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Recap of Episode 22 of Australian Survivor Brains V Brawn 2 - Battle of the Brains! Thanks for listening! Follow us: Instagram @ATASurvivor TikTok @ATASurvivor Email us: ATAustralianSurvivor@gmail.com Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;03;43 Rachel Hello and welcome to American stock Australian survivor I'm Rachel. 00;00;03;45 - 00;00;04;17 Leah I'm Leah. 00;00;04;21 - 00;00;05;39 Matt And I'm Matt. 00;00;05;44 - 00;00;25;34 Rachel Thanks for joining us. We just watched episode 22 of Australian Survivor brains versus brawn two. And there will be spoilers ahead. We open up on the final five. Woo hoo! Wow. It's been a long journey for these players, but they are proud of themselves and they have made it to a huge accomplishment on any season of survivor to make it to the final. 00;00;25;34 - 00;00;29;09 Leah 544 days. It's unbelievable. 00;00;29;14 - 00;00;31;49 Matt You start to get nervous now right? 00;00;31;54 - 00;00;45;36 Rachel Yeah, and they should be, because we see Miles and Zahra talking on the beach. And Miles and Miles really wants to sit next to Zahra at the end. He thinks he can beat her and he thinks it's time to target age. It's number one. 00;00;45;41 - 00;00;47;57 Leah I don't want AJ to go boo. 00;00;48;02 - 00;01;05;54 Rachel Well, you know, I mean, I think we talked last episode about Kate and Morgan turning on each other and how how they didn't turn on each other because they have such a close alliance and how it's tough to watch that on survivor because you say, oh, it's a game, you've got to vote out your friends. And now here we go. 00;01;05;54 - 00;01;11;48 Rachel We see Miles being a survivor player, saying, I'm going to vote for my friend because I want to win this game, right? 00;01;11;51 - 00;01;15;11 Leah You did. He kept saying that I'm going to win the game. 00;01;15;22 - 00;01;32;04 Matt And with all the seasons of survivor we've watched, there's always people saying we're going to be friends for the rest of our lives. On the outside, we're going to stay in touch. So I mean, they become very good friends with when you eat, sleep and drink with somebody all day for weeks. 00;01;32;08 - 00;01;37;50 Rachel Yeah. And I think that Myles and AJ both have enough respect for the game that they'll be friends outside of this for sure. 00;01;37;52 - 00;01;41;37 Leah Well, Miles even said that that he thinks that data will respect them. 00;01;41;37 - 00;01;42;02 Leah Exactly. 00;01;42;10 - 00;01;43;30 Rachel So he's thinking that yeah. 00;01;43;37 - 00;01;45;42 Matt Yeah. When I vote you out, you'll respect me. 00;01;45;43 - 00;01;46;00 Leah Yeah. 00;01;46;00 - 00;01;59;27 Rachel One thing that Myles did say to Zara is when I take out AJ, the jury's going to be wowed. So Myles is already taking credit for this move. That hasn't happened yet that he needs Zara to help with. 00;01;59;31 - 00;02;00;15 Matt It's funny all. 00;02;00;15 - 00;02;01;01 Leah These all these. 00;02;01;09 - 00;02;04;27 Matt Plans it seems like a battle of the brains is really coming. Coming true. 00;02;04;31 - 00;02;16;13 Rachel Yeah. We've barely heard about Kate by the beginning part of the episode. She was almost gone last night and now she seems to have skated on by because the post grads are turning on each other, right? 00;02;16;20 - 00;02;22;25 Leah Yes. Well, I think it's interesting that there are four brains left. And last season, Hayley won 00;02;22;25 - 00;02;27;24 Leah the last brawn versus brains. So it's interesting. The brains. Here they go again. 00;02;27;28 - 00;02;31;36 Rachel It certainly looks like the brains are victorious against the brawn. 00;02;31;45 - 00;02;34;51 Matt If you could just get through those first couple of ones that you lose 00;02;34;51 - 00;02;35;33 Matt the brawn 00;02;35;33 - 00;02;42;18 Matt finishes all the, the tribal, the challenges and wins them all. If you can just get through those, you have a better chance, right? 00;02;42;27 - 00;02;44;49 Rachel Being a brain if you can make it to the merge. Right. 