montgomery on Instagram, so I would love it. If you want to get in touch to send a direct message, I'll communicate back with you. I would love to connect Montgomery Companies dot com is on our website. I'm also active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and if anybody reaches out, I will gladly respond. If you got a question, if you're wrestling with an issue, an opportunity I'd love to talk to it with and be of service to anybody listening. And Joe, I want to say thank you for having me on your show. It's an honor. It's always an honor to share your great with the questions that, yes, it's very clear that you showed up prepared and you also had great energy. And so I just want to say thank you for your time and attention. Thanks for who you are and for what you're putting out into the world. It's making a difference. I. Right back at you, brother.

Outside of emails, landing page copy and offers, what are the levers that marketers can pull to get better results from their conversion funnels? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, DropFunnels Founder and CEO Jordan Mederich explains the importance of what he calls "building your house on rock as opposed to building it on sand" — or why it's so critical to nail certain fundamentals on your website in order to drive big results from your conversion optimization and lead generation strategies. In this episode, Jordan discusses how things like page load speed, social proof, and landing page design can all play big parts in boosting traffic to your site and ensuring that the visitors you attract stay and convert. Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.) Resources from this episode: Check out the DropFunnels website Email Jordan at jordan@dropfunnels.com Transcript Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week, my guest is Jordan Mederich, who goes by Jordo, so that's what I'm going to be calling you after this. He is the founder and CEO of DropFunnels. Welcome to the podcast, Jordo. Jordan: Really glad to be here, I appreciate you having me. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you. I love getting into deep technical levels of marketing nerdiness, and I think that's what we're going to do here today. So let's start out by having you just do a brief overview of who you are, what you do, and what DropFunnels is. Jordan: Yeah, sure. And anyone who's here, hopefully we can give value and new insights, regardless of anyone who's just starting out, or you've been doing it for a really long time. So I've been in the marketing game for, I'd say about a decade, actually I came from the filmmakers' perspective and training, I was in very much the creative space. And I make commercials for a long time and had films produced on Amazon Prime, and we've been seen on all the big networks and whatnot. And I realized that there was this big switch that I kind of had to make from kind of the mass market branding, corporate level of marketing, and realizing that I was blown away and shocked by the amount of waste that occurred specifically in marketing, corporate level businesses. I did work for Sony and Verizon, I was like, "Wow, there's so much money, billions of dollars being spent on advertising with no attributable results from most of those marketing efforts." Jordan: And so I dove deep into the direct response marketing world, and I was building sites and whatnot on WordPress. So WordPress powers 34% of the internet, it's Google's number one favorite platform to rank. But it's also extremely technical. It's very powerful, in that sense, it can do a lot. But you better have a marketing or development team, a designing team, you better know what you're doing, you better have great servers and all those things. And so I was building new marketing funnels on WordPress, and building new sites in businesses on WordPress. But about six years ago, there's this resurgence, and it kind of started with ClickFunnels, and Kartra, and Kajabi. It's the sales funnel builders, hard coded platforms that made it more simple, I would say, easier to build your business on a platform and they had the psychology of sales. Jordan: So we know that sales funnels blow away as far as conversion rates are concerned any corporate website and can really help you to get new leads and sales. And so they had this psychology but not the technology. And I look back and I realized as I was making the switch from corporate marketing into more direct response marketing, WordPress really has the technology, but not so much the psychology, it's really difficult to build on. So a couple years ago, I was looking back and I said, "Why don't I just combine these two worlds? Why don't I bring them together and make it easy to have the psychology and the technology at the same time? Make an entirely drag and drop, remove the code and the difficulty," and so we're the first platform ever to combine these two worlds. And to give you unlimited sales funnels, your websites, your blog, all of your courses into a WordPress based infrastructure, so that your sales funnels can rank, you build true domain brand authority, your pages load at around two seconds, which is really powerful for both paid and organic traffic. Jordan: And it gives you the absolute strongest foundation to be building your marketing on outside of having a massive team of servers and devs and all of that if you're going to go build it on your own, DropFunnels is really the all in one platform to help make that happen. So since we launched in early 2020, we've seen unbelievable tremendous and very rapid growth, and we're breaking things all the time and re-innovating and reinventing what we want to see the marketing world to be like, and we're seeing some amazing growth there. So that's kind of the history of DropFunnels and where we are. Kathleen: Well, the first thing that stands out to me that you said is that you launched your business in early 2020, what a time? It's a lot to do business, wow. I mean, granted now what you're doing is mostly online thing, but I'm just curious, how were you affected by COVID? Jordan: So being online was a huge blessing for sure at the time and everyone who was already established in the online space pretty much won, everyone won through with that whole thing. Zoom obviously exploded, all these online companies did, and what I saw was a lot of people who were doing physical business or brick and mortar business wanting to move online and really struggling to learn how to do that, to make that happen. So for us, it made us step up our training and our onboarding processes, because we had to make it not twice as simple, but probably four or five times simpler to help them to get moving, because it's such a foreign game for most people. Jordan: I think this morning, actually, I had a call with a client who is very brick and mortar, physical business, and just even using the verbiage, the vernacular of sales funnels in direct response marketing is so foreign that it's more of an education play than it is a service or marketing play. It's like we have to help the world understand how to reach people online instead of physical business. But I think it was a wake up call. Kathleen, I think for a lot of people running physical businesses and having no digital presence at all, it's like, "Wow, this kind of stuff can happen like that, and when it does, if you're not prepared, it can sink the ship." Kathleen: Yeah. It's really interesting the way you describe that, because in my day job, I am head of marketing for a company that sells software into e-commerce. And we saw something really similar where, at least in the retail industry the data that I've read indicates that COVID sped up the shift to e-commerce by something like 10 years within the span of a year. So it was this massive acceleration, and you're right, a lot of people weren't really ready for it, but they were sort of forced to make themselves ready. And so it was an interesting time for sure, just to see the people who would normally not be the early adopters or the technology adoption curves sort of being forced into a place of discomfort and having to do things sooner than they otherwise might. Jordan: Yeah. And I'm super well clearly thankful for it, but in a universal sense, it's like we needed some kick in the butt. The industry, the marketing world, the business world needed a kick in the butt to say, "Hey, it's not 1992 anymore, you have to adopt these methods or you're no longer competing against the guy down the street from you, you're competing against guys like me who live and die marketing." And so when you move into the space, it's this new world of early adopters, right? It's now a new phase of people who have never done it and never had an incentive to do what they have to do it. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny because I was going to say I said early adopter, or innovator, but those are actually the wrong terms, Because those people have already converted to digital. So this is the... I don't remember what the term is, the laggards, the laggards are now being forced to move more quickly than they otherwise might have. Jordan: Yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, because I think it serves them better, too. Kathleen: Yeah, agreed. Well, one of the things that I was really excited to talk with you about is just, obviously with all direct response the goal is conversion and there are a lot of ways to get there. And one of the things that you've talked a lot about is getting to better conversions by improving traffic. And I wanted to sort of open that up to you and hear your perspective on that and then maybe we can dig in and get a little bit more nerdy on it. Jordan: Yeah. So I think there are two audiences to speak to as it relates to conversions in the online space. So for people who are doing really high volume traffic to specific offers, it's really the small hinges that swing big doors and identifying where the key measurements to really make a big move and dial-in processes. So what we see for example, in every single study on the planet that's ever been done, you find that your page load speed is one of the biggest movers as it relates to your conversion. Amazon found that in their own individual test, every 100 milliseconds of latency could cause a 1% decrease in conversion. Obviously, their mass traffic mass, mass appeal, and I think a lot of people realize, "Oh well, maybe one second isn't going to make that big of a difference, because I'm not that big yet." Jordan: But you have to realize that if you ever have that desire to be big the time to fix it is right now. And as we spoke before in our previous conversations, that it's really the comparison of building your house on the rock instead of on the sand. Building it on the rock means starting from day one on a strong infrastructure where you have the best chance to win versus the house on the sand, which is like, "Hey, I can just get this going, it'll be fine for now, and eventually, we'll go solve this," or "Eventually we'll go make this." And I kind of liken it to, if I were to get married to someone and say, "Well, it's not that great right now but it's going to get better later." We don't know if things and everything will be better, right? It's just not the case and it makes it harder to solve a problem down the line. Jordan: Whereas building it on a strong, firm foundation, where it's fast from the get go... I always wondered, I asked the question, "How many sales are you willing to sacrifice because of one thing that you could control from day one?" So high volume, page speed is important, social proof is important. And actually, this is something to kind of nerd out on, which is probably good for both high volume, but also people just starting to get into the game, we find that in our marketing, specifically direct response, so direct Facebook ads or YouTube ads directly to the landing page, we find about 30... This is going to blow your mind, about 20 to 30% of our traffic who go to a funnel, we're directing them to a funnel not to a home site, they're leaving the funnel and often on mobile or desktop, they're leaving it and going to the root domain to go get more information. Jordan: So we're seeing that even if we have an offer, maybe it's a coaching offer, or a course or whatever that is, and we send them to that funnel, they leave and go to the home site and then they'll go back to buy again, or they'll go buy a different product. So we realize that for marketers who are just relying on a sales funnel, or that infrastructure, and you have no home base authority there's nothing there to go back to go learn more to establish some of that trust, you're losing between 20 and 30% of your buyers, potential buyers there, and only about three to 5% obviously, depending on the funnel are ready to buy right now, right? And so we're losing so much of this and I feel like a lot of the general answer to marketing is you need to go spend more on traffic, you need to go spend more, spend more, get more traffic, more traffic. Jordan: And I say, you're not maximizing the value of the traffic you have right now, you are hemorrhaging traffic, because they're leaving for whatever reason, to get their design, or the offer doesn't really make sense to them on the page so you have to retarget them. And we know it's true, that's why retargeting is so valuable and follow-up sequences is so valuable, because just expecting them to go to a page to buy right away, it's the smallest percentage of the people most problem and solution and product aware audiences who can actually take an action on that right there. So it's all these pieces, I would bet that anyone listening to this year, you could literally double your sales by not increasing your traffic at all but by maximizing the traffic you have available to you right now. Kathleen: So Alright, I have a ton of questions. First, and we're going to kind of try to break this down. The first thing you talked about was page load speeds. So obviously, everybody's got their websites built on different platforms and we can't control that. I mean, of course, people can change, but assuming everybody is where they are, are there certain low hanging fruit things that you usually see that somebody can do to immediately improve page load speeds? Jordan: The first thing you want to do... There's lots of tools out there, our favorite is gtmetrix.com, and you can run it directly through there to find out where you're at. And here's the benchmark, if you're over four seconds in total page load time, you're losing conversions, period. It's undeniable, every study on the planet from Harvard to Stanford to Google and Amazon, they've all done the studies, you're losing money, period. So when that happens it's time to take some radical action. Inside of that page load report you'll see a waterfall breakdown, and it'll tell you what's slowing down your speed. If you have some developers who can help you and your more advanced in that way, you can defer some of your scripts to load later, that can help, crushing down images to be a small file size as possible is one of the biggest movers, or eliminating images at all, if you can. Jordan: Backgrounds, don't have images in backgrounds, embedded videos can slow things down quite a bit as well. Kathleen: By the way, is there a certain image size that you want to target to be under? Jordan: Yeah. I don't think that there's a universal answer as it relates to what that would be. If you had one image on the page that could be larger than if you had 20 images and they all need to be under a certain benchmark. But generally pages that are over 123 megabytes in size, they're really going to start to load slowly, especially on mobile. And mobile is what you want to optimize for first. So I always say build with mobile in mind and then move into desktop, where it could be a slower loading experience because desktops can handle that. So images and embeds of videos and those types of things can can really make a big difference. And you'll really want to watch out for any external tool that you're depending on their servers, right? So here's an example. Jordan: If someone was on DropFunnels right now we're extremely fast, the average is about 800 milliseconds in load time, but everything you add to the page slows it down beyond that. So if you added a hot jar traffic recording tool script on there, that's going to depend on their servers. A Wistia embed is going to do the same thing, a social proof widget pop-up, a chat icon that you can click to chat. Now each one of these things you want to keep in mind can really help you with your tracking and your overall conversions. But again, you want to start as the baseline and say, "Okay, a page with nothing else on it, how fast can we get that to load?" And your goal is under three seconds, for sure. As of today it needs to be under two seconds. Kathleen: I was going to say, I feel like even three is too long, for sure. Jordan: It can be, for sure. Especially if there's no other tools on top of it, right? So your base page you want to shoot for under two seconds, and then when you add a tool on top of that what's the impact going to be in that regard. Kathleen: So say the name of that tool that you mentioned again that's a good way to test. Jordan: Yep. So gt, the letters G-T, metrix, M-E-T-R-I-X.com. Is a great place, throw in your URL, you can test from different data centers depending on where you are. And to get a complete breakdown... And actually, they've just optimized to be kind of based on the lighthouse code base, so it's more recognized by Google as to how they see page speed. Kathleen: Got it, that's interesting. Okay, so that was the first thing you mentioned. So definitely run your site through gtmetrix, and dig in and see what's slowing it down and where the biggest issues are, and that's step one it sounds like in squeezing the most juice out of the orange you already have, meaning the traffic that's already coming to your website. The second thing you mentioned, if I remember correctly, was social proof. Is that right? Jordan: So I think that's one of the easiest things you can do immediately. I think we're in this third era of marketing, where now that consumers are more knowledgeable, they have information at their fingertips that we've never seen before. So it's like the used car dealer type of comparison back in the 80s and 90s, you'd go to a car dealer, and you hope he doesn't swindle you because he's the one with the information. He's like, "Hey, this car does this, and this, and this." Now, you don't even go to a car dealer with not an idea of what you're going to... You know the car, the color, the mileage on it, you've done a Carfax report on, you have all the information and it's the powers in your hands. Jordan: So when you show to the dealership, they're not trying to get you into a different car, they're saying, "I want you in this car, because I know this is what you want and you've researched." So with that what we find is, you can't over educate someone to buy, it's much more a trust and a relational play. And so we see that testimonials, quotes, any videos or text that you can do actually will have a bigger conversion rate change than adding more copy to the page to try to convince them to buy something. Kathleen: So a question on this, and I'm 100% with you, I am a strong believer that you've got to have social proof. One of the things that I hear though a lot, and I used to work in cyber from some companies is like, "I work in an industry where my customers don't want anybody knowing that they're using my product," either cyber or I don't know, my husband is VP of a company that makes competitive intelligence software, and so you don't tell your competitors what software you're using to track them, right? So what's your opinion on how to handle that? Is it still valuable to have a testimonial, where it's a little anonymized where you say like, "Head of marketing for this type of company," and you don't name the company or the person or do people just see that as BS? Jordan: Well, such a great question. It's like the overall question is, is social proof if you don't know who the person is? Is that even social proof? Kathleen: Yeah. Jordan: So like a tree falling in- Kathleen: And sometimes I feel like... I don't know, I wonder can it hurt you if people think you're making it up? I don't really know the answer to that. Jordan: Yeah. It would be tough for them to know whether or not you are making it up, I hope people are more integrous than that but I know that there are those cases. I would say that if it's not a reputable name, it's tough to have social proof that really carries any weight, so that can be tough. I think asking the right way can generate testimonials to say, instead of saying, "Hey, would you give us a quote about us using your service?" You could say, "Hey, we'd like to feature your company as one of our cases, would you be open to us featuring you?" And it becomes more of a marketing play in that sense. Jordan: Again, I think for most companies they'd be fine to scratch backs in that way, but in more specific niches where it's kind of guarded and confidential. Yeah, that's a tough one. I haven't thought about some ways to kind of get around that other than just asking whether or not, maybe even just a logo could be fine. Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, I think there's still definitely people who are going to say no across the board. It's so funny, because I actually saw a conversation about this recently, where somebody said that the best way around it is to give your customers awards. And because everybody to brag that they got an award, and so it was like, if you can figure out a way to make it about an award and not about your product, they'll consent to mentioning it effectively in that's sort of a backdoor way. Jordan: Yeah, that's a great play. I think, recognizing them or even doing a case study on their business specifically, you'd be like, "Hey, here's how these guys got this x result." And again, it feels like it's more of an ego play then, really. Kathleen: All right. So that was social proof, we already talked about page load speeds. And the third thing was- Jordan: Yeah. I think the overall concept is about optimization of the funnel flow. So it doesn't matter what you're selling, I can't tell you how many websites we see that are just... It's a hose with holes all over it, you put in leads and are going to go all over the place. There is no benefit to linking to Facebook from your primary corporate page or your funnel, there is no benefit. No one is sharing it enough to make any quantitative or qualitative impact on your business. So I say for almost all offers, strip away everything that doesn't serve you. Jordan: And frankly, we only build sites like they were in the '90s in that same way today because it's what's always been done, not because it's- Kathleen: Right. And I feel like some of those features come out of the box also, and so people are like, "Well, it's there, so it must be a good thing." Jordan: Yeah, exactly. It's the De Beers Corporation kind of invented wedding rings and we still do that till today, but for the longest part of history that never existed. It's like we do what's been done because it's been done and that's what I should do. So I say just be a little bit adventurous, in the sense that you have permission to not do what everyone else is doing. And if someone goes to DropFunnels.com, for example, there's only one call to action on the entire page, every button really for all intents and purposes, almost every button is called an anchor link and it drags people down the page to more information, instead of moving them to About Us, no one cares About Us. No one cares about me or what we're doing, they care about themselves. Jordan: So I think they want to know, is this end result going to help them? So we really try to focus all marketing efforts towards a single call to action. So and I think it's important that companies get clear on that strategy. What is the main thing that you want them to do? Is it driving them to a lead magnet or an ecosystem offer? Is it booking a consultation call or strategy call? Is it adding them to a Facebook group, because that can be advantageous as well, but push them into the main ecosystem, push them where you want them to go. And it's easier to optimize around one point, around one metric point instead of 30 and hoping, "Hey, I don't even know where these people are going, they're clicking here and going there." And even in Google Analytics, you can track where people are going, but the more links you have you'll find the more erratic people are, because they don't have a plan, it's your job to point the plan for them and to give them that path. Jordan: So for us, I think optimizing around clarity and simplicity in all of your digital assets, even like, "Hey, let's kill some sacred cows here." Is the fact that you have a blog is it actually serving you? Linking to your blog and your homepage, does it actually give you any output? I mean, you can track those things. Is having any social share buttons or any links to social or a billion things for people to do, does it actually serve you? And I think those are the tough questions we should have. Kathleen: So you mentioned something interesting when you were talking about this earlier, which is that, even if you have, say a landing page where you've got your offer, a lot of the time somebody will actually jump from that landing page and go back to your homepage, whether that's to research something or just learn more about you or to find some other information. Knowing that's the case, it's funny to me because the traditional kind of thing that you're taught as a marketer is don't put navigation on your landing pages, right? To your point like, "Let's not distract anybody with links that aren't absolutely necessary." Kathleen: So they find a way to get back to your homepage despite your best efforts to not lead them there, what does that imply for what you should do to the design of your homepage to make sure that they don't drop out of your funnel? So that they stay engaged and ultimately convert? Jordan: Yes, and that's exactly what I was just mentioning about being so clear about that call to action, that for us it's very circular and it feeds itself. So if someone goes to a funnel and we're recommending a software or a trial, or whatever that happens to be, if they leave that and go back to our homepage, they're going to end up right back to the funnel, because our homepage will push them back into that way. So I would say that there are a lot of great companies do this well. One of my favorite funnels of all time, it's through this company called Get Sunday, and they're a lawn care company. Kathleen: Oh, I used them. Jordan: Yeah. We probably bought through the exact same funnel, it was genius. And hopefully, people are buying things even just on propulsion of seeing an ad and going to buy just to study what they're kind of doing- Kathleen: That's 100% I was targeted with an ad. Jordan: Yep. And I met with them for two years, I don't know anything about lawn care, but I was so entranced by their funnel. But it was a perfect example of the experience of going through that funnel is really in synergy with what their homepage is doing. And I'd recommend anyone go to their site to take a look. I think Basecamp does some interesting things, they're very an analytical company, but their page is, I think, very well done. But generally speaking, if you have a landing page, I promise you people are leaving your landing page and your funnels to go check you out on your homepage. If you don't have a home site with that domain and that brand reputation there, you're losing sales, period. Jordan: And on that, instead, again, eliminate what doesn't serve you and focus everything on to getting them back to that funnel, either with a complimentary