Podcast appearances and mentions of matt let

An evolving market calls for an evolved approach to user acquisition—one that treats players as individuals and weighs each user's needs against all available acquisition tactics. When preparing to adopt this approach, though, game studios must consider one key question: Should they stick with the mainstream channels (META, Google, Apple, etc.) that provide reliability but unpredictable ROAS or focus their attention on alternative channels that bypass saturation and offer users that are 50% more likely to make in-app purchases? Studios face some tough choices in 2024, and this week's guest encourages marketers to embrace the shift from “growth at all costs” to more targeted acquisition strategies yielding high-value users. We ring in the new year—and PG.biz podcast's first anniversary with hosts Peggy Anne Salz and Brain Baglow— with digital marketing veteran and Fluent Cofounder and Chief Customer Officer Matt Conlin. In this insights-filled episode, Matt reveals where some studios are missing the mark and evaluates how game-changing UA trends (including rewarded discovery and influencer marketing) light the path to sustainable growth. He also shares his exclusive SWOT analyses of UA channels (both new and old), what games studios can learn from retail, and, most importantly, which tactics will power profitability in 2024 and which are better left in 2023.  CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Happy 1 year to the podcast 02:20 - Trends to watch in 2024  08:00 - The incentivised player 12:18 - The value of rewarded discovery 15:28 - SWOT analysis on rewarded platforms 19:37 - SWOT analysis on influencer marketing 23:10 - The new mobile landscape 26:24 - What's on the radar for 2024? 29:40 - How Fluent navigates rapid change 31:10 - Favourite games Q&A with Matt * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  ** Let's Connect **

Some ECW memories, Brian finishes a huge collection, not without some controversy! (Episode 55) Matt Let's a special figure breathe (Let Em Breathe Bonus) Usos incarnation and some Q&A! (Episode 220)Social Media: Twitter: @MajorWFPod , @TheMattCardona , @Myers_Wrestling, @majorpodnetwork @Silverintuition, @JGeorgeTheMovie Instagram: @MajorWFPod , @TheMattCardona , @Myers_Wrestling, @SmartMarkSterling , @majorpodnetwork @jgeorge.mp4This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4481264/advertisement