00;02;45;26 - 00;02;59;34 Rachel Well we see the brains all talking to each other. The postgraduates and Myles is expressing that Kate is next. And AJ being the great poker player that he is. Says that's ridiculous. He's definitely got something else up his sleeve. 00;02;59;37 - 00;03;00;56 Leah Yeah. 00;03;01;00 - 00;03;06;23 Rachel So he knows him well. Yeah. He doesn't know that he's the target, but he certainly knows him well. 00;03;06;28 - 00;03;11;15 Matt Right? He thinks it's Kaitlyn. Yeah, AJ thinks my Myles is going to vote Kaitlyn. 00;03;11;15 - 00;03;13;00 Leah Right? And he tells Kaitlyn that. 00;03;13;00 - 00;03;16;49 Rachel And he also tells Art, which is interesting that Zar is getting all A's. 00;03;16;54 - 00;03;17;27 Leah Yeah right. 00;03;17;39 - 00;03;31;03 Matt And I thought for sure at this point that AJ was going to say and Myles has a now an idol but he didn't. He kept it like a good poker player. Kept it close to his chest. Didn't let other people see what he knows. 00;03;31;03 - 00;03;49;22 Rachel Well now it's time to get into the immunity challenge. So. Right at the beginning, we talked about, you know, how Kaitlyn's won so many. And AJ announces to the group that he wants Kaitlyn to win every single one in hopes that he doesn't stop. Which is an interesting thing to say about your competitor. 00;03;49;27 - 00;04;04;53 Leah I think AJ is such a good friend to Kaitlyn. He really sincerely wants him to keep winning and maybe he knows since he is good friends with Kaitlyn, Kaitlyn will protect him with that with immunity. I guess it's better to have your friend win it than someone else. 00;04;04;58 - 00;04;09;19 Rachel Yeah, and I guess AJ probably could beat Kaitlyn at the end. I think that's what he's thinking. 00;04;09;24 - 00;04;10;34 Leah I think so. 00;04;10;39 - 00;04;15;06 Matt I guess so. So if Kaitlyn wins everyone, that's okay because he'll take me with him. 00;04;15;11 - 00;04;16;20 Leah Yeah. 00;04;16;25 - 00;04;19;24 Rachel Yeah I don't know if AJ has told us who his top 00;04;19;24 - 00;04;20;33 Rachel person said Kaitlyn. 00;04;20;33 - 00;04;22;44 Leah I thought he so did. Yeah I think he said both and. 00;04;22;44 - 00;04;26;34 Rachel It makes me. Yeah yeah makes sense that he wants Kaitlyn to keep winning immunities. 00;04;26;34 - 00;04;29;27 Matt But did he ever tell Myles that he was that they were. 00;04;29;34 - 00;04;32;28 Leah I think Myles and AJ know that they can't take each other. 00;04;32;30 - 00;04;34;04 Matt Okay. They're smart enough. 00;04;34;05 - 00;04;34;27 Leah Yeah. 00;04;34;29 - 00;04;38;49 Rachel Yeah. Yeah. They know they can't sit next to each other. But what what how would that be. That would be. 00;04;38;49 - 00;04;44;55 Leah Awesome. I would be the best. The absolutely best. And who would win? Yeah. All right, so off to the immunity challenge, 00;04;44;55 - 00;05;05;23 Rachel Yeah. So they have to take these blocks over a little obstacle where you can, you know, trip it and wobble your stack, and you have to stack up 12 blocks. So it feels kind of similar to last night's, challenge at tribal council where, you know, you're stacking things and it's balance and it's precision. Right? So I, I was a little frustrated that it was quite similar. 00;05;05;24 - 00;05;08;42 Rachel I would have wanted something a little bit different. Right. Back to back. 00;05;08;43 - 00;05;09;07 Leah Challenges. 00;05;09;11 - 00;05;12;41 Matt Similar to immunity challenge number two from from the previous. 00;05;12;41 - 00;05;34;13 Leah Episode. Well, what I didn't like is that they didn't base it on height. Like AJ had an extremely difficult time getting under the, gate. And, Jonathan even said something about being like, I don't know, something about tall. Yeah, it was a challenge, so that just doesn't seem fair. Why not make it so everyone has an equal, distance? 00;05;34;18 - 00;05;36;08 Matt Okay. Should be based on your body, right? 00;05;36;09 - 00;05;36;42 Leah Correct. 00;05;36;54 - 00;05;43;59 Rachel Because, yeah, for the strength ones, they do it by percentage of your body weight. So it should be the same thing. It should be based on your height. 