or identical offer, so that because when they do that you don't want to lose them when they finally land on your page and suddenly it's some rabbit trail that takes them off somewhere else. Kathleen: So for those who haven't experienced it, can you just describe a little bit about the Sunday funnel and what you liked about it? Granted, you're going to have to do this from memory, so it won't be exact, but what stands out in your head as what worked so well? Jordan: Yeah. I have this kind of rule when it comes to marketing and when we're consulting with people as well, the best words that you can think about it's two words, it's for you, for you. So even in sales calls or any of that, it's the best phrase, I think that you can use. Is that people when they have high amounts of information, especially in competitive markets, and there's lots of people to compare to, personalization is absolutely key. My buddy, George Bryant, he actually coined the phrase, "Relationships beat algorithms." And it's not always the best offer gets their wallet, it's whoever gets to their heart gets to their wallet. Jordan: So what Get Sunday does that I think is so unique and I think a lot of brands are tapping into this as well, is the for you experience, the personalization. So you literally type in, I think it's your address, I did it a year and a half ago, I still remember it. It's your address, and they show you a satellite image of your house. And then you draw these lines or whatever around your lawn about what's... They're, "Okay, based on this, hey we're going to send you this soil kit." And it's just free kit or whatever it was part of it, I don't recall it exactly. They sent out this thing, it came the next day, it scooped out some soil, and actually my kids got into it too, it was kind of a fun science experiment. Jordan: Gave them that and then they sent back this custom report, "Okay hey, this is the acidity, the phosphorus, all the chemical things, this is the for you experience. Hey, we've also looked at the weather patterns for the past 12 years, here's how much rain you're going to get this year, here's how much sunlight based on the geography of your land," and I was like, "Holy cow, they know more about me than I do, right?" Which is so critical. And through that process, I ended up taking every upsell, everything there is because I felt like it was so personalized. And they said, "Hey, Jordan, for you, this is what is going to be a good fit." Jordan: And to put a cap on that, one of my favorite phrases is that a prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. Prescription without a diagnosis is malpractice. And so when you get a diagnosis and you're given the prescription to not take that is insanity, right? So they're telling me, they know my lawn better than me, they know the geography, they know the weather, they know the soil better than I do, if I have any desire for the end result, which is they have a beautiful lawn, what else am I going to do? Am I going to go figure that out on my own? No, I'm going to go give them my money and they're going to tell me exactly what to do, and ship it right to my doorstep. Jordan: And so some of these home kit companies have really tapped into this as well, "Based on your diet, based on your preferences, what is it that you like?" So I think all of us, all these kind of technical aspects are sometimes almost a moot point if you're not delivering to someone some for you experience, some way to make them feel like they're not a number, that they're a person and that they've been diagnosed as a specific prescription to what's going on. If we can tap into that psychology more often, I think, you could have a 12 second loading website and you could have a personalized experience, you'd probably be fine. Kathleen: Yeah. It's so funny to hear you talk about Get Sunday, because that's the exact same experience I had. And I went through it, and I was like, "Wow, clearly they've tapped into, I don't know, Google Earth, or whatever it is, and they're measuring my lawn and checking my weather and the whole thing," and I was so enamored of it. So I definitely became a customer based on that funnel, I have a feeling they're doing pretty well off of it. Jordan: And as anyone will experience if they go through it as well, you get a phone number to your person, your consultant, which I mean, it was a heart check for me too like, "Man, what are we missing out on the support aspect?" I think I've utilized it once in two years, so it's not like I'm using it, but knowing that it's there will probably keep me on for a very long time. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. They've nailed it. I love that example and how specific it is. Anything else that you want to add beyond? So we started with three things, we started the page load speed, social proof, and then shoring up the leaks in the bucket, if you will. I mean, and the last category really encompasses a lot. So I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything before I move on. Jordan: No, I think that's like drinking through a fire hose probably for most people. So it's- Kathleen: Yeah no, that's great. So you obviously have worked with a lot of different companies, you've got a lot of different brands using your platform, any examples from the DropFunnels world that you think are notable to share in terms of before and after results from doing some of these things, even if it's just your own marketing? Jordan: So, this is less technical on maybe slightly more mindset. I would say, for most people, and again, we're a more advanced platform than many, so people are looking for click button done type of thing, it's not really a good fit. It's meant for those who really want to dive in and- Kathleen: You don't need to be a developer though, do you? Jordan: No, there's no code at all. Kathleen: That's what I thought, yeah. Jordan: But just things are in different locations. It's like you move your house, they say the two most stressful things in life is divorce and moving. So moving your business is no different, sometimes it... Well, we've got migrators that can help people in that regard. But I think the mindset for most people is that, we're all duct taping so many tools together between autoresponders, and CRMs, and call floors, and dialers, and website, and funnels, and courses, and all those things depending on your business model. And for us, I think the biggest thing that people fall in love with is how many tools they can subtract, so getting more by doing less. Jordan: Here's an example. We have this tool and I actually built it in, we might be one of the first ever to build this, I'm not sure. But I added a feature that allows you to collect a legally binding signature on a checkout form directly through mobile. So when someone's going to go in and purchase your product, there's actually Terms and Conditions box that normally you would check, but I instituted a finger scribble sandbox that generates a PDF that would help you against refunds and chargebacks to ensure that you're collecting those terms specifically. So for some people they'll cancel like DocuSign through that because they can use that as an actual legally binding contract generator. Jordan: So I think it's an example of that, of having fewer tools, fewer monthly subscriptions. And again, I don't want this to just be in advertising for DropFunnels, more a mindset about get more by doing less and simplify as much as possible so that you have less mental real estate being lost, right? Kathleen: No, I think tool sprawl is a real problem. And it's not just a problem from a psychological standpoint of like, "Where is my information? Where is my data? How is it all talking to each other?" It's a huge financial problem. I mean, as somebody who owns a marketing budget for a company, by far the biggest line item for me is my tech stack. And so if you can eliminate things that frees up money to do other things in marketing, which can have a big impact, potentially. So I definitely think that's important. Kathleen: All right, we're going to shift gears because I've got two questions I always ask all my guests before we wrap up, and I want to make sure I know what your answers are. First one is, the biggest pain point I hear all the time from marketers is that it's like drinking from a fire hose trying to keep up with everything. And so are there particular sources you rely on to stay up to date and educated? Jordan: I'm probably the worst person to ask that, because I kind of live in a cave for most of the time. But I stay connected with a couple people in different industries, so I think masterminding is really important, networking is important. And I listen to a lot of audio books as well, so that's helpful. I just finished actually, for the first time, The Richest Man in Babylon, which was a great short listen, for most people a great mindset book there. And doing a lot of that, I also have this remarkable tablet, I'm holding up for those on the podcast, the- Kathleen: My husband has one of those and he loves it. Jordan: Yeah, it's super cool for doing some deep work and writing without any connection to the internet. So I guess my answer is, I tend to feel escape when I get off of the internet and consume a little bit less, because there's so much kind of noise going on there. So I find that my relaxation and escape comes from disconnecting, but I'd say audiobooks are big, I actually really like going on YouTube and listening to some TED Talks, and they're quick bite size- Kathleen: Any particular favorites? Jordan: Everyone says it start with why, but there's actually some really... I mean, it's fine. Simon Sinek is great. I like Malcolm Gladwell stuff, and there is actually one on... I don't know the name of the guy, but it's about addiction. And he lays out this thesis for I think it's called The Hidden Truth Behind Sobriety or Addiction or that kind of thing. But he lays out this incredible thesis that, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection, its like this perfect theorem of why we get addicted to things, and the recourse from that, etc. So I couldn't recommend that more, it's one of the most watched ones on there. So TED talks have been a really good way to stay. Kathleen: I love that, and I've seen that Ted Talk, it's very good. Jordan: Yeah, very good. Kathleen: All right, second question. Of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park and doing inbound marketing well these days? Jordan: I think most companies doing really well or really maximizing both and turning... There's a guy named Cole Gordon, who is in the high ticket closing space and is a master at, I think both inbound and outbound. And so he maximizes all of his inbound with additional outbound outreach, and whatnot. And so he's just so masterful at that, so that's Cole Gordon, I think it's Gordon Advertising, people could probably Google him. I also see Gary Vee and some of those influencers, they're doing a lot of like, "Hey, text me, get out this number," and getting people onto your list with a more relational SMS. Which by the way, I'm fairly convinced is the future of marketing is going to be SMS. Jordan: Email rates are deplorable, Facebook, the algorithm is getting harder all the time, and I think SMS has about a 99% open rate. Kathleen: It's very generational. I mean, I have kids, when you look at how our kids communicate, it's so different than how we do, it's crazy. Jordan: Yeah. And I think it's probably going to change as new... Man, it's probably eventually going to be TikTok, and- Kathleen: Or I was just going to say Discord. I have a 14 year old and they're all on Discord playing their video games and talking to each other. And I think that's already starting to happen, the number of private communities that are cropping up. I just attended, Shopify had its Annual Developers Conference, and all of the chatter around it, all the conversations, they set it up in Discord. And they created a room, I don't even know if that's the right word, because I'm not a big Discord user but I did do it. But yeah, I was like, "This is really interesting." I see my 14 year old on it, I see Shopify having official conversations with its audience on it, I definitely think there's a move in that direction too. Jordan: Yeah. And actually I'm to the point, we just did it this week, that we're pretty much eliminating our post purchase Facebook support groups and moving even into Slack to do- Kathleen: Yeah, Slack is huge. Jordan: Slack is good, and people say Discord's like Slack on steroids, I haven't done much on Discord. Kathleen: Well, I just used it for the first time, I was a little intimidated, but it is. If you are a Slack user, it will feel very familiar to you. Jordan: Right on, yeah. But I think the social channels and social media and whatnot, they're going to start to kind of wane. And people are wanting to go into more private servers, and Telegram groups, and eventually, it'll all be on the blockchain and everything will be completely anonymized and encrypted, it seems like that's where the world is going. Kathleen: Yeah, for sure. All right, well, we've come to the end of our time, and so before we finish, importantly, I need to ask if somebody has a question about any of this or wants to learn more about you or DropFunnels, what is the best way for them to do that? Jordan: Yeah. I'd be happy to give my personal email, it's jordan@dropfunnels.com. If anyone has any questions, or if I can encourage you in some way, J-O-R-D-A-N, and it's my personal email, so it'll go straight to me and would be happy to respond with any insight that I can. And then dropfunnels.com is the main place if you want to check it out and kind of see even as an example of how we turn standard sites, or how we utilize standard sites into a sales funnel type psychology. But I'd encourage anyone to no matter what platform you're on, or whatever you choose to use, to just remember that those principles are true, a confused mind will do nothing. Jordan: And so simplifying, make things faster, think about your strategy, what do you want people to really do? And in any infrastructure that you're on right now, push more people into that way and eliminate the things that don't serve you, and I really think that that's a way to grow very quickly. Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. Well, that is it for this week. If you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And of course, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week, thank you so much, Jordo. Jordan: My pleasure, thank you.

You never know when inspiration will strike. For Jordan Nathan, the idea for his company came after an unfortunate incident. Jordan got Teflon poisoning after burning one of his pans while cooking. After researching the dangers of Teflon, which is one of the most prevalent materials in all of cookware, Jordan knew there was a chance to carve a niche for himself in the market with a non-toxic and eco-friendly product. Thus, Caraway Home was born and it launched with a waiting list of more than 150,000 customers. Jordan has been building on that initial buzz by focusing on his Ecommerce platform and selling a vision of a company that can go far beyond just non-toxic pots and pans. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jordan explains how he builds a pipeline to drive customer reviews, which he uses to organically grow the business. Plus, he reveals the growth strategy for Caraway Home and why he believes that if you want to truly take on the big brands in an industry, you need to use an omnichannel approach to take market share and shelf space away from them in all areas.  3 Takeaways: Reviews are key to showing the value of a product when you are selling online. Building and maintaining a review pipeline is critical and means following up and offering products to everyone from influencers, to editors to ordinary people Taking a data-driven approach to product development allows you to lean into introducing products that have a strong chance of flourishing online In order to achieve true saturation of the market, you need to have an omnichannel approach. It’s smart to build up your Ecommerce platform and product offerings at the start, but to compete with the bigger brands, you need to eventually replace them on the shelves of brick and mortar stores For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back everyone to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles from Mission.org, and today, we have Jordan Nathan on the show, the founder and CEO at Caraway Home. Jordan, thanks for coming on. Jordan: Yeah, thanks for having me. Stephanie: I feel like we have to start with the story of you poisoning yourself which brought you to your company. Can you please tell me about that because I read that in the notes and I'm like, I didn't know you could poison yourself from pans, like pots and pans, so I wanted to start the episode that way if that's okay. A great way to start, on a high note. Jordan: Definitely. Yeah, back in, I think it was late 2017, I was cooking just like any other night and unfortunately left a fry pan on my burner for about 45 minutes. I think I ended up getting a call right when I was starting to cook and forgot the pan was there. Call ended, ended up feeling kind of nauseous and light headed and the apartment was feeling super fumy and soon realized that I had forgot the fry pan on the burner. Yeah, ended up getting sick. I was nervous based on having inhaled a bunch of fumes, live in a really small couple hundred square feet apartment in New York City and ended up calling poison control. They basically had told me that I was likely exposed to Teflon poisoning which occurs either from overheating a fry pan with Teflon in it or scratching it and it getting into your food, and really just was really surprised that something that I was cooking off of and touching my food could potentially get you sick. Also, further research showed that there were definitely some longer-term consequences that have been proven through a number of studies related to Teflon and felt there was a big opportunity to build a brand in the kitchen space around launching non-toxic products and eco-friendly products in the category. Stephanie: That is a very good reason to launch non-toxic products. Before deciding that you wanted to start Caraway Home and build non-toxic pots and pans and things like that, let's hear a little bit about your background and what brought you to moving to the world of Ecommerce. Jordan: Sure. Well, grew up in New Jersey, went to school at Colby College, up in Maine. Studied consumer psychology there. I tried launching my first startup out of school, which was a Ecommerce marketplace built for direct to consumer brands. This was back in 2015. Really got it as far as I could, but unfortunately, really struggled with that fundraising process and coming right out of school, didn't have much experience, but it was really a great kind of launchpad to testing and learning and trying to do my own thing. Jordan: I then joined a company in New York in early 2016 called Mohawk Group. They're a consumer product holding company owning about four brands and I joined them to lead Vremi, which was their kitchen brand and ended up basically working there for about two and a half years. Launched close to 200 different kitchen products. The brand itself was really focused on a post-college consumer. Average price point was $10 to $20, so definitely someone looking for something that was lower cost, colorful, and was my kind of first really great experience at obviously working in the kitchen category launching a number of products and really fortunate to have done more or less the exact same thing prior to Caraway. Stephanie: That's awesome. What were some of the lessons you learned, especially at Vremi when you were launching all of these products that you brought into Caraway? Jordan: Yeah, I think biggest lesson was don't launch 200 products in 18 months. Stephanie: Sounds intense, but why? Why not? Jordan: Yeah. Well, it's definitely a lot of fun and learned about a lot of different materials and categories, but definitely caused a lot of issues with inventory forecasting and quality. I think through that experience really got to see the power of selling through digital mediums. At Vremi, we really did focus on Amazon, which is quite different than what we're doing at Caraway, but a lot of the same kind of growth principles that carry over that we now implement at Caraway. It's really a good opportunity to leverage data, use that to inform product decisions and the beauty of online, obviously, is the ability to test. Really taking a lot of those same principles into what we're building at Caraway. Stephanie: That's great. Were you any bit nervous when you were moving from a large company that had resources and infrastructure and more funding and all that, to then start your own company where you had to do everything on your own? Jordan: Definitely. I think when you take that first leap, it's super scary and you leave a comfortable job. You end up initially pitching investors and getting rejected a lot, you're not getting paid anything, and really, you are the only person in the world who actually believes in what you're building. It's definitely scary, but I had enough conviction in Caraway and having sold all these products before and had experience, felt really there was no better person to go do this. The supply chain and the manufacturing were really easy for me just because I had done a lot of this. It was more of the fundraising that was kind of a challenging and new process for me. Stephanie: You had some recent success around fundraising. Right? Jordan: Yes, that's correct. Stephanie: It was a seed round? Jordan: Yes. We just closed and announced a $5.3 million seed round. Stephanie: That is awesome. How did that feel closing that when I think earlier on you said it was a bit of struggle trying to attract the investors. How did you find the right investors and get them to believe in your vision? Jordan: Yeah. Well, we're really excited. It's a big step in our journey and I think validation for what we're building. We took a little bit of a different route than most brands and I think something that's maybe becoming a little bit more common in consumer, but we raised from over a hundred investors in the round, a lot of founders and execs a number of funds and a lot of consumer-focused investors and really took the approach to building a large network, which we felt would be much more valuable in the long-term. As you can imagine, getting a hundred investors means I probably pitched a thousand investors and it took a long time, but I think in the long run it will net out much better because we're more or less one introduction away from any company, given the large pool of investors we have. Stephanie: Were some of the key differentiators that either excited the investors or that they saw about your company? Jordan: I think there have been a lot of news and some companies out there over the past number of years who've really focused on growth at all costs and really prioritizing top-line growth and thinking about things like profitability at a much later stage. Coming out of my prior experience, I had a really great grasp on economics and how to manage cashflow. I think since day one, our pitch has always been really growing a sustainable business in a category that's super-exciting and stale and hasn't seen much innovation. As a brand, we call ourselves Caraway Home for a reason in that cookware is our hero product, it's where we've launched and felt there was the biggest opportunity, but we really see taking those same product principles and applying it across the whole home. I think what's really exciting, that investors have really been attracted to is basically the breadth of how big the home is and how many products there are within the general category. Really, an opportunity to build a lot of products and a pretty large brand across a variety of categories. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, that's great. When it comes to organic and non-toxic cookware and things like that, how do you convey those type of unique differences on your website because when I was looking at it, it's like, I wouldn't automatically maybe know that Teflon can poison you. I mean, I kind of have heard it before, but it's not something I think about every day, maybe when I grab out my pans. Especially if I'm on a Ecommerce site where I'm looking and shopping, how do you show people this is why we're better than all the other brands out there? Jordan: Yeah. I think for us, storytelling's a really big piece of DNA. Most places where people are coming to from the site, whether it's press or a Facebook ad or Google, we do our best to tell that non-toxic story through those mediums, so they're coming into the site with an idea. We're not here to use any scare tactics; we're here to educate consumers. We try not to push it too hard on our site. We've got sections on materials that you can go deeper, we have a lot of blog posts, so we really provide those educational resources in case you're interested to read more and educate yourself on the subject, but the site's really meant to emphasize all the points of differentiation, whether it's design or color or the storage components that come with our sets. We really want people to get the full picture there, but in those kind of advertising mediums and press, the nontoxic is really who we are and what we stand for. Hopefully, before coming to the site, you get some type of idea of that product feature. Stephanie: Got it. The one thing that I liked when I was browsing through your site was it had this very risk-free feeling to it because it has that free returns and 30-day trial and it had a ton of reviews. I mean, all over the page and it had a whole tab, like a tab for just reviews. Was this something you did from the start or is this a more recent implementation? Jordan: Reviews have been a really big piece of the brand since we first launched and this was a big learning from my prior experience, especially on Amazon, which is so driven by reviews. It's one thing to just show a product on a website, but you can't touch and feel it and reviews are really the only way to create validation for the quality. Really, since day one, we've been focused on our review funnels, we also want to get feedback to improve our products. Yeah, we continue to improve that pipeline, but we're excited to really continue building that out. As a brand, again, with no brick and mortar presence at the moment, it's really the best place customers can go, especially for a brand that's six, seven months old and they've never heard it before. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). How did you go about getting those reviews because that, to me, seems like one of the hardest things to do, especially with a new product or podcast? For anyone that hasn't reviewed this podcast yet, please help us and share the word and review it. How did you go about getting those reviews because some of the places that you were getting them from where pretty big media brands? What was the strategy there to bring people in to actually review the product? Jordan: Yeah. I mean, on the site, we've run post-purchase email funnels, SMS funnels, we hit each customer with it a number of times to get their feedback and then, when it comes to press, we did a lot of gifting at the early stages and really tried to create a culture amongst editors of getting the products into their homes and actually using them at home. Not really pushing them to write stories on us, but getting them to experience the product and if they love it, have them come back and write their honest opinion. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's great, yeah. I think if you get something in someone's house, even if they didn't originally maybe even ask for it, you kind of feel obligated to give a review. I know on Amazon, I left a two-star review on something for a baby product, and they sent me a new and different product just saying like, "Hey, we're sorry that the first product didn't work out, but if you could please reconsider your review because here's three new things we're sending you to try out." Even though I didn't ask for it, and I didn't expect it, I kind of felt obligated to get on there and test out the product and re-review it if I did end up liking it. I think that's good to get it in their house to get people to start thinking about it. Jordan: Definitely. We see the same things with influencers as well. We want to be working with people who organically love the brand and product. We're very confident in the product that we've created and the quality. We've seen just a lot of success of once we can get it into people's hands and they cook with it a few times, it's really a great bridge to starting a bigger partnership conversation. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. The one thing that I saw that was interesting was, it was on a blog post where you mentioned that when you were launching, you had a wait list of I think it said 150,000 people who joined pre-launch to get the product when it was ready to go. Is that the right number and, if so, how did you garner that excitement for people to get on a wait list? Jordan: Yeah. That is the right number and that wait list was a really incredible kind of launch platform for us. I think early days, it really started with me pitching just a lot of investors and talking to as many people as possible. Created a lot of word of mouth, which drove to our landing page and then, prelaunch, one of the things we did was partner with other brands on things like sweepstakes and giveaways and start building our brand rep through a lot of those partnership campaigns. Then, towards the end of the funnel, we started building, not dissimilar from what Harry's did to build their prelaunch, I think hundred-thousand wait list, ended up doing a referral campaign within that existing list we built and that referral was super-successful. We got a lot of word-of-mouth and people sharing out of it. By the time we launched, we had a nice grouping of customers who were really excited to test and be our early adopters. Stephanie: That's really fun. How do you keep them coming back and engaged because I think of cookware, I mean, I got mine, I think, at my wedding and I haven't really thought about it unless it breaks, which has happened a few times when we've dropped it and it's gotten all bent up. It's not something that comes top of mind or would bring me back maybe to a site easily. How do you keep those customers, especially the really engaged and excited ones, coming back to the site and checking out your new products? Jordan: Yeah, it's really through content. We're pretty active and it becoming building a much stronger content platform, both on the site and social. For us, we obviously want people to buy the product, but we also want to provide education outside the physical pots and pans, so we see a lot of activity from consumers coming to us. Actually, less about food and cooking and recipes, but more about design and colors and seeing Caraway kind of inspired them to redo their whole kitchen or rethink the products that they have in their homes, so whether it's our blog or social or writing in through chat or email, we work to really provide these pieces of education to the consumers. Jordan: As we grow, we have aspirations to build a pretty large portfolio of products, so what's fantastic about cookware is it's a larger purchase item, we're not waiting for revenue to come in through a subscription. We get that first purchase and then, really have opportunities as we launch more products to focus on those for upselling and reengaging customers. Stephanie: That's great. How are you thinking about retail locations or like your omnichannel strategy? Jordan: Yeah. Right now, we are solely focused on our website, we are on a few marketplaces like Zola and Goop and Huckberry and a few others. Omnichannel is super exciting to us. I think going back to our mission, if our goal is to really get non-toxic cookware into as many people's houses as possible instead of Teflon, really the only way to truly embrace that and do that is to replace the products that are on shelves and currently saturate the market. Online right now is really our main focus, but we see big opportunities with partnerships in retail, with our own brick and mortar. Still, today, we're a young brand, so we're focused online, but have some exciting new plans coming up in the next 18 to 24 months. Stephanie: Fun. What's the experience been like selling on marketplaces versus just if you just CBA your website? Jordan: Yeah. I think for us, we see it as opportunities to reach different demographics than what we've... are currently seeing on our site. We've gone into it with a really open approach and have seen a lot of success. Obviously, being in the kitchen and home category, a lot of these items are purchased through a registry process, so that's always been really important to us at the beginning, but also someone like Huckberry, who we're working with, it's an all men's marketplace, they do a really amazing job with curating and they really know how to talk to their customers. It's one of those marketplaces where we've just seen great success. It's a totally different demographic from what we see on the site. It's really a good opportunity to just test and reach new markets that otherwise we'd have no access to. Stephanie: That's great about the registry idea. I mean, it seems obvious when you say it now, but making sure that you're in on all the websites, I don't even know how they link up because I think when I built my registry, they were already linked to different marketplaces already set up. Do you have to go to the marketplace to get that relationship or is it a brand who controls the marketplaces all in one place? How does that work? Jordan: Well, most of them are marketplace controlled, but they're all standard kind of retail relationships and a lot of the major registry players are all digitally driven. Some of them allow you to add any product from any site onto their platforms. They're all a little bit different, but we want to be at the top of every registry platform and also, encourage users who come to our site, who are getting married, to go to those platforms as well to add us. Stephanie: Yeah. I think just your colors and I saw some of your videos, that should be enticing enough for people to want to add it to a cart because it does look very different than the typical black or light gray items and I haven't really seen many videos of cooking where I'm like, "That's a nice pot or pan or whatever it is," and I'm not even looking at the food. I'm looking at how they're cooking in this nice, colorful, bright product. Jordan: Yeah. Color's a big part of our brand and this was actually a big learning from my prior experience, but there's just a big lack of color in the category and the colors that do exist are typically like bright reds or really de-saturated baby blues and I think there's definitely a place for those. Also, we just saw a big, kind of wide-open space of colors like navies and sages and creams that exist in the rest of your home, but for some reason don't exist in the kitchen. I wanted the brand to have a little bit of playfulness, yet sophistication through colors and also give people the opportunity where you can really create a kitchen that I think represents your personality in the rest of your home. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really fun. Why weren't there colors before? Is there something about creating that that makes it harder to incorporate colors? Jordan: The creation of colors certainly is challenging. It's a lot of back and forth, a lot of sampling. For larger brands, who I think are cranking out products and not really investing the time into innovation, it's much easier to just choose something like black or stainless steel. Quite frankly, that's been what's popular on the market for decades, so Le Creuset is really one of the first players to come in and introduce colors. KitchenAid has done and awesome job, but I think a lot of the legacy brands who dominate the category, they've been selling neutrals for such a long time that for them to even test colors, could actually potentially cannibalize their existing business. It kind of opens that door for us to try something new. Stephanie: Yeah. That is good. How do you go about creating new products? Is there a data element that you use to maybe get like customer input to know what they're looking for or what new products you're going to be exploring? Jordan: A lot of our product process is super data driven. There's definitely an element of asking consumers what they want and what's bothering them across certain product categories and what they like. We do that qualitative research, but a lot of how we think about products is looking at things like Google Trends, Google AdWords, what's trending on social. We have a number of internal tools that we used to model out what we find to be interesting. Obviously, there are things like market size and competitor mix, so we really like to take a data-driven approach and we were the same way at my prior company as well and where I learned this. Yeah, I think we would really like to lean into products where we've got a strong conviction that will sell well online. We typically like to avoid things that purely exist for potentially a brand marketing reason, which I think a lot of companies get caught up into in many cases. Stephanie: Yep. What metrics do you think are most important when it comes to, like you said, you take a very data-driven approach, which ones have been the most important and how should a company think about implementing that type of data and research into their product development? Jordan: I think it really comes from the channels that you're in and kind of working backwards from the core metrics that you track as a business. If you're on Facebook and Google, really understanding if there might be an opportunity at the micro level across the category, but you really want to make sure that where you're going to be spending your marketing dollars and efforts, there's an opportunity as well. I think that's even the more important piece is we found niches in certain places where we feel even at the macro level, it's very competitive and saturated, but we feel there's a big opportunity within the digital landscape. I think it's really focusing on where your marketing dollars are. Stephanie: Got it. Are there any website metrics that you pay most attention to like how many tests are you doing every single day to see what helps with conversions or what helps with your customer acquisition strategies? Anything that you look at there on a weekly basis or a day to day? Jordan: I think for us a lot of the focus right now is definitely on top line growth, but working back from that conversion rate, return on ad spend is incredibly important. We place a big emphasis as a brand on being first purchase profitable and making sure that we're growing sustainably and not burning cash on each purchase. A lot of the emphasis is really on that. As we grow, things like LTV and repeat purchase rate will become much more important. Within each specific ad platform, we've certainly got different goals and metrics we try to hit, but as a brand, the focus at the moment is really on metrics that lead to top line growth. Stephanie: Yep. Are there any platforms that you're finding your most success in or new platforms you're exploring right now? Jordan: Sure. We, similar to most D2C brands, focus a lot on Facebook and Google, but I think one thing we've really put a big focus on since the beginning is growing our influence or ambassador network. We currently work with a group of a hundred to 200 influencers and this is a group that's growing really fast, too. Similar to what we were chatting with before, we've gifted, they've experienced the product, there's really an organic relationship there built and really working with fantastic creators who I think are the best voices for the brand and they've got trusted communities who watch them every day and listen to them. Having those groups really tell the story for us has been tremendously success. As a brand, we've actually avoided the food and recipe market, which I think a lot of this category goes after, and focused a lot more on things like wellness and design and tried some new categories that I don't think kitchenware has really entered into until point. Stephanie: Well, that's smart. I'm thinking of utilizing Pinterest and places like that where people are, like you said, designing their kitchens or their homes- Jordan: Definitely. Stephanie: ... and just thinking about things differently. That definitely seems like your kind of ideal customer. Jordan: Definitely, and we see Caraway as almost... and we hear this from a lot of consumers, that almost being that first kind of inspiration or purchase that they make, that then kind of put them on a path to redoing their full kitchen or wanting to create a safer and healthier home. We love being in platforms and working with creators who kind of align with that strategy. Stephanie: I think it's really important that you're moving in that other aspect of the home because that reminds me, when I got a... it was like a pastel green tea kettle, it was super cute and I liked it a lot and I put it in my kitchen. Then, I'm looking around and I'm like, "Oh, man. I don't have anything else that matches this tea kettle." I started trying to go around and search for that color and I couldn't find a match. Yeah, it did start making me rethink about how to redesign my kitchen and then, incorporate into my living room because they're so close. I think having multiple products, kind of help create that experience all throughout the house and that nice design principles could be very beneficial. Jordan: Definitely. Pulling that back to new products as well and color, it creates a really exciting opportunity where you make that first navy or sage or cream and having a bigger portfolio of products to really seed that throughout the rest of the home is really where we want to get to. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you pick colors that can't really be matched with other brands? Jordan: That's certainly part of it. All of our colors are custom made. A lot of brands typically lean towards choosing a Pantone color. Colors are very difficult to replicate. Just going through the experience, they do take a lot of time to get right. There's definitely some data that we look at when it comes to what people are looking for and searching. It's asking customers, but at the end of the day, we wanted to create something that was uniquely different in this category. I think in the initial research stages was really surprised that something as simple as navy, which you're wearing in your clothes every day and is such a prominent color in people's homes just didn't exist in the category. As a young brand, it's fun to have a website and be able to test into colors that just don't exist today. Stephanie: Yeah. Have you tested anything that you didn't actually have on-hand yet? Jordan: Nothing publicly, but we certainly do some stuff privately or in small tests across Facebook or Google. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Got it. Is there any time data's led you down the wrong path where I'm over here googling fluorescent pink pan and, then you make a product? You're like, "Eww, a lot of people were googling that or searching for that keyword and it was because of this and we probably shouldn't have made maybe a product around that or no one's actually buying that color." Any time when data's led you down the wrong path? Jordan: Yeah. Nothing specifically with Caraway, but my prior role with Mohawk Group and Vremi, we launched a lot of products, there were many that we had strong conviction on based off data. Sometimes, it doesn't work for whatever reason. It could be the product design, it could be the colors, it could be the price point. There are so many variables to it, but I think understanding all the variables that can impact the success of a product is super important and as long as you're really trying to make something different and really try to make it a compelling offer, I think, across all the categories you have a pretty good chance of success. Jordan: Really, I think this is a universal truth, but the product quality needs to be there. It can look pretty and the price could be great, but as long as that product's a really great product and people love it, that in and of itself should generate its own word of mouth. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Is there any way that you encourage that word of mouth with your customers? Jordan: Definitely. I mean, we encourage consumers to continually post on social showing us what the pans look like in their home, showing us how they organize their kitchens with the pan racks that we sent over, showing us what they cooked. As we roll out new products and expand the brands, I think there's definitely some areas we can improve in, in word of mouth, but so far, it does make up a large percentage of our sales and having reviews built into the brands I believe also encourages that. Stephanie: How are you measuring the organic growth right now? Like you said, referrals make up a large part of the sales. If you don't have a referral program yet, how are you tracking that to see where the customers are coming from. Jordan: It's definitely tough. We run a post-purchase survey after people purchase. Obviously, not everyone fills it out, but we get a lot of data through there in terms of asking consumers where they came from. That's really the best indication, but we're also very... in a position where we really understand how many sales are coming from Facebook and Google and a lot of other channels, so we're able to kind of parse out between those two methods what we think the word of mouth effect is. Stephanie: Got it, got it. It seems like it would be kind of hard to keep people, not only just customers, but also even like the influencers engaged because I think about when someone sends you something or you buy something new, you're really excited for maybe a week and then you're kind of, like a lot of people, at least myself, maybe not everyone else, it's on to the next thing and excited about the new thing. How do you keep, not only your customers, but also those influencers that you were sending products to, engaged for the long haul? Jordan: I think a big, important piece of our influencer program is that most of these relationships are tremendously organic and we work with people who truly love the product. Just like anything, there's always more excitement at the beginning when something's new, but we like to work with people who are sharing content around cooking and sharing content around storage and design and our products are always in those content pieces. It's really been a pretty organic relationship and we haven't seen a massive drop-off in sharing amongst that group. In terms of customers, we put a lot of emphasis into email and SMS and new blog posts and social and really try to get people into those funnels and onto the social page, so they're staying up to date with everything that's going on with the brand. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you have any events or things like that where you bring together your influencers or maybe even customers to build that camaraderie feeling? Something that I think back to, when I was at Google, we had this local guides' program and they would do big events where all the local guides could come and meet and get some swag and really feel like a community. Is there anything like that that you guys are planning for in the future? Jordan: Definitely. I think community is tremendously important. We, obviously, really focus on that with our consumers, but for our ambassador base, it's still really early days and early stages. Looking at companies like Glossier and I think they've done such a great job at creating that community amongst ambassadors and the people they work with are tremendously proud to represent Glossier. Events and dinners and opportunities to gather are certainly among top interests for us. With COVID going on, it creates some more challenges, but- Stephanie: Yeah. A Zoom happy hour. Jordan: Yep. Yeah, we're looking to roll out a community base whether it's on Slack or Facebook groups in the coming months for all of our influencers to connect. It's also a good opportunity for them to share best tips on what's working for them and what's not on their social posts or maximizing engagement. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that definitely seems like it could be really beneficial because you have this group of people working for you behind the scenes, teaching each other best practices, that you're not having to employ- Jordan: Exactly. Stephanie: ... which is great. Circling back a little bit to your background, I saw or I think you mentioned that you studied consumer psychology. Is that right? Jordan: Correct. Stephanie: Okay, cool. How did that background help you with building your company, if it did, or what kind of principles did you take away or remember from your studies? Jordan: Yeah. Back in school, I was really interested in understanding why people chose the products that they did, why they align with certain brands, and I think at Caraway, we take a pretty granular focus when it comes to that. A lot of that's reflected through the messaging that we put out. We're, at any given point, running dozens and dozens of tests across our ads and our website and there's obviously demographic information on people, which we try to segment based on, in terms of our consumer, but there's also personality traits and more of a psychology of further breakdowns of certain demographic categories. We do our best to collect this information from consumers to really understand who the customer is, what they're thinking about, who they are as people and that, in turn, really informs the macro messaging, what's on the website, and branching out to the brand principles. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, very cool. Is there any element of personalization right now when you come to Caraway based on the data that you just mentioned, whether it's demographics or anything else? Jordan: At the moment, not onsite. We're really focused, and this was highly intentional at the beginning of launching the brand that is we really want to create a product and brand that are really accessible to the most people possible and also, kind of narrow down the decision making that they have to do. Stephanie: Yeah, super important. Jordan: Right now, we've got one set, it's really simple, really the core decision is the color that you have to choose. As we grow and we start launching more products, I think that's where we'll start to see a lot more personalization and trying to help people, once you buy the cookware set or you buy another product, like what's that next piece that you should add into your kitchen and why do you need that product. I think that really comes with expanding the brand into those new categories and then creating sub-segments based on what their initial purchases were, where they come from, who they are as people, and how we can help them better merchandise and support them in their home. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Very cool. You've been in the world of Ecommerce for a while. What's one thing that you wish online sellers would either start doing or stop doing? Jordan: Great question. I think for me there's become this really big mentality of consumer products of growth at all costs. I think a lot of venture-backed companies have really, really pushed into achieving most of their sales through buying ads and buying customers. That's certainly a piece of growth, but I'd also encourage to really, especially in your early days, like growth's not that challenging to come by, you're starting with a smaller number and really putting the emphasis on word of mouth and expanding your return on ad spend. I think it's easy to get caught up in high growth, but you want to make sure those founding principles are there from day one. Jordan: I think generally as a piece of advice, that's one thing I think we've done well at Caraway and I learned from my prior experience. I just see a lot of sellers and vendors I think focusing on top-line growth a little too much in sacrificing something that's going to be more beneficial in the long-term. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that does seem like something that a lot of companies, especially over the last couple years, have lost sight of. Because, like you said, I mean, when you have these VCs who are telling you that you need to hit these crazy growth numbers, it is kind of like, well, we just have to do whatever it takes to do it and to hit those numbers. It seems like in the process, a business wasn't actually built behind the scenes. Kind of like a fake business where there's only ads, buying customers, but then not having a good product and I think we're seeing a lot of the problems from that right now. Jordan: Absolutely. I think a big piece of it, too, is it's really building that mentality internal with your team and building a culture where it's just as much exciting to lower the cost on something as it is to increase growth or launch a new, fun marketing initiative. For me, I'd love to see more founders and teams focusing on that sustainable growth. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), completely agree. Is there anything top of mind that we missed in this interview before we jump into a quick lightening round? Jordan: Nothing off the top of my head. Stephanie: All right. The lightening round, which is brought to you by our amazing sponsors, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, is where I send a question your way, Jordan, and you have a minute or less to answer or 30 seconds, whatever you want to do. Jordan: Perfect. Stephanie: Are you ready? Jordan: I am ready. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu queue? Jordan: Oh, tough question. I'm excited to watch Ozark, season three, have yet to get to it, but I've heard it's a good one, so that's been at the top of my list to get to. Stephanie: Nice. Yeah, that is definitely a good series. If you were to have a podcast, who would your first guest be or what would the podcast be about? Jordan: Would love to focus a podcast on brands that really focus on doing good for the world and, whether it's non-toxic products or eco-friendly products, really hear more about their journeys to creating those items and hearing about the larger impact that they have on the world. Stephanie: Oh, that's a good one. If there's any sponsors out there, hit Jordan up. We can help you out with that. All right. A slightly more difficult one where you might have to think for a bit. What's one thing that will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce the next year? Jordan: I think the short answer to this and tying it into, obviously, what's going on in the world is I think people staying more in their homes and what that means in terms of general macro online sales, brick and mortar. I think we'll come out of this with really a different world and excited to see how the retail landscapes starts merging with the digital landscape. Stephanie: That is a great answer. All right, Jordan, it's been such a fun interview. Thanks for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Caraway? Jordan: You can check us out at www.CarawayHome.com and thanks for having me. This was super fun. Stephanie: Yeah. See you next time.  