If you're like me, you know Josepha Haden Chomposy is the Director for WordPress the open source project in title, but you probably don't know what she does on a day to day basis. Or that she's part of the Open Source Group Division inside of Automattic. Something I always knew, but once framed that way in discussion, was more interesting to hear. I was lucky enough to chat with Josepha for nearly an hour, so I'm breaking up the conversation in two parts. Today, part 1, we'll cover the logistics of her role, bringing WordCamps back, and the challenges with Gutenberg. Thanks to folks over at Malcare for supporting this episode of the Matt Report. If you want to support me, you can buy me a digital coffee or join the super-not-so-secret Discord group for $79/year at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport Episode transcription [00:00:00] Josepha: You say that's the easiest question, but like anyone who has spent any time with me knows that I also spend a lot of time, like, considering, like what, what, what are my, what am I doing? What, what purpose do I bring to the world? Who am I when I'm not trying to accomplish things? Like, yeah, it's easy, but it's not easy. [00:00:17] So yeah. I show stuff. I Hayden jumbo, C a WordPress projects, executive director since 2019. So I'm starting my what third year of it is that right? Yeah. Starting my third year of it, time flies.  [00:00:29] Matt: That's 30 years in COVID years, by the way.  [00:00:32] Josepha: ain't that true? Isn't that true? And before I did this, I actually was as my Twitter bio suggests very much into. [00:00:43] Digital literacy and making sure that that communities were safe and sound, because I think that communities are the foundation of everything that we try to do in the world. And so, yeah, that's me. [00:00:53] Matt: There's a lot of folks who think of community as well. It's a big marketing buzzword for sure. Right. Everyone who has a product company wants a community. But they are looking at community in probably a very lesser form definition in a silo and something to just kind of prop up either their brand or product. [00:01:12] Maybe get some feedback and get really interested. Customers. Community is a whole different ball game and scale at your level. Give us a sense of just like the daily routine. One has to go through to manage what you have to manage.  [00:01:29] Josepha: Gosh, from a community aspect or just from like me as a  [00:01:33] Matt: you wake up and you're and you look at your wall-to-wall meetings. Cause I, I imagine largely that's what you're doing is meeting talking to people, fusing ideas, together, shaking hands, dealing with folks, maybe crying and laughing and arguing. How do you do it?  [00:01:50] Josepha: I'll tell you, number one, that only about a quarter of my time, these. Is spent in meetings, which is really different from, from how it used to be. I used to spend about 60% of my time in meetings. And that was really hard just cause when you're in a meeting, you really have to stay present to, to really support the people that you're there with. [00:02:09] And, and also to really get that work done and be as fruitful as you can with it. And so about, about a quarter of my time now is in meetings. And actually like I've got, I've got a number of hats obviously, cause I'm the executive director of the WordPress project, but I also lead the source practice at automatic. [00:02:29] And so there's a lot going on there. And the best way that I have to manage it at the moment is to just kind of set focus intentions for my day. Like I used to have a day where I just worked on automatic things or when I just worked on community things. And like that's still documented out in the world, like the, the themes that I have for each day, so that like, if people had had to work with a deadline, they knew what. [00:02:55] Going to probably get to on various days so that they could time their information. To [00:03:00] me, it was super useful when I didn't have quite as big a job as I have now. But now I kind of have a day where I focus on meetings. I have a day where I focus on the strategy. I try to make sure that if I have any community things that I'm blocking, I try to get those accomplished, like before the big meetings, which generally is like Wednesdays and Thursdays. [00:03:19] So try to get and get everybody the information that they need to keep moving on time. But I actually start basically every day with about 30 minutes of mindfulness. Just no meetings, no slack open, no anything else. And just making sure that I understand what my goals are for the day, what my tasks tend to beat for the day. [00:03:41] And then I end every day with about 30 minutes of what I like to call my ta-da list instead of a to-do list, things that I got done and that I need to get done tomorrow. [00:03:51] Matt: Little positive affirmation to end the and the day you say that the open source practice is sort of a different approach. Maybe something that you wrangle are managed differently. Can you give us give the listener a sense of what that might be  [00:04:04] Josepha: At automatic or just generally do I approach open-source differently?  [00:04:07] Matt: You mentioned that you, that you either manage or work on the open source practice of WordPress is that something different than the, than the day-to-day role of the executive director?  [00:04:17] Josepha: Huh. Yes and no. So on the one hand I do, we technically are referred to as a division inside automatic. It's the open source group division. And I just, I don't know, saying division seems very clinical and. Very divisive, like splitting things into when maybe we, we need to do a bit less of that right now. [00:04:38] And so when I refer to it as open-source practice, it's a little bit, because I'm trying to make it clear that it's like an ongoing thing that we work on an ongoing thing that we do, but also to identify that it is that yeah, we do. We kind of approach it differently. So open source as a practice rather than open source as just a general methodology, I think has a wider application than just software or adjust your product. [00:05:04] I think that open source, many of those 19 lessons of open source that exists out there could be seen as just like core intentions for how to accomplish things. And when you move it away from just like, this is a core directive for how to build software and instead think of it as this open source methodology that you can use to coordinate an. [00:05:30] I think it makes a big difference to how you accomplish things in open-source projects. And so, yes, that's, I wouldn't say it's different from my work as the executive director, but I do know that people don't necessarily identify that work.  [00:05:44] Matt: Right. How big is that division?  [00:05:46] Josepha: that particular division is just over a hundred people at this point. [00:05:50] And then we also have we, the WordPress project also have the five for the future contributors who work with me and that's a little lighter [00:06:00] touch. They get about a ping or two a week from me just asking what I can help them work through. And just checking in with them generally. And there's probably like 20, 25, maybe 50, if we're generous outside of automatic that are doing that. [00:06:16] So yeah. [00:06:16] Matt: And do the core contributors that contribute to WordPress open source, open source wars, WordPress from automatic. Do they fall under that division or can folks be from any division in, at automatic to contribute?  [00:06:28] Josepha: Yeah. Most of them do a lineup in this division, but there are also because so many of automatics products are, are part of the WordPress ecosystem. There are also plenty of people that are just in automatic as a whole that are contributing to core. So, [00:06:43] Matt: And if I could just illustrate that from a non not automatic company, this could be something like a GoDaddy might have a open source division  [00:06:53] Josepha: Right. [00:06:54] Matt: and their objectives or mission would be to give back to open source. And they would say, Hey, let's give back a little bit to WordPress. Let's give a little bit to whatever Joomla or PHP or something else. [00:07:06] That's open source. You'd have this collective that, that their mission is to, Hey, we're part of this bigger company, the bigger company, isn't all about open source and we're missioned to go out and contribute to open source.  [00:07:18] Josepha: Exactly. Right. So blue host has a group like that. Goat GoDaddy does have a group like that. Google also Yoast all those, all those folks in there, others as well. I'm not, I'm not intentionally leaving other people out. It's just that there are probably like a hundred different companies and I will not be able to just rattle them all off that way,  [00:07:38] Matt: Eh speaking of GoDaddy, looking at con core contributors I don't have the pie chart in front of me. In fact, it wasn't even a pie chart, but there were lots of circles. with automatic representing the largest piece. If you were to give advice to other companies to, I don't know, spin up divisions, give more spin up open-source divisions, give back more to whether it be WordPress or another division. [00:08:00] Are there one or two, like key things. If I want to form an open-source division or to contribute more, what's the best step forward for an organization? To either measure it or approach it to rally people around it. Do you have like one or two things that you look to as a north star?  [00:08:20] Josepha: Yeah. So, firstly, if you're, if you are thinking about creating an open source team, who's either planning to give back to WordPress or just planning to give back to open source in general. There is actually a five for the future white paper that exists to just like essentially take to your, your corporate entity that says, like, this is what it means to give back to this product that has given to us. [00:08:45] And it's, I think on wordpress.org/five, I think there's a link to it right there. But if not, We'll get it done.  [00:08:53] Matt: sure.  [00:08:53] Josepha: And, and that in the end does direct you kind of, to me to make sure that you have all of the information about [00:09:00] the open source philosophies that we're working with in the WordPress project. [00:09:03] And also make sure that that, that we all kind of understand what the goals of the WordPress project are at the moment. And so there is kind of just like a kickoff call with me to see if everyone agrees, it's like any, any relationship that you're entering into, everyone should understand what we're working with first and then make that choice together. [00:09:20] So that's one thing that anyone can take a look at also if. As an employer or just as yourself, want to contribute from like a five for the future pledging perspective, but don't necessarily have the time or resources to commit like a whole team's worth. There is actually a contributor training series that you can go through that gives you the basics of like how WordPress does open source, how open source functions in software, and also covers things like how we make decisions in WordPress, all of that stuff. [00:09:54] I believe that's on wordpress.org/contributor, hyphen training or something like that. We can find the link for your show notes, but yeah, those are both excellent ways to just like take stock of what that kind of contribution tends to look like. And see if it's a good fit. [00:10:11] Matt: I I'd imagine that part of your role or part of your efforts are to knock on the doors of, of big businesses that might be leveraging WordPress and saying, Hey, I think you can donate another person or two or 20 to the cause. Do what, what, what is that like? Are those efforts fruitful for you or are there certain strategies you try to put in place before you knock on the door of, I don't know. [00:10:35] I use GoDaddy just because it's the top of mind Right. now, but I'll go daddy or Bluehost or whomever [00:10:39] Josepha: Right. Yes.  [00:10:40] Matt: government.  [00:10:42] Josepha: the government,  [00:10:43] Matt: Right.  [00:10:43] Josepha: I have never knocked on the door of the government to ask them to contribute  [00:10:46] Matt: me know when you find that door, which door is it? I don't know. Neo find another one. [00:10:51] Josepha: find another door. Yeah, no. So, yes, there is general. I don't, I call it fundraising just because I understand that like, there are. Four-ish different economies in the WordPress ecosystem and not all of them are about money. A lot of them are about time and, and other things. But so yeah, I do that outreach every year for the most part. [00:11:14] And actually met does that as well. So Matt often we'll start with like the highest decision-making levels. Cause you, you do kind of have to get some buy-in on that. Not, not this Matt, dear readers other Matt, Matt Mullenweg what was I saying? Yeah, he frequently will start at like the CEO levels of having those conversations and then they move to me to kind of have a better understanding of what it looks like, what it could look like, what we want it to look like, all of that stuff. [00:11:42] As far as like, do we, do we, do I do anything to like prepare companies for that? Not really. The fight for the future program has been an excellent experiment and has been growing for years. And, and I don't know that I have ever [00:12:00] felt the need to like prime prime, anyone for the ask of like, do you have anyone who can help us with these security patches? [00:12:09] Do you have anyone who can help us with these design issues that we have? Like, I've never felt the need to do it necessarily. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. As I mentioned, like Matt does that also, he does that outreach as well. And so if there's priming for that call from that, that outreach from me, it's probably happening there. [00:12:27] Matt: Forgive my not understanding fully of how the inner workings of automatic works, but from executive directors that I've worked with in my local community, a lot of them are for nonprofits and a lot of them are, are raising money and that's a whole large part of their job. [00:12:44] Do you do that at all for any degree of the work for the WordPress foundation or is that completely separate? Not even in your purview.  [00:12:52] Josepha: I used to do that. Yeah. is not in my purview anymore. We actually have some community folks that really have done excellent work to keep that program moving all of this, the global sponsorship programs. They do that work these days. I did use to, but, but not now.  [00:13:09] Matt: Okay. Fantastic. And speaking of the, of the foundation word camps coming back. Question, mark. We just had word camp us last year. And now I think Birmingham is next. If I, if I have that correct. Is there other others coming? Is that something that you're looking forward to proceeding cautiously with? [00:13:32] Again, I know there was something on the Tavern about no or little to no masks at the last camp. A lot of folks worried about it. What's your prediction or what's your outlook on local meetups or local camps? Sorry,  [00:13:45] Josepha: So word camp, U S actually was, was a virtual this year where it can't one state of the word  [00:13:50] Matt: state of the word, sorry. Yep. It felt like a word camp because everyone Was. celebrating it.  [00:13:55] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was it was an excellent experiment and it actually was not our first in-person event. There was a word camp in severe. I want to say that that weekend right before state of the word, that was our first one back. [00:14:09] And then yes, we've got Birmingham on the calendar. We have WordCamp Europe on the calendar as an in-person event. And we have word camp us 20, 22 on the calendar as, as an in-person event. Cautiously with cautious optimism. Is that a thing I can say? We're proceeding forward with cautious optimism about it. [00:14:27] Matt: in San Diego was cautious. Optimism.  [00:14:31] Josepha: Excellent. I'll let them know. Yeah, like. I have been, I've been talking to people about this a lot this week. So much of the information that we get from, from everyday users of WordPress, about what they love and what they don't love, what they need and what they want with the software comes from those events and not having them has certainly been very difficult for the community as a whole, to, to keep on [00:15:00] top of their own resilience. [00:15:01] But, but the community of contributors, as it relates to the support of the community of users, like it really, it's very clear to me that all of our contributors feel a little bit, I don't want to say hamstrung, but like they don't have the same touch points that they used to have to make the decisions that we all have to make. [00:15:22] And so. That's the optimistic side. Like I'm optimistic that we can get back to in-person events so that we can have that, that high value information from our users of the CMS more and, and faster and better. And the cautious side is of course, that everything is changing with this from week to week. [00:15:42] At this point, like for a while, it was month to month, things were changing and now it's week to week, things are changing and, and I never want to put people at undue risk and so am prepared to make the best call that we can make in the moment. And as things move as quickly as they are. It has made it more difficult when things were just kind of progressing on a month to month scale, you had time to, to cancel things or to move them or, or whatever you had to do. [00:16:15] But in the case of Omicron that moved so quickly that, that there was a little bit of blind sightedness happening on it. So  [00:16:24] Matt: is  [00:16:24] Josepha: I don't know if I've answered your question. [00:16:26] Matt: no that you have, or you've let us to at least maybe the next question. or the maybe just helping me define a better question. Is is there more stress on the local volunteers to raise more? Because one, there might not be enough ticket sales for enough people to maybe businesses have retracted from sponsoring camps in three. [00:16:50] I think that there's less money at hand, right? To, to Dole out to word camps in the fund, for lack of a better phrase.  [00:16:57] Josepha: in the fund. Yeah. So, That's such a complicated question. We, the, so the, the WordPress community support entity has been providing still a good portion of, of the infrastructure that people need in order to organize a WordPress event. And as far as like getting fiscal sponsorship, getting financial sponsorship from local entities, I am sure that it is more stressful, but I don't know that, that we, as like the stewards of this community have said, like, you have to find more local sponsorship because we cannot commit to as much global sponsorship. [00:17:40] I don't, I don't recall that happening with any of the events that we've seen lately.  [00:17:46] Matt: got it. Got it. Let's let's shift gears back to to WordPress to Gutenberg we think back well, we have WordPress 5.9 in 19 ish, 19 [00:18:00] ish days. Right?  [00:18:00] Josepha: no one be scared. That's great. [00:18:02] Matt: Thinking back three and a half years ago, whenever Gutenberg was announced, there was mass chaos, massive stereo. My God, we've got this Gutenberg thing. [00:18:10] What is it? Don't want it everyone up in arms about it. I, for one while maybe I didn't enjoy the way it rolled out and the way it was communicated as a non-developer. Yeah. [00:18:22] And when people started using it, I was like, this is, this is, this is just software. It's going to get better. I think here we are three and a half years later, it's a much different product. [00:18:32] It's much more refined from obviously when it started. Cause it's been three and a half years. Although  [00:18:37] Josepha: you've been working on it in the background. [00:18:39] Matt: Yeah. if you were, if you were, if you were in the early beta access, you were, you were playing with it. If you knew how to download it from GitHub [00:18:46] Josepha: Those fancy people.  [00:18:48] Matt: Those fancy people. [00:18:49] I don't even know above my pay grade. [00:18:50] Although I still struggled to drag some blocks in between columns. Sometimes that's a little bit frustrating, but do you think the the time that you think it'll take the same amount of time basically is what I'm getting at for full site editing to mature and to be adopted? Or do you think this is going to be fast paced because now we've kind of experienced Gutenberg.  [00:19:08] Josepha: My short answer is I do not think it's going to take as long and I'm going to give you a long answer now. So on the one hand, I think it's true that people are now a bit more bought in. Like our users are quite a bit more bought in on on this. Change than they were in 5.0, there's, there's a reason for them to trust that it's the right direction. [00:19:29] We have consistently been showing that ever since 5.0, came out and so like, yeah, I think that on the one hand, there's a lot more willingness in public sentiment and public grace that we have at the moment. And so from that aspect, I think that that we're in a much better position than we were when we were merging things in 5.0, but also between 5.0. [00:19:50] And now we have actually heard and by we I'll just be super clear. I have heard so much that it's not necessarily the change that upset people. It was how we made the change. And I totally understand that people felt left out. They felt like it was forging ahead without them, like, there was no way they could keep up with it. [00:20:10] And I, and I understand that it like it's the Gutenberg project was and is moving along a lot faster. Then WordPress core moves along from the, from the standpoint of like how frequently they have releases. So releases every two weeks is very different from releases every four months. And so having heard from so many people in so many different areas of the project, that, that it was the way that we did it. [00:20:37] That was so upsetting. Between 5.0, and now we actually have done together a lot of work to change the way that we talk about it. And so there are a lot more consistent updates from the folks who are working consistently within the core Gutenberg spaces of things, including stuff like our performance metrics that we are [00:21:00] gauging all of the features that we're planning, the features that did get in there. [00:21:03] And the last two weeks, like we're just communicating more in that space, but also we have really re-invigorated the testing area and the triage practice, both of those practices across the WordPress EcoSys. And created a number of different places for anyone to get this kind of information and sponsored a number of different spaces, where users and developers and agency owners and, and decision makers, technical, or not have been able to get better information about what they need to know about the software. [00:21:37] And so when was 5.0 at the end of 2018? Yeah. So. Yeah. Since 2018, I would say that there are probably four or five really big projects that have helped us to move past that whole, like it's the way you did it. Like we figured out the ways that we did it, that made people mad and we've made changes to fix them. [00:21:59] They're four or five large scale things that you can see, but also a lot of just small individual things that each team or any contributor does to make that whole process a little less scary, a little more tidy, little easier to see everything that we're doing on learn right now with trying to get more and more workshops and courses and lessons out for people like, yeah, we've done a lot of work based on the feedback that I got. [00:22:24] I did a six month listening tour after 5.0, to hear how mad  [00:22:29] Matt: That was. said with a big site.  [00:22:31] Josepha: Yeah, it was, it was hard. I it's like a listening tour is hard anyway, but I spent six months going to the events with people who were the maddest at WordPress and at me and at Matt and, and did nothing, but like tell me how much you hate this. [00:22:50] And that's all I wanted to hear it. I didn't have reasons or explanations or excuses for anything like their feelings of anger were because they felt like we hadn't heard them. And so I was showing up to hear them and, and in that six months time, that is when I identified, these are the things we need to fix in the future. [00:23:10] And we have spent years fixing them and I'm very proud of that work, so.  [00:23:13] Matt: It's a perfect segue to a couple other questions. Let's get the pitchforks and the torches out folks. No, I'm just kidding. Surprise. You're on a game show. Have you seen running, man? No, I'm just kidding.  [00:23:20] Josepha: No. [00:23:21] Matt: On the listening tour I'm sure you heard things like, Oh, what we're doing here is we're just competing against Squarespace and Wix. [00:23:28] Why do we want to, this is, I'm sure you've heard that. Right. We're Prestos wants to compete against Squarespace and Wix. My response is duh  [00:23:36] Josepha: of  [00:23:36] Matt: duh. Yes, I do. Like, I want to compete against Squarespace and Wix so that we can, because I want WordPress to survive. Do you think that did one, did you hear that sentiment two, do. [00:23:48] you think that's kind of going away and feeling like, Yeah. [00:23:50] actually we do want to compete against them to, to win.  [00:23:53] Josepha: I definitely heard it a lot and I hear it a lot even now. There are, there are two sides to that [00:24:00] conversation. Cause sometimes people are like, you're competing against these things that are so tiny, why bother. And sometimes it's, you're competing against something that is not the group of, that's not catering to the group of people that WordPress wants to cater to. [00:24:14] And so like, there are two different takes on that particular argument and I see both sides of it. But also like, technology always, you have to stay relevant and you have to move fast enough to be if, if not a competitor to a tiny thing that exists now. Cause like, sure, it's not a threat if it's 1% of usage across the web. [00:24:36] But, but there is something to be said for self disruption in that way, like I like this is my favorite example to use. So like when the iPad came out and there were just. Tablets everywhere. And the iPad mini came out and everyone was like, there's no point in having an iPad mini, we do not know why apple is doing this. [00:24:56] This is the most useless thing. Like people were like, why are you even bothering? No one wants this one. Plenty of people wanted it. And to taking the opportunity to, to, to disrupt what's happening in your own ecosystem before other people can show up and, and do that disruption to you, like that's smart. [00:25:18] That's a good idea. And so I do know that Gutenberg has been a really disruptive change and that for a lot of people, it also has been a breaking change. Even if it's not like breaking websites or breaking the code or breaking your dashboard, a broken workflow is still a breaking change for you. [00:25:35] And like, that is why Gutenberg is, is as a project being done over so many years. Right. If, if you feel like asking me about, about the reason that that was the right call, I would tell you, but most people don't care. But yeah, like moving fast enough to stay relevant, slow enough to bring people with you where you can is so smart and not only for the project, but for the people who rely on the project to have better lives. [00:26:05] So, [00:26:06] Matt: True or false. This is this is not about open source WordPress, but this is about automatic. And I would say that about true or false, the challenge true or false in your opinion  [00:26:14] Josepha: We're building some caveats in here. I like it. [00:26:17] Matt: I don't wanna, I don't wanna like put you too much on the spot, but you have walls. Your opinion. [00:26:22] The challenge for automatic is on innovation and pushing the software forward and fricking everything. Woo commerce, Gutenberg, wordpress.org, jet pack. The challenges still not enough people I'd imagine to, to help produce push code to, to improve everything across the board.  [00:26:42] Josepha: you threw so many pieces in there that I cannot give a true false cause that's probably true for some and less true for others would be my guests right now.  [00:26:50] Matt: let's talk about, let's say Gutenberg true or false, not enough people to, to really refine the whole thing. Fast enough,  [00:26:59] Josepha: I don't know if you [00:27:00] can hear my stomach growling. Cause like my microphone is right down by my stomach. I apologize if you can, like, I don't have a monster in the room. It's  [00:27:06] Matt: your, your stomach. cannot answer the question.  [00:27:10] Josepha: It tried real hard. It had so many things to say. Yeah. So for gluten, so you're asking true false for gluten. Is the limiting factor that we don't have enough people. [00:27:18] Matt: Let me frame some context around it. When I interviewed Matt when I interviewed Matt back in January, 2021 [00:27:24] There's just, there's so much on the plate for automatic in terms of.com jet pack, VU, commerce, which is just a sleeping sleeping giant we don't have anything close to a WooCommerce Shopify yet. And I look at automatic and I say the biggest problem for Matt right now is just, there's just not, he can't hire fast enough to, to iterate and develop these products. There's just. It's just impossible for somebody to hire this many folks and get them up to speed to push these products. [00:27:53] I feel the same for Gutenberg. And I guess the open source answer is yeah. [00:27:58] more, maybe more people should step up or more brands and organizations that have the money hosting companies should step up to to contribute to this right. To refine the product. Like I wanna be able to drag my block in between three columns without me losing my mind.  [00:28:14] Josepha: Oh man, I have a very complicated false for you. I know. So, okay. So there are a lot of people contributing to Gutenberg and, and while we can always use more people contributing that we can not contest there is actually a different limiting factor. That's not necessarily about developers. And so. [00:28:37] I'll just get real clear. So I don't, I don't know that other people agree with me about this and, and that's their prerogative. But as someone who is looking across our entire ecosystem across our entire project from a substance, a pretty high level, with a huge number of, of data points that are coming to me from, from the community, I can say with pretty high confidence that some of the more pressing limiting factors are things like we don't have enough. [00:29:11] Essentially mid-level deciders who can say confidently, these are the black and white questions that have already been answered. This is the answer and move everybody forward. Like we have a lot of bottlenecks that are still built into that, into that product. There is also an incredibly limiting factor of our user outreach, like are unactivated community members, as I like to call them in my notes to myself are the, the community members that represent our community of users. [00:29:42] So people who don't necessarily know that the project exists, they don't necessarily know that they can like provide feedback about what is working. What's not working, what's broken. What is what could be made better? Like the lack of feedback from them. Frequently is something that is more of a [00:30:00] limiting factor than not having enough developers. [00:30:02] Now, if the entire WordPress user base showed up and was like, here's all of our feedback, like for sure, we would suddenly discover that we don't have enough developers to get those things done can confirm.  [00:30:13] Matt: Yeah.  [00:30:13] Josepha: But, but yeah, I think that our more pressing issue is around the people who can help us, like confidently say, this is the most likely decision based on what we know from Mathias, who is our primary kind of Gutenberg architect or Riyadh or whoever it is. [00:30:31] We just have such a small group of people who can do that. And that's true to an extent in the WordPress project as well. There are various things that we could blame that on COVID is a great example of a thing that might cause people to be less. Less engaged in that level of, of contribution. [00:30:52] But yeah, I think that in the hierarchy of things where I would say, yes, we definitely have a dearth of those. Those two would come up prior to developers on the open-source side.  ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress news is hard. I mean, it's hard to turn it into a real business. I get away with covering WordPress here on the Matt Report because our guests share lessons on how they built their business or spend time telling us how they navigated the community, until they found their way. But news? Well, that's why The WP Tavern has been the only name in town for a while, loaded with two critical components: A dedicated staff and they are funded. If you want to make it, you do things differently, you do things like Rae Morey‘s The Repository newsletter. Today we'll chat about building her WordPress news newsletter, background as a journalist, and explore what it really takes to make all of this work. Thanks goes out to Malcare today for sponsoring a month of Matt Report and The WP Minute. You can help us by visiting buymeacoffee.com/mattrpeort Episode transcript [00:00:00] Rae: It's a completely not in the WordPress world at all. So our processes is, as you said, an experiential design and creative technology company, and we develop experiences for cultural and tourism organizations. [00:00:14] So, you might go into a gallery or museum and experience an audio tour and we create immersive experiences where you can. Wander around a space and he audio that that's designed, especially for that space. It moves with you around, around the gallery or exhibition. We do precinct technology, virtual queuing, augmented reality experiences, and we do exhibition design in. [00:00:40] A lot of different spaces, for example we're doing a a brand new exhibition smack bang in the middle of Montana at the moment for there for first street project there. We do we do the audio guide for the Getty in Los Angeles. So that's an example of the kind of thing I do for my, my day job. [00:00:58] There is communications manager. So I look after Publicity marketing anything to do with words, I guess, on the website? Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I do for a day.  [00:01:09] Matt: Does anybody ever give you like a side eye when maybe a customer comes in and they're like, we have a WordPress website that they look at you and be like, Hey, we think we know somebody who kind of knows this to implement whatever project we might have. [00:01:23] Rae: I don't know. I, I, to be honest, I kind of played down what to do with WordPress, because I don't want to be that person that people kind of like go to asking for, help me with my website. Yeah. [00:01:33] Oh, I I hate to say, but our website and our process is actually uses Drupal. So I've had to learn that this year not, not my decision, but yeah, it's been interesting seeing what the competitions.  [00:01:44] Matt: Yeah, that was the, the second, most serious application I used to build websites was Drupal before or slightly after a front page. [00:01:51] Well, I guess throw Dreamweaver in there too, but we went front page Dreamweaver and then Drupal and then WordPress triples, fantastic platform. I think I wouldn't use it today, but I th I still think it's a very powerful  [00:02:04] Rae: platform using it compared to WordPress at the moment. Very different platforms. [00:02:10] Matt: How do you find time to to do the repository and works by birds and you have a family? How do you, how do you structure your day with all of this stuff?  [00:02:20] Rae: The honest answer is I have no idea. [00:02:21] I, I think over the past couple of years I don't know if you're aware, but Melbourne where I live here in Australia has been the most locked down city in the world. We've had the most restrictions lockdowns out of everywhere. It's just the circumstances I guess, here, but it's given me a lot of time to look at. [00:02:36] To spend on side projects, I guess. So when so the, the repository I started that with came guest star from male poet back in November, 2019. And that was just before the pandemic. And so I guess the repository in a way became a bit of a handy pandemic passion project that I was working on while in locked down and has continued through to now. [00:02:59] And. [00:03:00] Yeah, I was, I was also on maternity leave from my day job throughout 2020. So that gave me a lot of time and focus on building up the newsletter and yeah, since returning to my day job part-time I've, I've just I guess structure my week so that, Part time work and also have the repository for a Dane half a week. [00:03:21] So just try to split up the weight to fit everything in. And also I'm very fortunate to have a partner who. Who I cope? Well, shouldn't say co-parent with where to very much together, but we split our parenting duties 40, 50, 50, which is we're very modern family in that respect. So yeah, we both prioritize our careers, but also our son. [00:03:44] So, yeah. So there, there is a way for moms with a lot of things on to, to do all the things that they are passionate.  [00:03:53] Matt: Do you have a certain structure and I can, I can share mine as well for, for the WP minute, but you have a certain structure that you would, you wouldn't mind sharing on how you keep track of all of the news. [00:04:05] And this obviously is happening throughout the week. Are you jotting things down and the to-do lists in a notion document. And then at the end you go to write up the email and you just sit down with all of those notes in front of you. How does this all come curated?  [00:04:18] Rae: Yeah, look, there's no pulling back the curtain. [00:04:21] There's no special, fancy way that I do it. My background is, is in journalism. I studied journalism at uni and so I naturally just do a lot of note-taking all the time because I'm just every time I see something, I think, oh, that's really cool. And I use apple notes on my my medical kit or my iPhone, I'm an apple person and everything sinks. [00:04:44] And so I'm constantly taking notes. And I guess with the repository I use feedly.com to track something like 70 or 80 different websites and blogs. And so I go through that periodically throughout the week just to track what what's happening and keep on top of everybody's latest updates. I'm also checking Twitter all the time on my phone. [00:05:06] And it's a bit harder to save tweets, so I have to yeah. Finding a way to do that really well, but I'm always checking Twitter, whether I'm No throughout the day or in the evening while I'm watching TV, having having a scroll. And that's mostly, I guess my research for the pository just between those two, just seeing what's going on. [00:05:27] And I guess also just catching up with people throughout the week in the WordPress community, whether it's just aiming on on Twitter or chats over emails and Coles. Those are the kinds of ways that I keep in touch with what's going.  [00:05:42] Matt: Sure the the newsletter there's. So there's a, you just said that there, you're probably tracking 70 to 80 sources of, of news or at least new news that you can throw into an RSS feed and put into. [00:05:53] Feedly probably 20% of them. I would reckon are [00:06:00] our newsletters or have a newsletter component to them. Your newsletter is unique to, to me, by the way, or listen, let me take a step. I'm honored for you to be here. I'm not a journalist, I'm not a great writer. I struggled with words, in fact and I look at your piece as something that is it's fantastic. [00:06:19] It's unique. It's creative. I look at it as a conversation that, that ends up in my inbox. Before I knew who you were. I had some other voice in my head, but then I realized that then I found out who you were. And I was like, oh, now it's your voice. Every time I read the newsletter, like I'm hearing it with this Australian accent. [00:06:37] And it's fantastic. But it's, it's much more of to me anyway, like a S a conversation, maybe a story. Was that on purpose? Is that a strategy? I don't want to slap strategy on art, but is that a strategy of yours to make it different than.  [00:06:53] Rae: When when Kim and I originally started the repository, or at least before, actually before we started the repository and we were talking about ideas because Kim and I are both journalists in previous life. [00:07:05] And we wanted to bring something to the WordPress community. Then I guess, in a way there was an ulterior motive of showing off male poet platform, but also. Well, as, as former journalists, we just wanted to put something together that brought the WordPress news in a way that was, I guess, a lot of new stories in WordPress tend to include a lot of opinion, but we wanted to bring other people's opinions to the fore as well. [00:07:27] We wanted to increase the diversity in the news, but not just by having lots of different new sources, but bringing people's opinions that you might. You might not otherwise see. So the, the format that we came up with and, we still have to this day was looking for looking at a particular issue from a lot of different perspectives. [00:07:52] So we, like a story recently, like I know the word, it's not just the actual state of the word video, but lots of different blog posts in opinions, from different people and what they make. Of the state of the word. So you can kind of, read about read about a new story, but also get the context of where that story fits within the WordPress world and then varying opinions on what people thought about that. [00:08:15] So, you can get that kind of more nuanced viewpoint from, from different people and, and have that way of understanding any issue. From different viewpoints because not everybody looks at things the same way. It's nice to kind of read something, but then understand where, where it fits in the ecosystem. [00:08:31] And that's, that's the approach that we were going for.  [00:08:34] Matt: This is a huge question and I'll let you dissect it and define it and pull pieces out of it as you see fit.  [00:08:41] WordPress news, like what is somebody with a journalistic background? What does that really mean? Or what should it really mean? And maybe even before you answer that, can you help clarify, like what at journalists [00:09:00] produces versus let's say an opinion piece or a commentator might produce, because to be honest with you I didn't discover this recently, but for many years I was just like, oh, I don't know the difference. [00:09:12] I didn't know that you, that a journalist doesn't really put opinion into their, into their piece. And there are certain guidelines that one should approach journalism with versus, I would say like somebody like a Kara Swisher, who's what I would say is maybe a celebrity journalist, but no longer a journalist I think is much more on the commentator side. [00:09:33] For probably many different reasons, but anyway, could you help us define what journalists means to you should mean in the WordPress space?  [00:09:41] Rae: Yeah, it's interesting because there's definitely. Of everything in the WordPress community. I worked in, in newspaper journalism, and so it was very, and I guess the newspaper I worked for, it was very straight in that it was, new stories to get one report on one side of the debate and the other side. [00:09:58] Of the debate. You make sure you have balanced views on a topic and you present that and that's purely without any kind of opinion. And you try to be as objective as possible in the way that you present it. So that's, I guess, very traditional old fashioned old school journalism. That's kind of where my background is, I guess, in that, in the WordPress community. [00:10:22] I don't really have anything, I guess the closest to that would probably be Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern. And even then some of her pieces can have some opinion inserted here and there for, for her context. She's, she's been in the community for a really long time. So her opinions, I, I find it fairly valid, but but yeah, that's not really, I guess, old school journalism as, as a lot of people would say it And then you get. [00:10:47] Yeah, I think blog, blog posts and things like that, where people offering an opinion that's I wouldn't really class that as news, so much as it's opinion and people adding their perspectives to the debate. It's, it's an interesting one in the WordPress community. We don't have a lot of new sources. [00:11:03] A lot of people have tried to start WordPress news over the years. Haven't been, haven't been that successful because it's. It's not a business that is profitable as we've seen more broadly in, in the news industry with the rise of the internet and, the fighting for advertising and paywalls and, and all of, all of that kind of thing. [00:11:23] In in WordPress, we could, we could definitely use more new sources, that the greater diversity you have with news the more accountability businesses have to have to operate in this environment. The more and more scrutiny, the better, I think, in terms of, businesses operating and, and making sure that they're operating above board It would certainly be nice to have more new sources. [00:11:45] It's, it's certainly great that there are a lot of people who, who blog and share their opinion. But yeah, I think there's definitely room for, for more harder news in the WordPress community, particularly, over the past year, how we've had so many [00:12:00] acquisitions, right. And we were going from an ecosystem full of, I guess, small to medium businesses to, we've got big corporates and multinationals, I guess, like Google that are operating in, in our in our ecosystem. [00:12:12] And, we want to keep those businesses to. No, around what they're doing. And I, I'm not saying way to, to scare them, that they shouldn't be in our ecosystem, but, just to, people want to know what's what's going on and, and, and make sure that they're operating in a, in a fair. [00:12:27] Matt: Let's say news article or piece or research even if you went to an acquisition that happened a year, two years ago we might be checking in on, let's say something like an eye themes was probably the one that I can think of at least off the top of my head, that dates pretty far back, big company getting picked up by a hosting company. [00:12:46] And now Corey who started that company now runs both status. One might say. Let's take a look at what happened with these acquisitions in terms of employment. Are the people still there? Is the products. What it was when they acquired it. What is the price point look like? Have these, big hosting companies, which catch a lot of heat because they are big hosting companies. [00:13:08] Did they just roll it into their mega solution? And the once artismal piece of themes is just gone and it's just another toggle, it's just another toggle on the dashboard, right? Is that a fair assessment to say that's the kind of news that we were journalism that we would want to see in the space, or at least maybe you would want to see in the space, not trying to put words in your mouth, but  [00:13:30] Rae: yeah, I think that kind of journalism would be good. [00:13:32] I guess, It's interesting because we work in a space with some really big companies and there are lots of acquisitions going on. It's it's it's, that would be interesting to say, the, the, the the quality and the end product that's offered to, to users is that being maintained, as I know there's been a bit of angst with also motive of buying out people plugin, Sandhills development it'd be interesting to go back in, as you say, in 12 months time. [00:13:56] And from looking at that story as a journalist, you'd probably want to Find long-term users and get their perspectives, whether that's on the record or as background for a story and maybe speak to stuff. If they're happy to speak, even anonymously, get their, their views on how they think the. [00:14:16] Transition has been yeah, those are the kinds of interesting stories that we're not really seeing so much, we're saying the, the, the acquisition and the sale, but we're not really seeing the I guess the journey of how acquisitions are tracking. We're not seeing what's happening to, particularly with automatic buying out so many distances, what are happening to those businesses? [00:14:36] They bought quite a few in the, in the past year and the past few years have been interesting to say, what's, what's happened to the end product house has been absorbed into it, automatic and wordpress.com and, and it has it, has it been for, I guess, the greater good in supporting those employees and, and the businesses, but also providing a a more polished product for the end user. [00:14:57] If that, if that was the purpose of the, of the equity.[00:15:00]  [00:15:01] Matt: I think another, another topic would be something like a core, core contributors, which companies are funding core contribution to the WordPress core. I think in Matt's state of the word, which I do have the slides on the WP minute. [00:15:15] So I'll try to link up in the show notes. I think he showed a graphic of automatic somewhere in the seventies. Person, mark a Yoast coming in again, this is just off the top of my head. I think second place with maybe 14 people. And then it's like GoDaddy who just acquired Pagely who's a multi-billion dollar publicly public. [00:15:36] Are they publicly traded? I better not see, this is what, this is what makes a real journalist. They don't just say things like, I think they're a publicly traded company. If they're not, they're really big. And they've got billions and billions of dollars, but I think only four or five people. Actually contributes to core and word press is a massive part of their business. [00:15:53] Why aren't they doing? Why aren't they doing more for, for WordPress what's, what's the reason. And how much are they really benefiting off of open source? I think a lot of people give Matt an automatic, a lot of heat around the fact that, well, this is an open source product and, and this is just all funneling to the top of wordpress.com to make wordpress.com more money, but it's oh, by the way, There are billion dollar hosting companies leveraging this to who are not giving back. [00:16:20] Yeah. And don't  [00:16:21] Rae: forget Google as well. They're, they're pretty massive company. And, and I'm not sure exactly how many people they've contributed to the, how are they contributing to WordPress 5.9. But. Yeah, it'd be interesting, but you also mentioned Yost in there and I wonder if they'll increase their contributed the numbers now that new fold digital has acquired them. [00:16:39] It'd be interesting to say, how that contribution space changes and, and also in the state of the word Matt shared how he liked to see that landscape of contribution change in the coming years. So, Yeah, it would be, it would be great to see those big businesses putting back more in as far as five for the five, five for the future goes it's great to see so many smaller individuals and businesses contributing. [00:17:04] But also another interesting story I think is over the, over the past year, there's been a drop in, in volunteers and contributors to the project. And an automatic is picked up the lion's share of that work, which, you can't fault automatic for, stepping in and, and supporting the project in that way. [00:17:22] It would be great to say. Nice. Some of the bigger businesses stepping in and putting out resources for that too. I was really pleased to say XW pays as has, has put up contributors for the performance team and it'd be great to see more businesses like that who have that kind of expertise to be able to, to. [00:17:39] Could contribute their people to different parts of the project. Would that help? Because it's not really just about developers. It's also about marketing and design and mobile. There, there are a lot of different end-to-end education. There are a lot of different spaces that need country. [00:17:54] Matt: And what we've I've hoped we've just done is illustrate how important WordPress news [00:18:00] is and could be if there was more funding in the space. So how do we make money doing this? Ray, I wanna, I wanna pivot and talk about that a little bit because you, you, you have. The, what I'm going to say, the only vehicle for content you put out for WordPress is the newsletter, the repository. [00:18:17] You're just sending out email. You're not doing a blog, you're not doing a YouTube channel. You're not doing a podcast yet. And you monetize that through through sponsorship. It's. Well, I'll let you, I'm not, you don't have to say any numbers. It's not a full-time job for you. In other words, it's not supporting you. [00:18:34] Full-time compared to your day job. Maybe one day will like, what do you think it's going to take to make the repository of full-time job? Is there another. Of an audience in the WordPress news space to build a true air quotes, air quotes business, or should it be selling NFTs to support this  [00:18:55] Rae: maybe, but who knows how long that's going to be around for? [00:18:58] To be honest, I don't see their positories a full full-time job for me. I started it as a bit of a side gig. I thought that would take four, maybe four hours a week. And, and how it's more like a donor. So it does take a bit of time to put together because it's, it's solo single stories, reading everything. [00:19:16] And in making sure that, I don't want to just pick any, tweets to include in the newsletter. I want to make sure that I'm trying to find as many views as possible. And the ones that I'm including in the newsletter, a representative of, of the, of the views that you know, are in the community as well as any of that. [00:19:32] It might be a bit unusual. The, I think that it's an interesting one funding. I'm very lucky to have GoDaddy in element or sponsor sponsoring the newsletter this year. They'd been fantastic sponsors. One thing I do is when I enter into an agreement with a sponsor, I make it clear that. [00:19:52] If that, I want to retain editorial independence. So if there are any stories that involve them good or bad, I'm going to include them in the newsletter. Even earlier in the year when automatic mail poll was sponsoring the newsletter for the all of last year and, and And that was fantastic. [00:20:10] It allowed the newsletter to really great. But then when automatic bought out male poet automatic began took over sponsorship of the newsletter for the first quarter of 2021. And that was part of the agreement as well. I made sure that any stories involving automatic rules, you were going to report on those. [00:20:28] I think it's really important. If any publications have sponsorship agreements of that type, that it is very clear that editorial independence is important and, and that's separate from sponsorship. There are lots of other different models as we've discussed before as well, of the podcast. [00:20:48] There are lots of different models for, for funding use. It's, it's a bit of experimentation, I think there's philanthropy as we've seen that philanthropic or philanthropic funding [00:21:00] model. There are a crowdsourced kind of funding models. It's, it's an interesting one because at the end of the day, P everybody wants news, but not everybody's willing to pay for it. [00:21:10] And that's, that's the struggle is real there. It's really hard to overcome that because for a long time, these is. Well, my speed. Well, it's been free on the internet. It's easy to find sources. A lot of people think that they can find it themselves, but the convenience of having a newsletter letter, like the repository brings it all together and makes it more accessible. [00:21:30] Yeah.  [00:21:31] Matt: How do we encourage, ah, I'll I'll fall on this grenade. You don't have to agree with me. Okay. I'll be, I'll be the guy who says it out loud, but. How do we encourage better content? To be made. And I say content specifically, because I know not every, not everyone doesn't want to cover the inside baseball of, of WordPress. [00:21:58] They don't want to dive deep into stories. I get it because it's a very small audience. And maybe we'll talk about that in a moment. Like it's kind of a small audience who really cares about this stuff versus like, how do I build this element or site to make a thousand dollars a month? That's a much larger audience who cares. [00:22:16] Again, air quotes cares about WordPress. How do we encourage others to create better content? Or do you have any, any words of wisdom on how to create better content so that we all the content creators in WordPress, whether it's a journalist, a, an opinion piece, or maybe even a tutorial. That businesses take us a little bit brands that sponsor us or donate to us. [00:22:39] Take us a little bit more serious because I've overseen. I've. What I've seen is the over-saturation of asking for like donor donations and sponsorships, and then the content never gets made. And what I feel like is that kind of hurts us. Maybe not, I don't know, but it kind of hurts us where we knock on that, that brand's door. [00:23:02] And we say, Hey, we got this great thing. We're pouring so much effort into it. And they go, yeah, that other person burned me for $5,000. And they didn't really, they didn't do the ad read. Right. Or they didn't create the amount of content that we thought, or, the content didn't bring us that much traction. [00:23:18] So, you have this, I'm giving you 5,000. I want 5,000 in one. Any words of wisdom for elevating the quality of content or is it just like survival of the fittest?  [00:23:29] Rae: Yeah, that's a really interesting topic. In the good question. The only way I guess I can answer that is, is from my own experience. [00:23:36] When. I started the ripples of trails or, really fortunate that I guess I was the writer for the project. It was a collaboration between myself and Kim. So I was writing, Kim was basically bankrolling. He didn't, he was, running his own company, didn't have the time. So, there was a collaboration between the two of us. [00:23:53] We talked, discussed the news and, and made the website and we kicked it off with, I think, seven subscribers. I [00:24:00] can't remember in the first issue, not many And we got, got up to about a hundred subscribers and it kind of just plateaued for a while, but we kept on going and slowly and it snowballed, but it took probably a good year of, of the newsletter to really get into. [00:24:21] To really start growing our subscribers. I think by that stage, we might've had two or 300 subscribers by the end of the first year, we were a bit deflated. We thought we'd have more subscribers. And we were trying to try to, become more well known and, and get more people reading. But it's a, it's a pretty hard thing. [00:24:39] And so. When it, when it came time for came to step away when male Paul was acquired and then automatic finished sponsoring after they acquired male poet. I was kind of in a spot where I didn't know where I was going to go next with sponsorship. And it was that, that good year of very slow growth and just focusing on writing something quality that attracted GoDaddy to, to sponsor they would, at their hour, they were our first sponsor who really saw what we were, what we were aiming for with the newsletter or by that stage. [00:25:14] No. I was really luckily. So, Laura Nelson, who works at a male poet in their marketing, she's now at world commerce. She was absolutely critical in helping develop that relationship. She's a fantastic member in the WordPress community, so she helped introduce us and yet he's still a sponsor and it's, it's there. [00:25:34] Adam and Courtney and their belief in the newsletter and, and, and wanting to, they also have a sponsor section in the newsletter that allows them to share events and, and, and other pieces with the community. That's, that's been critical in the, the ongoing. Publishing of the newsletter. [00:25:51] Yeah, these kinds of projects can't really can't happen without money family to support. So it's, it's an interesting one in terms of, how do we keep these kinds of things afloat? And as far as going back to your question about quality content, I think I think a lot of people want to make money really quickly. [00:26:10] And yeah, of course, who doesn't, everyone wants to make money, but sometimes it does take a slow burn and working on something with the aim of producing something high quality. Is going to make some money in the end. And I'm happy to say the, and happy to share that. Then the repository is profitable for me. [00:26:27] It's not going to be a full-time job, but for what it, what it is at the moment. And I don't have plans for, major expansion, but it is not well, I, I don't have big plans to have a podcast or a big website and do lots of reporting. People subscribe the same, pretty happy with what it is at the moment. [00:26:48] And, and I am happy to share that in, in the new year, Allie Emmons is coming on board to help with community outreach and in increasing the number of voices that are in the newsletter. That's really important for me to make sure we not just, rinse [00:27:00] and repeating the same voices over and over again, the newsletter. [00:27:03] We want to make sure that people. Who are doing awesome things and they might not be as vocal. We want to make sure that they're included as well. And, and I want the newsletter to be a source of, of amazing work that's happening across the community, not just the same things over and over again as can happen in, in some spaces. [00:27:22] Yeah. Other than  [00:27:25] Matt: one of the things that I think is a challenge is, is that I think. What we want is we want the, maybe not even average WordPress user, but maybe above average WordPress user to want to turn into the news, like turn excuse me, tune into the news. Right? Because Hey, maybe the above average WordPress user is an it professional and she manages a hundred multi-sites for a university. [00:27:53] And. Not in the WordPress community, but my God, wouldn't you like to know when awesome motive buys those, the suite of plugins that you use, and suddenly you're like who the heck is awesome motive. And if I was tuning into a news coverage, maybe somebody doing a piece on who automotive is and the background and the history, et cetera, et cetera Yeah. [00:28:13] I don't know if you've thought about this. I don't know if this is something that maybe you even plan to go into with the newsletter is like, how do we, how do we dip into that segment of the reader of the demographic? I think of a local newspaper, all of a sudden. We're doing fashion week and it's I know what's going on here. [00:28:32] Right? One, you have advertisement that to hope. You're, you're hoping that you're doing fashion week and you're getting some new eyeballs on the, the, the baseline publication, maybe at that it raises more readers in the long run. Is there something like that that we can do without, selling ourselves to affiliate links  [00:28:49] Rae: in? [00:28:50] That's a tough question. How do you, how do you broaden your own. It's a hard one because we're pressing uses so smaller niche and how you reach that kind of other level of, of, users is a, is a tough one. I don't know if I have any answers today. I'd be interested to hear from other people who might've done it successfully, because I can't think of how it, it just feels like there's a, almost like a Seton barrier between. [00:29:18] The people who, who read S I guess, serious WordPress knees that, core contributors and developers and small business owners and people who are very involved in the community. And then everybody else, it just seems like a big step. And Yeah, I don't know. I just don't feel that they're that necessarily interested in, in how WordPress comes together or if people who you use a platform like that, every will be. [00:29:47] That's a, that's a really interesting area to explore.  [00:29:50] Matt: I'm going to say, I'm going to say something in hopes that Sarah Gooding is listening to this and she, and she uses this in the, in the headline. But I think that the cap on the audience [00:30:00] and you could probably. Again, you don't have to reveal anything from your side, but I think the cap on the audience of people who really care about the inside WordPress news is probably right around 3000 human beings on the face of this earth is the number that I would say of people who actually care about. [00:30:21] What Matt says in the state of the word and how it impacts WordPress, for, for, for years, I was gonna say most months, years to come or really care about, themes getting acquired. I think my number is about 3000, maybe on a good day, 3,500, but I'd say 3000 is the global reach of WordPress news. [00:30:41] Yeah, I can use that, Sarah, if you want.  [00:30:45] Rae: Well, I'll tell ya. I don't have that many subscribers to the newsletter. It's it's, it's an interesting one. Like how, how many people are really interested in WordPress news because I've spoken to. People who work at automatic and some other WordPress businesses who work with the community, but aren't necessarily interested in the community or kind of want to be kind of that stick away because they don't want to be too involved in it. [00:31:12] So it, it, it is an interesting number, but also, we've got the English speaking people who are involved in the community, and then we've got the non-English speaking people who have communities in other parts of the world. So who knows, if I assume that number, you're thinking probably English speakers. [00:31:29] So if we think about the people who are non-English speakers and are very involved in WordPress, like you can see all the amazing work that Mary job is doing in Africa. And, The amazing word camp that was held would would camp Spain recently, and the community's just so passionate over there that they even produce a live late night a late night show pre recorded. [00:31:52] But. There, there are people really passionate about WordPress and the community. Oh WordPress the recent word camp in in Portugal, Portugal recently. Yeah, looking at just their their daily schedule of, of, of. Throughout the the two days it was all very community-based and the events I had on day two, where, where everybody getting together and doing things in person together the whole cop that, that whole event was around community and nurturing, connections with people. [00:32:22] And, and so there. You, it could be 3003 and a half thousand people who are really just in WordPress and, and know knowing more about WordPress news. But I would say that number would be. A lot bigger. Once we start thinking about non-English speakers. And I think that's an interesting area to explore that. [00:32:42] How do we kind of bring the, those communities together, the English non-English speakers? How do we bring those people? As just, people who interested in WordPress regardless of language, and that'd be an interesting one to explore the next year or two, as we get closer to exploring when, [00:33:00] when language and translation becomes the, the dominant focus of the program. [00:33:06] Matt: Piggyback off of this conversation of how many max amount of audience I might have the WB minute who has only been around for about six ish months. The biggest piece that it saw was big story that it, so I was Paul Lacey story about Gutenberg and how that Gutenberg has impacted himself, but also his, his opinion on how it impacted. [00:33:25] The community at one saw about 2200 2300 views to the, to the article and about almost 400 downloads to the podcast episode. And of course, anything that you bring up around Gutenberg and. It's impact on whatever mean Gutenberg's impact on whatever the community, the software performance is always going to get a look or view. [00:33:51] Are there any other hard hitting topics you think that might be that we haven't explored yet? By the time this episode goes out, it will be 20, 22 something this year you think, which is kind of interesting that folks should be paying attention to, or the next time.  [00:34:07] Rae: Oh, yeah. I'm interested to see how the acquisition train goes next year in terms of more acquisitions in the space. [00:34:16] And also you can't really get away from Gutenberg. That's going to be a big focus of next year. It really jumped out at me during the state of the word. When Matt was saying, we only have a handful of, of block themes and you'd like to see 3000 by the end of next year. So, interesting to see, I, I guess one of the interesting stories will be how, how blockchains become more commercialized as well. [00:34:39] Are we going to see. More, same authors once w 5.9 comes out are they going to feel ready to really explore that space? We're going to see a lot more of those themes on, on ThemeForest and other kinds of Marketplaces like that. Be interesting to say how that rolls out next year, because after that Matt was talking about, venturing into collaboration as the focus of the next phase of the roadmap for, for WordPress. [00:35:03] So are we going to see blocks wrap up next year or continue, kind of fall into the, into the following year? Yeah. And I, I think the, the other thing is also probably most seriously thinking about volunteers and contributors to WordPress, that was a big focus of the state of the word. [00:35:18] And, and with the lack of volunteers, thanks to you, the pandemic, that'd be an interesting thing to watch next year. Where are we? It's, it's mostly sponsored people who are contributing to WordPress. We, we see a lot, a lot of that. I was going to say, more of a drive to have more sponsored people working on the project, or, we're trying to recruit more people who, who aren't sponsored. [00:35:40] That'd be interesting thing to watch next year, as far as contributions go and how that increases or potentially decreases, I guess.  [00:35:49] Matt: Gutenberg everywhere blocks. Give me all the blocks. Ray, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really can't. Thank you enough. I could go on for another hour, but I'm sure you're sick and sick and tired of hearing me. [00:35:59] Where can folks [00:36:00] go to sign up to the newsletter and say, thanks online.  [00:36:03] Rae: Well, if you interested in joining the repository, it's it comes out every Friday, go to the repository.email to sign up. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Matt. I've been listening for years and yeah, it's, it's really an honor to, to  [00:36:18] Matt: be feeding. [00:36:19] No, I, I, I, it's a pleasure and an honor having you here as well. I also love the repository. Go sign up the show. The links will be in the show notes. Hey, if you want to support independent WordPress news or content number one, sign up for the repository. And if you are a big business and you've got some bucks, make sure you knock on raised door to say, Hey, I'd love to sponsor the news. [00:36:44] And then when you're done with her, she will send you my way to spend $79 to join the WP minute membership. Get your hand in the weekly WordPress news in our private discord interact with folks like Ray and others who produce the show@buymeacoffee.com slash Matt report. We'll see you in the next episode. ★ Support this podcast ★

It's our first (intentionally) XXX-rated episode and we're not talking about the movie with Ice Cube! Matt & Andy get a little sauced up and bare all. Well, mostly Andy's coy and Matt's a bit shy! We still manage to find out Andy is the foot guy of the hentai world and Matt drops a bomb that stops the show. Put your grandma away, strap on some leather, and maybe put on headphones for this week's episode of Matt & Andy with Andy and Matt!

Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there's still plenty of opportunity ahead for the industry. There's lots of potential users, customers, and room for investment (note: we just saw the acquisition of Yoast happen by Newfold, formally EIG. If I had to guess, somewhere between a $30-50M deal.) If you though the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically the membership & LMS veritcal, then I have a surprise for you today. Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her business. From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software — this is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the a crowded market, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product. Episode Transcript [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it's their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It's a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website.[00:00:20] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money.[00:00:43] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it's an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That's site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season.[00:00:56] Matt: Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there's still plenty of opportunity ahead for them. There's lots of potential users, customers, and room for investments notes. We just saw the acquisition of Yoast happened by new fold, formerly EIG. If I had to guess a deal somewhere between a 30 and $50 million acquisition, if you thought the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically, the membership and LMS vertical is crowded.[00:01:22] Then I have a surprise for you today, Natalie Lucier founder of access, ally and LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her. From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software. This is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the crowded space, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product you're listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders.[00:01:51] Subscribe to the newsletter maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on. Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode, please do, because I just read that the best way to grow a podcast is word of mouth and sharing. So please share this episode with others.[00:02:09] We'd love more listeners around here. Okay. Let's get into today's episode.[00:02:13] It almost feels like a SAS software as a service. Tell us about that, that moment when you realize I'm teaching people, I might as well build the software too.[00:02:22] Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. So I was in the like marketing and tech space and doing videos on like, how to build a popup and how to do things on your WordPress site and how to market your courses and all of that stuff. And I was teaching. In courses and also on YouTube and people who were, signing up to our free challenge.[00:02:42] We had a challenge called the 30 day list building challenge to help people build an email list and they were signing up. And it was, becoming pretty popular. So we had a lot of people logging in at the same time. And at the time. I thought we were getting attacked by hackers or something.[00:02:56] Cause we have so many logins and the way that our plugin that we were using at the time it kept pinging our CRM and every single time somebody went to any page on that site. So, we were having nightmares basically. I would wake up every morning and have to call my host to have them. Unlock us, essentially, we put my website back up and then all the people who were signing up were upset with us because, they signed up and they couldn't get what they were asking for or what we had promised.[00:03:21] So essentially my husband and I were like, okay, let's just quickly whip up a plugin to replace what we have right now, just to stop this problem. And so that's literally in one weekend we wrote the first beta beta version of access ally. And it was just to solve our own problem. Yeah. But then after that, we kind of realized like, Hey, okay, this gives us a lot of, interesting options.[00:03:40] And we started adding on and kind of building other things that we thought would be very useful for the people going through our courses and content. And that was kind of the start of what you see today.[00:03:51] Matt: So you ha I, I didn't write this down in our peer review, but what was the timeline you had popup ally first and then.[00:03:58] Then we created access ally, correct?[00:04:00] Nathalie: Yes. So we built SSLI first just to solve this problem. And we knew that someday we might release something like this, but it just felt like too big of an undertaking to do a whole like online membership or LMS or anything like that. So we ended up building popup ally next and releasing that first because we knew we could do a free version.[00:04:19] We could see how that went. Then we could do a paid version and see how that was. Being responded to and how we could handle support and all of that. And then we realized, okay, yes, we can actually do this. We have the chops. And so let's go all in on SSLI and kind of build[00:04:33] Matt: that. And I'll, I'll paint sort of the the, the picture at least of the way that I see it in my head is pop-up plugin a very, very broad market, big market.[00:04:44] Chances are anyone who might be selling courses or digital content is going to be attracted to a pop-up to use on their site to capture the visitor's attention. And, oh, by the way, we also. Have this LMS plug-in fair statement.[00:04:58] Nathalie: Yeah, it totally started off that way. It's a much broader, pop-ups are much broader.[00:05:02] And then, yeah, like you said, people who are using them to build an email list and audience, they probably will want to sell something online. So, so that pretty much leads to access ally.[00:05:12] Matt: Yeah. I want to start with something that I won't say it's a curve ball, but a little bit on the hot seat, but something that I totally enjoy what you're doing with access ally is the pricing.[00:05:22] And I think I know a lot of Plugins in the space a lot of, well, let me ask you this question. Before I dive into that, do you refer to it as a plugin or software? Like how do you feel about the product itself? I don't want to just say plug in if you feel like you're greater than that.[00:05:40] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it's their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It's a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website.[00:06:01] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money.[00:06:24] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it's an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That's site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season.[00:06:37] Nathalie: Yeah. So it is technically a plugin, right?[00:06:39] So people download it and install it. But we do see it as software, as a service, just because we are constantly developing and people have so many feature requests and things that we're constantly updating. So, and then we also offer a lot of support. So that's the service side as well. So I do feel like it's a little bit more than just like here, download this plugin and good luck.[00:06:57] It is like a real partnership. And I think that's why the price, in my opinion reflects that when people will come to the website and people also do think so. I mistake that it's a platform and that it's totally hosted. And we've talked about potentially doing that, but we do also appreciate that it's a plugin and they could work with other things.[00:07:13] And there's a lot of benefits to being in that WordPress ecosystem too.[00:07:18] Matt: That's sometimes it's a disadvantage for a bulk of visitors that come to the site and they go, oh, wait, I was looking for a plugin. This looks like a platform. Do you, have you ever noticed that a drop off in the quote unquote funnel at all, that, that you've actually paid close attention[00:07:33] Nathalie: to?[00:07:33] Usually it goes the other way where they wanted a platform and then they're like, oh wait, I need to WordPress. So most, most of our marketing so far is kind of the opposite, but yeah.[00:07:44] Matt: Yeah, I wanted to give you a sort of a fair chance to see how you disseminated between the plugin and the, and the soft.[00:07:51] As a mindset, because I think a lot of us, myself included, like I have a tiny little plugin, easy support videos. I've done other plugins in the past, which have burned a miserable failure of a death. And, but the fact of the matter is I was always kind of just like, oh yeah, it's just, it's just this plugin.[00:08:08] And I think a lot of us just have to say, no, This is a software business. Like let's, let's, let's, let's give ourselves a little bit of credit here. Like this is a software business that we're in. We're not just like this little throw away plugin, even though that's the technical term for it. And I think we could do a lot for ourselves mentally.[00:08:24] If we just have a little bit more of that, that confidence boost when, and when we look at it, because it changes the mindset, it changes how you approach it. And that's what I want to talk about with your. $99 a month. That's what access ally essentials starts with. That's one website. Very far beyond what, you might see from just, let's say a free LMS or an LMS plug-in that's $79 for the year or something like that.[00:08:49] How did you get to this pricing? Was it immediate or did you have some bumps and bruises along? That's[00:08:55] Nathalie: a great question. So we started off at 79 a month. That was before, that was the first price that we started originally a couple of years ago. But yeah, we've, we've had a lot of conversations internally and a lot of it really comes down to what value I think we really provide to people.[00:09:10] So we are pretty close to making people money, right. So we help them take payments. We have an affiliate program built in and we basically help them sell courses. All kinds of other things. So that to me shows me that we can provide a lot of value for them. And when you're comparing, what other tools they might be purchasing to do with something similar, sometimes they might be purchasing, multiple things like maybe it's multiple plugins, or maybe it's like one thing for a shopping cart, one thing for this other thing.[00:09:36] And then by the time you add up all the time, Invested in making all of those things work together. That's kind of to us a lot of value, so that's kind of how we thought about it. And then we were also just looking around at some of the competition and also what we knew we needed to charge to provide the service that we wanted.[00:09:52] So that also came into it a lot. So we have two full-time support people and US-based, they we love taking care of our teams, so they have, good salaries and benefits. And I don't think we could do that if we were trying to charge less and try to compete on the, on the pricing side, we wanted to really provide more value and then also charge well for it.[00:10:12] And there is also something that changes when somebody pays more for software, which is that they're a little bit more committed. They're really in it for the longterm. Most likely to stick as well. So like, obviously if it's too expensive for them, they're not going to sign up in the first place. So we kind of lose people that way, but we do have more people signing up and staying long-term because they know we're kind of in that partnership.[00:10:33] And a lot of times people tell us we love access ally because it lets us do all these great things. But also because every time we have a question or we have something we want to do that just quite do yet, it comes out like a month or two later. Right. So that's something we couldn't do if we were, trying to appeal to too many people at a lower price.[00:10:51] Matt: You have a degree in software engineering, this, that answer and the way you've positioned the product is what I'll say. And these are my words, not yours is a much more mature business answer than what I normally see in the WordPress space. Again, myself included, you build a product you're like, oh my God, does anybody want to buy this?[00:11:11] And then you say to yourself, I know what I'll do. I'll just make it cheap. Then somebody will certainly buy it. But you, you jumped in at an eight. 860 ish dollar a year or a little bit more at my mass. Not really good right out of the gate at 79 bucks a month. Is this the first business you've launched or this you're a second, third, fourth, fifth business.[00:11:29] Cause it sounds like you've gone through the paces a little bit before.[00:11:32] Nathalie: Absolutely. So yeah, this is not the first business. And I started off with my very first business out of college. It was all in the healthy eating space and that was kind of my training business. So I just learned like marketing and like I built my own website and all of those things.[00:11:45] And then. The kind of teaching of the online stuff and the online marketing was kind of the next one. And then this is sort of the third business I would call it and yeah, it, it definitely like we learn so much. Yeah. Yeah.[00:11:58] Matt: And this is a great thing because I think this is hard to just like, this is not a question, but much more of just like a general statement and then interested on your thoughts, but it sort of raises the value of all of us, right?[00:12:12] When you price your product like this. Well, you're getting true value. You're asking for true value. And on the other end, it's a, it's a solid business. Like you said, there are people working for us. We're paying them well, you're going to get great support. You're probably getting a higher degree of customer as well.[00:12:30] Like they're not coming in, just like, give me all this free stuff. Cause they're already paying a hundred bucks a month. So there's a different level there. There's money out there that I think a lot of people just get a fee. I get that fear factor where like, oh, I guess I do have to do a hundred bucks for the year because my God, nobody will buy it otherwise.[00:12:46] But yes, there are people who just want good stuff with great support. And that's the most important part for them is to like have somebody that's going to be there for them and stand the test of time. Right. Especially if they're a long-term WordPress user who has seen other places come and go or freelancers come and go, they don't want that.[00:13:08] Their vote of confidence is I will pay you a solid amount of money. So you stay in business and support me. Well, But it sounds like you've learned that over the years and that's how you've got to this point.[00:13:18] Nathalie: I literally had customers tell us that we know you're not going to disappear overnight because we're paying you well, and that's worth it to me.[00:13:24] Is that kind of security. And yeah, absolutely. We have that long-term vision and that long. Yeah. Stay in the game kind of energy. And I think that definitely comes across with the people that end up signing up for us. Yeah.[00:13:37] Matt: To that. I was going to put you on the hotspot, but then we kinda, we kind of shifted a little bit on your pricing page.[00:13:42] One of the check marks is top of the line support. I feel like everyone might say top of the line support, or we have the best support. What does top of the line of support mean for you and for your customers?[00:13:53] Nathalie: Yeah, we have a lot of things that we do for our customers. So everyone gets a free jumpstart calls.[00:13:58] So that means after they purchase, we get on like a zoom call with them. We help them get everything set up. We answer any questions they have. We make sure it works with the things that they're currently using or planning to use. So that's a big part of it. And then we also have a tune-up calls. Three times a month right now.[00:14:14] And so they can jump on any time they have questions or want to walk through something that they're trying to accomplish, that maybe they got stuck on. And then in terms of actually, if you get into a situation where you're stuck or anything like that in between, then we also have email support. And like I said, we have two people dedicated to that.[00:14:30] And obviously our response time varies, but right now it's like averaging at eight minutes, which is kind of crazy. So during this. So, yeah, we do have, we do a lot and then we also have really robust, message-based and videos and all of that stuff to make sure if you're more of a, self-serve kind of like, I just, I'm working at midnight.[00:14:47] I know you're not gonna be online. I'm just going to finish this up and watch this video kind of thing.[00:14:51] Matt: Yeah, it's fantastic. It's one of the things I do as part of my role at cast dose is we do two weekly calls, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:00 PM, Eastern, same kind of thing, open office hours, or show up.[00:15:02] If you have a question, you can answer it there. We don't do phone support, which is still like a thing these days. Like people still are like, why can't I just call somebody? It's like, well, we have these two dedicated hours where you can hop on a zoom call and you can chat with us, which I think is a fairly fair approach.[00:15:16] Plus. Nearly 24 7 help desk support through Zendesk and an email and chat. So, that's a fantastic approach. I certainly like your approach of having that onboarding call that kickoff, call that alone, which I know developers, the more developer mindset folks who don't want to talk to anybody. I just want to print money with my product that I'm selling.[00:15:36] Don't ever talk to me, just buy it. Man, you can re like that's literally what you can charge. Out of the gate. Like if you just tell somebody that you buy this and I'll hop on a zoom call to help you set it up, whatever that means for your product, that's worth so much money to somebody. And it's just that one hour of your time.[00:15:53] I know there could be some chances where they knock on the door against, Hey, we're going to hop on another call. I think largely 95% of your customer base will never knock on your door again and just email you. And I think that's a fantastic approach. I applaud you for that. What else do you provide on those tune-up calls?[00:16:10] Is there anything else that you do in a more structured approach? I just leave the door open. I say, come in and show up and ask anything you want, but do you approach it with any more structure than that? Yeah,[00:16:19] Nathalie: for the most part, we just talk about what people bring to the, to the call, but sometimes we do have like new features or new scenarios and things that we've kind of seen people creating and we want to share it with them.[00:16:30] So sometimes we'll do like, okay, you're doing a teams kind of feature. So that basically means, you're selling to a bulk group of people and then here's how you set that up. And here's how they would assign other team members to the courses and that kind of stuff, or we'll do like, okay, here's what you need to know about doing this summit.[00:16:46] If you're using XSLT to run your summit, like how you do that. So we'll kind of talk about a little bit about those scenarios that are kind of either popular or that we've seen someone do really well and kind of want to share with the rest of the community.[00:16:57] Matt: Gotcha. No, that's awesome. I will, I will write that down or release it to my episode and then apply that to cast those next time.[00:17:04] I'm on my next time. I'm on my call. You started to, to say that, look, we know who our customer is. One they're paying a little bit more. We're helping them make money. Who would you say your best customer profile is for accessing.[00:17:19] Nathalie: So some of our best customers are people who are in the business space.[00:17:23] So they may not be like teaching business, but maybe they have business processes that help other business owners. So kind of that team aspect I was talking about. So, we have people who are, let's say a sales trainer, and then they've got a program that they've developed that they sell to other companies to train their sales teams.[00:17:38] Or we have someone who's doing a coaching certification. So she's a coach and she's teaching other people how to become a coach. So they will become certified in her method. So there's a lot of that kind of teaching something, but two groups of people that tends to be one of our bigger people. So we have like a dog trainer and I think, she comes in and she's, she's got groups of doc trainers in other businesses learning her methods and that kind of thing.[00:18:01] So that seems to be one of our, our ideal.[00:18:04] Matt: Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's awesome that you can identify. How can you paint the picture of how that has changed if at all, from when you first started the business? Like, did you go into the business thinking, yeah, we're going to serve this one particular set it's changed.[00:18:18] Nathalie: It's changed a lot over the years. Mostly our understanding of it. I think kind of similar people have been coming to us just based on like, who knows us and who they've recommended it to, and that kind of thing. So we've got a lot of authors and speakers and podcasters, and basically the content creators do come to us quite a bit.[00:18:34] And over the years we realized, okay, the ones who are really doing well are the ones who they have a little bit more of that leverage. They can kind of sell to more people. So that's. Evolved over time. We definitely have people who are more of the, do it yourselfers or who are just getting started.[00:18:47] So that that's great too, but I think our kind of top customer, those people who are a little bit more established and have that credibility and can kind of scale a little bit faster that way.[00:18:56] Matt: One of the questions I have written down from our pre-interview was how you navigate the competition.[00:19:00] And as we're talking, like, I'm thinking about. Like boy I don't know if you compete against anybody in the WordPress space, just because of your positioning, your brand value statements and who you, who you're serving now as customers. Do you find yourself competing with more WordPress or more SAS based or is it just a, a good 50 50 mix?[00:19:18] Nathalie: Yeah, it's a little bit of a 50, 50 split. I would say. We definitely could be more with like Kajabi and teachable and Thinkific for the most part. But we also have a little bit of competition on the WordPress side too. It just depends on like what people are familiar with when they find us. So a lot of times if they aren't familiar with WordPress and they've probably looked at LearnDash or number press or lift your LMS or something like that.[00:19:39] So they're kind of familiar more with that. Or if they're kind of. Sort of, they don't quite know what they're doing, but they just know they want an online course and they might have already looked at Kajabi or teachable or Thinkific. And so they'll kind of compare us very differently based on their background and kind of where they're coming from.[00:19:55] So we do have a lot of developers who are more comparing us to WordPress versus business owners themselves tend to compare us more to the class.[00:20:03] Matt: Yeah. If you grew up in WordPress and you only knew of the WordPress LMS plugins, you'd be like, yeah, it's a decent size market, but then once you get into like these SAS based businesses I'll keep the name.[00:20:15] I won't say the name, but I worked with a hosted LMS. It wasn't really even an LMS. It was just a membership. It had nothing to do with like learning modules or structures or anything like that. It was just a membership site. I'm trying to say this without revealing who it is, there was nothing wrong, but yeah, so it was like this blanket membership thing.[00:20:34] And it served all kinds of anyone. And I, I talked to this person and I heard what they were doing for revenue. I was like, Wow, the space is that big. Like, I can't even imagine what these other platforms that are doing that have, like, hyper-focused got great product, great marketing after this person had anything wrong, but it just made me and my eyes wide of like how big this market is.[00:20:57] Do you have a sense? Of how large the market is numbers wise for outside of the WordPress LMS[00:21:03] Nathalie: world? Yeah, so I don't know the exact numbers, but I know that sort of the LMS, like in general market is like billions of dollars and just continues to increase year to year. So it's definitely growing and obviously like with COVID and like a lot of things have changed more and more in the online direction.[00:21:20] So. Only going to keep growing in my opinion. But yeah, I don't know the exact numbers for each individual businesses, but I know that, some businesses are going public or, so there's definitely a lot of growth in this space. For sure.[00:21:33] Matt: You said you started a business with your husband.[00:21:35] Labeled co-founder too, or just painting.[00:21:40] Nathalie: He's definitely my co-founder, but I would say he is more like head of engineering and just focused on development and kind of making sure that that sort of thing is solid[00:21:49] Matt: with everything that's going on. With, COVID weird to say, cause we're like for two years, I feel like we're going two years into it, 20 years into it feels like, but at least in the podcast world, we saw a huge rush to private podcasting company.[00:22:01] Only podcasting a way to communicate internally with your organization instead of just video calls all day long. I'd imagine there's a market there for you where people started knocking on the door saying, Hey. It w maybe we don't want to sell this, but we need software that structures education to our organization out.[00:22:18] Do you feel like you're at a point where maybe having a sales team knocking on enterprise doors and like playing that game, is that something that you're interested or exploring or already doing?[00:22:28] Nathalie: That's a great question. So we do have one person on our team who's in sales, but we haven't done as much of the outreach piece.[00:22:34] So that is definitely something that is kind of. I think on our horizon essentially so far, we've been just working with the market that we know and kind of just building for them, but there's definitely a lot more potential for where we can go. And we're actually just trying to figure out like what what that looks like and kind of what, what those, like other verticals might be as well.[00:22:54] Cause we are trying to just stay focused just because I think that's easier to grow, but once we've kind of figured this out, then I do think we can kind of open up to the other verticals.[00:23:03] Matt: Is this a fully bootstrap business? Or do you have investors that salesperson when, what is their responsibilities now?[00:23:11] Is it just answering questions? Inbound questions. Does he, or she like structure custom agreements extra support, that[00:23:18] Nathalie: kind of thing at the moment, it's basically she does demos. She'll do some of those onboarding calls. So it is half, I would say customer support, half sales in that way. And then we have marketing that does more of the, like getting people to book those demos and kind of come to the website and all of that.[00:23:34] But yeah, that's something that we're like definitely like all eyes and ears open for how to, how to do that slightly[00:23:39] Matt: differently. Have you had any requests from bigger enterprises or brands, could pay more than a hundred bucks a month?[00:23:46] Nathalie: I have we've had some clients and part of it is like sometimes like a school would be interested, but then we, there's a couple of things that don't quite work.[00:23:55] Either. Have certain requirements and that we're not quite fast enough to be able to like, get up to speed on what they're needing. So we, like, I think it's kind of that tricky thing is like, we built it really for entrepreneurs. So when we have different types of institutions that come to us we might not have exactly, exactly what they want, but we have like 80% of what they want.[00:24:12] So this is kind of the, the balance of what we're working[00:24:15] Matt: on for sure. Put a an identifier on whether or not that's like a feature that you don't have, or like an administrative thing you don't have like SOC two compliance or something. Ridiculous.[00:24:28] Nathalie: Yeah. A lot of times it's like SCORM type stuff and like more more things that I don't personally have as much experience.[00:24:35] Yeah. Even just having a conversation about it is kind of like, okay. Tell me exactly what that means. It gets a little bit tricky versus where if they're talking to someone who has that experience, they're just going to be like off to the races with that. Yeah.[00:24:47] Matt: Yeah. It's another lesson. Again, just looking at your site and listening to you and how you position yourself.[00:24:53] Like, there is lots of opportunity there. And, and for other folks who are listening to this in the WordPress space, 90, but I don't wanna say 90%, but 70% of the time, like when a big enterprise knocks on your door, Your price could literally be 10 X, what you're charging now. And it has nothing to do with the features.[00:25:13] It is the time that it takes to sell them. Right. It's just the sales process. It literally like six months to a year for most of them. And then it's all this administrative stuff back and forth. And then it's your terms. How can we pay you? Right. And. People are like, wait, we don't have a credit. We're not going to give you a credit card for a month.[00:25:32] We want to pay for three years. Like, where's the, where's the legal ease around that. And it's like, if you just had like all of this templated purchasing or procurement structure in place, you could be off to the races without even adding features. And in fact, I'd say features ends up being. Down the totem pole because a marketing person gets excited and they're like, yeah, this is a great product.[00:25:54] Oh, by the way, here's the procurement team. And then you're just like, oh shit, I got to go through legal now than I have to go through InfoSec, and then I get to talk to like the CFO and they get to talk about like, structuring a contract. So, again, no real question there, but just from my own experience, like I think WordPress can do WordPress products can do better by satisfying some of those needs that just doesn't have anything to do with.[00:26:15] At the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. You your husband to support people? I heard the sales person. That's five, a marketing person is six. How much more on the[00:26:27] Nathalie: team? Actually two marketing people right now. One person who is in people ops, and then we have two development interns as[00:26:36] Matt: well. Nice. How do you recruit the interns locally?[00:26:39] Nathalie: Yeah, so they're at the university of that. My husband and I both went to, so they have a really great program. That's like a co-op program. So we basically just post and interview and hire and it's been going really well.[00:26:50] Matt: Yeah. I would definitely say a lot of that. Some agencies and product people should definitely look locally.[00:26:55] For developers, especially in that sort of intern phase, it's great to sort of educate people locally and pray to God. They stay, don't leave the area when they graduate, because where I'm from, they leave the area when they graduate and we lose that, that great talent. When you started, how big was it?[00:27:08] Nathalie: When I started, it was just me, my husband, and an[00:27:11] Matt: assistant any, and this was going to be a broad question. Thoughts on hiring people, growing the team? What was that? Was that stressful at all? Turbulent at all?[00:27:22] Nathalie: Yeah, it was a huge learning curve. So I feel like some of our best hires we figured out. A little bit late was it was already in our community.[00:27:31] So they were already, super fans or maybe they were building websites for people using our plugin. And so they already have the talent and the know-how and he just had to like recruit them. And that, that was a big learning curve because we were posting on these very broad job boards and finding people who were just looking for a job and they don't really care about us.[00:27:50] And so when something else comes along, The end. So, that was a big kind of ruining her for us. And yeah, we're doing a lot in that, in that way. Like how can we nurture our community? How can you make their lives easier and better? And then, if they're ready for a different kind of position that fits what we're looking for, then yet we're definitely super excited about.[00:28:09] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. The whole, like, I don't know if you hear it, but I've heard it before I started or when I was starting my businesses, like hire slow fire fast and I'm like, yeah, Yeah, you just got to laugh at that. I'll be like, I just need people now. Like I don't have time to slow this process down. And then you realize that six months into it, you're like I pick the wrong person or this or this person picked the wrong place.[00:28:32] And now what do I do? And that is so true. I mentor at a local accelerator in the, and it's a nonprofit accelerator for sustainable businesses in my area and the company that I'm mentoring. Now, they're trying to launch a nonprofit for daycare for disabled children. And. They're raised. They're, they're trying to figure out how they're going to get money.[00:28:51] And they're talking about grants and funding and all this stuff. And they're like right out of the gate, we want to hire 10 people and I'm like, man, that's going to be tough. Like you don't like that process of just getting people in, especially 10 of them is going to take you. It's going to take a thousand people to talk to literally quite literally to get these 10 perfect people in the door here.[00:29:11] And it's, it is not easy. What's the next role that you think you'd be hiring?[00:29:13] Nathalie: We're actually hiring right now for a product manager and that's sort of. Me cause I've been head of product for quite a while. And it's great because I talk to our customers a lot. So I kind of know what they were looking for and how to build what they want.[00:29:27] But I also know I could be doing other things too. So it's kind of just freeing myself up a little bit so I can do more of the marketing and the sales and kind of the things you were talking about, like, okay. Like what's next, like lifting my head up a little bit and yeah.[00:29:39] Matt: Looking bigger picture. Is that where you would focus more on marketing sales?[00:29:42] If you were to alleviate[00:29:44] Nathalie: yourself? It, yeah, more marketing and sales, more interviews like these, more things like that where I can be a little bit more publicly visible and kind of get the word out for access to LA. Yeah.[00:29:55] Matt: Let's talk about the marketing side of it. How, without giving away the secret sauce, what, what has been your best approach to reaching these customers?[00:30:03] Previously you built your own audience. I assume you still leverage that same audience. What other areas are you getting into or how are you expanding that?[00:30:11] Nathalie: Yeah. So a lot of, I think my success is from list-building and building that community in the beginning and just having a lot of alignment with what they wanted and also like what we were offering.[00:30:22] And so we've done so much in the list, building realm, like we did a free challenge, we've done a like free, essentially a free video course where people like opt in and then they get a free video every day for 30 days. And that was probably. Lead magnet that was so super successful. And then, yeah, like, YouTube podcasts I've pretty much done all of the marketing things and kind of took a break for the past year and a half just because I had a baby and then obviously pandemic and so many things happened, but yeah, I feel like there's so much in the space of marketing that works really well.[00:30:52] I will say I don't tend to jump on. Like flashiest things. So I deleted my Instagram account. I'm not on Tik TOK, I'm not doing it clubhouse. Like I know there's been quite a few trends of like new platforms and new things, but I try to stick to things that work long-term. So for me, that's like SEO, YouTube videos.[00:31:09] Like those are the kinds of things that once you put it out there more and more people will find them over time. So to me, that is a really good long-term kind of investment on the marketing.[00:31:18] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I find Instagram to be challenging personally myself, even though I shouldn't, I just like podcasts, you should be able to, like flex in that area.[00:31:27] Is that what the kids say on Instagram? Like flex in that area and it should work well, but it doesn't, especially on like the WordPress site. It's like, there's nothing really flashy. That's going to be like excited. Like here's a picture of the dashboard with a filter on it. Like, what are we going to do here?[00:31:40] I get so jealous when I look at like other companies and other brands, right. Cool, like collabs, like backpacks, collabing with like these other makers or creators, like, ah, it's such an awesome way. You can't do that with WordPress is nothing there. It's fun and exciting. It's a challenge for sure.[00:31:54] What about you hinted before. That maybe you kind of explored the world of SAS. I know you said you wanted to be hyper-focused or you are hyper-focused even if it wasn't full on SAS, would you go and kind of pivot to supporting a Drupal or Joomla or another platform at all? Is that anywhere on the radar, SAS or otherwise?[00:32:14] Nathalie: Not so much the other off of WordPress. If we were to do more of a SAS, we would probably just take WordPress and host it and kind of do it. Like plug and play one click button. Your site is ready kind of thing. Which I know other platforms like Rainmaker have done, like they took WordPress and they sort of, Close it off a little bit.[00:32:32] So that's something we thought about and we've tested doing like hosting with the seam and things like that in the past. But also we know that our people tend to be power users and they want to be able to install other things and kind of make it work with other stuff. And that's kind of the beauty of WordPress.[00:32:45] So we don't want to like cut off the best part. So yeah, we kind of, we explore it like almost every year. We're like, what about now? What about now? But I don't think it's really the right move.[00:32:56] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. What about this is also kind of marketing kind of product, but what about partnerships in the WordPress space?[00:33:05] Advice or success that you've seen or not that you've seen in the space that you can speak towards partnering other plugins and, or e-commerce plugins or marketing plugins or anything like that.[00:33:15] Nathalie: Yeah. There are certain plugins that are positioned to do amazing things in terms of partnerships. So I know like WP fusion is an amazing one that they work with so many different things.[00:33:25] And so we've integrated with, with them. And there's a couple of other plugins that we've integrated with. But I would say our biggest integration partners are actually the CRMs and the email marketing systems that we integrate with. So they're kind of outside of WordPress, but we do integrate tightly with them.[00:33:38] So that gives us that ability to like co-market with them. And we're all listed on their websites and stuff as an integration options. So that has been really nice for us too. And people who are really looking for something that deeply integrates with that, they tend to come to us because of that. So.[00:33:53] Yeah. I almost feel like WordPress is awesome. And also there's other tools that most people are using. So just thinking about at that level too. So for example, we don't have an integration with zoom, but we used to have an integration with Google Hangouts. And so we would have, people could start a Google hangout from inside their membership site.[00:34:10] And so I think that's something too it's like, how can you connect to things outside of WordPress? Sometimes that people use a lot as well. So those are some, some things we've done in the past and some things that are still working well for[00:34:20] Matt: us, this seems to be a recurring. Trend in my last few interviews.[00:34:25] Is is integrations. Ad-ons, when to make those there's a million places you probably want to integrate with, I'm sure there's a million people who have requested things to integrate with. How do you find that balance? Because at the other end of it, and people are probably sick of me saying this already.[00:34:41] Is there is that the, the overhead of an integration that just doesn't become as popular as you thought it was going to be MailChimp, even though MailChimp's popular, let's just say MailChimp fell off the face of the earth. Then it's like, man, I got a half a dozen people over here using MailChimp and I still get to support this.[00:34:55] Add on how do you make the decision on when to support one or when to make one? And co-brand with one, two at the same time. Yeah.[00:35:03] Nathalie: So we currently integrate with five different email marketing systems. And the first one, we just build it for ourselves. Like, like I said, so that one was an easy, easy. Yes. And then after that, we looked at their biggest competitor essentially.[00:35:16] And so we went with that one and then. We noticed a trend where a lot of people were switching from both of these two to a third one. So then we integrated with that one. And then the next two are kind of just, they were all being compared a lot. So that kind of made sense to integrate at that time.[00:35:30] But yeah, we have, we have people constantly asking us to integrate with new payment systems and some people maybe in Europe can't use certain systems or in other parts of the world where they can't use Stripe, for example. So we definitely get a lot of. And I think it's exactly what you said.[00:35:46] Sometimes it comes down to numbers and if we've only had one person ask for it, like, I'm sorry, it's just probably not going to have it right now. And also integrations do change, right? So they changed their API and then we have to test and maintain and make sure it still works the way that promised or, that used to at least.[00:36:01] So that's been a bit of a trick. The situation over the years, because as those companies that we integrate with change and mature we have to kind of keep up with that. So that's definitely been a bit of a tricky thing. And we do have a whole backlog of integrations that people have asked for.[00:36:14] And we did keep our ears open. We keep track of each person that asks for it. And then when the numbers kind of tick up high enough, then that's kind of, usually when we pull the trigger on them,[00:36:22] Matt: I'm looking at the integration page now. I actually don't see a MailChimp. Has MailChimp not been requested or you just refuse to support the monkey?[00:36:29] Ah, yes.[00:36:30] Nathalie: So we've had a lot of people ask for it. I've never[00:36:32] Matt: said that on the air before it refused to support the monkey. I don't know where that came from, but sorry, go ahead.[00:36:36] Nathalie: That's hilarious. Yeah, no, we've definitely had. For MailChimp and our reasoning for not integrating so far is that they didn't have the functionality that we needed in terms of tagging and automation.[00:36:47] So we tend to integrate with the kind of more advanced CRM that do a lot of like cool things. And that basically think back to access LA after. And I know they've added a lot over the years, so we're probably gonna be revisiting, revisiting that again soon, but yeah, for now yeah, there's definitely people who've asked for it and.[00:37:02] Matt: I noticed that the footer there's a page called discover experts. Find an expert. I forget the title of it. It looks like there's a 20 ish or so maybe more if I actually filtered through and started searching how does this program work and what have been the, the positives and negatives of trying to build something like this off the ground, get something like this off the ground, because I know it's difficult to wrangle folks together to really get something of value here.[00:37:30] Yeah.[00:37:30] Nathalie: So we started our certification program. I think it was. Six years ago. So, it's been quite a few years in the making and the first round of it was in person, you had to fly out, we taught you everything there was to know about access ally and building sites and really kind of digging in. And it was a huge, it was a $10,000 program to sign up.[00:37:51] So it was definitely like, you're jumping in all in and that commitment level kind of connected with the people who were ready for it. So that really jumps start the program. And, a lot of those early people have had, hundreds of clients sent their way because of, being early adopters and kind of pioneering some of the things that we did with them and giving us feedback to improve the product and all of that.[00:38:11] So that's kind of how it started and then it's really kind of shifted over the year. So now it's an online things, so they don't have to come and fly out and meet us and learn the software. We actually teach them online. And basically what we do is we. Make sure they're really great at what they do.[00:38:25] And then we kind of filter them out based on what they're focused on. So some people only work with one CRM, that's their jam. They're super awesome at it. Other people love to do the design aspect of the site. Other people are more on the course development. So how to design the course in like the content and modules and all of that.[00:38:41] So we kind of have people doing different types of things. So we know kind of who to recommend when somebody comes to us and doesn't want to do their own setup and do all that.[00:38:49] Matt: Yeah, that's fantastic. And putting a price tag on it is very smart and I'm just like thinking in my head, how can I, how can I do that too?[00:38:58] Like, that's such a, that's such a great idea. I I've, I've, I've known about obviously certification programs. A lot of them again, when you're looking at the top it's it's, it's all paid. I again, when I look at the things happening in WordPress, because we're so I don't want to say desperate, but we're just so like desperate to get people excited.[00:39:14] We're like, just any, if you could fill out this form, you're a partner. Like if you can get through the capture, you win. They're like, okay, that's the bar we're setting for ourselves. But no, it's great that it's paid. And then, obviously don't have to tell you, but once people are paying for it they're spreading the word.[00:39:29] They want you to succeed. You want them to succeed and it's just those positive inertia in, in that direction. So that's fantastic. That's great to see that, that program, that program working before we hit record, you mentioned that you have a F potentially a new theme coming, anything that you can hint at about that release and why you started to be.[00:39:48] Nathalie: Yeah. So we've actually been working on it for about a year, which is like insane, but it's one of those things where we wanted it to be just right. And there's a lot of options for themes and builders and like Burke and so many things that people can choose from to make their sites look great. And the reason we decided to do our own theme is really just menus.[00:40:07] I know it sounds so simple, but when you have a course and you have our multiple courses with a different menu on each course, it's a lot of work to set up those menus on all those pages and. So that's kind of one of the biggest benefits it will save then you access LA theme. And then it also integrates with all the progress tracking.[00:40:23] So you can kind of see, like, as you're going through like little check marks show up beside your menu and you have your little progress bar that shows you how far ahead you are in a course or program. So we just wanted to make it easier for our customers to make things that look great out of the box if they don't want to hire a designer.[00:40:38] So that's kind of our thinking with that.[00:40:40] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. That's no, that's great. That'll be a huge, I'm sure, again, and just from my work with other LMS plugins, that's, that's always the hangup. It's like, I've got this perfect theme and it serves like all of my marketing and how I want my blog to look and how I want my homepage to look.[00:40:55] And then you install the LMS and it's like, that is the ugliest progress bar I've ever seen in my life. No, it looks like, I don't know what it is like this looks like a geo city site that I built, 30 years ago. Why is it looks so terrible is because it's not styled for it. Right. And it's, that's a huge crux of WordPress and plugin integration.[00:41:13] Are you excited about anything Gutenberg related? That's going to make your life easier for the plugin, for the theme.[00:41:19] Nathalie: Yeah. I really want to love Gutenberg and I think it's getting there, like, no, no, I really think it's we're close. And I think that a lot of people had a lot of. Emotions, let's put them around.[00:41:32] And and I think that we're really, really like if we're not there yet, I think we're like super close to actually having that. So we're actually going to be recommending people, use Gutenberg with theme. So if people don't have another option that they prefer, and I think that's going to be really amazing.[00:41:46] So XSL, it comes with blocks already, so it can do all the things that it needs within that area. I like kind of your main part of your content for your courses and stuff. So I'm super excited about that. And it's actually something I want us to go into more, like, I think that's direction. I really want the plugin to go into Morris, making the blocks even better.[00:42:03] So yeah, I'm definitely all in on Gutenberg, but I think that there's still a lot of resistance from people who are more familiar with it, or maybe haven't played enough with it and feel a little bit of that. Yeah, not too sure about it yet.[00:42:17] Matt: Yeah. In the beginning, everyone was sort of just, throwing their hats off saying why, why, why, why, why do we have this?[00:42:23] But you know, over, over time, like we all should have known like any soft first version of a piece of software. You, we all know it's not, it's not the, the version we are really gonna fall in love with. And it's taken a few years. I certainly enjoy it, but yeah, there's still some things where I'm just like, I literally can't drag this block into a column.[00:42:42] Like the most basic thing I should be able to do ever. I can't do those are some frustrating points and then there's some other awesome points. And I was making a landing page for, at castles today. And, and like the quick commands of like the forest lash and you just hit I, and an image pops up or P for power, like that stuff navigating that is it's fantastic.[00:43:06] Like, it just makes that stuff so much easier, but yeah, there's still some pain points and I think, I think it's going to be another year, maybe two until it's really smooth, especially with full site editing.[00:43:18] Nathalie: Right? Yeah. I feel you on that. And I think it's like, just. Keeping the hope right. That we'll get there and like, just keep them at it, keep it going and just putting our support behind it too.[00:43:29] I think as business owners, we have to say like, no, this is the direction we're presses going in. And we have to put our support behind that too. So that's. Yeah,[00:43:38] Matt: for sure. Natalie Lucier is founder and CEO access. ally.com checkout access, ally.com. If you haven't, if you have a customer or a client or you want to launch your own LMS, check out access, ally.com, Natalie, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks.[00:43:52] No, that's[00:43:53] Nathalie: that's fine. Thank you[00:43:55] Matt: stuff, everybody else. My report.com my report.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. And if you want your weekly dose of WordPress news and under five minutes, the WP minute.com. ★ Support this podcast ★