00;05;44;00 - 00;05;44;31 Leah Yes. 00;05;44;42 - 00;05;49;42 Matt And someone with shorter legs has a harder time because they have to lift their feet up higher. So maybe they're just saying it's, 00;05;49;42 - 00;05;58;10 Matt both, you know, taller people have to duck down lower. Shorter people have to lift their feet higher. But I think you got to lift your feet higher a lot more. I don't know. It should be. 00;05;58;21 - 00;06;01;03 Matt I feel like it should be the same for everybody. Based on your height. 00;06;01;03 - 00;06;01;38 Leah I agree. 00;06;01;48 - 00;06;03;18 Rachel They never take our advice. What 00;06;03;18 - 00;06;05;25 Rachel changes are they working on? 00;06;05;30 - 00;06;10;25 Leah Yes I know. Yeah. All right, so Caitlin's in the lead, right? 00;06;10;30 - 00;06;14;01 Rachel Yeah. To no one's surprise, Kate and Caitlin are both doing well. 00;06;14;06 - 00;06;15;27 Leah Right? Very well. 00;06;15;27 - 00;06;18;19 Rachel it looks like Caitlin's about to pull through, but he drops. 00;06;18;25 - 00;06;23;34 Leah Oh. All right, number 11. How upsetting. Oh, down. Wow. Had to be hard. 00;06;23;38 - 00;06;29;11 Rachel And he was, you know, preparing himself, taking a deep breath before he went in. So that was really too bad. 00;06;29;16 - 00;06;30;56 Leah Now okay. So that's the lead, right? 00;06;30;56 - 00;06;47;33 Rachel Yeah. So it's everyone's anyone's game really at this point. And this is one of those this is kind of fun about these sort of challenges is that you see people build up their stack and then they fall, and then someone else is in the lead and then someone else builds up. So it's kind of like a revolving door of who is leading the challenge. 00;06;47;33 - 00;06;49;31 Rachel So that's always a little exciting. 00;06;49;31 - 00;06;59;14 Rachel We see a lot of people drop. We see Myles drop on his absolute 12th block, yet the last one I need to set to take away the oh I couldn't get it. 00;06;59;14 - 00;07;01;27 Rachel So he looked really upset about that. 00;07;01;32 - 00;07;05;14 Leah And Zara wins. Yeah for Zara. 00;07;05;19 - 00;07;10;04 Rachel I don't think she dropped at all. She finally hurt as J. Upset. Finally. Yeah. 00;07;10;04 - 00;07;11;46 Leah Yeah, right. I honestly. 00;07;11;51 - 00;07;17;34 Matt I think that was an odd thing to say. Well yeah somebody is winning them all. And then you win one fight. 00;07;17;35 - 00;07;26;50 Leah Right right right. Well maybe but she did a great job. Like she's slow and steady. And congratulations to Zara. That was really incredible. And it. 00;07;26;54 - 00;07;30;20 Matt Was great at the end even as they were leaving the stack was still standing. 00;07;30;25 - 00;07;34;27 Leah Right in the background and she was doing a little dance. Yeah, right. 00;07;34;32 - 00;07;35;13 Rachel She seemed very. 00;07;35;13 - 00;07;38;30 Leah Proud. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, it was great. 00;07;38;35 - 00;07;39;42 Rachel I don't think we. 00;07;39;45 - 00;07;46;11 Leah Could do that. Yeah. No. Yeah. It was fun to see her so happy. Yeah, right. She's a very serious player, so that was nice. 00;07;46;11 - 00;08;03;20 Rachel So let me get back to camp. And Myles and Zara are still gunning for, AJ and they're really thinking ahead. They say we're going to tell Kate to vote for Kaitlyn. And then on the next vote at the Final Four, we're going to say, hey, Kaitlyn, remember when Kate voted for you? We've got to get her out. 00;08;03;20 - 00;08;11;17 Rachel So they're thinking, you know, multiple steps ahead of how to get people mad at each other. So you have to appreciate the good gameplay. 00;08;11;22 - 00;08;20;21 Leah I do, but Zara made a good point. She said. If we fail this, it's not going to be good, right? So they have to make sure they do not fail at this vote. 00;08;20;21 - 00;08;27;29 Rachel Yeah, so they're planning to do two votes on, Kate, two votes on AJ and then one vote somewhere else. 00;08;27;29 - 00;08;29;00 Matt On Kaitlyn, I think. 