Tamara K. Anderson interviews her children and husband on the Stories of Hope in Hard Times podcast. They talk about how their lives have been changed for the better because of two sons with autism. Lessons, advice, tips and love shared.The Anderson Family: One Family’s Perspective on AutismAnderson family BioJustin (old) according to the kids. Husband to Tamara for 22 and a half years, and father to four amazing children.Jordan, age 21. College student majoring in Elementary Education. One of my typical kids.Nathan, age 20. Mostly non-verbal kiddo on the autism spectrum. We talk about Nathan on our podcast, but he doesn’t comment (mostly because he would just echo back whatever we said).Jacob, age 16. Jacob is an amazing kid that has high-functioning autism. He just learned to drive last year and is attending high school.Noelle, age 14. Noelle is our only girl and she is an amazing “second mother” to the group of boys. She is also in high school and is my other “typical” child.What was it like to grow up with two brothers on the autism spectrum?Jordan: It was a learning experience. They didn’t grow up doing “normal” activities. He noticed that he couldn’t interact the same with his brothers as other brothers that he saw.  He dreamed of playing catch with his brother or wrestling with his brother, but Nathan didn’t want to do those kinds of social interactions. When Jacob came along he was able to finally grow into doing some of these things as he got older.Jordan explains that he had to learn to interact with Nathan differently. He learned how to show him that he loved him without a reaction.One interesting thing is that Jordan has always been extremely social and he wanted to tackle and interact with Nathan (who didn’t always appreciate that). I often felt when they were little like I was always playing referee. But looking back I realize that was probably the best thing for Nathan, because he had someone constantly inviting him to interact in the “real” world instead of always staying in “autism’s world.”Jordan is not intimidated by children with special needs, and he believes this is one of the blessings of growing up with brothers on the autism spectrum. As he is studying Elementary Education, Jordan looks at each child differently and he knows, he “can work with them.” He concludes he has a baseline because he has two amazing brothers with autism. He feels he has been guided to this major so that he can help children with all different kinds of needs.What is it like to have autism? What goes on inside your mind, and what makes you different from other kids?Jacob: The problem is learning to relate the “autism world” to the real world. “I don’t know what the normal world is like. All my life I’ve been living just being me.”Jacob is now fully integrated into regular high school. He didn’t always used to be able to handle this, but has grown to this point. One thing that is important to explain is that there is this real draw or pull to click over to the autism world in his mind or what we call “Imaginations” in our home.ImaginationsWhen I asked Jacob what he is thinking about when he does his “Imaginations” he answered that it is kind of a wild card. He explains that he can’t just think of one thing because that would be boring. So, he thinks of lots of things, but he can’t always control where his mind wanders. Sometimes he thinks of recent video games he has played, and creating off-stories in his mind. He also likes to imagine what would happen after the end of a book he has just read or the story before the book begins. Basically prequels, sequels and stuff like that.That is one of the cool things about having Jacob in our home is that he often thinks outside the box. When he was little he crafted these amazingly creative Super Jacob-man comic books that were so fun to read. He made the illustrations for them and everything. Jordan remembers having Jacob read him those comic books and helping him create the characters and then just watching the story come alive.Super-PowersI think every child has a super-power. Some of Jacob’s super-powers are learning math or numbers and dates. When he was little we would randomly ask him when people were born or when they died and he would tell us. It was pretty cool. So, this means he does well in history as well. Another of Jacob’s super-powers is music. He can memorize songs much more easily than most kids. Noelle has also noticed how easily Jacob memorizes long classical pieces after only playing through them a few times. She admits she wishes she could do that too:). I think we all do.“Kids with autism and normal kids have their own super-powers. You just have to find them.”NathanNoelle enjoys interacting with Nathan because he is so pure and he isn’t distracted by things in the world. Some of the things that make him happy are “drop pillow” when you drop a pillow on him and tickle him. Jordan adds that doing “Star Wars” where you do the Darth Vader’s breathing and then tickle him. He then laughs with this big gut laugh that is so contagious.Nathan is like a giant 2-3 year old child, but he outweighs all of us and he is taller than all of us, well, maybe Jacob is slightly taller than him now.It is nice that Nathan now has some very simple words or phrases to ask for certain things. He definitely lets you know if there is something that he doesn’t want by saying, “all done,” “no,” or “go home.”A Nathan StoryFor example, recently we took the family to go watch Captain Marvel. This requires a little bit of tricky planning. We always get seats on the very back row of the theater and we always seat Nathan in the corner. This way he can play on his iPad (with the screen turned all the way down) and not distract anyone.Anyway, on the way to the movies he let us know, “No movie. Go home.” We tried simple reasoning (with a little bribery). “First movie, then Walmart?” NO! “First movie, then DI?” (DI is a local thrift store where Nathan likes buying used DVDs). Yes! So, he happily walked into the theater and then I took him to DI afterwards. We didn’t used to be able to reason with him, so it is nice to have hit this point.Changing schedules with these kids is challenging. They do well with visual schedules and so we usually have to write things down to let them know what we are doing. Jacob comments that spontaneous surprises are very hard for him as well, and it bugs him.A Spontaneous Story–And Why that Doesn’t WorkI shared the example of spontaneously buying tickets to go see the Lego movie while my kids were at school. After I picked them up I told them we were going straight to the movie. Jacob freaked out about this saying, “This is not what we do after school. First we go home and have a snack and then we do our homework.” So, basically I had to try to reason with him and help him try to get past the change to even allow us to go. After the movie when I asked him if he liked it he answered, “Yes, but next time we have to follow the schedule.”So, spontaneity with these kiddos is very challenging. Jordan says he is very spontaneous too, so Jacob and Nathan act as a counterbalance for the spontaneousness in our home.This is going to look different in different families and from child to child. So, each family is unique.When I ask the kids how they feel about our family being talked about in my book, Normal for Me, Jordan answers that he is glad that we can share our story and spread more light. It is important for people to get a look at how autism impacts families and how we incorporate God in our family as well.Jordan goes on to say that he hopes this will help people see that children with autism do have super-powers and they have desires and hopes just like typical children.What are some of Nathan’s Super-Powers?Noelle shares that Nathan is really gifted at doing puzzles. Most people take their time with a 500 piece puzzle, but Nathan can crank it out in about 2 hours.Jacob adds that another of Nathan’s super-powers is doing word-searches. He does them on his iPad but he will also crank through an entire word search book in about a day. But he has to circle the words in the order in which they are liste. I have to buy word search books at the 99 cent store because we go through them quite quickly.So, Nathan can see patterns in puzzles and in words and letters more easily than the rest of us. Those are his super-powers.The Kids Favorite Bible VersesNoelle–Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” Noelle likes this verse because it helps us remember that we are in God’s hand and that He can help us, and He knows what we are going through. He is always there.Jordan–Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”Story behind the verseJordan was at a point in his life where things were challenging and this verse taught him that I can’t do this, but if I rely on God, He can pull me through it.” The more we give ourselves to Him the more He can guide us to where He needs us to go. He still feels God prompting him and guiding him even in college.Jordan explains that some people think of God as a puppeteer, but Jordan sees us more as a Pinocchio. We can choose where we want to go, but it is good sometimes to let go and let God guide us.This is often hard to do when God is putting you on a path that you don’t want to go on, like I describe in the Normal for Me book, when my kids were diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Trusting God at those times is hard, but we do learn a lot. One of the phrases I coined at that point in my life is “Two people can do anything if one of them is God.”Jacob–Matthew 5:14-16 “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”To Jacob this means that it is important to share your talents. Going into Junior high this was hard for him because his friends seemed to outgrow his comic books and it became a little harder for him to fit in socially.Social Interaction ChallengesSocial interactions are often more challenging with kiddos on the autism spectrum–and it seems to be more challenging for the higher functioning kids. Lower functioning kids like Nathan don’t really care if they socialize or not, so it has never been a big deal for him. But the older Jacob got the harder it got for him to socialize, know what to say, or how to talk to others.Jacob confesses that sometimes he just can’t think of words to say.Jacob’s AdviceThe advice Jacob would give to parents and other teens is to “be patient” with kids on the autism spectrum. They need love too and are often lonely. Don’t be afraid to help kids with autism out and be a friend.Another tip: Kids on the spectrum are usually pretty honest–there isn’t much of a filter that goes on between what they think and what they say. They will tell you if you do indeed “look fat in that dress” (whether they should or not).Jacob’s Advice to Parents of Teens on the SpectrumHelp your kids practice social things like getting someone’s phone number, asking a friend if they want to hang out, how to text properly.Noelle’s adviceBe nice to kids on the autism spectrum and try not to be super-sarcastic. The reason for this is they often don’t always understand sarcasm. They are sometimes very literal.Jordan chimes in that he likes to think of kids with autism like Drax on Guardians of the Galaxy. Sarcasm goes right over their heads.Final thoughts from Jordan“Be patient with these kids. They are not kids with autism. They are kids with super-powers. Just like in the movies, sometimes the superheroes get attacked.”Jordan has been doing some classroom observations this semester at an elementary school. There is a sweet girl with autism in one of his classes and she has a wonderful aide that is so patient with her. When Jordan asked the aide what got her into this field, she said, “I see potential in all of these kids.”“If we give these kids chances to change the world, they will.” Often that change is in our own world.My final comments: “Having children with autism has changed me for the better.”Interview with my Husband, JustinJustin’s advice for parents of children with autismYou are in for a different life that perhaps you had planned. There will be challenges, but there will also be some really great things as well. Having kids on the spectrum can be something that will bring you closer to your spouse as you let it. It can also help you find a different level of love and patience than you naturally had.Some of the Lessons Learned in Hard TimesDifferent people process diagnosis differently. Justin was more quick to acknowledge there was something wrong with Nathan while I lived in denial for a little longer. I was terrified of an autism diagnosis. Justin was more terrified as he realized life was going to be different.You will go through the stages of grief. There is also anger. I felt anger. Justin felt cheated out of experiences he was going to have with his son. He felt very sad.When expectations have been changed by diagnosis it is hard to envision a clear future.Take things day by day and week by week. Hold on to hope because these kids are amazing!Some of the Things Justin Learned from our Children with Autism1. We are children of God. When Nathan has had hard times and we have had to just hold him and pray, God has opened Justin’s mind to see what a special person Nathan really is. There is a big, strong, manly and faithful spirit inside of his body and his disability simply impairs his mind, but it is not who he is.2. Knowing who your child really is as a son or daughter of God, helps you to have a different level of patience, love, kindness and understanding. This is who they will be forever.3. These kids are not their disabilities.4. Pray for this gift from God to see your child from a more eternal perspective.“Heaven is close when you are on your knees in a really hard spot.”Another lesson: Be Willing to Try New Things and Support your SpouseI was the more aggressive in wanting to try new things with Nathan. Justin was supportive. Sometimes we found things that worked, and other times we ruled out things that didn’t work.Advice for Dads Ask what you can do to help and keep on trying. The work you are doing is so important and needs a father’s strength and support to accomplish it. This is not a one-person job. If you aren’t pulling your weight, then it is time to step up and be a man. This means talking, listening, offering support, and doing things with your child that are different from what you expected.Help your spouse. They need someone to talk to.Justin subscribes to a Google wordsearch for “autism” each day. This pulls up any articles that come up on autism. This helps him to see what is going on.Join Facebook pages. Sometimes all you can do is listen and offer encouragement, but that is good enough sometimes.Give your spouse a “break” and help.It is also really important to note that full-time caretakers need breaks. If they don’t have a spouse to help them, then they need to get some kind of respite. This is often available through government programs.Justin’s Favorite Bible VerseIsaiah 12:2 “Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid: for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation.”This verse means that having Jesus Christ in your life is the only way you are going to be able to accomplish anything. It also means that He will give you strength to be the parent of a special needs child who needs your care.“God is strong enough there to help us moment by moment as we learn to parent different children differently.”

Listen as I interview a family on how their lives have been changed for the better because of two sons with autism. Lessons, advice, tips and love shared. The Anderson Family: One Family’s Perspective on Autism Anderson family Bio Justin (old) according to the kids. Husband to Tamara for 22 and a half years, and father to four amazing children. Jordan, age 21. College student majoring in Elementary Education. One of my typical kids. Nathan, age 20. Mostly non-verbal kiddo on the autism spectrum. We talk about Nathan on our podcast, but he doesn’t comment (mostly because he would just echo back whatever we said). Jacob, age 16. Jacob is an amazing kid that has high-functioning autism. He just learned to drive last year and is attending high school. Noelle, age 14. Noelle is our only girl and she is an amazing “second mother” to the group of boys. She is also in high school and is my other “typical” child. What was it like to grow up with two brothers on the autism spectrum? Jordan: It was a learning experience. They didn’t grow up doing “normal” activities. He noticed that he couldn’t interact the same with his brothers as other brothers that he saw.  He dreamed of playing catch with his brother or wrestling with his brother, but Nathan didn’t want to do those kinds of social interactions. When Jacob came along he was able to finally grow into doing some of these things as he got older. Jordan explains that he had to learn to interact with Nathan differently. He learned how to show him that he loved him without a reaction. One interesting thing is that Jordan has always been extremely social and he wanted to tackle and interact with Nathan (who didn’t always appreciate that). I often felt when they were little like I was always playing referee. But looking back I realize that was probably the best thing for Nathan, because he had someone constantly inviting him to interact in the “real” world instead of always staying in “autism’s world.” Jordan is not intimidated by children with special needs, and he believes this is one of the blessings of growing up with brothers on the autism spectrum. As he is studying Elementary Education, Jordan looks at each child differently and he knows, he “can work with them.” He concludes he has a baseline because he has two amazing brothers with autism. He feels he has been guided to this major so that he can help children with all different kinds of needs. What is it like to have autism? What goes on inside your mind, and what makes you different from other kids? Jacob: The problem is learning to relate the “autism world” to the real world. “I don’t know what the normal world is like. All my life I’ve been living just being me.” Jacob is now fully integrated into regular high school. He didn’t always used to be able to handle this, but has grown to this point. One thing that is important to explain is that there is this real draw or pull to click over to the autism world in his mind or what we call “Imaginations” in our home. Imaginations When I asked Jacob what he is thinking about when he does his “Imaginations” he answered that it is kind of a wild card. He explains that he can’t just think of one thing because that would be boring. So, he thinks of lots of things, but he can’t always control where his mind wanders. Sometimes he thinks of recent video games he has played, and creating off-stories in his mind. He also likes to imagine what would happen after the end of a book he has just read or the story before the book begins. Basically prequels, sequels and stuff like that. That is one of the cool things about having Jacob in our home is that he often thinks outside the box. When he was little he crafted these amazingly creative...