We’ve all seen it — maybe some of us have even fallen for the trick — you’re on an ecommerce site and a big “Wheel of Savings” pops up. This innocent-seeming discount offer, though, isn’t what it seems, and it’s doing damage to the end-user spinning the wheel, and the site the wheel pops up on. The world of malvertising and browser extensions has been causing headaches in the ecommerce world for years and brands are constantly looking for ways to fight back and regain control of their websites. Matt Gillis is helping with that mission. Matt is the CEO of clean.io, which offers real-time protection against malicious actors and code for some of the most-trafficked websites in the world. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matt takes us through some of the methods bad actors are using to install malicious code on ecommerce sites, and he gets into the nitty gritty of why browser extensions like Honey and Wikibuy are hurting brand bottom lines, and why those extensions are making marketing attribution nearly impossible. But he also offers some solutions, too, so that ecommerce brands can finally win back control of the user experience. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Good Guy or Bad Guy?: Traditionally, malvertising is done by bad actors who infiltrate websites and take over through ads. But in the world of ecommerce, the bad actors are actually manifesting in the form of Fortune 100 companies that profit from website extensions like Honey and Wikibuy, which disrupt the user experience of the customer on the original ecommerce site. Solving that problem is the challenge for ecommerce brands that want to take back control.Sneakily Effective: In the malvertising world, the bad actors are at the top of the marketing game. They can achieve a 100% click-through rate at little to no cost because they are using sly, untraceable strategies. Targeting and eliminating those malvertisers is critical in order to level the playing field for ecommerce marketers to have success moving forward.Last Line of Defense: Publishing platforms hold most of the responsibility for the end-user experience. Everybody has a role to play in minimizing the risk of malicious buyers or advertisers, but ultimately, the publisher is the last line of defense against malvertising moving into the user experience, and they should be held accountable.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:Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder at mission.org. Today on the show we have Matt Gillis, the CEO at clean.io. Matt, welcome.Matt:Stephanie, thanks for having me. I'm excited.Stephanie:I am very excited to have you here. We were just talking about how cool your background is, and I think that's actually kind of a fun place to start of where you're at in the world. And tell me a bit about your background.Matt:Yeah. Hey, so I'm in Baltimore and we actually just took possession of this office in February, right before the pandemic. And so the irony is I've been here every day since the pandemic started pretty much.Stephanie:By yourself?Matt:But I'm by myself. So we have 4,000 square feet. We just did the mural right before the pandemic and no one on our team has been able to experience it pretty much. But yeah, cybersecurity company located in Baltimore, we're about 45 people, I guess you could say solving this problem of untrusted and malicious JavaScript that is ruining user experiences in revenue across the internet. That's us in a nutshell.Stephanie:Cool. Well, I am really excited to dive further into clean.io. Before we do that though, I was hoping you can kind of go through your background because I saw you've worked at places like AOL, you've been in publishing. You've been in ad space. Tell me a bit about what you did before you came to clean.io.Matt:So full disclosure, I'm old. And so I've been around a little bit. I've had some fun. But yeah, I think key things I've spent probably the last 20-ish or so years in a couple of different capacities. Right out of university, I started in the mobile industry and mobile at that time was just making phone calls, that's it. There wasn't even texting then.Matt:In fact, my job back in those days was I would stand on a golf course at a golf tournament and let people make free phone calls because that was the cool thing to do then. No one had cell phones and if they did, they were like those brick ones. You remember those ones that you couldn't fit in your pocket?Stephanie:Yeah. And you were the cool guy like, "I've got access to an awesome phone, anyone want in?"Matt:Yeah. And listen, men and women would come up to me and they'd be like, "Can I call back and check and see if I have any messages?" And so that was the cool thing to do then. I know it sounds so crazy that was a thing at some point, but yeah. So I worked at mobile operators in the early stages of my career.Matt:So I worked at Bell Mobility in Toronto, Canada. I'm from Toronto. And then I moved down here to work at Verizon Wireless. And at the end of my tenure at Bell Mobility and my tenure at Verizon, I was focused on some of the services that you live by on your cell phone today. So this was in kind of late '99 and then the early 2000s of things like video on demand on your phone, playing games on your phone, downloading ringtones on your phone, I'm sure you did that.Stephanie:Oh, ringtones, yeah [inaudible].Matt:They were, obviously a huge business at some point.Stephanie:Now if my phone rings I'm like, "Stop it, what are you doing? Who's calling me? Don't call me, text me."Matt:Put it on mute. Yes, exactly. So I was kind of part of the foundational days of things that you would do with your phone, before the iPhone. And then I went and took a swing at being an entrepreneur and joined a little small video game company. Our biggest game was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? We did a lot of TV game shows. So we did, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? And things like that.Matt:So I kind of walked the mile as a publisher for a while and then Capcom, which is the Japanese video game company acquired us. So I ran their publishing business for a few years and I got to experience what it's like to be a publisher and how hard it is to make money.Matt:And that was kind of in those early days of the iPhone where I'd say to people, "You'll go and spend $5 on this latte, but you won't pay $5 for unlimited use of a game over a period of time." And this is back in 2008, 2009. And so we had a real struggle and people weren't wanting to pay for our games. They want them free and free became kind of the thing on the iPhone.Matt:And so recognizing that struggle, I actually joined this company called Millennial Media, which was one of the earliest mobile ads platforms for app developers, helping app developers make money with ads. Some of our biggest customers at the time were like Words with Friends, if you've played Words with Friends-Stephanie:Yes, I have.Matt:... ads in every game. So we were kind of one of the foundational tech partners with folks like Words with Friends and various other games across the internet and apps. Did that for eight years through an acquisition with Verizon and AOL. And then we acquired Yahoo. So I ran the publisher platforms business at the combined entity of those companies, which was awesome.Matt:And one of the biggest problems in my time over that period was this thing called malicious ads, or malvertising as they call it. You probably are familiar with when you're scrolling away on your phone and all of a sudden it redirects you and says, congratulations, you won an Amazon gift card. And you're like, "I didn't click anything." Or spin the wheel for your chance.Stephanie:Yeah. I did that once I fell for it. I was like, "Oh, I spun it." I couldn't help it.Matt:Never spin the wheel, Stephanie.Stephanie:I only did it once, but yeah, afterwards I'm like, "That was a bad call. Why did I do that?"Matt:Yeah. So it was a big problem in my past life. And there were a few folks that were solving this problem and two of them were folks that I had worked with at AOL. When I left, it was called Oath at the time, which is Verizon Media now.Matt:I went and had lunch with these guys and they told me that they were spinning up this company called Clean Creative and set to solve this problem of malvertising. And I didn't have a job and it was getting too cold to golf. And so I said, "Hey guys, can I be an intern?"Matt:And so I came and hung around for a couple of days a week. And I was like, "You guys are really onto something here because this was a massive problem in my prior life." And so I said, "Hey, can I have the keys?" And they obliged. And that's how I'm here, started as the CEO two years ago. And we've kind of been blowing it up ever since. That's awesome.Stephanie:Yeah, such a fun story. So what is your day to day look like now? And what's your best day in the office look like while you're there by yourself? Are you around skipping around bicycling around the big office? What is your days look like?Matt:I do pace and I get my steps in over there. Day-to-day, we're startup, so we're small. And so as any of your listeners would know at a startup you do everything, and you take the trash out and you sign big contracts, hopefully you raise money. You kind of do run the gamut. So it's a little bit of everything. If you've worked at a startup you know that generally speaking, there's epic highs and epic lows. And so you have those days where you are the king of the world and you and your team are high-fiving and celebrating. And that's a little different now because you got to do it all virtually.Matt:Part of being at a startup is you get that culture of everybody generally speaking, being in an office like this, but we're a widely distributed culture now. We were before the pandemic where we kind of had, I don't know, five or six or seven locations among all of our people, but now we have 40 locations. So it's just like any other gig except there's really no net underneath you. You're walking this tightrope and hopefully you get to the other side.Stephanie:Yes. I definitely feel that.Matt:It's fun though. Isn't that why you do it?Stephanie:I mean, yeah, it's definitely really fun. Other times you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm responsible for so many lives." And then other days it's like, "This is fun." So it's a good balance.Matt:Yeah. I mean, I won't lie. I had months of sleepless nights when we were raising money. We most recently raised our series A and we started raising it in March, right at the beginning of the pandemic. And yeah, all these people's jobs, for me, the pressure was on me to make sure that we could raise money and continue on this mission.Matt:The reality is, is the people behind the scenes are the ones that actually made my job easy because they're the ones that enabled me to go and tell the story of our massive revenue growth and our massive traction and our product market fit and all of that sort of stuff.Matt:Startups are hard, but there's a reason that many people once you leave the big company and you actually go and take your swing, that becomes the thing that you keep doing and doing and doing because you like having that euphoric feeling.Stephanie:Yeah. No, I definitely agree. And I mean, I think it's a good reminder too, as the CEO at any company to kind of get out of your way and hire a team that can support you and do things, but then let you do the higher level things like selling, raising money, such is a good point for, I think a lot of business owners who want to kind of stay attached to, "I've always been coding." Or, "I always did this part of the business." You need to step away and find people who can step in for you so you can go on to the next thing.Matt:Yeah, and focus on your strengths. Don't try and overcompensate and really... We did this thing called StrengthsFinder with our leadership team. And it was really about figuring out what are the strengths across this group of people that are practically leading the company. And you go, "Okay, well, I'm really good at this, this and this. And you're really good at this, this and this. Wow. We compliment each other. I should continue to keep doing this stuff. And boy, we should just let you handle all of this sort of stuff." So yeah, hire a diverse team and hire people that are way smarter than you and you'll be successful.Stephanie:So how have you seen the digital security landscape change? Maybe even over just the past year or two, what new things are popping up, what should e-commerce owners be aware of right now that maybe wasn't happening last year or two years ago?Matt:I would say that where we cut our teeth was in this malvertising space and what it is, is malicious JavaScript that's kind of being injected into the user experience through ads. And what we've seen is that the bad actors, the people that are doing it, are getting even more sophisticated over time. They have figured out how to get around the systems. They've figured out how to get around the checks and balances.Matt:And we kind of stumbled into this e-commerce world where we were protecting, we're protecting some of the biggest websites on the internet. There's seven million websites that run our code. Probably many of the websites that you go to everyday either to get your news or to read entertainment gossip, or that sort of stuff if you do.Stephanie:No.Matt:I'm not saying you do Stephanie, but we protect all of those sites; every single page view on those pages, we make sure that the user experience is protected and revenue's protected. And by the way, in that world, it's folks that I would say, delivering malicious JavaScript. What we started seeing in the e-commerce world is there's this whole phenomenon of what I would call untrusted JavaScript.Matt:Now in either case, the premise is you own your website. You should be able to control everything that executes on your website. You should be able to protect your user experience. You should be able to dictate your user experience because it's your website. On the malvertising world, what we saw happening was if folks had ads on their website, they had lost control of the user experience. They had lost control of revenue because any bad actor could just buy an ad and take over the user experience and get you to spin the wheel.Stephanie:Only once, but yes.Matt:Only once, but it happened. And so in the e-commerce world, what we've noticed is there's a lot of stuff happening on e-commerce sites, just like there is in any website that is without the permission or without the authorization of the person who owns the site. The biggest problem that we kind of dug in and gone to solve for is, if you ever heard of these things called Honey or Wikibuy?Stephanie:Yeah.Matt:So these are Chrome extension, Safari extensions, Firefox extensions. They sit resident on the user's device and Stephanie, when you're out shopping on your computer and you get to check out, Honey will pop up and say, "Hey, I've got coupons for you. Do you want them?" You as the user you're probably like, "Yeah, I'd love to get a discount. I'd love a better price, if I can get it without having to do any work." Honey does all the hard work for you.Matt:We think that's not really in the best interest of the merchants because they own their website and now someone is injecting code in and disrupting the user experience, disrupting your revenue. So just like it is in this malvertising world, the same phenomenon is happening over here. The difference is Honey is owned by PayPal. Wikibuy is owned by Capital One.Matt:So the folks that I would call "bad actors" in this world are actually fortune 100 companies. They're folks that you would expect to be able to trust. And what they're doing is they're actually injecting code in to disrupt the user experience and disrupt revenue. And so that's the problem that we've gone out and solved.Matt:We just launched our product that's called cleanCART. And what it is is it's a Shopify app and it gives Shopify merchants the ability to protect their carts at checkout and make sure that they can prevent this sort of code from disrupting user experiences in revenue. So it really is giving control of the websites back to the merchants.Stephanie:Oh, interesting. So when you implement that you just can't get coupons or are there other pieces that it kind of protects as well, or the user can't see coupons from a Honey or something, or are there other things that your app is also protecting against?Matt:So we're in, I would say the second inning of the baseball game. So early stages. We're really focused on to start is blocking the automation of these coupons. So we don't want to block you as a user going in and manually inserting the coupon. We think that's the intended use case. But what we think is unfair is that someone is standing beside you at checkout and handing you a mitt full of coupons and actually not even handing them to you, they're actually giving them and just scanning them all to make sure that they all have a chance to work.Matt:If you think about this analogy, the grocery store would never let someone come and stand beside the checkout and save you 30% off your grocery order while you're already ready to pay. And I think that's the phenomenon that we're trying to solve for in the earliest days, which is, let's prevent the automation from happening. Let's not prevent people from manually inserting coupons. Let's give control back to the merchants because it impacts them in so many different ways. Obviously, it impacts them from a revenue loss perspective.Matt:I talk to merchants every day. Many merchants are complaining that these injections are literally scraping and pulling 30% off of their cart value at checkout. So someone who had $100 cart, they go to checkout, Honey runs and it knocks their cart value from $100 to $70. That's kind of bad for the merchant, especially if that person was going to convert anyway.Matt:The other key thing is Honey and Wikibuy and these other discount extensions have made it really hard for merchants to have discounting strategies that they can track. And so what's happening is that promo codes are ending up in the wrong hands. It's creating an attribution nightmare for merchants where they think that this social media influencer or this Instagrammer, or this YouTuber is driving tons of sales and lo and behold, Honey has grabbed that coupon and is injecting it.Matt:And now every order that comes through where Honey was present on the page is applying that person's code. And so now the merchant not only has bad data that is going to ultimately drive their marketing decisions but now, they're also losing revenue and they're paying out affiliate fees to folks that generally didn't deserve that affiliate fee. So I think it's created a bit of a nightmare.Matt:And so, we felt this kind of pent up demand for this product. And that's exactly what's happened is that no one has solved it. We think we're first to market. And we think it's important that people are fighting for the merchants. There's been 10 years of growth in e-commerce over the last year. The pandemic driving a lot of that.Matt:And we think it's important that merchants really get control of their websites, get control of their margins, get control of their revenue and really get the right data to make the right data-based decisions of how they're going to run their marketing programs.Stephanie:Yes. I think that's a really cool story. You were just talking about how you were looking at a problem that people were complaining about, and then now you guys are like, "Well, let's solve it." Because I've read, I'm trying to think where this was, where they're talking about going to Reddit and looking at some of the threads of people talking about problems that keep occurring and occurring and how you could build businesses just based off Reddit threads. And you guys did that, just looking at problems with what merchants were struggling with. So a really cool example of how to build a business is look at all the problems that are going on and jump at solving it.Matt:Well, and I think the other key thing here is as you know is solving the problem, but also during that process of your hypothesis that you're going to develop of what you're trying to prove, it's you also need to prove that people pay for it. And that's, I think part of the foundation of what we've built here, obviously on the malvertising side, but also on the e-commerce side is it's a big enough problem. People need to protect user experiences.Matt:If you think about just in the internet in general, it's very expensive to create content. It's very expensive to drive traffic. And once you've done those two things, why would you leave it to chance that someone might come to your website and have a crappy user experience? Protect your user experience.Matt:It happened last week on the Harvard Crimson on the crimson.com where somebody was on Crimson and they got one of these redirect ads that took them to this landing page that said, "Hey, you're a Verizon customer click here and take the survey and answer these nine questions and you'll have a chance to win." And this user actually took to Twitter and said, "Hey @thecrimson, which is, I think their Twitter handle, you've got a crappy user experience. Why are you letting this happen?"Matt:I never even saw a reply from the Crimson. But when we did some investigation on what was going on, they don't even have protection on their website. So it almost feels irresponsible at this day and age to not be protecting your asset because your asset generally speaking, isn't your website, your asset is your users.Matt:And so protect your users, make them feel confident that when they come to your site, they're going to have a great experience. And so that's really what we've focused on is just delivering technology that solves a problem that people are willing to pay for. Because obviously without that, we don't have a business.Stephanie:So when thinking about like the Crimson example, that's all from a bad ad being run on their website, correct?Matt:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Stephanie:Someone was able to buy that ad unit have bad JavaScript, and then that's when they were sent to that Verizon survey. I'm I thinking about that, right?Matt:You're totally thinking about that right. And what's interesting about the thread is that when this woman went on to Twitter and said, "Hey, this is what happened. And here's a screenshot," there were a whole bunch of people that piled onto the thread of like, "Oh, here's what I think is happening." "Oh, you have a virus on your computer." Or, "Oh, you have a bad extension on your computer or whatever." Everybody had a hypothesis of what's happening.Matt:And so we actually went and captured the threat and reverse engineered it and said like, "Here's exactly what's happening." And yeah, it's all coming through ads in that case. And there's so many great things of the open programmatic ecosystem.Matt:So programmatic media being able to buy a single oppression at a time by single user real humans, real devices, real networks, like you know I'm having a one-to-one engagement with this person and in the malvertising world, that's a feeding ground for bad actors because they get to do the same thing.Matt:And quite frankly, they're better at it than any other advertiser out there because they're the ones who know how to pay 20 cents CPM and buy an ad and actually get 100% click-through as opposed to the rest of the world that's just hoping that they get a half a percent click-through rate. And so they figured out how to buy that ad, that ad renders on your device.Matt:And then usually it's like an onTouchEvent. So when you actually just touch the device, they put a transparent overlay on your device. And that turns into a click or they'll auto click something on your behalf, or however they decide to inject their technology. But yeah, it's as simple as that. And I think it's lucrative, otherwise-Stephanie:They wouldn't be doing it, yeah.Matt:What they do is they try to do it at the lowest possible level without getting caught. So if you think about sophisticated marketers, what do you do? Well, you pick the right users, you maybe frequency caps so that you don't lambaste them with ads. You want to hit them at the right time with the right message and all that sort of stuff.Matt:And so these bad actors have figured out how to very elegantly and in a sophisticated fashion, they'll hit you with that ad. But the reality is they'll probably frequency cap you to one so you can't reproduce the experience and that's how they evade getting caught in most cases.Stephanie:Yeah. Very interesting. I didn't understand the whole backend of how that works. I mean, I do spend a lot of time thinking about building incentives for advertisers because we build up our own ad networks to advertise our podcast and we bring on partners all the time.Stephanie:And it's really funny thinking through how to build incentives for especially newer advertisers when you might say something like, "Oh, we'll incentivize you based on a download." Then all of a sudden you're getting all these fake downloads. No, not downloads. We'll incentivize you based on consumption. Like, does someone listen to the episode? They wanted to hear it.Stephanie:And then you see instead of actually having good people come through and consume the episode, the advertiser will say, "Okay, I'll pay you to review the ad or review the podcast, which makes it show that you were consuming it because you had to for maybe a minute to then be able to review."Stephanie:And it's always interesting trying to figure out, I mean, and these people are not good actors maybe, I'm not really sure. But it's always very interesting thinking, how do you incentivize people to do the right thing and actually deliver and not try and always get around the rules and just meet a number which I'm sure a lot of the platforms deal with the same kind of thing, but-Matt:It's interesting you use the word incentivized, and that was a dirty word in the early days where most advertisers didn't feel that the word incentivize was a good user because they didn't truly have the intent to do the thing that you want because they were being paid or a bounty or whatever the thing is.Matt:I saw the evolution of incentivized in my mobile career where it became really hard to get people to consume video commercials, like 15, six second whatever that metric was. And in the games world, they figured out this thing and they actually rebranded it instead of calling it incentivized video, they actually called it rewarded video. And-Stephanie:I feel like that's a little more, I don't know.Matt:Well, listen, and so I talk about one of the apps that I love is this app called Candy Crush. And I've been playing candy crush for almost 10 years now, I think. And when's the last time you played the same game for 10 years? Like never?Stephanie:Yeah. That's impressive.Matt:But they've artfully integrated video into their app. And I think if you run out of lives, you can watch a 30 second spot that is unskippable. So you have to watch the whole thing. And then if you, do you get rewarded with that extra life or whatever it is, maybe a lollypop, I don't know. But yeah, so I think there's different ways to approach it. But you're right, usually when you figure out the bounty, everyone else figures out how to capitalize on the bounty.Matt:And I think the interesting thing with Honey and Wikibuy is they've figured out how to get paid for the bounty or get credit for the bounty when lo and behold, they didn't really do anything. All they did was they had code that was resident on the machine that allows them to kind of get credit for that user purchasing when I think it's questionable whether they had any influence on that.Stephanie:Yeah. I've kind of thought that too, when seeing different Instagrammers with their promo codes for e-commerce site. And I always thought like, "Oh, how does that attribution work?" Because I mean, she's sharing it here, but I'm sure it's very easy for someone who doesn't follow her to also find that code outside of a Honey, but just be like, send it to my friend, "Hey, use this code." They never even followed her and now, they've got 25% off or something. So it does seem like attribution can be tricky, even if someone's not using Honey. How do you think that world's changing right now to make it easier for merchants to track where their sales are actually coming from? It feels very messy.Matt:Oh, I agree. I think it's a total mess. That's why we focused on the automation because I think that's one of those low hanging fruit, but big problems. Honey will tell the world that they have 17 million or so users. I don't know if Wikibuy which is now called Capital One Shopping, I don't think they announced how many users they have. But what I can tell you is both of those companies are spending a tremendous amount of money acquiring new users.Matt:Every time I log into Twitter, usually the first ad that I get is from Honey. All throughout the Christmas season, the holiday season just recently Capital One which owns Wikibuy Capital One Shopping, they were running TV commercials for this product with Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. So there's like a tremendous push for them to grow these user bases.Matt:In talking with merchants and we've got, I don't know, we've got maybe 25 merchants using our product right now. And we're in closed beta. That problem that you just mentioned, which is, "Hey, I worked with an Instagrammer and I gave them a code. And all of a sudden two days later, I've had a vitamin company tell me that story. I've had a sporting goods company tell me that story. I've had a toilet paper company tell me that story.Stephanie:They're using Instagrammers?Matt:They're using Instagrammers. They're using YouTubers. They're actually using podcasts as well.Stephanie:I mean, interesting to see how they're partnering on toilet paper.Matt:Because they're partnering for the audience on these podcasts and they're hoping that they can get that audience to find out about their product and again, then they're incentivizing them to come and become a customer. It's basically the same net story. The vitamin company told me they're like a supplement company. They partnered with one of the biggest triathletes in the world.Matt:Let's just say they had 50,000 or 100,000 followers, but you've got to imagine they're probably rabid followers. If you're into that, then that's probably the gold standard of who you would listen to. And that person did some blog posts and did some Instagram posts and posted their code and as soon as it happened, they saw a surge in sales attributed to that person.Matt:Now, the marketing person at the company was like, "Oh my gosh, we figured it out. We nailed this. We knew that people would be rabid about that person's content. We knew that person had so much influence to get people to come and buy." And then they're like, "Oh my God, it's Honey." Because literally they went from zero sales to 80% of their sales that had coupons was that person on Monday.Matt:I think it's a frustrating problem. And I think the sophisticated marketers have woken up and are like, "Man, we're bleeding money." One merchant told me that when they started kind of parsing out the attribution that Honey was costing them. They did about a million and a half in revenue online per month, so call it a $15 million business give or take. They believed that these promo code extensions were costing them about 150 grand a month, 10% their overall value.Stephanie:I mean, we just had a guest who they ranted about their hatred of Honey, I mean, even on the show. So I think it's maybe a couple episodes before maybe when yours is going to go out.Matt:Call me. We can help.Stephanie:Yeah, I'll send the link so you can hit him up.Matt:Absolutely.Stephanie:He was not a happy dude about Honey. But I guess when I think about promo codes, it kind of feels archaic to me. Maybe this is just a me thing, but it feels like where QR codes were where all of a sudden they're gone and you don't even think about them anymore. Promo codes kind of feel like that to me too of just, it feels like a manual old way of attributing things.Stephanie:How do you think about attribution when it comes to influencers and stuff or anyone, without having to use a code? Are you guys even thinking about a new way of doing things or do you hear of people trying new ways of attribution that isn't like I'm putting in a manual like Stephanie 20, to get my 20% off? Is there a new way of doing it?Matt:I mean, we're thinking through all those things. I think the challenge is specifically if you're using these one-to-many mediums. In a perfect world, I think you'd have a unique code for every user and so you'd have to authenticate. We'd know that that code went to you Stephanie and if you redeemed it, I would know that you actually bought something and you bought something because of this engagement that we had. I think in these one-to-many mediums it's, how else can you do it? And some of the challenges that the one-to-many mediums like think of YouTubers.Matt:One of the companies that we're working with has a problem where they have a very high dollar ticket item. Their item that they're selling is about 1,000 bucks. And obviously, if somebody grabs a code of 20% off that you're losing 200 bucks, it's a lot of money. Their problem was that they were doing YouTuber videos and they were publishing a code within the YouTube video to reach the audience. And for them, it was extreme sports, the audience that they were going after.Matt:Well, literally the next day, and I don't know if you know how Honey works. If you have a Honey on your machine, the very first thing that Honey does is it scrapes out anybody who manually puts a code in. So in order for Honey to be able to grab that code, it has to happen once where a real person saw the code and was motivated to go and type it in and buy.Matt:If that happened to me, if I got that code, I would go in and type it in. And if Honey were on my machine and then I hit okay, Honey will scrape that code out and now everybody who comes after me gets access to that code whether they saw that YouTube video or not.Matt:The problem for this company is spending a lot of money engaging with YouTubers and creating videos and obviously, doing the presentation layer of these offers. Well, once Honey gets a hold of the code... And what they've also found is that Honey and the other extensions, are not very merchant friendly. The relationship between Honey and these merchants is actually quite adversarial. And so it leaves them with no other option.Matt:I guess the two options: one, you just keep running your YouTube thing and you resign yourself that you're going to be paying out a 20% discount to everybody who comes and has Honey; which that stinks, that doesn't feel right or you need to reach out to the YouTuber. You need to recut the video. You need to recut the voiceover. You need to kill that code. You need to put a new code in. And so it's made this sort of marketing endeavor with YouTubers and Instagrammers and you name it very hard, because you're actually turning off codes.Matt:We saw one email which was interesting. I always say to people, let's remember we're all consumers too, you and I buy stuff on the internet, even though we're deeply entrenched in the businesses that we're running. I have Honey on my machine, so I can understand what that user behavior is, so that I can actually talk with merchants.Matt:One of the folks on our team bought a pair of shorts from one of these companies that advertises on Facebook and Instagram. And they were out of stock after he had ordered it, so they sent him an email. And they said, "Hey, listen, sorry you didn't have it but guess what, here's a code. You'll save X percent. But please, make sure you use it within the next 48 hours because Honey has been grabbing our codes and we're going to shut this code off."Matt:How can people market, if you constantly have to play whack-a-mole. And if you now think of the analogy, it's back to what we do in the malvertising side. If you aren't going to solve things with software, you're basically playing this long cat and mouse game that you won't win.Stephanie:I mean, that's why I think about merchants turning on and off codes.Matt:It's a nightmare.Stephanie:We were handing out swag and me just trying to... I had unique links that could work for more than one person and just thinking, "That could be tricky and go really bad." But I guess that's why I just think codes just feel, like I said, a little bit archaic. Why can't I just go to a YouTube video?Stephanie:I mean, the internet knows so much about me and where I'm at anyways. It should say, "Hey, Stephanie watched Matt's video where he was talking about this toilet paper." And then all of a sudden she's at our website, you can say, "Stephanie, a 20% coupon awaits you when you go here."Stephanie:And then when I get there it should know who I am and then be like, "Your coupons applied. And it will be applied for the next three days on this website or whatever, because I know where you've been and what you saw and where exactly you came from." Why can't it just work?Matt:I mean, I wish it was all that simple. Listen, we are taking obviously, technology solution to what we think is a longstanding and challenging problem. And in the malvertising world, the people in ad operations were literally playing whack-a-mole. Like, "Let's figure out where this bad ad came from." "Turn that demand source off." Or, "Turn that buyer off." And guess what, the bad actors, they just pop up again.Matt:And so we believe that, and I've seen and talked to merchants who are like, "Listen, here's how I solved the Honey problem." And they're like, "We actually created promo codes for 10% off, but the promo code was Honey is stealing your data."Matt:Because if you use Honey, you know that when Honey pops up it'll actually tell you the codes that it's implementing. They went on a mission to discredit and put the fear of God in their buyers that Honey was doing... They were like, "Honey is doing nefarious things with your data." And guess what, Honey D listed them as [inaudible].Stephanie:Well, there you go. Now, you know how to do it, I guess.Matt:The irony is, is that was three months ago that I talked to that merchant. And yesterday they cameback in and said, "Listen, we have a problem again."Stephanie:Honey added us again.Matt:No, this time they've got a Wikibuy problem. The problem is going to be never-ending, I think. Ultimately, we're hopefully going to give e-commerce companies the tools that they need to go out and be able to operate their business and focus their time on the things that really matter, in my mind, which is driving incremental revenue; not playing whack-a-mole with your promo codes and having to go recut YouTube videos. Hopefully, that's one of the big things that we help solve for.Stephanie:That's cool. I mean, I do like the idea of that one merchant you were mentioning where they said, "If you act within the next 48 hours or whatever, it'll only lasts this long." And I just had a guest yesterday who said that. I think it was either Burger King or McDonald's made it so if you're within 20 feet or something of a McDonald's they would send you a code and say, "You have five minutes to get to a burger King to get a free burger or something."Stephanie:And I'm like, "That's interesting." That's a good way to make people act quickly if you know something's expiring, I know I act a lot quicker. But I mean, of course, solve the problem that's number one. But I do think that's an interesting marketing tactic too.Matt:And make it measurable. I think that's the key thing is that... I often say, "What gets measured gets managed." And so hopefully, what we're doing is we're taking one of the things out of the equation that is making measurement really challenging for merchants. Again, using the triathlete example, yes, the marketer was high-fiving the rest of their team going, "We finally solved this." And then when they actually looked at the data they were like, "Damn it. I guess we got to go back to the drawing board."Stephanie:It's also just so tricky too, knowing how much of those people would have bought otherwise or not. So even looking and being like, wow, we have all this attributed to this one promo code and maybe it was because of Honey. But how many of those people would have bought if there wasn't some promo in there? It's just hard to know.Matt:We're solving that problem. We're giving merchants some deep analytics on exactly what's happening on their site, because we think there's a blind spot there where they don't know. For instance, how many users actually came to your site that actually had an injection capability? One of the extensions of Honey, Wikibuy, Piggy, Amazon Assistant, you name it. So we give them that lens.Matt:And then we give them the lens of, what were all the promo codes that they tried to inject? What was the most popular promo code? And stack rank those things and then going deeper down to conversion rate. And guess what, what we're seeing in these early days is that when you block Honey and Wikibuy at checkout, the vast majority of users actually still convert.Matt:And so that to me is the icing on the cake which is, guess what, you take control back of your website. You take control of your margins. You take control of your revenue. You now have the data you need to be able to go out and drive incremental sales. We think that's pretty powerful.Stephanie:I mean, that makes sense. I've heard a couple of times that also, discounts don't matter as much as you would think. I think they were talking about, they did a study between 10% off and 20% off. And actually, they were kind of the same when it came to consumer happiness. And what can be worse though, is if someone has the ability to go in and put a promo code in or something and then it doesn't work.Stephanie:I don't know if you remember those days of just going to the internet promo code for macys.com and trying out 10 different promo codes and all of them failing. I was way more unhappy then, than just not having one at all, just buying at full value.Matt:Let me tell you the opposite of that which is the worst-case scenario, in one of our merchants experience and that's why they're using our software. They're in the home interior space, so they do drapes and carpets and wallpaper and all that sort of stuff. And they were trying to build favor with interior designers because they wanted interior designers to know their site and know their stuff and all that sort of stuff. And so they did a very exclusive but unfortunately, a promo code that Honey got ahold of that gave interior designers 50% off.Matt:Well, lo and behold, as soon as one designer used that code and also had Honey on the machine, that code then got swept up in the Honey and everybody, every order that had Honey was now getting 50% off. Their customer service nightmare was that they couldn't afford to give every consumer 50% off, so they actually had to cancel orders; believe it or not.Matt:They called customers and said, "We can't honor your order with that coupon because that coupon was not intended for you." Created a customer service nightmare for them. And that's what they want to do is, they want to control their user experience. They want to control their revenue and their margins.Stephanie:Oh my gosh, that's horrible.Matt:Out of control. But think of that disaster of having to call someone and say, "Hey, I know you wanted to spend $500 with me, but only pay me 250 bucks. I can't give you 50 off but I can give you like 15 off, that's kind of what you were probably entitled to." So anyways, just trying to get control back in these merchants hands and let them control their destiny.Stephanie:I love that. When thinking about back to the now advertising piece, how much do you think it's on the publishing platforms? Is it their responsibility to make sure that they continue to increase their efforts to make sure bad actors aren't out there anymore?Stephanie:I mean, I know they're probably doing a lot. A lot of people like to hate on the publishing platforms and they want them to always do more and more and more. Is it maybe on them or maybe not on them anymore to continue to try and track those bad actors, who like you said are kind of popping up here and then they shut down and then open up a new account and do one off things and then shut down again. How should we think about leaning on the platforms like that?Matt:Well, I say to folks, the value chain in that industry is actually quite wide. And so from the bad actor who's putting their hands on the keyboards to the consumer, there's a whole bunch of players in the middle. I think it's on everybody to really have defenses in place and to make sure that they're protecting...Matt:So if you're at the front end, if you own the demand side platform that the bad actor's using, you need to have your own checks and balances to make sure that you're not bringing in malicious buyers. But all through that value chain, the onus is on everybody. But at the end of the day what I say is, the only person that can be responsible to that end user, is the publisher.Matt:Pick your publisher, if you are Fox News or you're the New York Post or you're the Washington Post, you're the one that has that ultimate relationship with Jenny or Johnny consumer who is surfing your site and consuming content. So you're the last line of defense. You're the one that created the site. You're the one that drove the traffic. You're the one that is using ads to monetize your traffic. It's really on you I think, ultimately.Matt:Now the publishers, all those folks that I named and there's millions of them, they all want to look upstream and they should. And they should hold everybody accountable upstream. But I think they're the ones that are really the that last line of defense.Matt:Because if you go to one of these sites and you have a crappy experience, you don't really care that it came through an ad. Like the woman at Harvard Crimson last week, she didn't know the origins of why it happened. And here's the other crazy thing, she knew that when she went to the Crimson, she was delivered a crappy experience.Matt:Now, the crazy part. First time we've ever done it, we actually did a private webinar with the end user because we wanted to explain to her here's exactly what's happening. She told us this story, she said, "Listen, I use ad block." And obviously, the risk to publishers are, if you don't create great experiences, your users are going to start using ad block.Matt:What she said was, in the desire to get real news and in the desire to really understand what's going on in the world and in the desire to actually make sure that real news publishers are actually getting compensated, she turned her ad block off and this is what happened.Matt:So shame on the Crimson for not delivering a great experience, because guess what? Now that user's like, "I'm not turning ad block off the next time I come to your site. You're not going to get paid for the traffic that I'm going to generate." So again, it really goes back to the publishers, the onus is on them.Stephanie:And thankfully, I think there is like new technologies popping up that maybe we'll be able to enable them or even just thinking about implementing. I mean, I've seen some advertisers looking into blockchain and having that as being kind of like a more source of truth to be able to know a one-to-one relationship and knowing who's behind... You don't know exactly who's behind what, but if you have it in a way where they sign up and they can't just start creating a million different accounts because they've got their one single one that they can go off of, it seems like there's a lot of ways that it can improve over the next couple of years that maybe hasn't been so easy the past decade or so.Matt:I agree. Obviously, there's industry bodies all trying to figure this out together. There's companies like us who are innovating and coming up with new and unique techniques to block these sorts of nefarious actors. I do think the biggest and most important thing is to recognize that the bad actors aren't just sitting still waiting for somebody to solve this problem. They're innovating honestly, a more rapid rate than many of the industry leaders that you would expect that have hundreds or thousands of people trying to solve this problem. Bad actors unfortunately, are innovating at quite a rapid pace.Matt:So the problem I think is going to evolve and change. We've seen it evolve to not just being ads but obviously, compromised Chrome extensions that just seems to be a great vector. And so I think you're going to see the problem move around and especially, if there's a lot of money in it. If there's ways for these guys to make money, you're going to see them salivate with... You're going to put up this defense and they're going to figure out this way to get around it.Matt:And there's so many different browser types. There's so many different machines. There's security flaws. There's zero-day. There's so many ways for these guys to actually buy and target, to only focus on iOS 13 and below and blah, blah, blah to reach their audience.Stephanie:So tricky. Hopefully, it'll get solved over the next decade. Cool. Well, with a couple minutes left, let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Matt?Matt:I am ready.Stephanie:All right. First the harder one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Matt:Listen, I think it's been the gold rush for e-commerce merchants over the last year. In many cases I talk to merchants, they're like, "It was raining money last year." Sales were up five X, 10 X, who knows. I think the next year is going to be that year where folks actually look to efficiency, and they look to figure out where there are holes in the boat that they haven't had to look before.Matt:And I think that plays to our product because I think in many cases when it's raining money, you almost turn a blind eye to some of these sorts of things. But I think now folks are like, "Listen, if I can be more efficient. If I can take control of my revenue and my margins, I'm going to do that."Matt:So I think that's probably, this is the year of people now are catching their breath and they've figured out their distribution and they've figured out their fulfillment and their warehousing and all that sort of stuff and the panic that they had to do to keep up with the pandemic growth. Now, I think it's a deep breath of like, "Okay. Now, let's look at the math."Stephanie:Yeah. I agree, that's a good one. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Matt:What one thing do I not understand. I think the affiliate landscape is complex. I think there are a lot of legacy ways in which people have calculated incrementality and I'm not sure if they're all believable. And I hear a lot of feedback from merchants where it's kind of like they just brush it under the rug and they're like, "I know I'm probably paying for stuff that I didn't really get, but let's just let it go." I think every percentage point matters. That ecosystem, because I hear there's good guys and there's bad guys and I'd love to really dig deeper on that. And I think that's a big opportunity for us as a company.Stephanie:That's a good one. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Matt:Wow. The nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me.Stephanie:I like to go deep.Matt:Yeah. That's a deep question. I think I've been fortunate throughout my whole career in that, I have been given opportunities that I probably wasn't ready for. And by the way, I had never been a CEO before I was at this company. And so, who knew that I'd be able to do it.Matt:But I think it actually starts way back to when I first graduated and I was seeking my first job. And I had a mentor that took a risk on me and gave me my shot. And I worked my butt off and hopefully that translated and he and she felt great about what I was doing. So I think the nicest thing, I've just been given opportunities that I don't think I deserved and hopefully I earned that respect and trust over time.Stephanie:That's a good answer. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Matt:Wow. This lightning round is hard.Stephanie:Good. Needs to be.Matt:If I were to have a podcast. I love gadgets. I'm one of those guys that buys the infomercial type stuff. I bought one of those Rotisserie Showtime girls 20 years ago, I still use it.Stephanie:Worth it.Matt:Maybe it could be interviewing people who've built made for TV products and really understanding the backstories behind how they came up with the idea and how successful they were and God knows how much money we all made them.Stephanie:That's good. We had Kevin Harrington on the show, he was the original OG shark in Shark Tank. He basically made the infomercial. And it was very interesting hearing his perspective of how it started, where it's at now and Shark Tank.Matt:I'm fascinated by that ecosystem, it's super cool. And by the way, I always do buy one of those stupid things for my wife for Christmas and she hates me for doing it because she's like, "You're just burning money."Stephanie:I had fun buying it and watching the infomercial today.Matt:Believe it or not, one of my coworkers gave me a Squatty Potty for Christmas.Stephanie:I actually feel like those have good value though, the science is there. It's just a weird thing to buy your wife, if you got that for her. Someone gave it to you, got it.Matt:I was given it, by one of my coworkers, "By the way it works."Stephanie:And their marketing, I think that's the Harmon Brothers who did their marketing with the whole unicorn and they did the Poo-Pourri thing.Matt:Oh yeah, it's super cool. I love those kind of gadgets.Stephanie:That's a good one. I would listen to that show. All right. And then the last one, what's up next on your Netflix queue?Matt:Well, on my Netflix queue, I think I've got three episodes left on the Queen's Gambit.Stephanie:Love that show. That was a good one.Matt:I'm a documentary guy. I actually will tell you that I've been kind of hooked on HBO Max for a little bit. And I just finished the Tiger Woods documentary last night, which was fascinating. Nothing that you hadn't been told before. This guy through adversity has come back multiple times; knee surgeries, winning on a broken leg. So I'm into those sorts of stories. One of my guilty pleasures is The Bachelor, so it's on my DVR. I'm playing catch up on that.Stephanie:That's great.Matt:I love reality TV and that sort of stuff.Stephanie:I like where your head's at, me too. Well, Matt, this has been a very fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and clean.io?Matt:So you can find me at matt@clean.io. So if you want to send me an email, obviously happy to help you guys in any of your challenges and would love to hear your challenges if they're similar or if they're different than ones that we're solving for. Hit me on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. And our company website is clean.io.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us.Matt:Thanks Stephanie. Thanks for having me.