00;08;29;05 - 00;08;34;12 Rachel On Kaitlyn. And then they're going to revote and then it's going to be two. So they've got a. 00;08;34;12 - 00;08;35;37 Leah Lot of right. 00;08;35;47 - 00;08;40;42 Matt Then there's only the two of them who can vote. And then they can both vote off whoever they want to vote. 00;08;40;42 - 00;08;46;53 Rachel AJ dizzying to think about all these different strategies that everyone has going on with only five votes. 00;08;46;59 - 00;08;53;56 Leah I don't know how they do this. They're so tired. And now, you know, I haven't had anything to eat. But here, they're very good. 00;08;54;01 - 00;08;54;44 Rachel They're good. 00;08;54;44 - 00;09;01;16 Matt But it's interesting that they could, that Myles comes up with a 2 to 1 vote. And then AJ comes up with two one. 00;09;01;18 - 00;09;04;15 Leah Yes. Well that's why they're friends. 00;09;04;20 - 00;09;05;33 Rachel Yeah. They think alike. 00;09;05;35 - 00;09;06;15 Leah Really. 00;09;06;20 - 00;09;21;29 Rachel Well Kaitlyn had a great plan to set a rat trap. So he thinks that he's pretty worried about Myles idol. So I guess Kaitlyn knows about the idol. It's hard to keep track of who knows about the idol and who doesn't, but I guess Kaitlyn knows. 00;09;21;29 - 00;09;23;52 Rachel He thinks that's going to come down to Myles versus Kate. 00;09;23;52 - 00;09;30;44 Rachel So he's like, if Myles plays his idol, then K goes home. If Myles plays his idol for Kate trying to send Kaitlyn home. Yeah. And Myles goes home. 00;09;30;44 - 00;09;31;02 Leah So 00;09;31;02 - 00;09;35;13 Leah yeah he's thinking. He was thinking I like Kaitlyn's plan. I thought it was a good plan. 00;09;35;17 - 00;09;50;43 Rachel Yeah. And then AJ says you know we're gonna have two votes on Myles. Gonna have two votes on Kate. Then we're going to revote on Kate. And it's just a lot of a lot of re votes allotted two on two splits. But it's interesting that AJ is gunning for Kate who he tried so hard to save last night. 00;09;50;54 - 00;09;54;43 Leah Well I think he's a postgraduate graduate. Must be loyal to them. 00;09;54;43 - 00;09;55;53 Matt Sticking to the four. 00;09;55;56 - 00;10;02;51 Leah Yeah, yeah. So I think them working together they said since the beginning right. So yeah. 00;10;02;51 - 00;10;05;48 Matt He spent every day with two days with Sara. 00;10;05;53 - 00;10;06;46 Leah Yeah. Yeah. 00;10;06;50 - 00;10;11;01 Rachel Do they really known each other. Yeah. Yeah. Like a month and a half together. That's crazy. 00;10;11;02 - 00;10;11;58 Matt Gosh. 00;10;12;03 - 00;10;14;16 Rachel No breaks to go to work and come back. 00;10;14;19 - 00;10;15;00 Leah Okay. Go to. 00;10;15;01 - 00;10;15;55 Matt Sleep. You can't. 00;10;16;06 - 00;10;17;11 Rachel Drive all the time and drive. 00;10;17;11 - 00;10;18;44 Matt In your car and listen to a podcast. 00;10;18;49 - 00;10;25;31 Rachel Well, it is nice to see that AJ has sort of finally left. Kate's a spell. You seem to really be, 00;10;25;31 - 00;10;35;00 Rachel you know, siding with her quite a bit on a lot of these votes. But it seems like for whatever reason, he has flipped a switch and he's no longer, trying to save Kate. He's actually looking to get her out. 00;10;35;00 - 00;10;50;33 Rachel then we see Zara say that she is, you know, obviously she's thinking about AJ, but she also doesn't want Kate to make it to the final three because as we know, Kate and Zara are both good at endurance. Right? And Zara needs to set herself up to win for that situation. 00;10;50;38 - 00;11;00;19 Leah And so you see Kate and Zara talking, right? Yeah. And Kate tells Zara that Miles told her to vote for Kaitlyn and Zara seems quite surprised. 00;11;00;19 - 00;11;08;11 Rachel Yeah, because Kate is following Myles and not AJ, which is not what you would have expected from Kate. So this really flips things around for Zara. 00;11;08;23 - 00;11;11;41 Matt Well, Myles also did give her kind of an ultimatum. You have no choice. 00;11;11;41 - 00;11;14;39 Leah Yeah he's not very nice and for sure you know. 00;11;14;44 - 00;11;18;42 Rachel That does seem to be his go to strategy to say well you've got to do my way. You have no choice. 