This week, Taylor Gibb from the customer success team at Braze brought in Senior CSM, Jordan Houghton, to discuss how she met her husband on OKCupid. Match Group finally acquires Hinge, adding to it's caché of dating apps, and don't forget about Bounce (the dating app on which you can do nothing EXCEPT meet for a date that very evening).     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:02] PJ Bruno: On this Valentine's Day, me and the team would like to say, whether you're swiping for fun or looking for that special one, whether you're cuffing at home, or just love being alone, if you're going to give a gift, make sure it's relevant, personalized, and well timed. That apple of your eye wants nothing that isn't personal, and poorly timed, well, that's a crime. So, this year, kiddies, avoid the mess of a shameful Valentine's tragedy. Keep it personal, and treat your valentine like your customer engagement strategy.   [0:00:36] The Captain: This is the captain. Brace for impact.   [0:00:45] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest, and I'm so thrilled today to have back again by population demand Taylor Gibb from CS. How you doing, Taylor?   [0:00:58] Taylor Gibb: I am excited to be here. This is a big one.   [0:01:01] PJ Bruno: It is.   [0:01:02] Taylor Gibb: This is an inaugural run of me on this podcast on Valentine's Day in 2019.   [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: It is, and you brought a buddy with you, I see. You have a friend.   [0:01:10] Taylor Gibb: I definitely did. We roll deep in succeed, I like to say, so I brought one of the very best, and I'm apparently rhyming.   [0:01:15] Jordan: No. This is Jordan.   [0:01:18] Taylor Gibb: Jordan, guys, it is so good to have you here, and I really wanted to lean into our Valentine's Day festive podcast here.   [0:01:26] PJ Bruno: Ooh, I'm intrigued.   [0:01:26] Taylor Gibb: I brought a little theme in to guide today, because you know we're all thinking about love. A lot of us in New York City are kind of looking for that special date tonight, a lot of restaurant reservations out there-   [0:01:36] PJ Bruno: Don't you know it?   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: ... So I wanted to kind of focus in on dating apps today, and Jordan, I brought you in not just because you've got a silky smooth voice-   [0:01:45] Jordan: Oh, thank you very much.   [0:01:47] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, absolutely, but because I know that you actually... You've got a particular stance on dating apps, or at least the way that they were a couple of years ago. Do you care to elaborate there?   [0:01:56] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:01:56] Jordan: I am a success story of dating apps. I met my husband on OkCupid.   [0:02:01] PJ Bruno: How about that?   [0:02:02] Taylor Gibb: That's right. Yeah. I brought in one of the very best. Jordan, tell me about your OkCupid experience there.   [0:02:09] Jordan: Okay. So, this was a few years ago. I had absolutely no intention of meeting anybody online. I just wanted to make a profile, maybe have some people reach out, make me feel a little bit better about myself, never thought I'd actually go out in person, and met some really great people, and met my husband.   [0:02:27] Taylor Gibb: That is a huge success story, and I always used to think that was rare, that you were more likely to run into a dud than you were the one, but these success stories are getting more and more prevalent. I think I saw a statistic that it's expected something wild, like 71% of couples in the year 2025 will have met online.   [0:02:45] PJ Bruno: What?   [0:02:45] Taylor Gibb: I saw that, and I thought that was just absolutely crazy because it seems like maybe five years ago that the idea of dating online was this kind of... I don't know.   [0:02:54] Jordan: No. I made the mistake of telling my mom, as I was walking to my first online date, that I actually had made a profile on OkCupid, and I was going to meet somebody, and I'm from Kansas originally, and she was literally screaming into the phone, begging me to either go to a public place, or turn around and walk home, because you don't know who you're going to meet, and they could very much be an ax murderer.   [0:03:14] PJ Bruno: So, the advice there is don't always listen to Mom?   [0:03:17] Taylor Gibb: If we wanted to tell you one thing here in this podcast, it's don't listen to your mom.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: It could cost you the love of your life.   [0:03:23] Taylor Gibb: Come on.   [0:03:24] PJ Bruno: So, wait. Was this the mobile app, or this is the-   [0:03:26] Jordan: This was the mobile app.   [0:03:27] PJ Bruno: Okay, cool.   [0:03:28] Jordan: I got really addicted to swiping.   [0:03:29] Taylor Gibb: An early adopter.   [0:03:30] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:30] PJ Bruno: Early, early adoption.   [0:03:31] Jordan: Yes.   [0:03:32] Taylor Gibb: I love that.   [0:03:33] Jordan: I was very much into it.   [0:03:34] Taylor Gibb: You know, we're going to dig into a little bit more on kind of the dating apps, the pros and cons, ways they're changing here later, but I would be remiss if I didn't have a mini intro for you, PJ-   [0:03:44] PJ Bruno: Oh, really?   [0:03:44] Taylor Gibb: ... Because I know, and without going too far into detail, I know that you've used your share of dating apps, maybe a bit of a connoisseur.   [0:03:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, wow.   [0:03:52] Jordan: A connoisseur of dating apps.   [0:03:52] PJ Bruno: Where are you getting your information?   [0:03:54] Taylor Gibb: I don't know.   [0:03:55] PJ Bruno: You been through my phone?   [0:03:57] Taylor Gibb: I've been swiping through your phone when I was testing earlier.   [0:03:59] PJ Bruno: You know, I like to do research, so I like to... I have Hinge on my phone. I think that's pretty neat. We're going to touch on Hinge soon. I've tried Tinder, I've tried Bumble, and there's something to be said for it. I think I can argue for both sides. There's something very cool, especially in a city like New York, the ability to connect with random people that, honestly, I have a handful of people that are still friends to this day that I met on dating apps, so that's a cool thing, but then, of course, other side of the coin, you start to not appreciate people as much. They're just so easily dismissible, and you just don't really put the time that's required to build something that matter and lasts.   [0:04:37] Jordan: Oh, tell me-   [0:04:37] Taylor Gibb: We kind of forget that they're human beings because they're just a sound bite, maybe a picture, and one thing about them that may or may not have caught your eye, and you forget that, hopefully, they're a fully fleshed human being on the other side that might be waiting for your text, or might but hoping that you swipe right on them. I think it's really easy to have choice paralysis when there's an endless array of options.   [0:04:57] PJ Bruno: Totally. Well, that leads really nicely into our first little article here, which may be the solution to that swipe paralysis, or whatever you want to call it, people not willing to jump in and get stuck in and meet someone in person. We're really thrilled, actually, to be able to plug a good friend of ours. A previous coworker from Braze, Dylan Petro, was able to launch his dating app, Bounce, and all you can do on the app is date. Right? There no chatting?   [0:05:26] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:27] PJ Bruno: It's just literally you connect, and that night, the date, it's on. They pick a spot. Is that right?   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:05:31] Jordan: They do.   [0:05:31] Taylor Gibb: That's right, and I have to say, I actually was one of the first users of this app. I remember Dylan gave a special code to a beta group of testers, and there's something really exciting about it. Right? You get a notification on your phone... First of all, love notifications here at Braze, so having get ready to go on a date, that's amazing to get delivered to your lock screen.   [0:05:53] Jordan: It also makes sense, though, because it is so time-sensitive, it's not just so-and-so likes you, or you have 35 swipe right people, but it's like, you have a date in 25 minutes, or two hours from now, so it's very time-sensitive, so that's the right channel, in my opinion. An email could get lost in your inbox.   [0:06:09] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely, and it's funny, too. This article that we brought up here says that this is the perfect dating app for Millennials who have this kind of analysis paralysis. It even said anything that I'm unfortunately very familiar with. It's like swiping through Netflix, and you've got so many options that you just end up looking at the options for an hour and going to bed.   [0:06:27] PJ Bruno: Yep, yep.   [0:06:28] Taylor Gibb: This is exactly what I do every time, and so when it comes to dating, absolutely, I'm going to keep swiping.   [0:06:33] PJ Bruno: That's the thing. It's like, because, I don't know, you always go back to the well, and I'm a big Netflix browser, and some people are just like, “Oh, my God. Pick something,” but I enjoy going through all the stuff and just keep scrolling and scrolling, and so sometimes I get into that mode with swiping. It becomes-   [0:06:51] Jordan: Definitely.   [0:06:51] PJ Bruno: I mean, they've gamified it. Right?   [0:06:53] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah.   [0:06:53] PJ Bruno: So, it's like you're talking to someone, and I don't know, there's always that incentive get back in and continue to swipe.   [0:06:59] Jordan: My girlfriends, they have a rule that if you've been texting for more than three days and they haven't mentioned a date, to cut it out right then-   [0:07:05] PJ Bruno: That's a pretty good rule.   [0:07:05] Jordan: ... Because they're not necessarily interested in dating, so Bounce is so interesting because it's forcing you to say, “I actually want to meet someone tonight. My makeup's already on. I got my shoes on. Let's go. Let's not just go back and forth and then just flow into the ether of ghosting.”   [0:07:18] PJ Bruno: Right. Right.   [0:07:18] Taylor Gibb: Definitely, and I know that PJ hates when he puts on his makeup, expecting to go out on a day. He's got it all, and then they ghost him.   [0:07:25] Jordan: He's got the shoes on, he's got the mascara ready to go.   [0:07:26] Taylor Gibb: God, and he just looks so good, so fly.   [0:07:28] PJ Bruno: When you put that much time into it, of course you're going to be upset when nothing comes to fruition.   [0:07:31] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:07:32] Jordan: Lord knows, you're not going to meet someone in real life, so why would you actually go out unless you've got a date already planned?   [0:07:37] PJ Bruno: Exactly. That's silly.   [0:07:38] Taylor Gibb: So, here's the devil's advocate thing, though. I find that some of my friends who are maybe a little more shy, a little more reserved, really like to put in that emotional groundwork before they meet somebody. Love the idea of being on Hinge and being able to message for weeks. It's kind of a... You've got your Jane Austen pen pal romance a little bit.   [0:07:54] PJ Bruno: Yeah, it's a vetting process.   [0:07:55] Taylor Gibb: There's something to be said, right?   [0:07:56] PJ Bruno: There is.   [0:07:56] Taylor Gibb: Because it may be that for a certain kind of person, well, maybe for anybody, it's scary to meet somebody that night not knowing much about them. Right?   [0:08:03] PJ Bruno: Absolutely, and I'll say about Hinge, actually, out of all the apps that I've used, Hinge is pretty good about giving you more than just, okay, this is what a person looks like. They have those little prompts. Have you seen these texts? It's just like-   [0:08:14] Taylor Gibb: Oh, yeah. Oh, I love those little prompts.   [0:08:16] PJ Bruno: It's thing like, “Something I'll never do again is,” or, “One thing I'm weirdly attracted to is,” and it just is three prompts that you can pick what they are, and it just tells you a little bit about themselves, and if it's funny or quirky and weird, it's just kind of like, oh, okay, I can get down with this. So, it's kind of like-   [0:08:31] Jordan: That's why I loved OkCupid. The concept of just meeting someone because they're within a hundred feet of me and good looking freaked me out. So, I think I answered, I'm not kidding, maybe 300 or 400 questions. It was like an SAT that I filled out to potentially meet the love of my life, and it was actually really interesting, some of the questions that I differed with people. Yeah, it was really interesting to me because I'm similarly of the mind of you, Taylor, that I don't necessarily want to meet a stranger unless I'm literally in the same place as them. The idea of leaving my house and meeting a complete stranger would've freaked me out a little bit, so I think having both sides of it, either I know what you look like, I know what you think like, I know what you believe, I know what we're doing, we're both interested in sushi. Cool. Okay.   [0:09:15] PJ Bruno: One thing I'll say for the audience out there is even if you're using dating apps, and you're not quite finding that special one, you're losing if you're not learning, so at least take stuff away from it. For example-   [0:09:25] Taylor Gibb: You're losing if you're not learning. I like that.   [0:09:27] PJ Bruno: ... Two things I found, just call it research, one is that apparently I look different in every picture I own.   [0:09:34] Taylor Gibb: Great.   [0:09:34] PJ Bruno: So, apparently I look different in every photo, one, and two, girls who own cats are less likely to own guns than girls who have dogs.   [0:09:43] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting because you would think it's a little utilitarian.   [0:09:44] PJ Bruno: I'm a dog-   [0:09:45] Jordan: Have you met a lot of gun-wielding dog owners in New York?   [0:09:48] PJ Bruno: Actually, I don't run into them personally. I'm just telling you from the series of photos I see-   [0:09:52] Jordan: Oh, interesting.   [0:09:53] PJ Bruno: ... There's cat girls, and I'm like, “Cool. I like you. I'm allergic to cats, though, so sorry,” and then girls... Not all dog girls have guns, but there are way more dog girls that have guns than cat girls.   [0:10:03] Jordan: I will tell you a learning that I... I have two learnings. One, if you are taking a mirror selfie in a restroom, I'm probably not going to swipe right on you.   [0:10:12] PJ Bruno: Well, you're married, but...   [0:10:14] Jordan: Thank you very much. Tristan, I am not swiping.   [0:10:16] Taylor Gibb: She might be researching, PJ.   [0:10:17] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're doing research. That's right.   [0:10:18] Jordan: Absolute research. But no, I also realized there's a game of which person are you in this picture that I love to play, where it's like you see a group, and you're like, oh, I really hope you're the second from the right, and then there's that two second of anticipation of swiping to the next picture and being like, oh, no, you are the guy on the left, or you're the one in the back that's just at the very end of the photo. It's such a fun game because it's so exhilarating.   [0:10:45] Taylor Gibb: He's the guy photo bombing in the background.   [0:10:46] Jordan: Yes. Yeah. No, it's my favorite part. Who are you? Which on are you?   [0:10:50] Taylor Gibb: Who are you?   [0:10:51] PJ Bruno: Oh, my gosh.   [0:10:52] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of who are you, one thing I forgot to ask that I loved to hear is, I believe back in the day of OkCupid, maybe still, you would have a screen name that you'd have to put out there. Right?   [0:11:02] Jordan: Oh, gosh. Yes.   [0:11:02] Taylor Gibb: I want to hear about your screen name, Jordan. I almost forgot to ask.   [0:11:06] Jordan: Oh, my gosh. I'm going to be giving you all my secrets now.   [0:11:09] Taylor Gibb: That's what this is about.   [0:11:09] Jordan: So, my screen name, true story, I made a profile and a password, so I made a username and a password, and it sat for six months because I was too mortified, this was five, six years ago, to actually add pictures and meet someone online. My username is [Rockjock3213].   [0:11:28] Taylor Gibb: [Rockjock], like rock climbing?   [0:11:29] Jordan: Some people would reach out about that.   [0:11:31] PJ Bruno: I thought it was like rock show.   [0:11:32] Jordan: So, mine's Rockjock, [J-hock 00:11:34]. It's a KU slang. I'm from Kansas, so it was important to me that I mentioned the fact that I love Kansas, I love sports, and 3213 are two of my lucky numbers.   [0:11:43] PJ Bruno: So, say it again, one more time.   [0:11:44] Jordan: Oh, gosh.   [0:11:45] Taylor Gibb: We'd love to look this up. Everybody on the air, take notes.   [0:11:48] Jordan: Rockjock3213.   [0:11:51] PJ Bruno: Sounds like a total babe. I mean-   [0:11:52] Taylor Gibb: I love it, Rockjock. Slide into those DMs.   [0:11:54] Jordan: You know, PJ, any other time, if it hadn't been Tristan, you never know.   [0:11:57] Taylor Gibb: Just waited a few more years.   [0:12:00] Jordan: If you had done OkCupid, because Tinder and Hinge, all that scared me at the time, I wasn't quite ready to delve out of the question, question, question realm.   [0:12:07] PJ Bruno: Fair.   [0:12:08] Taylor Gibb: Well, that's a good transition, too. Right?   [0:12:09] PJ Bruno: Wow. I missed the boat again, it seems.   [0:12:11] Taylor Gibb: Well, as always, [Peej], you're one canoe behind, one safety boat behind, but I was going to say, I had a great segue before you so rudely coming off. I was going to say, speaking of Hinge, Tinder, Match.com groups, we do have another little article here that speaks to a somewhere dystopian future of dating, our overlords at Match.com, and good thing or a bad thing, essential, the article says, “Match Group, which operates dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, completed its acquisition of the seven-year-old app Hinge on Thursday, following its purchase of a majority stake in June 2018.” So, we've got a bit of a monopoly of love on our hands here, which sounds like it would but a great slow jam, but is instead a monopoly of love. PJ, get on writing that.   [0:13:04] PJ Bruno: I'm going to do that.   [0:13:05] Taylor Gibb: Instead, means that there's one company that's kind of determining at least my friend group's dating lives in 2019. What is your take on it, fellow pundits?   [0:13:17] PJ Bruno: I mean, I think I speak for everyone in the room. Monopolies in general are a bad idea. Right?   [0:13:21] Taylor Gibb: You always end up throwing the board. I mean-   [0:13:23] PJ Bruno: You end up in jail.   [0:13:25] Taylor Gibb: ... I was bound to.   [0:13:25] PJ Bruno: I don't have a get out free card. Who knows? No. Yeah, I don't like this one bit, and I'm a big fan of Bumble and the whole female-centric thing that... Was it Whitney Wolfe Herd, I think the CEO [crosstalk]   [0:13:38] Taylor Gibb: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, exactly.   [0:13:40] Jordan: Previously of Tinder.   [0:13:40] PJ Bruno: Exactly. I love everything that she's done with Bumble, and they're staying strong, and they've staved off acquisition from Match Group. No, I don't like big, huge companies just absorbing and acquiring all this stuff, especially the Match CEO I guess was quoted saying, “Every person who's 18, 19, 20 should be on Tinder. We really want to be integrated into people's single social life, especially when they're young,” put the hooks in. Just because, while I said, dating apps can bring you towards a lot of really cool people, and who knows, maybe even the love of your life. I can also make you kind of be detached from society in a certain kind of way. Right? You're looking at your screen all the time. You're easily casting away person, after person, after person. I don't know. That's the thing, is I don't know if it's super good for our psyche, as far as the way that we treat people in general, and I don't know that's an outlandish thing to say.   [0:14:33] Jordan: I agree with that in the sense that one thing about choice analysis paralysis is the always consideration of what you didn't choose, so analysis paralysis being the more options you have, the more terrible your choice could be. If you had five versus 20, you could choose a statistically worse option if you had more than 20, things like that, but also, you're going to spend a lot of time thinking about the other 19 options that you didn't choose, which is very similar to dating apps.   [0:15:03] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:15:03] Jordan: I think that this concept that there's always the next person, which is also with these dating apps, their lifecycle, if they do their job, they're losing their audience. It's kind of like a babysitting app.   [0:15:16] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:15:16] Jordan: If you get the nanny you're looking for, or the before, or the girlfriend, or the partner you've been looking for, you deactivate your profile, you're done with that. The cost of acquisition just got higher. So, for them, they either need to, as you mentioned, hook me back in by always having that in the back of my mind, that there's more option and I should go back and swipe, and I miss the gamification, or they have to buy every other part of their audience, which means this massive acquisition and having this monopoly.   [0:15:43] PJ Bruno: I see. That makes sense.   [0:15:43] Taylor Gibb: That's brilliant.   [0:15:44] Jordan: So, no, it's not ideal. I think that it's changing... It's not just my thought. It's scientifically proven that it's changing the way people date, the way people interact, and I don't necessarily think it's for the best, but I think it's part of the nature of the game that everything is digital, and we want things in the palm of our hand, literally, and we don't necessarily want to have to go out. We're paying for convenience.   [0:16:06] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting, and that's a really... It's a good take I think that a lot of people share. I will say, it's also interesting to think about being one of these companies. Right? If your goal at the end of the day is technically to match people up with their perfect other person, but then that means they're off the app. Right?   [0:16:26] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:16:26] Taylor Gibb: So, I've posed this to clients before. I work with a few dating apps here at Braze, and I remember going in and saying, “Devil's advocate, if your app works perfectly, you're out of users. You don't have anybody in there. What does that make you feel like?”   [0:16:42] PJ Bruno: Right. It's a catch-22.   [0:16:42] Taylor Gibb: They said, “Honestly, we want as many marriages, as many people dropping off at the end of this as we possibly can do. When we look through the section of The New York Times, we want to see, 'We met on blank dating app. We met on this dating app,' and that's going to mean that we're really successful.” Now, of course, that's me going in in the moment as an outsider. It could be that there are other things that come from that, but-   [0:17:05] Jordan: It's de-stigmatizing it.   [0:17:07] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely.   [0:17:07] Jordan: The more that you see it's prevalence, that's great. I mean, I'm just going to throw this out there. I would love an app to make friends, because I think it's so easy to meet people with the instance of dating and love, and I think building community, if it's not at your office, or it's not in a friend group that you had from college, or it's not something that's based off of your personal belief system, it's really hard to make friends, and I think that's something that would benefit everybody. I know that Bumble tried to do that, I think, with business.   [0:17:34] Taylor Gibb: Bumble BFF.   [0:17:34] PJ Bruno: That's right, yeah.   [0:17:35] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:17:35] Jordan: Oh, yeah. They did it for business, too. I don't know how... I say this, but also, I met my person online, so I can't give them too much crap because I maybe wouldn't have met him otherwise. We both lived in the same city for six years and had mutual-mutual friends, never met, so I'm very grateful they were able to find the needle in the haystack was looking for.   [0:17:55] Taylor Gibb: Most definitely, and there's an app for everything. You've got your Bumble BFF. You've got your Bumble for business. I just heard today about a new app called [Tudder], which is Tinder for cows, and if you're looking to breed your cow-   [0:18:08] PJ Bruno: [Exsqueeze] me?   [0:18:08] Taylor Gibb: ... You get online, and you find a... On Tudder, you can swipe, say, "This looks like the steer for my particular cow."   [0:18:16] PJ Bruno: But how do cows even use apps?   [0:18:20] Jordan: Is it the farmer looking for the best lady cow?   [0:18:23] Taylor Gibb: I like to think it is just a cow that's swiping over there. He's got his big hoof, and he's like, “Oh, no, no. This will never do.” [crosstalk]   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: What are the pictures of? It's just-   [0:18:31] Taylor Gibb: They're of the cows. It's absolutely 100% Tinder, just with cows.   [0:18:35] PJ Bruno: Is it like a group of cows, and you have to guess which cow is the one?   [0:18:40] Taylor Gibb: Yep, and it's always the shortest cow, isn't it?   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Exactly.   [0:18:42] Taylor Gibb: Always the shortest cow.   [0:18:43] PJ Bruno: It's always-   [0:18:43] Jordan: Taylor, how did you find this? Did you product hunt this, or is this from experience [crosstalk]   [0:18:49] PJ Bruno: This is a good question.   [0:18:49] Taylor Gibb: Yeah. You know, we're actually trying to get them in as a client for next year, so thanks so much.   [0:18:53] PJ Bruno: Tudder.   [0:18:54] Taylor Gibb: I've just been doing Tudder.   [0:18:55] PJ Bruno: We got our eye on you.   [0:18:56] Taylor Gibb: Look out. We're going to be sending notifications. Is your cow lonely?   [0:19:00] PJ Bruno: You know, just real briefly, I want to come back... I love that whole idea because Hinge says designed to be deleted. Right?   [0:19:07] Taylor Gibb: Yes.   [0:19:07] PJ Bruno: That's their tagline.   [0:19:09] Taylor Gibb: That's it.   [0:19:09] PJ Bruno: I love that that's their mission and standpoint, is to get everyone to get off of it. I don't really buy it, especially now that they're acquired by Match Group, which is this big, huge, monster Frankenstein company, so I just... My question is, how do you build customer loyalty? Right? It's by building brilliant experiences. Right? So, what does loyalty look like in this industry? How is loyalty fostered in an app like this?   [0:19:38] Taylor Gibb: Oh, definitely, and it's funny too because we've got these preferences, but more and more, it's preferences within this Match monopoly. Right? I like OkCupid. I like Hinge. Match says, “That's great. It's all under us. Come on in.” Yeah, fostering loyalty, and then also, there is somewhat distressingly now this price put on things like a super like, or a boost. It's like, not only do I like you, Jordan, but I'm willing to pay an extra $2.00 to show you how much I like you.   [0:20:06] Jordan: Listen, that was before my time. That didn't exist back in the day.   [0:20:12] Taylor Gibb: Do you think Tristan would've dropped a couple of bucks to say hi to you?   [0:20:14] PJ Bruno: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Taylor Gibb: $2.00?   [0:20:14] Jordan: I think he did pay to be anonymous, so you couldn't see how often he looked at someone's profile. I didn't know that existed, so there might be some people out there that knew I was heavily stalking them.   [0:20:25] Taylor Gibb: They're like, “Rockjock?”   [0:20:27] Jordan: Oh, my gosh.   [0:20:27] Taylor Gibb: Didn't you view my profile 20 times?   [0:20:27] Jordan: Okay. This is getting too real. No, but to answer your question, PJ, this is something I actually thought a lot about. As a customer success team, we were doing some workshops, just trying to think about the user lifecycle across different verticals, and we were doing data apps at one point, and this is something that I think is so critical to think of as a marketer, but also as a person, is that it can be an exhilarating experience. I got in at a really good time, I found my person, I got out. It was great. It can be an incredibly lonely experience, especially if you're somebody who is putting yourself out there and being vulnerable, and maybe not getting the number of people interested in you that you'd hoped for, or the quality of people that you'd hoped for. I think that it's imperative that these companies remember that their relationship is with the person using their app, in that when you're the person that's bestowing all these amazing compliments, you can also be incredibly silent unintentionally, and so something that I like to think about is today is Valentine's Day. This can be a really tough day for some people, so use what you have. You have the ability to talk to them. Talk to them and remind them how many people swiped on them in the last year, how many people liked their photo, or how many people did they end up getting to see to build their community, things that you're in control of that aren't necessarily how hot did people think you are, or how many people wanted to go on a date that you said no to, weirdly, vanity metrics. Use what you have at your disposal-   [0:21:53] PJ Bruno: Totally.   [0:21:53] Taylor Gibb: Literally.   [0:21:53] Jordan: ... And truly build a relationship that you can, which can be either the comforter or the cheerleader, or both.   [0:22:00] PJ Bruno: So, so well said, Jordan. I love that message to everyone out there. You know, we're in the world of automation, and it's going to make our lives continually easier and easier, but let's not forget, along the way somewhere, we can lose something as well. So, on Valentine's Day, reach out to those loved ones, even if it's over the phone. Try to-   [0:22:19] Taylor Gibb: Even if it's in a push notification.   [0:22:20] PJ Bruno: Even if it's in a push notification that's triggered in realtime or near realtime. Who's to say?   [0:22:25] Jordan: Be good to yourself, too. I think it's a love day. Love can be everything, but love should also point right back at you.   [0:22:32] Taylor Gibb: Well, I can't-   [0:22:33] Jordan: Getting sentimental there.   [0:22:34] Taylor Gibb: That's good. It's Valentine's Day. It's the day to be sappy, and quite honestly, we can end it on that note.   [0:22:41] PJ Bruno: I'd love to end it on that note. This has been beautiful, you guys. Happy Valentine's Day to you both-   [0:22:46] Taylor Gibb: [crosstalk] Happy Valentine's Day.   [0:22:49] PJ Bruno: ... And happy Valentine's Day to all you out there.   [0:22:50] Taylor Gibb: All you listeners out there.   [0:22:52] PJ Bruno: This is PJ Bruno-   [0:22:53] Taylor Gibb: Taylor Gibb.   [0:22:54] Jordan: And I'm Jordan.   [0:22:56] PJ Bruno: Thanks a lot for coming with us, guys, and take care. [0:22:58]