It's getting a little hot under the collar this week! Matt and Glenn and joined by guest Grant to enjoy some milk and some local hot wing sauces. It's a journey and a half and all the chickens have for sure flown the coop - but with milk, Matt can do anything. Glenn see's the plan immediately and embraces his destiny. We're getting saucey with Grant and trying not to ruin chicken nuggets for Glenn or Matt - Let's Try something New!

Friday, November 6, 2020 - Jack Russell Weinstein discusses this Sunday’s WHY radio show when he discusses propaganda with Jason Stanley in an episode titled: “How Does Propaganda Work?” ~~~ News director Dave Thompson joins us for a recap of the week in news. ~~~ Matt Olien reviews “Let Him Go,” starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane.

A long time ago in a podcast not so far away... Welcome to the conclusion of Star Wars month! On today's episode the PCF crew discuss Rogue One, Solo, and the Star Wars television shows. PCF Fans the gloves come off for this one, who will win team Ron or team Matt? Let us know on Twitter your thoughts on these films and what movies and shows YOU would like to see from the house of mouse. Star Wars Month Part 4 of 4 witter: @PopCultureFed Mikey: @MiketheBorg9 Matt: @Mattybecks Pop Culture Federation is a podcast by friends for friends. Come hang out and discuss different things related to pop culture with us. Movies, tv, comics, major events, music, Thanksgiving sides, random shenanigans and more

Matt joins us from Campaigning for change and shares his very raw and touching story and how he wants to help others. A strong message of 'It's okay to not be okay' but lets help each other. We are stronger together.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:　VOA英语每日一听Matt: Taking one step back to the newspapers, my impression was that newspapers got all their money from the advertisements and that people buying newspapers basically paid for the paper, like the actual printing and maybe the delivery. That the actual cost, that any money they make was through advertisements so I don't see how that's any different than if they just had it online where they would get rid of all those costs of delivery and the paper and the printing and then just still have the same advertisement so I don't understand why they can't make that transition more smoothly.Rachel: And actually I heard that they get more money from online advertising than from the print advertising so, yeah, I don't know really know why it matters come to think of it.Matt: I'm sure that the newspaper will go the way of the Dodo fairly soon.Rachel: Yeah, yeah.Matt: But again, why is it that people will accept that but not books?Rachel: Cause I think ... I can handle a small article, like one page on screen, but I'm not for a long time. I can't read the same like. And also with news you just want to flick[輕擊，輕彈，輕拍] through it. You don't really ... you don't use it to relax.Matt: That's true. That's true. It's usually more active.Rachel: Yeah, whereas with a book you can read in the bath, or you could read it on the bed, or just ... it's a pleasurable sort of thing rather than a "OK, I've got to do this to be ..."Matt: Up with current events.Rachel: Yeah.Matt: Yeah, actually, and one nice feature about reading news online and that I've noticed lately when I went to the, I shouldn't say names, but the BBC web site and so I was reading an article. Recently in the news, they were talking about Iran and the elections and things like that, and they mentioned a lot of names of different positions in the government, and on the side was all of these links to background information about those people and about those positions and about the government and the structure of the government and it was really fun to be able to go through it and learn quite a bit quite quickly about the government system in Iran and that kind of thing. That's much better than a newspaper where you read it and go, "Ooh, where's my encyclopedia?"Rachel: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I did a similar thing with a report about Iran, and then looking at people who are campaigning against the government and I was like, "I don't know these people. But who are they?" and there was a link and I could find out about more which was cool.Matt: Yeah, it's nice. It's nice. Yeah. So ...Rachel: The death of the newspaper.Matt: The death of the newspaper. I think it's inevitable.Rachel: The book still survives.Matt: Let's keep the books. I like that.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:　VOA英语每日一听Matt: Taking one step back to the newspapers, my impression was that newspapers got all their money from the advertisements and that people buying newspapers basically paid for the paper, like the actual printing and maybe the delivery. That the actual cost, that any money they make was through advertisements so I don't see how that's any different than if they just had it online where they would get rid of all those costs of delivery and the paper and the printing and then just still have the same advertisement so I don't understand why they can't make that transition more smoothly.Rachel: And actually I heard that they get more money from online advertising than from the print advertising so, yeah, I don't know really know why it matters come to think of it.Matt: I'm sure that the newspaper will go the way of the Dodo fairly soon.Rachel: Yeah, yeah.Matt: But again, why is it that people will accept that but not books?Rachel: Cause I think ... I can handle a small article, like one page on screen, but I'm not for a long time. I can't read the same like. And also with news you just want to flick[輕擊，輕彈，輕拍] through it. You don't really ... you don't use it to relax.Matt: That's true. That's true. It's usually more active.Rachel: Yeah, whereas with a book you can read in the bath, or you could read it on the bed, or just ... it's a pleasurable sort of thing rather than a "OK, I've got to do this to be ..."Matt: Up with current events.Rachel: Yeah.Matt: Yeah, actually, and one nice feature about reading news online and that I've noticed lately when I went to the, I shouldn't say names, but the BBC web site and so I was reading an article. Recently in the news, they were talking about Iran and the elections and things like that, and they mentioned a lot of names of different positions in the government, and on the side was all of these links to background information about those people and about those positions and about the government and the structure of the government and it was really fun to be able to go through it and learn quite a bit quite quickly about the government system in Iran and that kind of thing. That's much better than a newspaper where you read it and go, "Ooh, where's my encyclopedia?"Rachel: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I did a similar thing with a report about Iran, and then looking at people who are campaigning against the government and I was like, "I don't know these people. But who are they?" and there was a link and I could find out about more which was cool.Matt: Yeah, it's nice. It's nice. Yeah. So ...Rachel: The death of the newspaper.Matt: The death of the newspaper. I think it's inevitable.Rachel: The book still survives.Matt: Let's keep the books. I like that.

In this episode we cover the gaming news for the week of 02/10/19! We discuss what exactly was revealed on the amazing Nintendo Direct! We also talk about future DLC for Destiny and Tekken 7. We also touch on Jedi Fallen Order the hopefully amazing Star Wars game coming hopefully sometime soon!Let us know what you plan on doing this weekend? You gonna be riding that Anthem train? You still finishing up Kingdom Hearts 3 like Matt? Or are you just waiting for Sekiro also like Matt? Let us know!!!Hit us up on social media and become Hit Start Gamers!Twitter: @hitstartpodcastFacebook: Hit Start Gaming GroupInstagram: Hit Start GamingYoutube: Hit Start GamingTwitch: Hit Start Gaming

Besides another economic recession, nothing can stop a company's growth faster than business regulation violations. These hidden costs sneak up on many business owners at the worst time, if we let them. So what's our best defense? An even better offense. Whether you're planning a new start-up or a seasoned business professional, this episode will both educate and give you the necessary tools to protect your organization from unnecessary regulation violation fines. ---- Do you have a question? Looking to get help on a business decision? Know a great guest for our show? Email roipod@iupui.edu so we can help your organization make better business decisions. ---- Ready to take your next step? Check out if a Kelley MBA is right for you: https://bit.ly/35aeAfZ ---- Show Notes: MATT: Regulations – the rules of the road within business; a term carrying many mixed feelings. Some say we have too many, others say we have too few. Regardless of where we stand, the reality is we must comply with the laws of our land or face penalties. On this episode, we're sitting down with Judith Wright, Assistant Clinical Professor of Business Law at Kelley, whose helping us play by the rules and protect what we've worked so hard to build. Let's get to the podcast… ||ROI MUSIC PLAYS|| MATT: Welcome to another episode of the ROI Podcast presented by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. I'm your host, Matt Martella alongside Associate Dean of Academic Programs, Phil Powell. If this is your first time joining us, welcome to the podcast. We put out a weekly episode to help organizations make better business decisions. And for those who are sharing this with friends on social media, we want to say thank you. We are very honored you find enough value in our weekly content to pass these episodes along. And Phil, I think today's topic carries a lot of value, especially for those of us in the early stages of organizational development. However, no matter how established our companies are, there are some great take-a-ways on this episode to protect not just ourselves, but our clients, our employees, and our organizations. PHIL: Absolutely Matt. We're taking a dive into business regulations because so many times, organizations are unaware they may have requirements, restrictions, or compliances they must follow. And it's the failure to follow these regulations that cripple businesses of every size. But before we dive in, it's important to establish why regulations exist in the first place. Judith Wright: A lot of people think, "Oh, there's too much regulation and regulation is bad." Until something happens to you. And then people say, "There ought to be a law!" Right? You've heard that phrase before? So, let me just give you an example of that. All businesses have to provide worker's compensation protections. So what that means is the government looks to business to provide for compensation for individuals who are hurt while they are at work. This is not new law. It's ancient law actually. And has been around since the 1800s and earlier than that even in Europe, then we brought those ideas to the US of course when we formed a country here. So, since the industrial age, if you get hurt at work your employer has to provide some protection for you, has to help you recover from that. Without that, think about what would happen. If you went to work and got hurt severely, theoretically, an employer could call your family, tell them to come get you and just plug in another worker. That doesn't seem like a fair way to treat workers. So I kind of liken it like this, this will make sense to you, it's like driving a car. You get behind the wheel of a car, and you're expected to know all the rules of the road, and comply with all the rules of the road. And if you don't you can be pulled over and ticketed for that. So when you get behind the wheel of a business, and you want to drive that business, you're supposed to know all the rules of the business, and if you don't comply, you can be ticketed for that lack of compliance.  MATT: It's important to understand that regulations exist for protection. It cannot be stated enough. Of course they're not perfect and according to Judith, they are usually lagging from what's actually happening in the marketplace. And as she mentioned as an example, though it can be burdensome for an organization to comply, they are meant for organizational safety. Just like monopoly regulations protect industries and keep competition alive, environmental regulations make sure our drinking water is clean, and health regulations make sure we get the right treatment. PHIL: It's easy for organizations to say that regulations hinder their business or more regulations need to exist. That's not the point. Regardless of our beliefs about regulations, the reality is, they exist and we have a legal obligation to comply. We want to make it clear, our focus is helping us leaders be proactive and educated about regulations affecting our industry rather than having to react to sanctions and pay fines for breaking the rules. Especially for violations we unintentionally are not following. If your organization is currently facing some government sanctions, stick around because Judith offers some next steps for your business. MATT: So let's start with being proactive. As organizational leaders, it's our duty to understand, not only our industry, but how we are to operate, legally, as a business. The hard thing is, we are so consumed with growing our organization that we do not have the time to follow each law being passed into Congress - and ask if it applies to our industry. So how do we stay educated? The first way to be proactive on industry regulations is by joining a Trade Association. Judith Wright: So what these organizations do, essentially, is help educate members about running a business in that specialty area.  So they provide newsletters, they have webinars, they have training programs, they provide market information, what's going on in your market, what are the trends. They do consumer studies. They have technology reports. Economic impact studies. All kinds of things that, if you're willing to educate yourself, help you feel more in control of those issues. So if there's a new rule proposed, for example. I saw the other day that the start of California is looking at banning plastic straws. So if you're a business that uses plastic straws, that's suddenly of interest to you. But the trade association can be in there early on helping influence whether the government actually bans them, if so, how the ban will take place and what kind of straws are ok and what kind are not and influence the outcome of that. Helping the regulators understand the cost of making this change for folks that are using plastic straws. PHIL: These associations, typically, have full time staff members whose job it is to educate organizations on new laws and even laws being proposed that could affect the industry as a whole. For us leaders, the one resource that's most scarce is time. We all have the same hours in a day, no matter what. So to have a team of individuals breaking down regulations affecting our organization is critical to remaining proactive. Judith also mentions that since many of these associations make up multiple businesses, they bring more influence to the law makers versus our organization as an individual. Judith Wright: And it works because, if you or I own a coffee shop and we want to call the governor or the legislator and tell them what we think about it, they might take your call and be very interested. At the same time, a trade association represents dozens in a state and thousands nationally and therefore can kind of get the voice of the small business person before a government party in a way that you or I would find time consuming, maybe frustrating and maybe difficult to do. MATT: So now that we have an education pipeline for protection, the second way our organizations can remain proactive on regulation compliance is to invest into legal counsel sooner, rather than later. Judith Wright: That said, ignorance of the law is not a defense. And so, often times, for example a health code violation, if they change something and you don't know, you're going to get cited for that for each day you're out of compliance, potentially. The cost of non-compliance is 2-3 times the cost of compliance. Meaning, if you fail to follow the rules and you get caught and you're subjected to fines, it's felt by experts that it's going to cost you 2-3 times the cost of just doing it right in the first place. And those costs come from things like fines, of course from doing things you're not permitted to do, but just the disruption in your business, the damage to your reputation, because the competitors do make hay with that. If there's, you know, a newspaper story that your company got cited for health code violations, your competitors are the ones who fan that flame.  And then just the whole cost of having to restructure how you do business and get it on track. And the legal fees in terms of settling that. I think that's an important thing to realize, ignoring the cost of regulation can be very expensive down the road when it catches up with you. PHIL: The hours spent with a lawyer outside the courtroom are so much lower than having to hire one once our company is before a judge, which means a substantial cost reduction. When getting a lawyer involved early on, lean on their expertise for clarity. They are the ones to check our organization's blind spots and make sure we've structured our companies properly. Start to ask other business owners who they work with – or better yet, ask the trade association for legal recommendations. And, should we find ourselves dealing with sanctions, we'll have someone to defend us early on – which could mean the difference between keeping our doors open and polishing up our resumes. MATT: So we joined a trade association for our industry, we've met with a lawyer who checked our blind spots, as an organization, now it's time to create systems within our company that make sure we stay compliant to these regulations. Judith Wright: Go back to the driving the car analogy, we all know there are rules to driving a car, but that doesn't keep us from getting in there, learning them and driving that car. And it's the same in business. Once you get a command of those rules and you know, for example, when you drive down the road, every day, you don't consciously in your head say, "Oh, be sure to stop at the stop signs." You know, and it's an intuitive reaction on your part. Once you know the regulation in your business and you become comfortable with that and you've built it into your processes and you have confidence that you're doing things right, every time you do them, and you have a calendar that reminds you when to do filings and that sort of thing, it becomes just part of the intuitive why you do business. It's not scary, it's just the way that it is. PHIL: B-P comes to mind when I think of major violations. As we know, back in April of 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded – sadly killing 11 employees and leaking around 4.9-million barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Government - into the Gulf of Mexico. This caused major environmental problems along with legal battles, bad press, and huge fines.  The EPA estimates that B-P has paid $4 BILLION in settlements, fines, and penalties. According to the White House Oil Spill Commission, B-P could have prevented the missteps that lead to the disaster by educating their workers and creating systems to comply with regulations. The report also states there were no procedure set on how to communicate faulty test results to experts. So as the leaders of our organizations, taking a little extra time creating systems within our organization that address regulation compliance could save us not just our jobs, but our organization as a whole. MATT: After we educate ourselves, get legal advice and make sure we have the right systems in place, the final take-a-way to be proactive on regulations is budget for them. If we're an entrepreneur, do research to find compliance costs that affect our organizations and include it in our financial planning strategy. If we're established as an organization, continue leaning into the trade association for ideas so that if we have to change compliance or add systems to protect ourselves, we have the cash to do so. Judith Wright: The US Chamber of Commerce did a study where they asked small business owners for information about the costs in their companies. And what they found was that, on average, a small business pays just under $12-thousand dollars a year, per employee to cover regulatory costs. Now I'm guessing most small businesses who are excited about their entrepreneurial business plan have not factored in $12-thousand dollars per employee to pay for regulation. And the same study found that on average a small business spends $83-thousand dollars to comply with regulation in its first year of start up. So that's a hidden cost... it's not hidden, it's just one that folks overlook. And as your business grows, and you get a little larger, additional federal laws starts to play. For example, some federal laws apply to businesses with 15 or more employees. So when you go from 14 to 15, suddenly you're in a realm of new regulation that you may not have thought about. And the thing that's interesting for people to take into account is that oftentimes the fine is per violation. For example, lawn care services frequently have to deal with disposal of grass and yard waste. Or clippings and trimmings from trees and that sort of thing. And more than half the states, at a state level, regulate how that waste gets disposed of.  So if the rules changed on that and you think you're ok but you're not, each time you improperly dispose of that waste could be a separate fine. And let's say for sake of argument the fine is $1,000 per violation. But if you've disposed of things improperly for the last month or so, without realizing it, you could have multiple thousands of dollars in fines before you even realize you're doing something wrong. Now, does the government come and catch you in the net and say, "Oh, you've done something here." Not necessarily, sometimes they'll work with you to help you understand that. PHIL: And it's examples like these that help us prepare for the ever changing regulations. Whether we're on the brink of filing for that LLC or about to celebrate our 100 year anniversary, we can still become proactive to make sure our organizations continue its journey of success. Regulations will affect us in some capacity – if we educate ourselves, invite the right help, create systems of protection, and make sure we have the cash available, our organizations can enjoy life in the fast lane. MATT: Let's switch sides now. Say, as an organization, we find ourselves in trouble. We violated a regulation and now we're facing a penalty. Judith Wright: Here is some legal advise, you don't call the regulator yourself and try to work it out. You really need legal counsel at that point. So number one, if you realize you have a problem, number one, face it, acknowledge it. Number two, get legal help now. If you don't already have a legal advisor, it's time to get legal help now. And let that lawyer help you interface with the government about how to resolve that problem. There are very few problems that can't be solved. Perhaps you can change your practices in a way that show you have a "good faith" effort going forward and they're not going to be so punishing with you. Perhaps you can negotiate a fine with the government. Honestly, they're there to make sure the protections are in place. They're not there to drive people out of business. But if you find that you really violated the law in some way, a lawyer is someone you should sit down with and talk to about it. PHIL: B-P still operates as an organization, despite the $4-billion in payouts, negative press, and setbacks they've endured since 2010. Now, hopefully we're not facing major problems like B-P, but the take-a-way here is to endure. Acknowledge our violation and more importantly our responsibility going forward. Make the changes necessary, pay our fines, and then jump into proactive mode. It's like a car accident or getting a speeding ticket. When we get back in the car, we become hyper aware or nervous, but what's most important is the fact we got ourselves back in the car and on the road. Our business can make it through if we lead it the right way. ||ROI MUSIC PLAYS|| MATT: So let's recap. Whether we agree with regulations or not or whether we think there are too many or too few does not change the fact that as an organization, we are obligated to abide by these laws. Embracing this truth helps us become proactive – keeping our organizations protected from fines. The first way we can be proactive on regulations is by joining a Trade Association. Not only do they provide the proper education, they voice our concerns to lawmakers with authority. Next, invest into legal counsel. They will ensure we have the right structure within our business to comply with regulations. Plus, if we find ourselves in violation, our legal experts already understand the inner workings of our organization, potentially saving us thousands in legal fees later on. Then, we need to create systems that ensure and protect our compliance. Whether its calendar reminders, check-ups, educational courses, or audits, create systems that keep our companies safe. Finally, complying with regulations costs money. If we work these costs into our startup plan or budgeting protocols, when we do have to pay, we're not scrambling to find cash. And if we find ourselves facing regulatory penalties, it's very important to acknowledge the problem, then get legal help as soon as possible. It's highly discouraged to work with regulators alone. This could mean the difference between massive payouts or ultimately having our business shut down. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, head over to your favorite podcasting app. While you're there, be sure to hit the subscribe button so you can receive the latest episode each week. Thanks again for spending time with us on the ROI Podcast presented by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. I'm your host Matt Martella alongside Phil Powell, where we work to help organizations make better business decisions. We'll see you next week.

How many times do we feel like we're "stuck" in our career? Or as though our personal growth has plateaued? On this episode, we spoke with Traci Dolan who shares her success as the former CFO of ExactTarget. She offers three, practical tips to launch your career to the next level. ---- Do you have a question? Looking to get help on a business decision? Know a great guest for our show? Email roipod@iupui.edu so we can help your organization make better business decisions. ---- Ready to take your next step? Check out if a Kelley MBA is right for you: https://bit.ly/35aeAfZ ---- Show Notes: MATT: As we approach the 10-year mark since the 2008 financial collapse - as a global market, we're still picking up the pieces. However, the economic comeback we're seeing across the United States shows favorable conditions for both new business creation and corporate development - which in turn means better chances for your start-up business's success or that big promotion. On this episode, we're talking with a CFO who offers some practical tips for professional growth. The sun is rising on our financial landscape. How will we make the most of it? Let's get to the podcast. (The ROI Podcast Music) MATT: Good morning, and welcome to another episode of the ROI Podcast presented by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. I'm your host, Matt Martella, broadcasting from the downtown Indianapolis campus with my special guest, associate dean of academic programs, Phil Powell. Hey Phil… MATT: Now Phil, we're only a few months away from the 10 year mark since the horrible 2008 financial collapse, that many experts are calling the worst implosion the global market experienced since the Great Depression… leaving so many families in turmoil and creating a highly conservative approach to the way both businesses and families spend their money. However, the global markets over the past few years indicate a sort of “bounce back.” PHIL: You're right! The confidence people have in the economy in recent years is really reflected in the strength of our current global market. And that's breathing new life into the start-up business environment as well as expansion and growth in corporations. Simply look at the recent trends. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, start-up firms were at an all-time low in 2010 following the collapse. Jump to 20-17 and we saw the number of new business creations grow by close to 100-thousand since 2010. Just last year, start-ups gained 1.7 million jobs since 2016... and the growth seems to continue. MATT: And major corporations seem to be reaping the benefits too. In fact the U-S Bureau of Economic Analysis are calling the first quarter of 20-18, just the first quarter ALONE, an all-time high for corporate profits since 1950. U-S corporations have profited close to 1-hundred-ninety billion dollars this year. That's some serious spending power if you're sitting in the executive suite to grow your corporation. PHIL: And this should also give those of us who have been kicking the bucket around, waiting for the right time to start a business some hope and encouragement to finally take the leap. MATT: Let's talk about that for a moment. Following the 2008 financial collapse, we experienced a MAJOR slow-down in small business creation. In fact, new business start-ups fell by almost one-hundred-50-thousand, going from just over 6-hundred-thousand new businesses in 2006 to barely crossing the 4-hundred-fifty-thousand mark in 2014, according to the U-S Census. What do potential entrepreneurs need to do to overcome their fear and take advantage of this incredible economic growth? PHIL: Well it's simple to hear, but hard to implement. The bottom line is they need to be confident. They need to trust the economic trends and plug themselves into this financial growth our country is experiencing. Starting a business will always come with uncertainty, fear of the unknown, and will most definitely push a new business owner's comfort-level, no matter how the market is doing. But seeing how far we've come since 2008, I feel if there was ever a time to take that chance for your new business, that time is now. MATT: One of our marketing professors, Kim Saxton, sat down for an interview with former CFO of ExactTarget, Traci Dolan, who most certainly can speak about pushing personal comfort levels. Not only did she rise to the CFO of a tech company WITHOUT a technology background, but as CFO of a different company, she led the decision to take a public company private. That alone would create a huge level of uncertainty. She says that no matter where we are, whether we're about to start a business or on the tip of the spear for making uncomfortable business decisions that ultimately could affect our career, we have to be comfortable BEING uncomfortable. Traci Dolan: “You can't be paralyzed by fear - my greatest achievements in my professional career have been because I put myself out there a little bit, outside of my comfort zone, either applying for a job that I really didn't know if I was qualified for, or taking the lead on some project that I might've not had the skill-set and knowing it wasn't going to be perfect. I often see people struggle with decision-making because they're fearful of making a mistake, and it's paralysis to an organization if that happens.” PHIL: This is not simply for those of us trying to start our own business either - this can apply to those of us in the corporate world who have sites on upper management positions, director roles, or even the big “C-level” office. Those looking to grow themselves in the professional world have to constantly push their comfort levels. I'm not saying we make radical decisions without doing our research first, but we cannot expect to grow ourselves as a corporate professional OR an entrepreneur by staying complacent. If we're struggling with complacency and don't know what to do, the best advice I can offer is find those people who have succeeded. We have to surround ourselves with those who have our dream jobs, our dream business, or are successful in an area we want to succeed. Take them out to coffee and simply listen. Find out their personal habits, see what they're reading, ask them what their success looks like, ask them about their failures, but more importantly, ask them how they overcame defeat. This will help us lay down tracks for our own professional goals without having to “re-invent the wheel” so to speak. MATT: And if we're in a position that affords us the power to hire, Traci says to surround ourselves with the best, then GET OUT of their way. Traci Dolan: “Hire people smarter than yourself, let them grow and develop, and hopefully [they'll] take the role you were sitting in so you can keep growing too. Often times people are less inclined to do that, they're either micromanaging or they're somewhat concerned that someone's going to "up-stage' them - I think that's [the] absolute wrong way to look at it. By bringing on the smartest people you can find and actually trying to fill the gaps that you yourself don't possess is the greatest way to keep growing, developing, and ending up in the C-suite.” MATT: The beauty of these principles Traci shares is they're scalable for entrepreneurs and corporate professionals. Because no matter what our title or where we fall in the corporate chain, we will have to make decisions. Some decisions will affect our organization, but MOST of the decisions we make will affect us personally. PHIL: That's a good point. Because even unmade decisions – decisions we are afraid to make or decisions we chose to avoid, are in fact a decision. In those moments, no decision BECOMES our decision. And people around us see that. And a lot of that stems simply from a fear of failure. As American's, we have a culture of “winners” and “losers”. If our decision succeeds, we turn a huge profit, hire the perfect candidate, or get ahead of our competitors, we're a winner. Yet, if we fail, we decide that person doesn't fit our company's morals, lose short-term profit, or get some bad press, we become a “loser”. And that's what business leaders have a hard time navigating through - they simply don't know how to let go of that winner/loser mentality. MATT: And for many, it's that fear of being viewed as a “loser” that prevents people from even trying in order to stay in their comfort bubble. But that view has to change because no matter what, life always guarantees us failures. It's not about winning or losing in business, it's about growing or stagnating. If Traci let her failures define her, I would bet my money that she would simply be crunching numbers as a public accountant still. However, she took a different approach when it came to failures… Traci Dolan: “I'm sure my life is full of failures, but I just kind of dust myself off and don't look at them as that way. I look at them with learning because tomorrow I'm going to fail at something - I'm not sure what it'll be, but it won't be what I failed at today because I will have learned and picked myself up to keep going.” MATT: And what better example of how to navigate through failure then watching Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, deal with some poor business choices recently. Let's study Facebook for a moment. Here we have a multi-billion dollar company, make some poor business choices that affect us, the consumer, on a very personal level. We're talking about a lot of people's personal information not valued the way we would expect. We even find Zuckerberg having to testify before Congress, gaining the attention of major national media outlets. For most, this would destroy their reputation, profits, and potentially their company. And who knows, this could still blow up in their face, but at the moment, their stock price indicates quite the opposite. So, what if Zuckerberg let fear overtake how he leads? What if he let the failures or his anxiety cripple his decision making process? PHIL: It would be corporate suicide. Despite all that's still stacked against the future of Facebook, they're essentially turning their lemons into lemonade. Sure it's coming with a high financial price tag - and I guarantee Zuckerberg feels the anxiety of his decisions, especially with the microscopic scrutiny of the media. But the BIG take-away is, he's still making decisions and moving forward. And even though they may not all be the right ones to make, the fact that they're made gives investors the confidence they need to put their money back into stocks. Despite their bad press, they closed at $207.23 per share on July 16th. That's the highest they've been since they went public! So if you're one to become overwhelmed with anxiety in the midst of making decisions, one practice to build your confidence is to know what's going on in your department or your organization as soon as possible and make the best choice with what is known.  Traci Dolan: “I think the sooner I can come up to speed on what's going on in the organization, the more effective a decision-maker I will be. I haven't been mentored to do that, per se, but just by career history, it's just evolved.” PHIL: Fear of failure and the anxiety that comes with decision-making put serious growth stoppers in our path to professional success. We have to remember that these emotions are normal for everyone. What separates those who are successful from those you are stuck are, they learn how to overcome them instead of being overcome by their emotions. MATT: Finally, it's extremely important that we don't limit ourselves by saying it cannot be done. In order to be a leading business owner or a top-level executive, we have to let go of the “we can't do this” mentality. Traci quickly learned her focus as a public accountant had to expand past the numbers and spreadsheets. This shift in seeing the big picture and how to make uncomfortable choices ultimately landed her the coveted “C-Level” position.  Traci Dolan: “What becomes really important is being a strategic business partner - once you establish yourself as that, and understanding the business and trying to find ways to say yes so that the answer isn't, "No, you can't do it," but it's, "No, you can't do that, but let's figure out how we can do this so that it's a win for the business.” —BUTT TO — “In fact, if you're not working with the business and you're sitting in your office cranking on spreadsheets, pretty soon no one is going to want to talk to you, and you've lost your strategic value to the company.” || MUSIC PLAYS || MATT: So let's recap. The key is to start. Start the business, start learning your organization, start finding a mentor, or start embracing the uncomfortable growth necessary for success. Next it's about shifting our perspective of failure - whether in fear of failure or anxiety of decision-making - we have to see failure as fertile grounds for personal growth. Finally, we CANNOT limit ourselves with a “can't do” attitude. We have to figure out ways to make it work so our business and we ultimately succeed. || MUSIC PLAYS || MATT: Thanks for tuning in this week. As always, thank you Phil for being here today. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to discover more, check out our archived episodes and don't forget to subscribe. While you're there, tell us what topics you would like to hear, leave a review, or just say hi. I'm Matt Martella and this has been another edition of ROI Podcast presented by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. || MUSIC FADES OUT ||