00;11;18;49 - 00;11;20;54 Leah Well, I think it's funny that Zara became. 00;11;20;55 - 00;11;22;12 Matt Really vote for whoever she wants. 00;11;22;12 - 00;11;33;56 Leah Yeah, but Zara ends up being the swing vote. It looks like. Right. If Kate's going to go with Myles, then it looks like she Zara will figure out. 00;11;34;01 - 00;11;35;14 Rachel But yeah. So deciding. 00;11;35;14 - 00;11;36;36 Leah Oh sorry. Go ahead. 00;11;36;41 - 00;11;53;22 Rachel Susanna has figured out that all four players on the beach are voting for each other, so Kate's voting for Caitlin. Myles is voting for AJ, Kaitlyn's voting for Miles and is voting for Kate. So there's four people eligible to receive votes and they all have one accounted for. And Zara gets to be the deciding. 00;11;53;22 - 00;11;55;07 Leah Vote, right? I know right? 00;11;55;12 - 00;11;59;15 Matt A huge move for her that all just kind of like fell in line. 00;11;59;20 - 00;12;05;04 Leah Well I think the big thing also is that Kate is finally looking for an idol. 00;12;05;04 - 00;12;06;21 Rachel Next time. 00;12;06;25 - 00;12;09;22 Leah But Myles is filing her and, you know. 00;12;09;29 - 00;12;10;48 Matt Half heartedly it seems like. 00;12;10;48 - 00;12;14;10 Leah Yeah, but still we still. Oh, are you looking for an idol? Yeah. Yeah, 00;12;14;10 - 00;12;17;28 Rachel It is nice to see Kate finally taking our advice and writing. 00;12;17;28 - 00;12;18;26 Leah For the night. 00;12;18;31 - 00;12;21;47 Matt We're 48 hours and the end of the game. You gonna look for an idol now, right? 00;12;21;56 - 00;12;22;23 Leah Right. 00;12;22;25 - 00;12;23;36 Rachel Well, better late than never, 00;12;23;36 - 00;12;39;29 Rachel Well, it is interesting to kind of think about Zara's plan here, so I'm thinking, well, she knows that she needs a big move because she played a really good game pre merge directly after the merge. I think she did a really nice job, but lately she hasn't really been doing quite as much. 00;12;39;29 - 00;12;49;30 Rachel So if she were to get out AJ yeah that's huge for her resume. But what if she ends up sitting next to Max? That's really Miles's move. More so than Zara's move, right? 00;12;49;30 - 00;12;53;33 Matt Right. And she could end up sitting next to Kate and she doesn't want to do that. 00;12;53;38 - 00;13;01;07 Rachel Well, yeah. So Kate's a big competition, but it's the easy vote. It doesn't have a huge mark on her resume. 00;13;01;12 - 00;13;04;57 Leah Yes, but the brains are thinking, right. Yeah, yeah. 00;13;05;02 - 00;13;10;53 Rachel But I'm thinking if I were Zara, I think the best move is to target Myles at this point because 00;13;10;53 - 00;13;22;14 Rachel AJ is not her original move Myles you know Kaitlyn's already voting for him, but it doesn't seem like anyone else thinks he's going home. And he really wouldn't suspect it at this point. So I think that would have been a big move. 00;13;22;24 - 00;13;23;26 Leah But yeah, the idol. 00;13;23;40 - 00;13;32;00 Rachel He does have the idol, so she's got a lot of choices, but it's hard to pick out like an exact good choice for Zara at this point in the game. 00;13;32;05 - 00;13;40;22 Matt Right? I don't feel like we got that from Kate. From Zara that she should vote for Myles she didn't even, like, considered. It didn't seem like. 00;13;40;22 - 00;13;41;31 Leah No. 00;13;41;35 - 00;13;47;19 Matt And we don't know that she knows he has an idol. So it seems odd that that part was missing. 00;13;47;24 - 00;13;51;43 Leah Well, I thought it was interesting because then you see Myles and AJ sitting on the beach 00;13;51;43 - 00;13;56;40 Leah AJ says I don't trust you for a moment to Myles. 00;13;56;45 - 00;14;18;57 Rachel So this is kind of sad. It's like their final goodbye almost their final chat on the beach. And Myles is tearing up and yes National. And it was it was kind of bittersweet to think about all the times that those two have sat on the beach together scheming away. And now there's like this underlying current where it's like, well, you can't tell me your plan, but I hope you don't vote for me, right? 