Episode Description: Welcome to another episode of The Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast! In this episode, Rob interviews the author of the best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, clinical psychologist Jordan Peters. Rob and Jordan cover predictors for entrepreneurial success, the importance of dynamic opposition in a business partnership, and just how crucial marketing and sales skills really are, even for creative artists. Together, Rob and Jordan break down the necessary evils of proper scheduling, the benefits of selling directly to consumers, and why you should always have someone around to say no. Key Takeaways: When analyzing potential business success, Jordan breaks things down into these categories: -Simple jobs: Where you train and then repeat what you've learned. Intelligence predicts how fast someone can learn a simple job but their levels of conscientiousness predict how well they will do it. -Complex jobs: Involve demands that change on a regular basis and cannot ever be fully “learned.” According to Jordan, IQ is the main predictor of success in a complex job. Jordan then breaks things down further into two very different business temperaments: -Managerial and administrative: Conservative, skeptical, organized, risk-averse, who are much more likely to say “no.” -Entrepreneurial: Liberal, excited, creative, lateral-thinking, risk-takers who are trait-open. Jordan explains that one is not inherently better than the other, but that both of these types of people need each other in order to operate a successful business. Creativity, inspiration, and energy are crucial elements but that creativity needs to be organized and focused. Rob agrees and points out that,  “Entrepreneurs tend to hire versions of themselves at first, instead of being more self-aware and like, ‘I'm chaotic and disruptive and what I need is order.'” But he also emphasizes not going too far in the other direction and getting held back by a stifling managerial influence. Rob and Jordan then transition to the importance of knowing how to properly sell a product and understanding that making a good product is only the beginning of a very long road. The assumption that a good product will sell itself is just not true. However, Jordan warns that trying to sell your product through a big company instead also has drawbacks, mainly that they are naturally risk-averse, move very slowly, and may never even happen at all. Instead, Rob advocates for selling directly to consumers because: -You're always at the decisionmaker -You get near-immediate feedback -It can be more rewarding knowing your product will change an individual's life Jordan agrees with this but also says that if you're selling directly then you absolutely have to understand how essential sales and marketing are. Jordan continues on saying that the artists and creatives who have contempt for the “business end” of things are only going to hurt themselves and never see any proper monetization from their creative works. Rob's solution for people who struggle with marketing and sales? Find someone who can: “To anyone listening who isn't really a natural sales or marketing person, partner or align with someone who is and you'll probably make a great team.” From there Rob and Jordan agree that dynamic opposition makes for good business balance, someone who's there to dream big and take risks and someone who can be conscientious and know when to say “no.” Having too many people with either personality in one company is never going to end well. They briefly switch to the value of structure and being held to a schedule, and if you can't be held to a schedule, finding someone who CAN hold you accountable to it. In short, in order to give your business the best opportunity for success, have people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Managerial, conservative types may feel constraining, but often that constraint can hold you back from making mistakes and provide protection. Best Moments: Rob: “Your downfall is likely to be organizational administrative ability. So it's often useful for entrepreneurial types to pair themselves with administrative types.” Jordan: “Most new ideas are stupid, dangerous, and counterproductive.” Rob: “And they're the ones that change the world!” Jordan: “If you're a naive entrepreneur, you think ‘well, all I have to do is make a great product.' No, that's about five percent of it!” Jordan: “It's really, really hard to be a good salesperson. And people like that are unbelievably rare and unbelievably valuable.” Rob: “Discipline, while it's hard, it's rewarding at the end when you feel that sense of deep happiness when you've gone through it.” Valuable Resources: https://robmoore.com/ https://robmoore.com/podcast/ The Money Podcast - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-money-podcast/id1358672174?mt=2 Money: Know More, Make More, Give More - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Money-Know-More-Make-Give/dp/1473641322/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1530197747&sr=1-1&refnements=p_27%3ARob+Moore Jordan's book: 12 Rules for Life - https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0345816021 Jordan's site for personality evaluations for better personal success - https://www.understandmyself.com/  About the Host: Rob Moore is the host of the UK's no. 1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur,” as well as an entrepreneur, property investor, property educator, and holder of 3 world records for public speaking. He is also the author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, and the global bestseller, Life Leverage. “If you don't risk anything, you risk everything” About the Guest: Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He is a frequent lecturer and author of the best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which has sold over two million copies since its release in January 2018. Contact Rob: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/robmooreprogressive/?ref=br_rs LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Staying relevant. Embracing technology to increase efficiency. Investing the time it takes to improve. Attorney and cultural ambassador at his firm in Tacoma, Washington, Jordan Couch connects with with Mark and offers his perspective on what a law firm can become simply by looking at everything a bit differently. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Hello, welcome to another episode of ALPS in Brief, the ALPS risk management podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS home office in the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS risk manager. I have the pleasure today of sitting down with Jordan Couch. Jordan is an attorney and cultural ambassador at Palace Law. He has done some writing on redefining lawyers and we're just going to have a conversation today about relevancy. Jordan, before we jump into our conversation, would you take a few minutes and just share a little bit about yourself and can you kind of fill us in on what's this cultural ambassador all about? JORDAN: Yeah, so I actually grew up out in eastern Montana, so part of me wishes I was in Missoula right now. But I am a plaintiffs workers compensation personal injury attorney out in Tacoma, Washington these days. In my office I carry a few roles, but the main one is I'm an attorney. And then in addition to that, I am the cultural ambassador of the firm. What that comes from is a couple years ago, the management team sat down at the firm and decided we needed to lay out what our mission is, what our values are, who we really are as a firm and we need to define that. Our mission is to help the injured and every community and we have a list of seven core values that we think help us do that. My job is to make sure that we are living up to that as a firm and that we are promoting ourselves based on that, and kind of conversing about that. Because it's one thing to define your values and your mission, it's another to live them. And so, my job comes from everything from talking about it to others, to making sure that when we hire people on, they're people that share our values and are going to stay with us because they believe in those values. And also, encouraging conversation right and in the office. We have monthly values that we kind of focus on. We talk about them and share stories about them. And then I'm also around encouraging people whenever they want to try something new in the office or pitch a case to take, or new idea for the office. I tell them make sure you put it in terms of these values and sell that to the team and talk about it that way and have it be a part of our everyday life, instead of something that we define and set aside. That's that job. MARK: Yeah, no, I really like that. It's a tangent here for a moment, but you find businesses of all types, to include law firms. But just sitting down and talking about mission statements and all these kinds of things. It's one thing to kind of do the preliminary work of defining who you want to be, and it's another thing to walk the walk consistently, day after day, throughout the year, year after year. I love that. That's a great idea. JORDAN: Yeah, it's unique position and it's taken some trial and error, but we're making new efforts on it. We constantly try it and we have to find ways to encourage people to talk about it every day. So, we have big posters around the office too, the talk about the values and are posted up everywhere. So, you can't walk into the opposite of seeing them, and our clients see them the second they walk into our office too. MARK: Very good. One of my interests in again having this discussion, yeah, I do over the years, quite a bit of CLEs and a lot of consulting. But in a number of the CLE programs we do, and we tend to focus on risk management, malpractice of wings, ethics, that kind of thing. But in recent years, I've been setting up some high bows and just talking about changes in the law. I find it interesting when I talk about the rise of Avvo advisors and example, or Legal Zoom, you see so many lawyers really starting to get, I don't know if it's threatened or upset. To my surprise, one of the comments that keeps coming up over and over again these lawyers get up and they'll say, because we're on a panel typically with bar council or ethics council and this kind of thing, they'll start yelling at the bar, "It's your job to fix this. To do something. It's the unauthorized practice law go out and make these entities go away." And we all sit here kind of ... It's it's not the role of the bar to do that, obviously. But we sit here and say, "These guys just aren't getting it." Law is changing and evolving very, very rapidly. Now I'm not here to say that's a good or a bad thing. I have my opinions about it, but I sit and say these guys that had these kinds of opinions in from my perspective seem to just not understand. I understand that they're frightened by it, but they don't see how they fit in going forward. And so, the answer is to bury their head and trail others to try to make this go away. You and I both know that just isn't going to happen. So, sort of with that premise, you know, speaking to the solo small firm lawyers in particular, what thoughts do you have about how to stay relevant? What does it look like? You've been referred to as a lawyer futurist as well. Can you kind of start to navigate this direction for us? JORDAN: Yeah. So, there's a lot there to talk about. I always begin with telling lawyers that at the end of the day, right now we are bad at what we do. Because you ask lawyers, and I've done surveys, "What do you do?" And they say, "Oh, we're protectors and we're problem solvers and we're helpers." But over 75% of legal needs go unmet. Now not only is that kind of a shame and a stain on our profession, but at the same time, that's a huge market that is untapped. Those are people out there that have legal needs that want us to do the things that people pay us to do, and we're not doing it. And so, I think solo and small firms especially are in a good opportunity because they're flexible. That's part of why I like working in a smaller firm. We can go after that marketplace. And so, instead of seeing Avvo and legalism competitors, think of them as people with really good ideas we should steal from, and then go after that same market. Because at the end of the day, they're not going after the clients that we fight over. Most law firms fight over 10% of the clients. The rest of us fight over the other 15% of the clients, and then 75% is just out there waiting for someone. They're not people that can't afford an attorney. I do continuously work, everyone can afford me. But it's their legal needs, that just tend to go unmet. The first thing I always tell people is this is opportunity. The way you have to go about addressing this is instead of looking at people as competitors going against your business, redefine your business. Because if your business is writing stock, wills and trusts for people, your business will die and it will die soon. It's time you need to start inventing new ways to better serve clients. To not only go after that 75% of people that are not tapped into, but also to do your own work more efficiently and make more money of the work you're doing and have a better work, life balance and a better life. Solo and small firm attorneys are highly overworked and do a lot of administrative stuff that they're not trained to do that they don't enjoy doing, and there's a lot of opportunity there. One of my favorite examples is actually a friend of mine, Forest Carlson, who is a wills and trusts attorney. He looked at our legal zoom and looked at Avvo inside of this was competing against him by offering low cost services. So, he built his own website, washingtonwills.com or wa-wills.com, that allows people to create a will online, on their own, and it's completely free. So, he's undercutting legal zoom, he's undercutting Avvo and serving these people. But what happens when things get a little complex and they can't do it on their own? Is they get routed to him to hire an attorney, and they want his services. They've already got the basics of work done, so he gets to focus on the higher-level work. Or as I like to call it, practicing at the top of my degree. MARK: Interesting. So, he's using this tool then, as I understand it, as sort of a screening. It's going out and finding the clients for him, and at the same time providing a service. JORDAN: Absolutely. We have a similar thing on out office we've just launched, what we call the Patbot, because my boss's name is Patrick. It's a robot on the front page of our website. It's right next to a calculator that will tell you how much your case is worth for free. And then it's this robot that will look through your case and talk to you about it and tell you know where your case is, what steps you need to take, because it gives us more informed customers coming to us. Some people will look at that and say, Oh, I can do all of those things and they'll go and do it. And those are the clients we don't want in the first place. Because they'd be mad at the end and saying, "Well, you didn't do anything. Why am I paying you?" Right? MARK: Right. JORDAN: I could have done this on my own. Now they know exactly what we're going to do, and they know when it's done in their case. And if we can't offer value to them, they're not going to hire us. But if they look at that and say, "I want someone else to do this." Then they come to hire us in there. We get better clients and we get to focus on the more intricate interesting legal work. MARK: Helped me understand sort of the journey that you guys took. What I'm trying to understand is, what advice do you have if I'm sitting here saying, "Okay, I need to be something different. I'm stuck." In other words. What can you share from for folks just saying, "Okay, I kind of get the gist of it, but I have no clue how to move forward here." JORDAN: First thing is to just stop. You're going to have to stop and take time and kind of take a leap of faith in this system that mean something. Where our office began is my boss had been you know bar president for a while and he'd been speaking about these issues. I had been in law school with some really great mentors that had taught me about these issues in the legal profession, got me looking at this. He finished up his term and a little while later I came into the office and we had a lot of good innovative people in the office had supported this idea. We sat down, and it was just time to say, "Okay, what do we need to do differently? How can we do things differently?" We decided to take a step back from our work and actually invest time in what needs to be done now. It takes an initial investment and it takes looking out there and kind of asking yourself, "What am I doing that I don't like doing? What am I doing that I don't need to be doing? What are the things I like least in the day?" And we actually did surveys in our office asking the entire staff, "What don't you like about your job? What is your biggest hindrances?" Start by identifying those and as you start listing those out, ask yourself, "What do I have to keep doing then? Can I outsource this? Can I automate this?" And that's just the beginning of it, right? Of looking at just the things you don't like. And then there a lot of things that can be done about this. There are a lot of processes that can be learned on designed thinking, where you start focusing on what your clients need and try and get their perspective and getting them involved in the process. But it really begins with just sitting down and taking time to think and taking time to act creatively and practice creativity. There are a lot of books on how to kind of train yourself to be creative, and I taught a CLE where we talked about that a little bit. But they are little things. Like just practice coming up with crazy ideas, like what would be a really weird practice area? Like what if I wanted to be a food lawyer? Or what if I wanted to go out and invent you know the next Legal Zoom, right? Just come up with these crazy ideas. Or, have a robot that would answer all my clients/ questions, right? MARK: Right. JORDAN: Some of them will be impossible, but some of them will start to turn into really good ideas and can be developed. Don't be afraid to test things. I think one of the biggest hindrances that lawyers face is they're afraid of failure. At the end of the day, as long as you are afraid of failure, you will never innovate. Because you have to be open to it and recognize it. Because what happens if you're not open to failure is you don't catch on to it quickly enough, because you don't admit that you failed. Whereas in our office, our goal is to fail as fast as possible, right? So, if this isn't working, we want to identify it right away, so we can adjust and try something different. And we do that a lot. I'll give one example on that. We spent a lot of time trying to kind of get our clients to call us less, because that was a big hindrance. We noticed in our surveys, there's just lots of client calls coming in. We thought, "What if we made it easier for them to communicate with us?" So, we spent a lot of effort into systems that allowed them to have a portal to communicate with us. Email, phone calls, letters. We allowed them to text us and made it easier for that to happen. We did all this work, and calls didn't go down at all. Okay. What's wrong here? Soon we went back to our clients to kind of asked them as part of the design thinking process, like why are you calling so much? We started looking at and we realized what they're calling is they're afraid of things. They're on workers' compensation. They want to know when their check is coming in, and that's every two weeks. And so, they're calling every day. Check every two weeks, right? Is my check here, as my check here? And we thought, "Well, why don't we just tell them when it's here?" We took the tools we built in that whole project that was something of a failure, and kind of rehabbed them into a system. And now, our clients get automatic notifications of updates in their case. And those calls went down a lot quickly. MARK: Yeah. Interesting. What I hear is, we ... I really like this because we're talking about redesigning the entire delivery system as opposed to, can I get a new computer and some new software and try to be a little more efficient? That this is not throwing a little money and try and create, and there's nothing wrong with creating efficiencies, but what I'm hearing is we're really talking about total redesign and questioning, challenging our own assumptions about how law should be delivered how the legal services should be delivered. I really like that. Can I also have you comment a little bit, I noted in your article you were talking about, and you mentioned this earlier, this 25% is the traditional client base we are all competing over, and you have kind of looked at and talked about collaborative efforts here. Can you kind of explain where you're going with that? JORDAN: Yeah, there's a couple things to say on that. One is, you talked about kind of redesigning it. I like to talk about this concept called reframing, which is a new method of problem solving. Most lawyers, the older model was you have this problem, you apply this solution and it's the solution your dad applied when he was a lawyer, right? And it goes back and back. Now you've got the more innovative attorneys out there that are applying like what different solutions can I have to this problem? Reframing is about taking a step back further than that and saying, "Am I solving the right problem? If you look at in the legal new study in Washington, low income families had on average more than nine legal problems in a given year. Solving those problems doesn't solve anything. You have to step back and say. "What's really going on here?" And really investigate what's happening. It's hard to do that as an attorney. That's one way that collaboration really comes in and is important. You have to bring in outside people to work with things on you. In our office, we have a project manager whose job is just to find ways for us to do things better. She has legal experience and then she's been in our office for a while, but she has no legal training. She's not a paralegal, she is just someone who is in charge of projects. She runs a team that brings in stakeholders from around the office from different departments to try to find better ways to do things, because it's really hard as a lawyer to think of something new. We've gone to law school for three years, we've had internships, we've trained on this old model and to come up with new ideas is cognitively almost impossible in some ways. But if you have someone come in who has no training in this and says, "Wait, why are you doing this?" It gets a lot easier. And so, there's that collaboration. Collaborating with lawyers outside of your community, there is a growing movement of phenomenal attorneys all over this country and out of the country that are doing amazing things. Little things just in their office that can make a big impact if they become more broadly accepted. The nice thing about this is, they're not competitive people. I think those who in this community have realized that a rising tide raises all ships, right? We all work together on this. I've found, I've been traveling around the country a lot over the last year and meeting with people. Everyone I meet with has been phenomenal, and we work together on projects, and we find ways to make all of us have a better relationship with our clients, better services for our clients. We share ideas, we work together on things. In our office we've worked with outside partners too. We have I think five tech companies right now that we're collaborating with. And we're collaborating with Suffolk Laws IT Lab, because of a friend of mine there who's a professor there. So, lawyers don't have all the answers and it helps to have outside people come in. One of the more remarkable experiences I had that kind of led me down this path is about three years ago when I went to a legal hackathon that we did. It was amazing to see all these lawyers come here and present these problems that they saw is really complex problems and have the tech people in the coders that's there say, "Well, that's really easy. Why haven't you done that already?" MARK: I love it. I'm also, as you're aware, a risk guy and something of a tech. When you think about just your own experiences here, are there I guess some tech tools or risk advice that you might share for people thinking about moving in this kind of direction, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel? JORDAN: Yeah. One thing I actually like to talk to people a lot in this kind of new future model of legal services is trying to commodities legal services. There's a good reason for that. If you look at the legal system, it's a very unique and bizarre market where everything is based on ours. And so, imagine if you went to Amazon and you bought a package and they charged you for how long would take them to mail the package to you, and you may or may not get that package. That's the legal system in a nutshell, and it's because lawyers don't know what their services are worth and that's a problem. And so, when I tell people to look at this, I tell them to try to find ways to commoditize, to really define and market. It's not they're hiring this attorney for their expertise, they're hiring this firm to provide the product that this firm provides. One thing that's really essential for that is having systems in place and definable measurable systems, so that every client comes in and gets service that will be on timelines, that will be on specific things. That's a huge bonus for risk management, because the biggest risk is human error in everything that you do. If you have, in our office with workers compensation, we have a lot of issues that have statute limitations and we might have 10, 20 things at a time on my table easily that have statute of limitations that I need to address, that could be harmful for my client if I don't That's a lot for a human being to manage. We used to have it documented written down multiple places and there was human checks and a lot of room for errors, and that's Bad. Because the more humans touching a system, the more room for error there is. So now, we created actually automated systems for all of that, for all of our kind of regulatory stuff, so that every time a letter comes in that we have to respond to within a certain timeline, it automatically creates tasks in our practice management system which is Cleo. It automatically creates cards on our workflow system which is Trello, which is kind of a visual workflow system. And, it automatically notifies us of all this and creates notifications with deadlines attached to them, so we can see the deadline coming up. This is all automated so that we don't have to worry about, oh, did this person into the wrong date here the wrong date here? Everything's done automatically. There are human checks on that because you don't want to get rid of humans entirely and just trust machines. But it's all automated for us and that allows us to provide a better, more safe system for our clients where they can know that we are on top of everything that comes through us. We do the same for just staying on top of cases. We have technology aided systems for our file review process to go over all of our cases, to make sure we're managing them on a regular timeline. The technology really helps with that. Again, started looking at what are the things we hated doing, and a lot of people said, "Well, all this manual you know, data entry. I really hate doing that."  Thought, but that's an easy thing to automate. I call it being you know tech enabled lawyer. MARK: Yeah. Sort of a final question from myself and I'll give you a second to have any closing thoughts, excuse me. There are a lot of lawyers out there that I have worked with it are what I would describe perhaps it's mid-career or a little bit further beyond, as opposed to the millennials just starting out in so many ways. When you think about all that you're talking about here, are these opportunities really limited to the millennial group? Or, if I'm in my 40s or 50s can I still do this if I'm somebody who's not highly trained with tech and comfortable? Do you have any thoughts about that? Because I do see at times when lawyers just say, "I don't understand any of this." JORDAN: It takes a little more work. Although I know millennials that are not good at this, but I think millennials are a little better poised for this growing up, kind of in this tech generation of being taught to kind of question some of these ways the legal profession has worked before. But my boss is in his 40s or 50s, I can't remember which for, and he does this. What it takes is not necessarily having all the skills to do it, but having the knowledge to say, "I need to do something differently. What can I do differently?" And then going out find people because at the end of the day, you don't have to be the expert on all these things. There are some who disagree with me on this, but I don't think every lawyer should learn how to code. I don't think lawyers need to have all these skills. They just need to have a baseline so that they can get into a situation and know who they need to talk to, and how to find the experts. So, we have a big data analytics project in our office that we've been working on for a while. It's been kind of a pipe dream of mine. I was lucky enough to make some friends at Suffolk who I of course couldn't do all the coding and build the algorithms for this, but they did, they could. They said, "Well, can we do this as part of our class? As part of our education for our students.?" And I was of course happy to say yes, you want to do my work for me? That's a pretty good deal. And we've kind of built in that partnership, just because they have the skills that I don't have. We have people in our office whose jobs is just working with tech and working with client relationships, things that are not legal, because those are the things we don't know. I'd say a simple analogy that I think attorneys will understand a little better is, how many of you run your own marketing campaigns versus hire someone to consult with you on marketing a little bit? Tech is no different. Or, how many of you have accountants that you go to, right? Tech is no different than that. It seems different because it's scary and it's new, and I understand that fear. But at the end of the day, if you can hire an accountant, you can hire a tech expert to come in and help you. If they can't demonstrate the value to you, then it's not the right expert. MARK: That's an important takeaway for me. Because I do think lots of lawyers that have not quite grown up in the way that my own [inaudible 00:23:22] and I'm in my late 50s now. In terms of our children's generation, computers are a very different thing. I do feel, lawyers, we are taught to problem solve and to be creative, some of us anyway. To have the ability to take the leap of faith, you don't have to be a computer whiz kid to do this stuff. It's about having the idea, that's what I'm hearing, and then finding the right people to help you make that idea a reality through testing and talking to your clients. But I like that, it's a hopeful thing to me. Do you have any final comments you'd like to share before we wrap up? JORDAN: I don't think I said it yet, but there's one other thing that I think is important to this as well. MARK: Yes, please. JORDAN: Is having a culture. Because sometimes I meet attorneys and one attorney will say, "Yeah, I really love this idea, but I don't know how to convince the other partners in my office." Or, "I don't think my staff would get on board with this." MARK: Real good point. JORDAN: I mentioned earlier, you have to demonstrate the value to people. If you can't go to them and say, "Here's the time you're saving. Here's the value you're getting out of this product, you're never going to get buy in." People always ask me like how do I convince people to do this. Don't convince anyone. Because if you're convincing, you're starting off on the wrong foot. Show them the value. Build a culture around this where people can communicate with each other and work together on things, so that you see the issues as they arise. And if you have to be convincing people rather than them coming it because they see the value of it, then it's not going to work. It takes buy in from team. One really helpful way to do that is go out to them and it really do, just ask them like, "What don't you like? What do you wish you didn't have to do every day? What do you wish was easier for you? How can I make that happen?" Because if you get that kind of buy in or people feel ownership of it, they really take to it and they really get excited about it. We have the first of our core values, although I wouldn't say that any is more important than others is being creative, innovative and adaptable. That's really important in client service. Because if you're going to be asked, "Why should this client hire you instead of the other 15 firms in there that do the exact same type of law?" I would like to tell my clients, "Everyone else cares, everyone else does these things, but I'm going to provide a team of creative, innovative adaptive people who are going to invent new ways to better serve you." MARK: Yeah, that's an important point. Thank you for sharing that. We are out of time. I would like to say thanks to Jordan. It really has been a pleasure. I've enjoyed our conversation today. To our listeners, I hope you found something of value out of the conversation. If in future any of you have any ideas for a topic or if you have questions or concerns you'd like to see addressed in one of these podcasts, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye bye. JORDAN: Thanks so much. Jordan L. Couch is an attorney and cultural ambassador at Palace Law practicing plaintiff's workers' compensation and PI litigation. He's been called a legal futurist for the work he does both in and out of the office seeking out new ways to build a more modern, client-centric law practice. Contact him at jordan@palacelaw.com or on social media @jordanlcouch.