There are two types of businesses - those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked. This may sound like hyperbole, but it's fairly accurate and many of those businesses are law firms. So you may ask yourself, how do I protect my law firm from a hack? Mark sits down with ALPS Director of Client Services, Matt Lubaroff, to discuss how ALPS has improved ALPS Cyber Response, our first-to-market cyber policy available exclusively to our legal malpractice insurance policyholders and designed to stay ahead of emerging cyber threats. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript: MARK: Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager at ALPS, and we're recording here at the historic Florence Building in Missoula, Montana. I'm very pleased to have as our guest today Matt Lubaroff, the Director of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service here, and today we're going to talk a little bit about cyber insurance. Matt, in terms of over the years of my experiences consulting with lawyers, conducting risk visits and these kinds of things, it's somewhat common for lawyers to have this belief that we're not big enough in terms of our firm, in terms of size. We're not going to be on the radar of hackers and these kinds of things. I guess, would you agree or do they face a problem that they really need to be concerned about? Do you have some thoughts on that? MATT:  Yeah. Thanks, Mark. I would not agree. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, it was probably the case because hacking was new. We didn't know what ransomware was. We didn't know what clicking on click links were and how that impacted us. But it's evolved into probably one of the most sophisticated industries out there, where some of the best technological minds unfortunately are using their skills for evil and not for good. So it really becomes a matter of when any business, but specifically law firms, will get hacked. Not a matter of if. MARK:  Yeah. I love ... there's a ... the FBI has put all kinds of information out there, but for law firms and businesses in general, and there's a great quote from one of the FBI guys. It's been maybe a year or so, but he basically said there's two types of corporations in the world. Those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked. MATT:  Yeah. It's accurate. We all click on things, and go, oh, I didn't mean to do that. But it's a little too late at that point. MARK: Well, and I absolutely agree with you, in terms of regardless of size, that law firms have a significant risk. Can we talk a little bit about solutions. What kind of solutions can we bring to the table and help with here? MATT:  Well, there's really two types of solutions that I suggest. One, of course, is insurance. Lawyers are trained in ways to manage their own risk. They go to law school not just to learn the substance of law and how to provide services to the community, but they also spend a lot of time in risk management techniques. They build practices that are successful. They build practices that help in our community, and the majority of lawyers out there are purchasing malpractice insurance in case a client sues them. But not enough lawyers and not enough law firms are buying cyber insurance. One way to prevent something is to purchase a product that will protect you should something happen. Because accidents do happen. The other one that's probably just as important is training. Employee training. Some of that comes from understanding, is how to prevent a hack. What are systems, both technical and people-wise, that you can put in place to make sure that you are up to speed with techniques that will prevent that hack from happening in the first place. MARK:  Right. A lot of what I do ... I try to talk, whether it's again consulting or lecturing, I try to talk about the necessity of, if you will, securing the human. Now that certainly is frontline defense. But this other piece of the insurance is absolutely essential and necessary, because again, it just ... a naïve, innocent misstep, clicking on the wrong link, opening the wrong file or attachment or these kinds of things can lead to just devastating consequences. Now for some time, ALPS has brought to the table, if you will, for our insureds, a basis cyber insurance policy, but we are just launching now a new product. Can you explain and share where we're going with this type of coverage? MATT:  Yeah, Mark. Happy to do so. We've tried to also adapt with the times. We've had the cyber policy available to our law firms for low per lawyer cost and lower limits for several years now. As our hackers have become more and more sophisticated ... we're all familiar with malware and ransomware that have become more and more popular, both on TV shows or in just the unfortunate press of everyday life. We've increased that coverage to provide more of that protection. Also expanded the liability coverage to handle really three different ways of providing the coverage. MARK:  Interesting. MATT:  There's one set of limits is available for that indemnity or kind of make yourself whole. So if you get hacked and there's a cost to you as a law firm, there's one aspect of the policy that provides that coverage. But there's two other towers or layers of coverage that we've included in the new policy that are just as important, if not more important. One is that prevention. The response to the hack or to the privacy breach. We need to figure how it happened, where it is within your computer systems and how to prevent it from happening again. MARK:  This is dealing with some of the forensic teams that come in and the costs associated with that. MATT:  Yes. MARK:  Right, okay. MATT:  The third one is ... I think you were telling me in an earlier conversation that 47 of the 50 states have- MARK:  Breach notification. MATT:  ... breach notification laws and requirements. MARK:  Right, right, right. MATT:  And so there's an available limit of liability should there be some notification requirements within that breach. MARK:  Yes, which can be very, very costly. A lot of people don't understand what did these regulations mean? For example, it's not in terms of the breach notification regulations that you're subject to. It's not where the breach occurred. It's where anybody impacted by the breach resides. When you think about law firms that have clients and all kinds of other people in their databases that cross these borders, this can get costly quickly. It sounds like we've got a wonderful product here at- MATT:  Yeah. The thing is, is these are very complicated situations. MARK:  Yes. MATT:  Let's just take the situation where a firm has ransomware. Ransomware is defined as your data is now encrypted, and the only way for you to get back your data realistically is to pay the ransom. If you think of how a typical cyber policy might respond is you have a payment of ransom. That's cyber extortion. You have the forensic investigation which is that breach response, that second tower, so to speak. Then there's the expense to restore the data from the backup that hopefully you have. That's data protection. Then you've got a loss of business. There are hospitals, stories of businesses that have had to shut down completely because what they need they can't get to. So that's network business interruption. Then you have the response, to your point, to the regulatory inquiries. You need an expert to navigate through that. You don't want to do it poorly. You don't want to do it too quickly, but you have to make sure that you follow the letter of the regulatory laws. And then you have these individual third party claims where it wasn't your data. It was somebody else's data that maybe you're in care or control of, and that third party, that other group, has been impacted by that data being stolen or lost, and there's susceptibility for claims there. MARK:  Okay, wow! You convinced me when I started to think through all of these different exposures and you think at times initially, oh, I get hacked and you just bring ... this is pretty complex stuff and spins out in all kinds of directions. I love it. You convinced me, and I hope many of the folks listening to us, of the value and need for a product like this. Can you share a little bit about okay, I'm an ALPS insured. How do I get this? What are my options? How do I go through this process? MATT:  Well, one of the things that we've aimed to do is make it as easy as possible for you. When you have your quote, when you're accepting your ALPS policy- MARK:  We're talking about the quote for the legal malpractice coverage. MATT:  Yes. MARK: Okay. MATT:  When you're being quoted or accepting your lawyer's malpractice insurance, you automatically have the ability, with no application, to accept our low limit, low cost charge per the attorney, right around $50. You don't need an application. Just accept it, sign, pay- MARK:  That makes it pretty easy. Yeah, wow!. MATT:  ... done. We have some different limits- MARK:  Nice. MATT:  ... based on the firm size, but there's no extra effort required. We also are very, very happy to offer limits up to a million dollars, which if you think of the susceptibility of data and how quickly things can happen and spiral out of control, the ability to secure your data and have response services available to you for up to a million dollars of limits is also important. There's no application required. However, we do have some risk management suggestions that we can help you put in place to make sure that there's no ... we can continue to proceed, get you those limits, protect your law firm. They're a little bit more expensive. We have some minimum premiums and higher per attorney costs, but what I can say without any concern is that it's the easiest process, the lowest cost, and I'd argue, probably the best policy out there in the marketplace. MARK:  Yeah, yeah. And it's my understanding this policy's the first out there to be designed, written intentionally, or directed at law firms. Am I correct about that? MATT:  You are correct. We've partnered with Beazley, United States and Beazley London, who's probably the leader in this space as it is anyway. MARK:  Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. MATT:  And they worked with us to provide a custom form, custom policy and custom process specifically for the ALPS lawyers book. MARK:  Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate your sharing all this, Matt. From my perspective as a risk guy, and just an individual living in this crazy world, this is a screaming deal, as I see it. Personally, I'm not trying to tell everybody to go out and buy these policies in the sense ... but how can you afford not to do this? When you look at the frequency of the attacks, the severity of these kinds of attacks, and it seems like you guys have really done a great job of putting a fantastic policy together that covers all these things. We've made it as easy possible. Just wow! Well done. Job well done. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap this up, Matt? Anything else you'd like to share? MATT:  Yeah, I would just encourage folks to talk to their account manager if they're an insured, if they're in the process of applying with any type of insurance, specifically lawyer's insurance. Make sure they're asking about this. It's really a shame. It's unfair when businesses or law firms get hacked. It's scary because there's people out there smarter than us that are coming up with ways more devious than we could ever imagine to get access to that data, and we all deserve to have our data protected. We all deserve to have experts by our side who are helping us prevent it and walk alongside that path to recover, should a hack happen. MARK:  And a closing thought that I would have, just as, again, coming at it from the risk perspective, is we are charged with protecting the confidences of our clients. I just think even as a consumer ... you and I suspect, in terms of just statistically, are victims of the Equifax breach. I have some feelings about Equifax that are not the most positive things right now. I just encourage all of you listening out there to appreciate, too. If you ever are breached and don't have this type of insurance out there and can deal with this in a responsible way, how do you think your clients are going to respond? I just invite you to look at it from that perspective, too. It's another way to come back and say I just don't understand how you can afford not to do this. How you get to that point. Well listen, Matt, as always it's been a pleasure. Thank you-

episode 2: This Is Episode 2Hosts:  Matt Grennier, Chris Buretta, Paul Unger, Allyson Smith, Producer Dylan Hoff, and Special Guest Mike DetermanFeatured and Reviewed MoviesBlade Runner 2049 - It -  Mother! -  PassengersThe ForumPart OneWe talk about Horror movies for halloween.  We give movie marathon recommendations. Paul - Jeeper Creepers 2, The Relic, Jurassic Park, Monsters Inc, and Tremors. Chris- Rabid, Videodrome, Shivers, Crash, and eXistenZ.  Allyson - Coraline, Monster House, ParaNorman, and Wallace and Gromit: Cruse of the Were-Rabbit. Matt - Let the Right One In, Near Dark, What We do in Shadows, From Dusk Till Dawn, and BladePart TwoWe conjure some ideas for reboots of 90's kids movies: DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Free Willy, The Golden Compass, The SandlotWe Play a fun trivia game!!!!Tangent Topicsaudio setup, hipsters, Young Hercules, Harrison Ford, SNL, spiders, Power Rangers, James Van Der Beek, moon landing hoax, key parties, Pokemon, Geena Davis, John Goodman, Bill Paxton, Salma Hayek, The Price is Right, Micheal Jackson, dead wivesDVD RecommendationsIt Follows - The Green Room - The Final Girls - I Think We Are Alone Now - Look Who's Back, Tucker and Dale Vs Evil -  Ton Toka Toni - Brazil Random Movies MentionedD2: The Mighty Ducks, D3: The Mighty Ducks, Cocoon, The wizard of oz, blackfish, my girl, Wayne's World, harry and the Hendersons, E.T., short circuit,  predator, look who's talking too, Dracula 2000, drive, god only knows, who framed Roger rabbit?, human centipede, splice, arachnophobia, winter's bone, eyes wide shut, the shinning, a clockwork orange, the mummy, city slickers, city slickers II: the legend of Curly's gold, a history of violence, eastern promises, The Fly, my little pony the movie, the frighteners, frankenweenie, up, twilight, lost boys, aliens, zero dark thirty, the hurt locker, twister, this is spinal tap, Nosferatu, ghost rider, spawn, batman and robin, Fantastic Four, batman forever, the crew, superman 3, the toxic avenger, Cool Runnigs, the rocketeer, dune and dumber, the mask, 8mm, the rock, con air, x-men, halloween, face off, Beethoven, 12 monkeys, halloween: H2O, scream, Snake Eyes, teenage mutant ninja turtles II: secret of the ooze, paranormal activity, the Blair witch project, hocus pocus, blade trinity

On this episode of the Ultimate Legal Breakdown, Nasir and Matt go in depth with the subscription box business. They discuss where subscription box companies have gone wrong(4:30), the importance of a specifically tailored terms and conditions(6:30), how to structure return policies (11:45), product liability concerns (14:45),the offensive and defensive side of intellectual property (19:00), forming partnerships (23:30), when to form multiple entities (31:45), and rules and logistics for shipping (34:00). Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub, and we’re two business attorneys with Pasha Law. NASIR: Yeah, welcome to the podcast today. We are doing our ultimate legal breakdown of the subscription box business. MATT: Yeah, looking forward to this one. it’s a pretty fun topic because subscription boxes can offer many different things. I’m sure that most listeners have probably either ordered their own subscription box or maybe have their own business. NASIR: You’re saying most people either have their subscription box business? Most people have subscribed to one, at least. I mean, some people are addicted to it. MATT: Well, it’s nice. NASIR: And they can be addicting. MATT: And we’ll get into why that’s the case. Just for those of your that aren’t aware, subscription boxes, it’s a pretty simple concept – at least the service aspect of it. Basically, you pay an amount and it’s typically every month but every month you get a delivery to your doorstep and it contains a boxful of items. It can be anything. I mean, I think the ones that people might be most familiar with might be a Blue Apron food service or Nature Box, Dollar Shave Club. NASIR: Dollar Shave. Loot Crate seems popular, too. MATT: The general concept is you pay this monthly amount and, every month, you get a box of different items and most of them are themed to, like I said, some sort of concept behind it – whether it be food, whether it be some sort of artistic thing. At this point, it’s a pretty booming industry. It can be anything few and far between – and I believe, when we checked here – 5-billion-dollar industry, 2,000 different services, according to My Subscription Addiction which is my go-to for subscription box statistics. NASIR: And it’s growing! I mean, 3,000 percent as far as online visits for subscription companies people are interested in the last three years, people are interested in this stuff and it seems like there’s basically two types of these businesses – the ones that curate products that they basically pick a theme – like, you said, the Blue Apron where they just kind of put together food that might be good for this particular recipe; some of them actually create their own product and it may be a different product every month. Somehow, they are actually the creators of it. So, it’s two types of categories there. MATT: Right, and we’re going to get into this later but, obviously, if you have the ladder there – the one where you’re creating your own product that you’re delivering out, you might have a little bit less to worry about from a legal stand. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that. NASIR: Less than more. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: It’s a different type of liability. MATT: Let’s get into some of these big issues here for these businesses. I think it all kind of starts where a lot of businesses do – with the underlying contract. In this case, the terms and conditions for these services. You know, I’ve ordered my own subscription boxes. I’ve kind of looked around it. Some others, just to see what’s out there. Surprisingly, a pretty wide array of terms and conditions, terms of service, whatever you want to call it that are out there. Some of them are very well-detailed, some of them are… NASIR: Horrible. MATT: Yeah, I was going to put it nicer than that but, yeah. NASIR: No, they are horrible. We have a few subscription box clients. In fact,

The guys kick in the new year by first discussing Cinnabon's portrayal of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia soon after her death, as well as other gaffes involving Prince and David Bowie. They alsotalk about right of publicity claims companies could be held liable for based on using someone's name or likeness for commercial gain. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Hello and welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. I’m Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. We’re two attorneys here with Pasha Law, practicing in California, Illinois, New York, and Texas. NASIR: Yeah, welcome to the podcast where we cover business in the news with our legal twist. Today, we are discussing some of the do’s and don’ts of celebrity endorsements and what to be aware of when using their likeness and recent gaps in the year 2016 f these instances. MATT: Yes. I mean, I guess, when people listen to this, it will be 2017 – unless they’ve hacked into both of our computers and pulled the audio files for whatever reason. NASIR: Or they could be listening in 2018, too. MATT: That’s true – if podcasts are still around. NASIR: Only for two years. MATT: Let’s take a long trip back to 2016 here which will be a couple of days at this point. I think, especially this past week in particular, it’s been going around how 2016 was the year of falling stars – all these high-profile celebrities have passed away in 2016. You know, recently, we have Carrie Fisher. I guess the timing of this too is pretty interesting. I can’t remember if you’re a Star Wars person or not. NASIR: Yeah, with the new Star Wars Force Awakens? MATT: Rogue One, yeah. NASIR: Rogue One, yeah. I’m a huge Star Wars fan. MATT: As you can tell. NASIR: No, actually, I did hear it was good. Go ahead, sorry. MATT: Understandable. With all these big-time, big-named celebrities passing away, we had Carrie Fisher. The reason I mention that is that happened, she was Princess Leia in, well, I want to say the original Star Wars movies but it depends how you defined that, I suppose. NASIR: The original episodes – 4, 5, and 6. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: And she was also in Force Awakens. MATT: I guess you kind of allude to this but it hasn’t become an uncommon thing for a brand or a company to pay a little tribute to these fallen celebrities. Obviously, tweeting out a message or posting something on Facebook, referencing these different individuals has become pretty common. What Cinnabon did – and it was very quick, you had to be very quick on the trigger to see this because I think they deleted it soon thereafter but we’ll link the photos so you can see – they put a photo up, it’s kind of a… how would you describe it? It’s almost like a painting. NASIR: One of those almost sand pieces. In this case, cinnamon art pieces. MATT: Cinnamon art pieces, yeah, drawn with cinnamon. Basically, kind of an outline of Carrie Fisher except – anyone that’s seen Star Wars – the hair buns on the side of her head, it was a Cinnabon. It looks kind of weird. When you first told me about this, it wasn’t what I was envisioning. You know, they have this and it says, “RIP Carrie Fisher. You’ll always have the best buns in the galaxy.” That was the tweet. NASIR: It’s so tasteless. I’ve always tried to figure out if other people had opinions about this. I know maybe some people, their humor is different. It’s not that it’s not meant to be funny. Obviously, it’s meant to be a tribute and I’m sure the intention comes into play. But it seems really weird, right? MATT: I think intent is the keyword that’s going to kind of run throughout this. What was the intent behind this? I think it does seem like they were trying to pay some sort of tribute but the approach was not executed that well. I mean, the whole thing wasn’t executed that well, but the approach was just not great. You know, I think it got more flack than positive feedback. There was some people that said, “You know, she had a pretty good sense of humor.

Nasir and Matt discuss whyAmazon seller accounts are getting suspended and banned without notice and how business owners can rectify this situation through a Corrective Action Plan. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. We’re attorneys here with Pasha Law PC, practicing in California, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Welcome to the podcast! NASIR: Yeah, and this is where we discuss business in the news and add our legal twist. Today, we are talking about Amazon.com. MATT: Never heard of it. NASIR: And how they’re… No, no, no, it’s a website that sells stuff. MATT: Okay, eBay. NASIR: Apparently, all these guys go on there and they sell stuff but Amazon is apparently terminating or suspending some of those sellers’ accounts somewhat arbitrarily – hundreds by the day, apparently. MATT: Let me just do a quick rundown here of kind of what’s going on. NASIR: Please do. MATT: I was just joking, for people maybe listening for the first time. NASIR: I think they know that you knew what Amazon was but sorry to interrupt you. Literally, yesterday, I was thinking about it because I knew we were going to cover this today. I think it was around 25 different packages from Amazon – no exaggeration – and the reason is because – I think I’ve talked about this last time – we were expecting so we had a whole list of things that we’re buying and we’ve been waiting for a while just to figure out because we’re also moving and we’re like, “Let’s just go ahead and buy it now,” so they all came within 24 hours so I picked it all yesterday. A couple of packages are arriving today still. MATT: Was that Amazon Prime? NASIR: Yeah, it was Amazon Prime, two-day shipping. MATT: Yeah, contemplating getting that myself. We’ll have to talk after this to see. NASIR: We’ll discuss it afterwards. MATT: For those who aren’t as familiar with Amazon… NASIR: Those of you who don’t live on Planet Earth. MATT: Amazon has thousands of third-party sellers who utilize their marketplace as a storefront – something which I imagine probably have actual storefronts as well but, for the most part, this is mostly eCommerce. And so, some of these small businesses as you alluded to are saying that their accounts are being suspended with little notice and very few options of recourse and what some are calling arbitrary suspensions. A recent conference for online entrepreneurs and sellers in Seattle pitted the sellers against Amazon with hundreds of vendors and merchants expressing their concern over these suspensions, nothing that they live in fear of being unable to sell on their site, and we’ll get into why that’s an issue here, because you might think, “Well, it’s just one site, why not sell somewhere else – like their own site, for example?” But Amazon, it’s a very impactful site for these businesses. A recent Wall Street Journal interview, a vice president of Amazon said, “Sellers reporting an average of 50 percent increase in sales from when they joined Amazon’s marketplace and used its storage and shipping services.” Pretty substantial. NASIR: Yeah, and they’ve made it so easy for sellers to enter into this because, if you think about it, if you have something to sell, not only will they take care of the merchant processing but also the inventory cracking, the shipping, even the storage. In fact, Amazon prefers you to ship your supplies to their fulfillment center so that, as soon as someone purchases it, they can easily ship it. Not only do they make it easy for you, you also get that marketing available that you wouldn’t get if you just had your own website. So, it makes sense. MATT: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the default spot – one of the default sites – people go to buy something. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: These business owners that are affected by this are saying they’re losing hundreds of thousands in sales – which could definitely be the case for some of them – due to ...

Nasir and Matt discuss the new iPhone updatethat employees should pay attention to. They also talk about the pitfalls of employers issuing wearable technology to their employees. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist to the business news. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: Welcome to our podcast. MATT: Let’s first talk about… NASIR: I had another sip of this Red Bull. MATT: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about. This is an update. We finally both got our class action Red Bulls. NASIR: I mean, it’s literally like cough syrup. It’s possible there might be another class action settlement because it might be considered poison. I’ve been drinking this thing for the last – I don’t know – almost an hour I’ve been sipping it. MATT: You don’t have to. It’s not required. NASIR: That’s true. But I want it. I deserve it. I worked so hard for it. MATT: Yeah, by going online and filling out your name and address. NASIR: Which I did during the recording of the podcast, if I recall correctly. MATT: So, yeah, I haven’t had any of mine yet but we at least got it. NASIR: I would just throw it away. MATT: I’ll probably have mine at some point but they might be in my fridge for a while. NASIR: Okay. MATT: I can’t imagine they go bad. NASIR: Yeah, like, they’re already bad. In fact, it may even actually get better. MATT: It ages well. Well, we’ve got a lot of security issues to talk about today. We’ll relate all these to how it relates to employers but apparently there’s this new iOS update and I was trying to look at it on my phone. I wasn’t able to figure this out. NASIR: This is 9.3 so I don’t know. MATT: Yeah, I don’t know what I even have. I imagine I have the most recent one. NASIR: You don’t even have an iPhone, Matt. In fact, you’re holding a brick right now. It’s not even a phone. MATT: Yeah, but anyway, this 9.3 update, I guess in the past there’s ways to do some sort of mobile device management by employers with employees. NASIR: I didn’t know about this but apparently Apple provides some kind of software. I don’t know if they provide it or they give access to some kind of software where you can monitor everything from GPS location to god knows what else, I don’t know. MATT: Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that either – probably because I don’t have an employer that has issued me a phone to have that on there – but with this new update, employees will now be able to see and know about employers are tracking them. I guess once on the lock screen where it says “this phone is managed by your organization” and, of course, if you go in the settings too, you can see it that way. Obviously, the lock screen makes it a little bit more obvious but I guess this is going to be a situation where, like you and I and many employees probably didn’t know that their employers were monitoring what they do and it’s not going to change the fact that they’re being monitored but they’re just going to know about it now which they possibly didn’t know about in the past. NASIR: And so, there’s different types of monitoring, right? I mean, there’s the cellphone and then there’s your computers – you know, that’s been going on for a while. I mean, maybe cellphones are a little bit new. Internet activity, key strokes can easily be tracked, cellphones, also GPS tracking on vehicles is pretty old as well – everything from truck drivers to delivery persons. And then, there’s also video and audio recording within the office. So, there are lots of different types of monitoring but each are a little bit different. But let’s put the law aside for a second – which we like to do 99 percent of the time – giving notification to the employee, specifically with the cellphone, is it morally good to do it? Is it required? Do you think the law should give notice to the employee? What do you think? MATT: If I was an employee, I would expect that almost.