00;14;19;00 - 00;14;30;23 Rachel Oh, it is, and it's I don't know, I think it's every, duo seems to get to this point in the game, but it's always I mean, it's just interesting to see. It's kind of emotional to watch. 00;14;30;27 - 00;14;38;23 Leah Yeah. Right. Well, I think also AJ said, Kaitlyn will take me to the end. No one else will. So that's interesting. 00;14;38;23 - 00;14;44;52 Leah Yeah, he he thinks Kaitlyn is the only one who's going to take him to the end. And I think he must believe that he'll beat Kaitlyn. 00;14;44;57 - 00;14;45;52 Rachel No, I think he can. 00;14;45;52 - 00;14;47;11 Leah Yeah, I can. 00;14;47;11 - 00;14;54;27 Matt Yeah, but that's that's a good point because he's probably right. Everyone else knows he's a good player. So why would you take him? 00;14;54;32 - 00;14;55;01 Leah Yeah. 00;14;55;06 - 00;14;59;16 Matt Right. Don't you think everybody is going to take Kaitlyn? 00;14;59;21 - 00;15;01;40 Rachel Yeah, I guess it's hard to say. 00;15;01;45 - 00;15;03;58 Leah But there's more surprises at tribal. 00;15;03;58 - 00;15;05;48 Leah What about the jury? Oh, I just. 00;15;05;48 - 00;15;11;55 Rachel We saw that Morgan has left the game. She's opted not to sit on the jury, but actually to go home instead. 00;15;11;55 - 00;15;19;10 Leah I mean, she took someone's place. She did not play this game, and now she leaves. Yeah, I think that's a really bad. 00;15;19;16 - 00;15;20;15 Matt So disappointing. 00;15;20;15 - 00;15;20;44 Leah Yeah. 00;15;20;49 - 00;15;34;36 Rachel Yeah. I was thinking about, Do you guys remember Noonan from the beginning of the season? She loved. Yeah, the game of survivor. So much. It's palpable on the screen. And I was just thinking, you know, she would love to sit on the jury. She would I sure. You know, it's an honor. 00;15;34;36 - 00;15;39;17 Matt And I would have been so excited to be there and hearing their stories, seeing what's happening. Yeah. 00;15;39;22 - 00;16;01;16 Rachel Yeah, she was a good player on the jury. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, a huge honor to be on the jury because you get to stay in the final, sole survivor of your season. You get to decide who wins the game. And it's such a huge part of the game. It's the jury. And to leave, it's like at that point, you may as well just quit the game because you already are not seeing it through to the end. 00;16;01;20 - 00;16;03;48 Rachel And I was yeah, it's very disappointing to see this. 00;16;03;59 - 00;16;05;40 Leah It's very upsetting actually. 00;16;05;45 - 00;16;11;24 Rachel You know, a morgan's an Olympian. So we know that she's been dedicated to things in the past and you just don't, 00;16;11;24 - 00;16;16;38 Rachel you know, expect someone as an Olympian to be, you know, quitting a game in the middle of it. Really. 00;16;16;43 - 00;16;17;53 Leah And she doesn't seem. 00;16;17;53 - 00;16;24;58 Matt That upset that she was leaving. Right? It's not like, you know, I've worked so hard for this, and this is my dream, and now I'm going to get voted off. 00;16;24;59 - 00;16;31;52 Leah And maybe someone told her, hey, why don't you go on survivor? And she just did it, but really doesn't care about it. I mean, she just didn't seem to care. 00;16;31;52 - 00;16;38;07 Matt I have read that in American Survivor they do go after certain people. They approach people. 00;16;38;12 - 00;16;38;42 Leah Who don't even. 00;16;38;42 - 00;16;40;43 Matt Apply and say, hey, you would be good on. 00;16;40;43 - 00;16;42;51 Leah Survivor. Oh, really? Yeah. 00;16;42;56 - 00;16;48;11 Rachel So maybe she didn't. She may have never even watch the game. Maybe she doesn't even know how important the jury is. 00;16;48;25 - 00;16;52;48 Leah Well, I'm sorry, you just made a good point about Noonan. I wish she would have made it farther. 00;16;52;48 - 00;17;10;09 Rachel I know she was fine. You know, she was terrified. The game was passionate about it. Who understands the role of the jury, the responsibility. And, you know, this is altering the game to not have your vote at the end, playing, you know, giving a say into how the game ends. It alters the game. 00;17;10;13 - 00;17;14;12 Leah Right. And Kate probably was pretty disappointed to not see her. 00;17;14;12 - 00;17;14;40 Rachel Yeah. 00;17;14;40 - 00;17;17;11 Matt Yeah. Especially if she was hoping for a vote from her. 00;17;17;11 - 00;17;17;59 Leah Yeah. So yeah. 00;17;17;59 - 00;17;19;48 Leah So that was crazy. 