Is Jordan Clearly better? Can LeBron surpass Jordan? It's always fun when we debate, but who's the winner? You decide! Let us know on social media or shoot us an email. Jago M. and J. Smooth will be sure to respond and let you know what's up! Links: http://www.areyouhearingthispod.com http://www.theringer.com/2017/11/27/16705730/welcome-to-the-j-j-redick-podcast

This episode is brought to you by The Kolada Group. Today, I’m talking about scheduling using Acuity. My guest is Nicole Holland, who is a podcaster and coach for podcasters.   Topics: (:31) Intro – Systems Saved Me Summit (1:45) Meeting Nicole (4:17) Podcast Pitching System (9:06) #1 tool (13:38) Ninja trick (14:42) Email game changer (16:14) Automation (20:41) Favorite Acuity features (26:29) Zoom + Acuity (31:53) Sales calls (37:07) What’s not to love? (38:16) Best financial investment (41:19) Worst financial investment (42:38) Finding Nicole   Quotes of the Week: “No matter who you are, you have a schedule. So it’s important for you to manage your time and to understand the best ways for you to be in control of your calendar instead of your calendar controlling you.”– Jordan “It’s the best thing –it’s my number one system or tool for being an entrepreneur online.”–Nicole   Resources: www.systemssavedmesummit.com www.interviewsthatconvert.com/systems  https://www.facebook.com/groups/businessbuildingrockstars/  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode is brought to you by The Kolada Group. Today, I’m talking about how you know when to hire. Topics: (:31) Intro – Systems Saved Me Summit (3:00) Hiring quadrant (5:49) 1st vs. 4th quadrant (6:36) When do you hire? (8:00) Look at your time (9:40) Worth the money (11:10) Criteria and value (12:02) Ask yourself (12:34) Jordan’s hires (14:54) Referrals and help   Quotes of the Week: “When you need to hire is when you’re making sales and you don’t have enough time to make more sales” - Jordan “It’s important to have those people in your business so that you can stay in your zone of genius.” - Jordan   Resources: Systems Saved Me Summit See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode is brought to you by The Kolada Group. Today, I’m talking about my success sabbatical.   Topics: (:30) Intro (:59) Systems Saved Me Summit (2:31) Time for a sabbatical (5:02) Going home (7:06) Biggest takeaway (8:05) Jordan’ s new schedule (10:20) Breaking habits (10:59) Tracking your time (12:30) Shifting your business (14:42) Time and energy over money (16:44) Success sabbatical wrap-up   Quotes of the Week: “I wanted to take the time to go inward and take the time to understand that ‘ today, presently Jordan Gill wants to work this way because this is the way that will serve her the most’ .”–Jordan “It’ s important to shed light on the dark...Let’ s bring it to the light and make the change now.”–Jordan   Resources: System Saved Me Summit See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mary Katharine Ham drops by to chat about political tribes, Disney princesses and more on this week’s episode of the Paradox Podcast. She explains why Twitter isn’t the best way to share your political views and what she thinks of people who line up out the door for cupcakes. Terrible Opinions Mary Katharine shares three terrible opinions for good measure. MK: 1) I want to heckle people who line up for cupcakes as if it’s a rock concert when cupcakes aren’t actually good. 2) I like cicadas because they signify summer to me. 3) I’m a big fan of Cleatus the FOX Sports robot. Jordan: It’s OK to mute people on Twitter to filter your timeline as long as you still see tweets from people from both “sides.” Matthias: We need a Twitter option that alerts you when accounts you follow go silent for a long time. Tribal politics Matthias opens up the discussion about political tribes by talking about his own experience trying to live in two different worlds when it comes to ideology. He points out that the gap isn’t between social and fiscal conservatives but between people on the right who believe in a particular ideology and people who are simply partisan. Mary Katharine talks about what needs to happen for people of all political ideologies to be able to talk to each other. Political rhetoric has only become angrier after the shooting in Virginia last week where a gunman seemed to be specifically targeting GOP lawmakers. Can we do better? We talk about why the left needs to welcome liberal evangelicals instead of alienating people of faith by being illiterate when it comes to religion. Jordan mentions the case of the Obama White House staffer who used the biblical reference “the least of these” and was asked over and over if it was a typo. ‘How Far I’ll Go’ Time for the important topic: Disney princess movies. Mary Katharine details her theory that “Frozen” is Disney’s version of “The Shining.” Desolate winter landscape? Check. Volatile main character who is a risk to family members? Double check. We talk about how dark “Frozen” and its Oscar-winning song “Let It Go” actually are. Mary Katharine talks about why “The Princess and the Frog” is her new favorite Disney movie and also explores the history of the classic “Sleeping Beauty.”

At Shopify Unite, we heard that Shopify is advancing their checkout process by adding new features like Shopify Pay. Advancement in the checkout process is great for merchants, and especially important for Shopify. It's important because the Shopify checkout process is tightly controlled. There's limited customization options, and unless you're on Shopify Plus, you're not given access to edit the checkout process. This brings us to a controversial point: is it not being able to edit that checkout process good or bad? And if we wanted to edit it, how could we do it? Then, what would do to improve the checkout process for the better? Joining me on the show to discuss it is Jordan Gal. Jordan is the Cofounder and CEO of CartHook, a software company that offers products that make your ecommerce business more successful. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: The coming battle for your Shopify checkout The arguments for and against replacing your Shopify checkout Customizations to consider that may improve conversion at checkout The one trend in ecommerce you need to know about The power of free plus shipping offers The strategy used by the most sophisticated Shopify store owners to dramatically increase ROI on ad spend Links Mentioned: CartHook Bold Apps Cashier (Beta) Zipify One Click Upsell Shopify Pay Address Auto Completion ClickFunnels Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: One of the interesting and perhaps blessed things that happen in Shopify is that unless you're on plus you can't mess with the checkout, and even on plus you can mess with it a little bit but totally rewriting the thing just probably isn't a great idea. The reason I say I like this about Shopify is the Shopify checkout is based on millions of data points, so in theory they're always optimizing this thing and we know it works well. I've seen really optimized stores with conversion rates at 3% and 5% and those that really juice their traffic to the store, conversion rates in the low double digits, so we know the checkout works. We've certainly seen it work a number of times, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve it, and not just in terms of conversion rate but there are other features maybe we would like to add to the checkout which would be cool. There's a controversial practice that happens and we'll go into why, but it's replacing the checkout. If you've ever used a subscription app, Bold app's recurring orders is a wonderful way to do subscription. It actually when someone goes through the checkout to place their subscription, it entirely circumvents the Shopify checkout, replaces it with Bold's that is just a duplicate. They have remade the standard Shopify checkout so that they can do their own payment processing, and then just funnels all that stuff back into your Shopify store via the API. It's kind of crazy and early on we were like, "Oh damn, that's how they solved that? That's nuts." And now we're seeing more people do it. You've probably heard about Ezra Firestone's Zipify, his company Zipify. Zipify's one click upsell. Bold Apps has one in beta. I've seen it enough places now I'm comfortable mentioning it, that we got a replacement called Bold Apps Cashier that's designed to try and pull all these things together, add a bunch of features to the checkout. And of course we have heard from him before. Jordan Gal from CartHook, who joins me today to talk about what's going on in this space, why and how it's heating up, and why it's controversial, what the trends are and what's going on. It's a more high level discussion but I think this should be very interesting. Jordan, welcome. Jordan: Thank you very much, Kurt. Thanks for having me on. I had to bite my tongue through the intro because I have a lot of interjections to make. Not disagreements but adding to the richness of the debate. How about that? I think we can get into it. I think it's a good, good topic. Kurt: I don't even know where I fall on this, so we'll see if you sway me. You probably will. You're a charismatic gentleman. Jordan: I don't even know if it's about swaying. It's a laissez faire argument. The checkout on Shopify right now is good. It converts well. Once people get into the checkout, it converts and it's standardized and it looks great on mobile and it's super stable and super fast, so there's not an argument to be made about how Shopify's checkout is terrible. That's not the argument. The argument is, should the eCommerce merchant have control over their checkout? And if so, then why? What are people trying to do with the checkout? And we saw the first rumblings of it with the subscription apps, and now it's starting to blossom a little bit in that space and we've got a few different companies playing in that space. Our company, CartHook, has a one page checkout and post purchase upsell app, and then Ezra's got OCU and then Bold's coming out, so it's getting interesting and my only argument is to let the merchant do what they want with their store. Kurt: When you phrase it like that then it's hard to argue with it. I'll play devil's advocate. The argument against it would be, protect people from themselves. If the checkout is based on ... It works and it's got these millions of data points, then lock it down. It's so important. Don't let people mess with it. But then I have said that and we've heard that on the show, but then I've also said if you want to add predictable, recurring revenue to your store, you should try selling subscriptions, in which case you got to replace the damn checkout. Jordan: And it may not even be like that forever. This very well may be a temporary period where things are in transition around the checkout. That's one of the things that we keep an eye on. We say to ourselves, how long does this last? This period where Shopify's checkout is locked down and then people are replacing it. Maybe there's something that we're transitioning into with some of Shopify's new APIs that allow for more features to be built into the Shopify checkout instead of replacing. I think it's a very fluid thing. To back up a touch, our product, it originated years ago when I ran an eCommerce business on Volusion where I ran the company with my three brothers. One brother was in charge of getting traffic to the store. I was in charge of converting that traffic into sales, and my other brother was in charge of everything that happened after the sale, from customer service to shipping, inventory, and so forth. So I spent my days staring at, okay, how do I convert more of this traffic into sales? The truth is I spent a considerable amount of my time on the checkout process or the cart page and the checkout page and trust symbols and error notifications and as everyone knows, every little tweak can make a difference. Sometimes you don't know which tweak makes a difference so you start off with your best practices and you make it super simple, and then you start to work from there and a lot of unexpected things happen. That's where it originated and now what we're really doing is we're bringing that same mindset and that same situation into Shopify. We're saying what works for one store may not be optimal for another store, so let's give control over to the merchant to experiment. Kurt: If we hand control over to the merchant, what are the things that people are going to do? What are they missing out on now that they could be doing if they had access to this checkout, or swap it to one of these other replacements such as CartHook? Jordan: We're seeing it happen in two different ways. The first is on the checkout page itself, and the second is what's happening after the checkout. I don't even know where we should focus first. I guess the first one's almost easier. Kurt: We'll do it in order. Jordan: Sure. I think it's more straightforward too and then the second part that the upsells after the purchase go deeper, so we can go deeper into that side. The first part is the checkout page itself. Shopify has a three step checkout and it's debatable whether or not that is the right way to go compared to a one page checkout. These days with more and more traffic and more and more conversions happening on mobile, you want it to be as fast as possible. Again, it's not straightforward that a one page checkout is faster and easier and converts better, but you can't tell without experimentation. What our customers are doing is they're trying to match up their checkout page with their brand so that it's on their own domain and it has trust symbols, testimonials, images, design that match the rest of the company's site so that there's a consistency from the product page to the cart page to the checkout page and then that consistency is generally understood to help conversions. Kurt: So the first is we want access to design for two reasons. One to make it match the store so you have a cohesive experience. You don't have this jarring, suddenly I'm on a different domain name with a different feel, a different look entirely. That's usually the first objection is listen, I just want this thing to look the same. Okay, cool. Then the second would be, all right, you're asking a lot saying to a stranger, "Hey, give me your credit card details and your home address, buddy." That's a big ask, so you want to add some psychological triggers in there like social proof, trust indicators. Even just, "Hey, if you have questions call us. Here's our toll free number." That kind of thing. Then of course remove all the friction. Make it as easy to use as possible. Add fancy features like address auto-completion would be a not atypical customization we see. Jordan: Yeah, and along with that just the desire to experiment with whether or not one page checkout will convert better for you than the multistep, and it's not straightforward. Kurt: It really does depend on the audience, because before we hitched our cart and did only Shopify, and obviously this was years ago so things have changed wildly, but we saw situations where some stores did better where you gave people the option to register as customers versus be guests. Some stores did better when you did one page checkout versus multistep. It really was dependent on the audience. Jordan: Yeah, it makes sense and that's what we're seeing too. It is not a straightforward, the second you add a one page checkout it converts better. It's not straightforward like that, so it's an experimentation piece. Kurt: And the end goal there to have those options, to have those features, is to increase the conversion rate. We make it as easy as possible, remove all those barriers, all that friction and we just make it easier for people to buy, and in theory our purchased rate goes up, right? Jordan: Yes, and one of the interesting things that we have an eye on is it's my opinion that the thumbprint wins. That's where I think everything is going on checkout. What I say is that my ideal is that 12 months from today, our default checkout page has no fields. Like the cart summary where you don't see the cart summary until you click on it and then it opens up and extends the cart summary. My hope is that the fields are hidden and you have to click on it to open up the fields to put your name and address in, because the thumbprint purchase will be that prevalent. That's what I hope things get to for merchants, because once ... There are a few different options. Apple Pay, Android Pay, some type of a Shopify Pay, Stripe. Whatever comes out over the next year I think the thumbprint is the thing that wins. Kurt: We see that with Apple Pay now and really I've only used it in maybe two or three situations and it was absolutely magical. Like oh my gosh, this is the easiest thing ever. How long has it been around? A year? And it's stunning to see how few ... This is not a criticism of just Shopify stores. Of just eCommerce and mobile in general that just don't use Apple Pay and that confuses me. Jordan: I think these things happen all at once. They grow and then all of a sudden you look at it and you say, "Whoa,". It wasn't that big last year and it's bigger this year and it's anticipated to be big, and the next thing you know it's huge and then everyone adopts it all at once. Over a 12 month period everyone will add it. That's my ... It's just inefficient, man. To be on a phone and punch in all those buttons when you're just using the credit card that you already have in your wallet and then you will eventually have inside your phone. It seems inevitable to me. Kurt: Absolutely. I'm confused as to why it didn't happen sooner. Jordan: I agree. Kurt: That's our dream as we get to, I want to check out. I just tap my thumb and it's like, "Hey, you want to pay with this card and send it to this address, right?" Yeah. Done. Send. No more thinking about it. It's done. It's over. It's one step. It works on our mobile devices and soon we'll see touch ID on everything. Jordan: It's a bit scary, isn't it? Kurt: A little bit. Jordan: The fact that the entire Internet will be as easy to purchase from as Amazon is scary. Kurt: Yeah. I ... It's a total rabbit hole here. I don't keep Amazon on my phone to prevent impulse purchases. When I need to shop on Amazon, I download the app and then I have to log in, make a purchase, then delete it. Jordan: Wow, good for you. Kurt: Because it's too easy. Jordan: If I were a Shopify merchant, that's what I would want. I want it to be too damn easy to buy from my store. Kurt: Right and fundamentally, with conversion rate optimization, that's the end goal is it is too damn easy to buy from this store. That's number one is, give me access to design so I can optimize this thing tailored to my specific audience. Then the pushback against that would be, "Well, if we do that we're giving you enough rope to hang yourself or you could mess it up and make it harder to use." In theory you're sophisticated enough. You can test it. You would know that your conversion rate goes down. Jordan: Yes. Like all business. I have plenty of rope to hang myself with in my business, just like you do and just like everyone else does. Kurt: There are other places I could through things up like uploading 12 meg PNGs to my carousel slider and that kind of thing. Then the other is this post purchase stuff, which I think is really exciting and is an untapped opportunity. Talk to me about that. Jordan: I think it's fascinating, and I have really enjoyed my job for the past year working in this space because it's just genuinely interesting and new. Once again, let's back up two steps. Here's what I see that happened over the past year or two. What's happening is that the marketers, the army of marketers that move around the web and identify opportunities, they have been moving from digital products to physical products en masse. Just a gigantic trend. It was not kicked off but accelerated by ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels brought marketing innovation in their platform. They basically said, "Okay, Leadpages, you guys have awesome landing pages, but people don't build landing pages on their own. They build them together in a funnel." So ClickFunnels just put that concept into play and said, "Now instead of building standalone landing pages, we're going to help you build landing pages that connect in a funnel," and then on top of that they provided a ton of education around how to use that. How to sell both digital and physical products through a funnel, and one of the key components of the funnel is the post purchase upsell. It's not just an opportunity to add something to someone's order. It is an opportunity to completely change the way you actually sell. The strategy from the starting point can be changed because of the fact that the post purchase upsell exists. A popular example is the free plus shipping offer. The free plus shipping offer, the way it works is what you want to do is offer something on the front end on your checkout page that's really low, low price. Ideally it's free. It's, "Hey, I just wrote a book. Buy my new book. I'll give it to you for free. All you need to do is pay for shipping." So the book is free, $0, and the shipping is call it $6.95, hence the free plus shipping nomenclature. Kurt: If you want to see this in action, if you've ever seen ads ... Clearly Facebook has considered me an info-marketer because I see ads for this stuff all the time. I got ads continuously for Russell Brunson, the owner, creator, of ClickFunnels, for his book DotCom Secrets, which was offered to me as free plus shipping and sure enough, after seeing enough ads, I did end up buying it for free plus shipping and it was like $7. Jordan: Right. And now after- Kurt: Then it worked on me a second time. He just came out with another book. Did it again. Jordan: That's right. So look, it works. It's a great offer, and so what that does is it gets the person into your funnel. All of a sudden your checkout page, what you're selling on the front end becomes an entryway. It's not the point. It is the beginning of the point. Once you put in your credit card information to pay $6.95 in shipping, what happens is that payment token can then be used again, which means ... Kurt, when you bought that book, what happened after you made the purchase? Kurt: Immediately afterward it's like, thanks. That's great. You