Nasir and Matt talk about the company that's attempting to convince athletes to stay in college by raising money from fans. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: I was going to try to do the lead-in for this even though it’s another sports story and the only reason is because I was at Sports Clips this week getting my haircut done. Yeah, that’s right; I get my haircut done at Sports Clips. And so, I was sitting down in the waiting area and there was I think it was ESPN. There were two guys. It looked like they were doing a radio show but they were being filmed on TV which I thought was strange. MATT: Mike and Mike probably. NASIR: Yeah, I think that sounds right. They were talking about this exact story and I’m like, “That’s pretty much Matt and I.” We might as well be on ESPN. MATT: Yeah, maybe. Actually, this is good timing. This episode will come out on Monday and this is right after Selection Sunday. NASIR: Oh, yeah. MATT: Which you actually like. I mean, Dayton will be back. You had your big Dayton thing last year. They’ll be in the tournament. NASIR: Will San Diego State make it this year? I don’t think so, right? MATT: They’ll definitely be in it as well. I’m projecting they’ll probably be a seven. I mean, it’s still hard to say because they still have a couple of games possibly at this point, but they’ll probably be around a seven. They’ll definitely be in. NASIR: Well, I was looking at their rankings and I was confused because there’s 36 teams that are selected, right? MATT: 68. NASIR: Oh, okay, then that makes sense because I thought they were outside that 30-some. So, okay. Phew! Very close. MATT: Now, they’ll definitely be in because they won their conference and it’s not a problem for them. NASIR: Yeah, I was thinking, like, they won their conference, they should be able to. Okay. Well, yeah, so Dayton and San Diego State, they’re going to be in the finals probably. MATT: Bold prediction. They’ll probably play each other first game. NASIR: Not to get distracted on our topic but you heard the billion dollar bet or billion dollar perfect bracket is no longer on the table this year because there was just too much legal dispute as to who came up with the idea and then people were upset because one of the participants went to the insurance company to insure the billion dollar bet but, by doing that, it made everything public and kind of let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, before they wanted to and it became a whole legal hoopla. MATT: I didn’t see that. That’s not surprising, I guess. NASIR: We’ll cover that next year – a little too late. MATT: Let’s get to your story that you already saw earlier in the week which is I’ve a very strong – well, not strong opinion – I think I have a correct opinion on this. NASIR: Okay. MATT: But this guy in – I believe – Chicago came up with this new idea. Actually, if we go really far back, I think this is one of the first things we ever talked about with the investment into a player. Do you remember that? That was a long time ago. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: Adrian Foster. NASIR: Adrian Foster, the Houston Texans, but that was for the NFL professionals, obviously – a little bit different. MATT: Well, it does mention professional possibly in here, but basically what this company is, this idea, this concept is, if you don’t follow sports, basically, you have four years you can play in college and then you have to leave. But some guys that are really good, especially in basketball and in football too, you have to play a couple of years, but you can play and then go to the pros and, you know, then your college team’s worse than it was presumably when their good players leave. So, this guy’s idea was, “Hey, I will just come up with this thing where anyone can donate money,” and a certain percent – it says 80 percent but then,

Nasir and Matt end the week by discussing the accountant who got fired from his job after a dispute he had with Comcast. They then answer the question, "We just brought on our first set of employees. How should we structure their pay to make them happy now and not have it backfire long-term?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to our business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. We welcome your questions and we will give you the answers and this is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Now that we’ve got that intro out of the way, let’s start our episode. MATT: The hardest part of every episode is the intro, I think. NASIR: For who? For you or for me? MATT: For me, it’s easy because all I do is say my name but that’s… NASIR: Ah. Then we’ll try it again with you one of these times. I know last time we tried it, you messed up horribly. MATT: I don’t know if I’d say “horribly.” NASIR: I know you wouldn’t say that. MATT: Let’s see. So, we have an interesting story for today, for this Friday episode. There’s actually a lot of detail so I don’t think we’ll be able to go through all the details, all the facts, but it’s pretty interesting kind of what happened. I’ll try to give as brief a summary as possible. So, this guy signed up with Comcast, as most relationships like this begin, some sort of promotional deal. So, he went with that. This was back in the beginning of 2013. Of course, we wouldn’t be talking about this story unless there was a lot of issues involved. So, like I said, this guy signs up with Comcast. There’s all these issues. They think they’ve misspelled his name so that was one thing so he was not getting bills. You know, all these different surcharges that are mystery charges that are coming up, blah blah blah, you know. Eventually, he tried to back out and, you know, a dispute back and forth between the two of them, it goes on and on. One way or the other, they found out, I guess, it looks like they might have searched online to find this out but they found out where this guy worked for and he worked for an accounting firm. And so, like I said, there’s a dispute back and forth between Comcast and this customer. At some point, Comcast actually reaches out at calls the partner of his accounting firm that he works for and kind of just informs the firm on the situation. One thing leads to another and the accounting firm actually ends up firing this guy soon thereafter Comcast calls them to inform them that he’s got some issue. I think they tried to bring ethics into it. So, that’s basically where we’re at. I mean, there’s been a couple of updates. I think Comcast has since kind of apologized – no, no, I take that back – they apologized for their bad billing services and all that, but they didn’t apologize for eventually him actually getting fired. So, from the accounting firm’s perspective, this is a bad decision, right? NASIR: From the accounting firm’s perspective? MATT: Yeah, from the accounting firm’s perspective. NASIR: Well, their reasoning of termination was because somehow they were under the impression – which, of course, the employee denies – that the employee used his firm’s name as basically saying – look, I’m challenging this in behalf of them in the sense that they have their employer’s backing them. Somehow, he used his employer’s name in a way that was improper from the employer’s perspective and it’s unclear exactly how he could have done that and why. He probably mentioned, “Hey, I’m an accountant at this firm and I went through this accounting process to go through all these charges that you mishandled,” and that’s probably what really happened. But it’s unclear the exact reason why the employer did this. I don’t know if you mentioned it – I don’t think you did – that Comcast is actually a client of this accounting firm. MATT: Oh,

Nasir and Matt talk about what to do when someone outside of your business takes control of your social media. They also answer the question, "Who can sign off on an agreement for a specific type of entity?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is… Matt Staub. MATT: Oh. NASIR: And Nasir Pasha. MATT: I would like to be introduced first one time, I guess. We’re only 89 episodes in, it’s still yet to happen, but… NASIR: One day. MATT: You never know. Actually, no, the one time you weren’t there, I introduced myself first. NASIR: Oh, that’s right. MATT: I forgot about that. NASIR: Oh, because it was a best of episode. You like to talk about that time that you did it by yourself. That’s interesting. MATT: It was only, like, a minute long at most. NASIR: All right. Well, welcome to the business law podcast. This is where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: Or you can send direct tweets or direct messages through Twitter @askbizlaw. NASIR: @askbizlaw. MATT: I wonder how we got that name. It seems like that would have been taken. NASIR: I was going to put ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com or @smartbusiness but it was so long and I didn’t want to put the acronym because that didn’t really look right, and “Legally Sound” was too long too or something, I don’t remember. MATT: Yeah, we left out. NASIR: Yeah, it was a good one. MATT: So, what do we have on the docket today? We’re talking about Facebook. NASIR: On the docket, I like that. MATT: Yeah, and we’re talking about Facebook likes specifically. I know our Legally Sound Facebook page has hundreds of thousands of likes because we’ve paid lots of money for that. NASIR: About a dollar. MATT: No, just joking. NASIR: All international. MATT: Let’s talk about in the story $500 for 10,000 likes, it seems like a good deal, I guess. NASIR: I think that’s for US likes, though, right? MATT: For $500, you get 10,000 likes in the US. There’s a cheaper rate for international. NASIR: What does it matter where it comes from if you’re just paying for likes? It’s still just a number. No one can see – or maybe they can, I don’t know. MATT: Anyways, well, I guess we’re not getting off-topic because that’s kind of the story here. NASIR: Let’s not talk about Facebook likes anymore, that’s off-topic. MATT: Who owns these Facebook likes? That’s really the question that it comes down to and this all came about because I guess there was a show that was on BET which I’m not really familiar with the show. NASIR: Called “The Game.” I’ve never heard of it myself. MATT: The Game, yeah. They started a show, it went off-air, but their Facebook page lived on and they ended up getting two million likes on this Facebook page for this show. So, BET was trying to say, “Hey, you need to give us these likes,” I guess. I’m not even sure how this works. Because they have the likes, do they have the information for all those people? Is that what it’s boiling down to? NASIR: I’m trying to think about it. I don’t think you have very much information. But this case comes with a story, just like any court case. I think it’s semi-interesting that, even though this fan page came out when the show came out, the person who ran it was not an employee or even associated with the show. So, it wasn’t an actual official page. But, after the show went off-air, it continued to just get more likes and I think people missed it or whatever – who knows? And then, when it came back, instead of the game, the show BET creating their own new page, they were like, “Okay, well, this page is still out there, let’s just use hers. This is just some fan.” And so, they entered into some kind of contract agreement where she’d post for her and she’d be paid like, $3,000 or $4,000 per month, and there are some different terms in there. But then,

The guys discuss Snapchat's seemingly minor punishment for misrepresentations about its privacy policy and answer, "How do I decide what salary to pay myself?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: This is Matt Staub. NASIR: Like the NBA – Matthew Staub. Welcome to our podcast. This is where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can submit to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. Episode #42. MATT: It is #42, yeah, the Jackie Robinson episode. NASIR: I didn’t see that movie yet. MATT: I relate all numbers to the players that wore the number for sports so we’re getting up to the numbers now. We’re running out of basketball so it’s maybe a little bit of baseball then we’ll cut into some football. Then, once we hit triple digits, it’s pretty much over. NASIR: Yeah, there’s no sports that go up that high that I can think of. Maybe golf? Actually, marathons – they have three-digit numbers a lot of times. MATT: Well, if anyone knows any marathon numbers… NASIR: Send them in. MATT: Yeah, send them to us and we’ll start using them but I don’t know any marathon runners. Well, there’s one guy from San Diego who just won the Boston marathon. NASIR: I doubt if he got the same number every time. MATT: You don’t. NASIR: Yeah. If I ever run a marathon – which hopefully I won’t someday – I’m going to request my number and be really dramatic about it. “No, I’m this number every time! I have to have this!” MATT: Lucky number, yeah. NASIR: Lucky number 101. MATT: Let’s get to the story we have for today. I can’t remember, have we talked about Snapchat before? NASIR: We may have but I think most people have heard about it at least. If you’re in the age of 13 to 15, you definitely have. MATT: I actually use Snapchat. NASIR: You’re like 16, right? you just came out of that phase. MATT: I’d have heard about it for a while and then a couple of my friends talked me into doing it. I still kind of find it pretty pointless. NASIR: Me, too. MATT: I’ll get into the reasoning why but, for those of you who haven’t heard the most recent story, let me step back a second and explain what Snapchat is if you haven’t heard of it. This is the way I see it. You take a picture – or I guess video now as well – and you send it to one of your friends and it’s basically just a picture text message but there’s a time limit on it – one to ten seconds – and then it disappears. Same with video. But the problem is I guess that these photos and these videos weren’t disappearing as they said – the whole point of Snapchat – and this wasn’t happening. And so, they were also doing something with using customer information too which is a whole other issue. They basically said they were doing one thing. Their main premise, they weren’t living up to it and the FTC came in, they got a pretty light ban here – twenty-year internal audit. That was what was handed down. NASIR: And no fines! I’m so surprised that they didn’t have any fines which the FTC, they have the power to do so. I don’t know why they went so light on this because I would be upset, right? I mean, you have the whole idea of Snapchat is that it’s private. Usually, if you’re sending – this is my assumption – if you’re sending an image or information that is only supposed to last a certain amount of time, I assume it’s not something you’d want to be shared but I don’t know. What else is the purpose? I’d be upset, for sure. MATT: That what I was getting to. It’s defeating the purpose of the app to begin with. NASIR: Exactly, yeah. MATT: I’m pretty surprised there’s no fine. I think the twenty-year independent privacy audit – I think I said internal audit, I meant independent audit – that’s a little bit funny because, what are the odds that Snapchat’s going to be around in twenty years? Pretty slim, right? NASIR: Yeah, I would agree with that,

Nasir and Matt welcome Jesse Lindsleyto talk about people are ripping off successful mobile games and answer the question, "My partners and I have been developing an online software and a mobile app, but we are wondering if we should split the mobile aspect of our business into a separate LLC since not everyone is developing that and the app could stand on its own. Is that advisable?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in at ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com and we’re ready to go. MATT: Yeah, I hope we make this a good one. The Wednesday episode seemed to be the most popular one. NASIR: Yeah, it’s the hump of the week and the top of the week, I think, for us. MATT: Don’t screw up, Nasir. NASIR: I know. It’s a lot of pressure now. Great. MATT: Let’s get into the story we have for today. It has to deal with this game, 2048, which I’ve heard of but I never play. I actually downloaded it yesterday. NASIR: Really? Okay. MATT: Just to see what it was and played it a couple of times. I get the gist of it and I can get how it would be addicting. I try not to do any of these games just because I don’t want to get sucked in. NASIR: I agree. I’ve played it and I admit that I actually have played it quite a bit but I’m not much of a mobile app gamer, I would consider myself, but for whatever reason, I heard other people playing it so I took a look and I like puzzle games. I got sucked in, I suppose. MATT: I’m surprised you’ve played because anyone that listens to this podcast knows that your math skills aren’t always 100 percent. NASIR: Oh, wow, that’s a low-blow. That is a low-blow. I was a computer science major. Math was important at that time. But, anyway, my AP Calc teacher is going to be upset at that comment from high school. I was just joking. MATT: So, what we’re dealing with here, the underlying story is the intellectual property behind these games and, more importantly, I guess the infringement thereof. But when we’re dealing with mobile games and I think they talked about board games as well, not everything you think would be able to be protected is protected. They mentioned how the protection is of the expression of an idea but you can’t protect the idea itself. NASIR: Yeah, and if you notice these 2048 games are everywhere and apparently it’s some kind of version of some game called Threes and I think everyone knows that, well, I never played but that game Flappy Bird which became really popular but then went off the market and then everyone put clones up, the reason is basically there was no patent on that idea and there’s maybe copyright as far as the graphics go and so forth but there’s limitations on that. But I wanted to get Jesse from Thrust. They have a pretty cool mobile app development company and kind of want to get their perspective. I’m sure this issue has been brought up in their development as well. Jesse, how are you doing? JESSE: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. NASIR: Very good. So, you kind of heard about what’s going on with 2048. You’ve seen all these clones and it’s weird. I use an Android. If you go to the top ten mobile apps that are free downloads or whatever, I think three of them are 2048 variations. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any experience with these kinds of issues dealing with your development. JESSE: Yeah, we come across this kind of stuff all the time. As developers, we get frustrated when people copy our ideas. I’ve been involved in these kinds of discussions from the gaming gambling days, early 2000 to the Facebook launching of games and a lot of the games were launched by Zynga and others were pure copycats of other games. So, it’s pretty standard and there’s court cases where sometimes the little gu...

Nasir and Matt talk about Amazon'soffer to employees to take cash to quit and answer a question on hiring employees to work remotely. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: This is Matt Staub. NASIR: And this is the podcast where we cover business legal news – well, actually, business news and we put in our legal twist. What else do we do? Oh, yeah, we answer legal questions that you submit, the listener, to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. MATT: It’s like you wrote that for yourself beforehand because you asked a question and then instantly answered it, but that’s all right. NASIR: It’s showmanship. MATT: Things get a little bit crazier on the Friday episodes. NASIR: That’s true. We’ve got to take it down a notch and get a little relaxed, right? Get ready for the weekend. MATT: We’ve got a good episode here and I like this story that we have. NASIR: Wait, wait, wait, wait. How do you know it’s a good episode already? MATT: Well, I think it’s going to be a good episode. NASIR: Well, let’s wait until the end and then we’ll comment on it. MATT: Okay. Well, I know it’s going to be good – well, I’m pretty sure – because the story we’re going to talk about, the first thing you see is it looks like a picture from your place because it’s a cat and an Amazon box which anyone who listens to the podcast knows that you love ordering things from Amazon and you love cats. NASIR: That’s true. Well, I don’t know if I love cats. I really love my cat but it’s my cat. MATT: Let me get in the actual details here. This is something that Amazon, I think, they’re going to do. They haven’t done it yet but they’re going to offer their warehouse employees money. NASIR: They’ve been doing this for a while, I think. MATT: Oh, they have been doing it for a while. NASIR: I think so because I read somewhere… Go ahead, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll be quiet. MATT: Anyway, they’re offering warehouse employees a cash incentive in order to quit. They call it the “pay to quit” program but it’s funny. They don’t want them to quit. They basically want people that are invested in Amazon in the long-term so that, even when they get this offer, it even says, “Please don’t take this offer.” It starts at $2,000 the first time and it increases by $1,000 each year until you hit $5,000. I really like this idea. It’s a really interesting concept. I mean, you know some people are going to take this and they’re going to take their $2,000 and run. NASIR: In fact, I looked this up on another website but it says fewer than ten percent of the employees who got the offer took it and left the company. That’s still ten percent. That’s still a portion of your business there. MATT: Yeah, and I imagine they probably have a lot of people that work for them. There’s a lot of Amazon packages going out and this is just warehouse employees so I’m sure there’s a lot of people. I mean, I know in Indianapolis, this past holiday season, they made a huge seasonal push and hired a ton of people. So, it’s probably for more long-term. NASIR: Yeah. In fact, I’m looking here, it looks like they’ve been doing this for a while but only for a portion of their employees. But, recently, in January, they rolled it out to 40,000 warehouse employees in January. What do you think about the concept? It’s pretty novel but, when you have that organization, you’re looking for long-term employees and people that are really bought into your industry. It seems like a pretty positive thing and something that has a lot of potential. MATT: You said 40,000 people were offered? NASIR: I think there were more people than that but the new people that were offered is 40,000 warehouse employees back in January. MATT: If we assume ten percent, that’s still $8 million which, to Amazon, that’s pretty much nothing. They probably do that in five seconds. But $8 million is $8 million. NASIR: Wait, how did you get to $8 million?

Nasir and Matt address the problem surrounding employees not taking vacation. The two also talk about overtime pay in the question of the day. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Episode 29. Are we ready to go? MATT: I am ready. Let’s get to. NASIR: First, we have to talk about SNL. It’s recorded live and it’s broadcasted live on the East Coast but then, with a little bit of a delay. MATT: Yeah, live on the East Coast. I hear that, on the West Coast, it’s on at the same time – the 11:30 p.m. but it’s obviously not the same as it is on the East Coast. I think it even says that on the thing. It says “recorded live from a previous…” or “taped” or whatever it says. But it is live on the East Coast. NASIR: I guess we can’t call our podcast “live” because we’re not broadcasting live on the East Coast. We’ll work on it later on. MATT: Let’s get to the story we have for today. I like this one. It deals with employees and vacation. There’s a lot of interesting things in here about what your employees are really doing when they’re on vacation. Vacation is supposed to be a time when you’re not working. I know, Nasir, when you go on vacations, you never work at all. NASIR: That is not true. I just came from a vacation to Costa Rica. I think that was the first time I had really unplugged – I don’t know – for four years. I think all my vacations have been working vacations. That’s different though. I think I’m in a different – well, apparently, to this article, I’m not different – than anyone else, apparently. MATT: Yeah, and this also talks about it’s more focused on the employees of companies and dealing with supervisors but there’s a lot of interesting numbers in here. Let me rewind a little bit here. It’s basically saying, when employees go on vacation, they’re still working – and we’ll get to the numbers in that, no big surprise. One of the first things it discusses is Americans only used 51 percent of their available vacation time in the last twelve months. NASIR: Meaning they won’t use all their time. MATT: Yeah, your vacation days accrue but they’re not even using the actual vacation days. I guess that’s not that surprising either. NASIR: Hold on, though. I just found a loophole in that statistic because there are some states which, once your vacation accrues, you can’t lose it. Even if you do end up not using the actual vacation days, you still are maybe entitled to vacation pay. Therefore, perhaps some employers just pay them out as a bonus at the end of the year which I know some of our clients do. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Technically, the employees almost have an incentive not to take vacation days. MATT: Yeah, because you’re still getting paid the money but you’re not getting the break which would be nice. I think everyone needs some sort of break at some point – no matter who you are, in my opinion. Let me get into more of the numbers in here. I’ll just get to the one I thought was the craziest, if I can find it. 20 percent of employees when they’re on vacation said they were contacted by their boss. This seems like a problem. NASIR: Yeah, that’s a problem because, basically, if you’re under the control of your employer, then you are considered to be in work time. Therefore, working. Therefore, not really on vacation. And so, probably a labor law violation in pretty much every state that I can think of. I think it’s also a federal law violation. MATT: Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was getting to – that’s the big issue there. But some of them say it was welcomed. You know, there’s a lot of different numbers always thrown around in this but the bottom-line is people are on vacation, in a sense, but not really taking vacation. Sometimes, it’s just helpful – I’ll talk from an employer’s perspective – if your employees go on vacation, let them go on vacation. Don’t contact them. That’s obvious advice. NASIR: No doubt.

Nasir and Matt talk about the lawsuit over items of flair from Office Space and answer a question on options in purchasing a business. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Episode 26 of Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And we’re ready to go. We’re going to talk about Office Space today – the movie. We tried to get it – at least The Office or Office Space or an episode of what else? Seinfeld and pizza. MATT: Yeah. Well, I was trying to think. I don’t know if we’ve discussed… Office Space is a pretty classic office-themed TV show or movie. I don’t think we’ve discussed it before, have we? Do you recall discussing it? NASIR: I think, tangentially, we have. I mean, I think the show, The Office, is based upon a lot of the happenings in the Office Space. MATT: I guess, for me, I’ve never really worked in an office environment like that. I did a little bit in college when I worked in this one place but, yeah, I guess I did for one summer. I had a cubicle-type setup, but it was a much different situation. I was much younger than everyone else that was working there and my boss was not like any of the bosses in this movie. NASIR: I think you and I have been pretty lucky in our past job experience, but I know very well – through family members and so forth – that these kinds of places do exist, unfortunately – or fortunately, depending upon your sense of humor. MATT: Let me get to the actual substance of this lawsuit here and it was a lawsuit and it’s Todd Duffee. Maybe some of you might remember him as the flair guy at Chotchkie’s – I think that’s it is, right? Yeah, Chotchkie’s. NASIR: Yeah, Chotchkie’s. MATT: So, there is a lawsuit. He’s suing 20th Century Fox or he did sue 20th Century Fox because I guess they came out with this game or something you could buy – some sort of product that had all these, basically, if you’d seen the movie – and, if you haven’t, go watch it because it is a good movie – he’s working at Chotchkie’s and they have all these items of flair so it’s all these buttons that they have to wear on their uniform. I guess 20th Century Fox has put out all these similar buttons. Basically, the buttons like they wear in the movie that you can wear. It’s your own personal items of flair. Now, I don’t know why it took them fifteen years for them to put this out because the movie was in 1999. Were they just circling back around and it just dawned on them to do this? But, anyway, the actor who played the waiter at Chotchkie’s was suing 20th Century Fox because, you know, he was basically saying that they were improperly using his image for this product that they’re now selling. NASIR: Well, I think it’s funny that he’s even suing at all – as if this product is making billions of dollars or something. I think it’s cool. I think it’s funny. But who actually buys this stuff? And what are you going to do – wear it maybe for Halloween or for a day and then that’s it pretty much? One-time use? MATT: For an update, he did lose and I’m not sure at what stage he lost but he did lose. I don’t even know what grounds he really had to stand on in terms of why he even brought this lawsuit in the first place. NASIR: Well, the assumption is use of likeness. But I think what Matt is saying is that, well, look, you sign up for a movie and they’re promoting the movie through these products. So, why wouldn’t they be allowed to? They had his provision in the contract agreement to be able to use his image for commercial purpose. When we ran film contracts through our firm, we basically have it so that the producers can use the likeness of the actors – pretty much any way they want – in connection to the actual project. And so, this would also apply – even though it’s some kind of board game – not a board game. It’s basically a box of buttons with his picture on it, you know? MATT: Yeah. NASIR: And it says “Office Space” on it and it says “A Box of Flair” and that’s pretty much ...

Episode 84: Playwright and Drama Teacher Matt Webster Matt Webster talks about what it's like to teach drama teachers, the biggest mistake he sees new drama teachers make, classroom management, and his play The Myths At the Edge of the World. Show Notes The Myths at the Edge of the World Growing Your Drama Program Through Outreach Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP, The Theatrefolk Podcast. I am Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you're well. Thanks for listening. This is Episode 84. You can catch the links for this episode at theatrefolk.com/episode84. So, today is a great mix of teaching talk about play talk. Drama teacher Matt Webster spent many years teaching folks how to become drama teachers before heading back to high school where he now teaches in North Carolina. He has lots to share, it's a great interview, so let's get to it. Lindsay: Hello everybody! Thank you for tuning in. I am pleased to introduce you all to Matt Webster. Hello, Matt! Matt: Hello! Lindsay: Matt is one of our new playwrights. He has with us The Myths at the Edge of the World which we will get into, but he is also… You've had a couple of different theatre education careers. Matt: Yes, I have, yes. Lindsay: Where are you in the world? Matt: Currently, I'm outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. I teach at a school that's in Mint Hill which is a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, and I'm the chair of the fine arts department and theatre teacher at Rocky River High School. Lindsay: Awesome, and I also saw that you used to teach theatre teachers. Matt: Yes, I am a former – I like to say “recovering” – I'm a recovering theatre education associate professor. I was professor for fourteen years at the University of North Carolina and taught teachers how to teach theatre. Lindsay: Now, why do you say recovering? Matt: Let's just say I am happy to be out of that particular situation and very happy to be where I am now. Lindsay: But I did want to start to just sort of get you to talk a bit about what it was like to teach theatre teachers. What was the thing that surprised you most about these newbies coming in who wanted to teach theatre? Matt: Well, every person who came into my office, the first question that I've asked them is, “Why do you want to be a theatre teacher?” and, if they didn't say that they were dying to be a theatre teacher, I said, “Don't. It's too much work. It's not enough respect. It has to be a passion,” and there were people who'd come in and say, “Well, you know, I want to teach until something better comes along.” “Well, you know, I want to be an actor but my parents want me to get a job so I want to teach.” What I tell them is, “Ultimately, my responsibility isn't to you and my responsibility isn't to this university or even to your future school you might get hired by. My responsibility is to your future students and, if you go into a classroom unprepared or without passion, and you bail out in six weeks because it's too hard or you didn't like it or whatever the case may be, you've left this group of students high and dry and they're going to have a bad taste in their mouth about theatre and you're doing a disservice to all these kids and to the profession itself.” So, I really push to make sure that people who taught theatre and who became teachers understood what that meant and understood the importance and the impact of that. Lindsay: I love that. I love that the focus is on the students as it always should be! Matt: Absolutely. Lindsay: Sometimes, they get caught up in some of the red tape and stuff which is why I'm not in the classroom. I like to parachute in and just do my little song, my little dog and pony show, and then get out very quickly. But that's another story for another day. So, did you often come across, particularly I think it happens with theatre, my theatre teacher in high school was an actor who tried to make it happen and then it just didn'...

Nasir and Matt start things off by discussing one company's huge victory over Yelp, and then get into Staples' motives for cutting the hours of part-time employeesand the FTC cracking down on Sensa for weight loss claims. The two give a call to former gym owner,Noah Mangus, to discuss cancellation policies for gyms and the lawsuit against Equinox for its automatic renewal policy. Nasir and Matt also answer questions about ownership in quickly formed startups, the perils of holding fake promotions, and drafting contracts on a budget. As mentioned during the show, please check out this charitable cause for type 1 diabetes: Jennifer's Tour de Cure fundraiserand here and make a donation for one of the members of the Top Floor Legal team. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And welcome to our business legal podcast. This is where we cover some of the business legal news as well as some of your business legal questions. MATT: Let’s jump right into it this week. There’s a story that came out. This could be very interesting what happens with this and it’s going to be good news for some business owners. NASIR: Yeah, I think it’s huge. MATT: Yeah, and I can’t remember anything like this happening before. It was a lawsuit involving Yelp. It was in Virginia. There was a company that had all these negative reviews and I believe they were also anonymous reviews. So, the people didn’t say who they were and, essentially, there was a lawsuit that happened, and Yelp was required to turn over the information of those so-called anonymous reviews. Like I said, this is going to be a big press stand. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. This was in Virginia, but it’ll be really interesting what happens in other states and just if anything follows up with an appeal. NASIR: So, we’ve covered Yelp a bunch of times now. It’s almost our nemesis. Our firm gets calls and emails every week from businesses that have had reviews on this Yelp website that are either defamatory or fake or what-have-you. There’s a lot of limited things that we can do. Also, frankly, from our business culture, I don’t think it’s the best idea to start suing your customers anyway. But this is something different. This is where you have anonymous reviewers that are posting information about your business that not only is false but is suspected to be completely your competitors or something. This is a carpet cleaning business and they think that this is a competitor that is going on this website and posting these bad reviews about them. MATT: Yeah, and I’m not sure if they found out who those people ultimately were or whether they were competitors. But, yeah, that would be what you suspect, right? It’s either competitors or I guess possibly disgruntled ex-employees. But, if you’re in a business and you have competitors and one way you want to get ahead I guess is to give those competitors negative reviews which is, you know, I wouldn’t advice that, but I guess that’s one way you can do it because people rely on Yelp a lot. More than I do, I guess. But I’ve been with a lot of people – personal and business – and they just, “Let’s look to Yelp.” Or I’ll talk to someone and I say, “Why didn’t you go with this person?” It’s like, “Oh, they had bad Yelp reviews.” And so, it holds a lot of weight. NASIR: I’ve used Yelp mostly just for restaurants, but not for other businesses. Now, keep in mind, people that are listening, this is a Virginia lawsuit. This was a public court decision. MATT: Yeah, this was done by the court of appeals. NASIR: So, understand what that means. Unless you’re in the state of Virginia, that is not going to apply to you, but it is going to be persuasive authority in the sense that it could be used to help your argument in your respective state. Also, keep in mind, I notice that the basis of their lawsuit was a statute that was passed in Virginia which t...