00;17;19;53 - 00;17;23;01 Rachel Yeah. So very disappointing. Interesting that, 00;17;23;01 - 00;17;31;52 Rachel think it was Ben at the beginning of the season, quit kind of unexpectedly from the brains, from tribe and, Morgan from the brawn tribe. Right. So it's. 00;17;31;52 - 00;17;32;59 Matt Season. 00;17;33;04 - 00;17;42;39 Rachel And it's not looking good for brains versus brawn. It looks like the bronze are quitting. They're not making it as far in the game. It's right. Looking like the brains are victorious overall. 00;17;42;41 - 00;17;50;40 Matt And I wonder if the four brains. I wonder what the reaction was when they heard that Morgan wasn't there. Probably like good. 00;17;50;45 - 00;17;53;26 Leah Yeah, because Morgan didn't like any of them. Right. 00;17;53;31 - 00;18;08;52 Rachel Yeah. I wonder if it even changed Zara's. I mean, I don't think it did, but I wonder if it made Zara reconsider her vote, knowing that if she were to sit next to Kate, she would not have that guaranteed vote for Morgan. 00;18;08;57 - 00;18;11;11 Leah I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. 00;18;11;16 - 00;18;16;05 Rachel Well, probably not, because, the tribal they're discussing, 00;18;16;05 - 00;18;21;52 Rachel you know, when to make a big move is it time to turn on the core four? It's going to be so awkward for. 00;18;21;53 - 00;18;22;57 Matt Bell to get awkward. 00;18;22;57 - 00;18;28;02 Rachel And when is it time to make your last big move, or, you know, one of your last big moves? 00;18;28;11 - 00;18;50;32 Leah Well, I like it that they showed us everyone but Sara. Their votes. So AJ voted for Kate, Kaitlyn voted for Myles. So that was weird because AJ was supposed to vote for Myles mapper, but I guess he just couldn't do it. Kate voted for Kaitlyn as Myles told her to do and Myles voted for AJ. So now all of them have a vote so we don't know if she's great, who Zara's going to pick. 00;18;50;32 - 00;18;52;40 Leah And that was very, very interesting. 00;18;52;45 - 00;19;00;12 Matt So it worked out perfectly for the producers. Yes, let's do it this way. I was like, yes, we knew what was going to happen up until the last vote. 00;19;00;17 - 00;19;01;56 Leah Yeah, that was really good. 00;19;02;01 - 00;19;05;13 Rachel But before they could read the votes, we had another twist. 00;19;05;13 - 00;19;10;01 Rachel Number four Myles plays idol number four for himself. 00;19;10;05 - 00;19;11;59 Matt And the jury is just like, 00;19;12;04 - 00;19;14;10 Leah Yeah. Thank you. Nothing like it was. 00;19;14;19 - 00;19;22;48 Rachel Yeah. Four idols. That's wild. And, you know, I mean Myles would be the one to ask, but there's got to be close to a record to play for. 00;19;22;48 - 00;19;26;03 Leah I was right, I went Indian. Oh yeah. That was awesome. 00;19;26;03 - 00;19;28;38 Matt That would have been funny if he would have said that. I believe this is a record. 00;19;28;53 - 00;19;35;58 Leah If anybody knows what the record is for how many idols a player? Yeah, yeah. Please let us know. Yeah. 00;19;36;03 - 00;19;46;37 Rachel All right. Yeah. So he played three correctly so far. This last one was incorrect. But that's okay. It's the last chance to play it. May as well and save himself just to be sure. 00;19;46;39 - 00;19;50;22 Matt Right. Well that would have been pretty bad to play it for Kate. And then he goes home, right? 00;19;50;22 - 00;19;50;47 Leah Yeah. 00;19;50;47 - 00;19;57;38 Rachel So we get down to it. And the very first vote out of the urn is for Myles. Does not count. Then the jury was shocked. 00;19;57;42 - 00;19;59;04 Leah Yeah. They were. 00;19;59;04 - 00;20;09;01 Rachel And then as we knew it was going to happen everyone got a vote. And there's one more vote. And at this point I'm thinking oh it's got to be AJ you know. Oh this is so sad. Here it goes H. 00;20;09;03 - 00;20;10;04 Leah Yes I'm thinking. 