purchased it. By the way, one time offer. You'll never be able to get this again. For $150 or something, add this extra package of just amazing value and it had a video and it was it's own amazing landing splash page and I said no thanks. But I also made sure to not read it because I'm sure it was very compelling and I might have bought it, and then when I said no thanks, it offered me another different thing. Jordan: A downsell. Kurt: A downsell, which is always going to be cheaper than the first thing it offered me. It always seemed way cheaper because I was just price anchored to the other thing. Jordan: Right. So if you had decided to purchase, in order to purchase all you would've had to do is click on the button that said, "Yes, I want to purchase." You would not have needed to reenter your credit card again. The credit card would have been stored in the payment token stored from the checkout page. That became very, very popular in the ClickFunnels world, and then the next phase what happened is a lot of people on ClickFunnels started selling physical products in this way. They'd say, "Okay, here's one unit of skin cream," and then after the purchase it's, "Hey, do you want to buy another one for a different price?" And, "Hey, do you want to subscribe and just save and get it every month without you having to do anything?" So then it started to creep into the physical product world. People started making a lot of money being really successful in the physical product world, and then what do they realize, Kurt? They realize, "Oh man, I really want to use Shopify to do the order management because it's really good at it." Then you had this strange gap where you said, "Okay, I want to sell like ClickFunnels but I want to manage like Shopify," and that's really what's happening in the market right now. You have a ton of these marketers coming into Shopify and they're introducing all these marketing concepts and now they're slowly seeping into the regular retailer world, not just the marketer world, and now there's this crazy [crosspollinization 00:19:30] around post purchase upsells are ... It's a legitimate strategy. It works. Kurt: Right. Initially, as soon as I think retailers and eCommerce folk in general hear info-marketer, they're like, "Oh, it's sleazy. I don't want to do it." Then over time they open their mind to it. It works for them for reasons, and a lot of the stuff is based on 50, 100 year old direct response marketing ideas. We've seen that with the power of landing pages and people's desires to rather than just have a product page, make these much more sophisticated, compelling landing pages for their Shopify store that are borrowed straight out of this info-marketing world. Jordan: Yes, and I actually want to make sure we talk about the landing page thing. That's probably the biggest insight I can give to your audience based on what we're seeing, so let's put a marker on that. I just wrote that down as a note. The process of normalization. I remember three years ago when we first launched our abandoned cart application, CartHook started off as an abandoned cart email app. We used to get people who saw our site and email us in such anger. Just, "I cannot believe what you guys are doing, that you are horrible, evil people who do this," and it's because we're sending emails to people after they abandon their cart. Do you know anyone who thinks that's a horrible, controversial, sleazy practice? No, it's normal. It works. It's inevitable. You need to do it in a tasteful way. It's always in the way you do it. Kurt: Yeah. Don't damn the tools. It's what you do with them. Jordan: Exactly right. I think there is now a process of normalization around upsells. I think within a year, basically not every single time but most of the time you buy something online you will have a post purchase upsell, and people will start to learn about it and be conditioned to it and understand that they're going to get certain offers and then they'll start to try to game it to see what kind of offers they get after the purchase. It's just a totally normal process. Kurt: I had not thought of it that way but yeah, we're already doing that as a standard practice in email marketing automation. You've got to be doing an upsell after the fact to extend customer lifetime value. Even the previous episode to this one that's literally what we discussed. Like a third of the emphasis was devoted to those post purchase sequences. At no point did we think it was strange, sleazy, or anything like that. Jordan: No, it's just a normal part of retail. Anyway, so that's the second piece. The first piece is the checkout. The second piece is what happens after the checkout. Now there's this amazing experimentation. What can you do ... If it's helpful I can give you what a typical post purchase funnel looks like. Kurt: I love examples. Really solidify it, picture it, so lay it on me brother. Jordan: Yeah, let's do it. Let's say you are selling flip flops. Okay. You sell flip flops from Brazil, so it's cool. You've got a brand going. A typical post purchase upsell funnel would look something like this. Visitor puts a pair of your flip flops in the cart, goes to the checkout page, fills out the forms, puts in their payment information, and clicks "complete purchase." After that checkout page the first page they would see would be an offer for more of the same. Meaning, the product you just bought, I'm going to offer you the same thing but for a better deal. Basically say, "You want to get a second pair of flip flops for 20% less?" And it's positioned as a one time offer because literally on the site publicly, it's offered for call it $40, but because you just purchased it, it's a thank you to someone who just purchased it. It's a one time offer. Add a second pair for you, for your spouse, for safekeeping, whatever. You get it for $30. Then, if they accept it, let's not get into downsells because that gets complicated, so let's just say three upsells in a row. Let's say they have two pairs of flip flops and they got a good deal on the second one and they're happy. The second would be for a complimentary product. What goes along with your flip flops? It is your flip flop cleaning kit. Then again you can say a one time offer, publicly or it may not even be available publicly on the website, or on the website the cleaning kit is available for $10 but now you can add it to your order for $5. So upsell number one is more of the same. Upsell number two is complimentary. Then what some people do, upsell number three is expedited shipping. What you're doing is you're saying, "This person is really interested. They just purchased. Maybe they want to get their product faster," and so instead of trying to convert them to upgraded shipping on the checkout page which creates friction, you can add an upsell as the third upsell for expedited shipping. Basically offering the same type of upgrade in shipping that you would've on the checkout page but this time you're not adding the friction up front. You're making an offer after the fact, then they can decide whether they want expedited shipping or not. That would be a typical post purchase upsell. More of the same, complimentary product, expedited shipping. Kurt: I love it. I love it and I can't do it right now. Jordan: Right. The point of this is really to change your average order value. Kurt: Right, obviously you're increase customer lifetime value but we're doing it in a much faster way. Where normally it'd be they make the purchase and then you email them their upsell offers, versus now we're doing it like, they have already committed to the first purchase, and in that same transaction now we're increasing that average order value, I think in theory extending their customer lifetime value through these upsells. Jordan: Right and the whole theory is, because these offers come after the checkout they don't interfere with the conversion rate on the front end. Kurt: Right and that's the risk. Right now if I want to do something similar I would use an app like Bold Apps Product Upsell [inaudible 00:25:51] pops up in the cart based on what's in the cart and offers me additional items. It's like, "Oh, you bought this beach towel. Did you also want to buy this suntan lotion?" So it pops this thing up. But they haven't bought the first item yet, so there's always the fear that this is going to increase bounce rate on the cart page. It's going to impact that conversion rate. Jordan: You got it. So it should be the same math on the front end. If you spend $10,000 a month in advertising and that usually results in let's just say 100 orders and the average order value is $100, that makes you $10,000 in revenue. Cool. Now, if you add post purchase upsells, that doesn't change at all. It's still the same spend, the same conversion rate, the same revenue but now 20% of those 100 purchases also add an additional average of $10, so now you've just made an extra $200. It shouldn't change the math on the front end at all on the conversion rate. Now what you're doing is just X% of customers are also taking an upsell, so you spend the exact same amount on ads but you make more revenue as a result. Kurt: So I'm getting a higher ... My initial order, my customer value goes way up but my cost per acquisition of customers doesn't change in the slightest. Jordan: Right. Shouldn't change, but the average order value goes up, and what does that allow you to do? It allows you to spend more on ads, and then you can make more money, and then spend more on ads, and make more money. Kurt: Right, you step on the gas and just keep this ... which I learned from you in a previous episode. If you get a funnel that works, it's profitable, step on the gas. See what you can do. Jordan: Yeah, step on the gas. Kurt: See how far you can scale it. That's a good example of how one might use upsells in eCommerce. Can I do this in Shopify right now? Jordan: You can do it in Shopify right now and there are a few options for merchants. Between ourselves and Ezra's OCU, there's starting to be some innovation in the space. Bold just came out with their Cashier. That's in beta, so the features there, we don't know what they're going to do but right now in the market you can use our product, CartHook Checkout or you can use Zipify OCU and people are doing it. We are getting a healthy amount of demand and we are kind of quiet. We don't really do any advertising and marketing, and we're just getting a wave of people who are talking about it in Facebook and then wanting to try it. It's starting to grow very organically and I think it's going to tip at some point over the next few months where it's just going to be more standard practice as opposed to the innovators on the marketing side. We're already talking to some really well known merchants that I don't want to mention, so it's already seeping into the ... The mean. The one standard deviation away from the normal. It's already creeping into the norm for them. Kurt: Right. Once we have these big ... You have some hero stores. Some stores that you aspire to be like. Very large, work in public Shopify stores. A good example would be [Beer Brand 00:29:18] or I always reference [Everest Bands 00:29:19] on here where you hear a lot about them and you're just like man, I want a store like that. Once you see those people, because we perceive they're successful and therefore when we see them adopting these things we go, "Well, they must know what they're doing." Everybody has that thought, even if they're just experimenting. That's what's going to normalize this and we're going to see more demand for it, and then we'll see more education about it, more people talking about it in Facebook groups, and you're right about that. I start seeing more and more mentions, especially in the Shopify Plus Facebook group. See mentions like, "Hey, how do I do this?" Then, "How do I do upsells? How do I do this?" And you hear people like, "Oh, check out CartHook. Check out OCU. Have you heard about this new thing from Bold?" I keep seeing this in the last month this conversation keep happening. Jordan: I think it's a great thing for Shopify merchants. I think it's a good thing for our market specifically. I expect more competition. Ezra and I are in touch and we're both supporting what the other person's doing and I think it's good for everybody. Kurt: That's one of the wonderful things about this community in general. Everybody works together for the greater good. Jordan: Yeah, and it's big enough. It's all good. Kurt: There's 400,000 Shopify stores. Jordan: That's wild. Kurt: It's all good, man. Jordan: Kurt, how we doing on time? I want to get to this one thing that we see that I don't want to leave out. Kurt: Right. We're at 30 minutes recording so I do want to wrap it up after this, but give me that one hit. Give me the tremendous value. Lay it on me. Jordan: All right, here's what we're seeing. People who are heavy into Facebook advertising, the people who really, really care about their ROI every single day for every dollar spent. What they are doing is they are first figuring out which product on their store sells, and then they are no longer sending the traffic to the product page. They are building a landing page and sending the traffic there and they are getting much more success from it. In theory you and I know that works. We know that a landing page converts better than a homepage let's say, but it is being put into practice in a big way in the Shopify world. People will figure out which of their products sell best and then they will do more work on the page to sell. Instead of just sending to a standard page where there's some photos on the left and then on the right there's some bullet points and a description, they'll put together a full blown landing page that does away with the navigation, keeps a super focus on the product, and does a lot more work with videos, additional testimonials, additional images, more copy, and they are being rewarded for going that next step in effort beyond just the standard page on the Shopify store. Kurt: I'm totally with you. I absolutely believe it. Just to give the crash course in Shopify landing pages, imagine a more purposeful product page. Often that is how we do it is if you've got access to a front end designer developer, we make a longer form version of the product page where we've got longer sales copy. We go through the whole pain, dream, fix format. We include social proof. Maybe we include urgency on there, scarcity. We'll do little hacks with that stuff ... And you can't do this for every product, right? So either you sell a few products, you could do it for all of them. Do it for your flagship product or use the 80/20 rule. Figure out, this is the big bad boy. Do it on just this one. Then take that same page, make a version of it where you just throw in some extra style tags and hide, display none, all the extraneous links that would get someone to leave the page. The fundamental thing that makes a landing page is in theory, it only has one call to action. Generally that means you got to strip out your navigation from your header/footer, so there you go. There's the easy crash course in Shopify product landing pages. Jordan: Just to plug my own product a little bit, what they're doing from there is they're using ... This is what our most successful merchants are doing. They're using what we call product funnels. In CartHook you can build something called a product funnel which links up directly to one specific product in your Shopify store and then provides you with a URL that goes right to a checkout page that has that product preloaded. They don't go from the landing page to the cart. They go directly from the landing page, they put the funnel URL from the CartHook product funnel, and then they go straight from landing page into the checkout page with that product preloaded, and then all the post purchase upsells after it and because you know exactly where the traffic is coming from, that one landing page, you know which product they bought so you can put testimonials that are specific to that product on the checkout page and then you can have a post purchase upsell sequence that's very specific to that product. It's a super, super focused funnel that you have full control over. You have control of the landing page, checkout page, upsell pages, thank you page. That's where our most successful merchants are dialing in their ad spend. Kurt: Just thinking out loud, if you are just starting out with a Shopify store, is this something you want to worry about or is this once you've got where your processes, your product validated, dialed in, then you want to start exploring this stuff? At what point do I start doing this, I think is my question. Jordan: I'm going to say that this is not something you should do as one of the first things. There are so many other foundational elements to your store that you need to get right, between the positioning and copy, navigation, and so on. I would work on that first. This is an optimization. This is, okay, how do I make things better? I think maybe eventually it will get to the point where, okay, I need an email app. I need a cart abandonment app. I need an exit intent popup app, and I need a checkout app. That's where I hope it gets to where every single person that starts a store just grabs these few fundamental apps that they need to add. I don't think it's quite there yet. I think this is a bit more advanced. Kurt: I want to wrap this up but now I got more questions. You rattled off here's the four apps you need to have. Do you have a preferred one or recommendation for an exit intent popup app? Jordan: No. I don't know. I don't know. I know OptinMonster. I know OptiMonk. I know Bounce Exchange for bigger stores, but I'm not as familiar with the app ecosystem to recommend exactly what to use. We partner with certain apps like ReCharge Apps on the subscription billing so people can sell subscription products inside the funnel and so on, but beyond the larger market, I'm not the right person to make those recommendations. Kurt: Okay. All good. I'll throw in my recommendation. I really like OptiMonk, but I've also heard fantastic things about Justuno but I have not personally played with it. I think in theory the thing I'd like to do and I never get around to because these other exit intent popup builders are so convenient, would be just coding our own using Ouibounce which is just an open source JavaScript snippet. It's O-U-I bounce, Ouibounce. I will throw those into the notes, the links mentioned. Jordan, where can people go to learn more about you? Jordan: Go to CartHook.com/checkout and you'll see more about the products, and then we interact with our customers and people on the site a lot so if you have questions just click on that chat button in the bottom right or hit us up at support@CartHook.com and if you are feeling podcasty, check out BootstrappedWeb.com which is my weekly podcast. Kurt: Who do you host that with? Jordan: Brian Casel. Kurt: He is a good dude. Jordan: My man. Kurt: Wonderful man. I will not go down any more rabbit holes as I was about to do. No, this is good. We're going to wrap it up here. Jordan: Cool. Kurt: Thank you, Jordan. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. I think that's all for us today at the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And to our listeners, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've heard come out of this discussion, so join our Facebook group. Just search the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. You'll find it. Apply to join. I will approve you, and come talk to us. I post every episode there. Or, you can always sign up for my newsletter at KurtElster.com. Shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified when a new episode goes live. And of course if you want to work with me, I'd love to have you. Go apply at Ethercycle.com. That's my consultancy. As always, thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.

For episode 37, the Paradox team is just exhausted with this whole year Terrible Opinions Zach: The name of the President of the Harvard GOP club is funny and Philip Bump is fine with making fun of his (very ridiculous) name. Matthias loudly disagrees. Jordan: It was unfair when people got angry at Hillary for the Orlando shooter showing up at her rally. Matthias: Evan McMullin is running for president. He is a ridiculous choice and he is being incredibly unfair to Hillary Clinton (inasmuch as he implies that she has no experience in dealing with terrorism). Also, Zach brings up a study on teacher pay (indicating that teachers make far less money than comparable workers) and Matthias looks at this with the national employment data.

Join Jordan, Matthias, Zach and our guest this week Christian futurist & author Jonathan Crabb as we walk through… Terrible Opinions Zach - Pina Colada's are terrible. Even fresh ones Jordan - I think it's fine that Hillary can't use the subway or pour a beer. She's arrived. She doesn't have to do that stuff. Good on her.  Matthias - There should be some kind of implicit or explicit protection for people who disagree with their employer's politics. Jonathan - Donald Trump will nominate his daughter for vice president Artificial Morality - 21:00 We talk about the corruption of Microsoft's AI chat bot Tay. We dive into the morality of bots and  how we can foster a sense of shame and morality into AI as they come "online" in the future. We draw some parallels between fostering morality in young humans and young AIs. The conversation veers into how we teach bots things about the value of life and how that fits into how an AI might value a human life. Convention  Politics and Colorado - 39:00 We note that Ted Cruz actually knows how to play the delegate game vs Trump who doesn't seem to know what is going on. We talk about the regions in which Cruz needs to beat Trump in order to force the contested convention. This shifts into a conversation about the four remaining serious candidates and how they fare against each other.  Predictions - 50:30 Zach - I had to wear a tuxedo and I felt like such a rich jerk, I hated it. I predict I'll never wear a tuxedo again.  Matthias - I predict Trump does worse than the "experts" predict in New York (71 delegates) and California (93 delegates) Jordan - It will be Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton in the general election