00;20;10;04 - 00;20;12;15 Matt It's going to be Myles and there's going to be a revote. 00;20;12;21 - 00;20;15;40 Leah Oh I doubt it's going to be AJ I was so scared because I don't want AJ that. 00;20;15;55 - 00;20;21;44 Matt People couldn't vote. So Myles would have been able to vote. Yeah Zoro would have been able to vote. 00;20;22;33 - 00;20;23;52 Rachel That would've been interesting to see. 00;20;23;52 - 00;20;24;53 Leah The exciting to see. 00;20;24;53 - 00;20;26;10 Rachel Oh, that would've been good, right? 00;20;26;10 - 00;20;26;19 Leah Yeah. 00;20;26;19 - 00;20;29;11 Matt And then if they couldn't agree on it. 00;20;29;16 - 00;20;29;41 Leah Yeah. 00;20;29;41 - 00;20;35;41 Rachel Well, it came down to Kate, I was shocked. I really was not expecting Kate to go home tonight. 00;20;35;54 - 00;20;55;21 Leah I know that, Zara has not wanted Kate the game because for it since the beginning, it seems like they do it since they were together. But, I was surprised. But did you see the big surprise from The Graduate? They were just like, whoa, AJ, I mean, it looked like none of them could believe that Kate was going home. 00;20;55;21 - 00;20;57;25 Leah So they were very, very surprised. 00;20;57;27 - 00;21;02;42 Matt AJ was quite surprised to get a vote. Yeah. He asked Myles, would you vote for. 00;21;02;47 - 00;21;03;37 Leah Yeah, yeah. 00;21;03;38 - 00;21;05;28 Matt File says you. 00;21;05;33 - 00;21;31;23 Leah Me yeah. So as I predicted, if this fails, there's going to be a lot of trouble. So and I think that's what's going to happen. But the interesting thing is the postgraduates and the brains are still here. So now the no bronze, they're all gone. So, just like Haley and King George. Two brains. Yeah. They're, you know, who knows who these four will end up being the two, but they're going to be brains. 00;21;31;23 - 00;21;32;47 Leah So. Yeah. 00;21;32;55 - 00;21;36;23 Matt Interesting. I think it looks in the previews. It looks awkward for me. 00;21;36;23 - 00;21;37;08 Leah It does. 00;21;37;13 - 00;21;39;25 Rachel Oh yeah. He's in a bad spot. 00;21;39;30 - 00;21;51;06 Leah But it's always funny going back to the beginning. You look at the players who like the Bryan have to win. I mean there's no way the brains are going to win. But here the muscles, right? 00;21;51;11 - 00;21;53;13 Matt Everybody's got a great body right. 00;21;53;18 - 00;22;00;12 Rachel Well thinking back to our initial predictions. So Matt you chose Myles. So it's looking like he's doing pretty well. 00;22;00;12 - 00;22;01;06 Leah Yeah. 00;22;01;11 - 00;22;02;32 Matt He's final four. 00;22;02;37 - 00;22;03;08 Leah Yeah. 00;22;03;20 - 00;22;05;08 Matt Hopefully further than that Morgan. 00;22;05;08 - 00;22;18;16 Rachel Yeah you chose Morgan. But I just point out yeah yeah. So that wasn't what you expected now. And I chose Karen. Of course. The only one of the graduates to be sitting on the jury and not in the Final Four. 00;22;18;20 - 00;22;19;32 Matt She's in the jury. 00;22;19;37 - 00;22;20;11 Leah Yeah, she's. 00;22;20;11 - 00;22;20;42 Rachel In the jury. 00;22;20;42 - 00;22;41;44 Leah But she was a very good player. She should be right there. Actually, when I think about it, I know Zara has done quite well, but I think Karen was more active in her gameplay. She was more like Myles in AJ. I think that's right. So I, I though Zara deserves to be where she is. I think it would be or AJ or Myles or Kaitlyn. 00;22;41;58 - 00;22;50;20 Leah I think it would be nice if Karen was up there also. I don't know who who she would replace. I'm just saying I think she should be up there because she was a good player. 00;22;50;20 - 00;22;50;58 Leah Yeah. 00;22;50;58 - 00;22;58;19 Rachel Well, it's been an interesting season and it's not over yet. I cannot wait for Sunday to see what's going to happen. 00;22;58;19 - 00;22;58;51 Leah Oh, boy. 00;22;58;51 - 00;22;59;21 Rachel Hey, Jim. 00;22;59;33 - 00;23;01;13 Leah I I'm sorry. 00;23;01;17 - 00;23;17;05 Rachel I think I'll go ahead. You know, if AJ would have gone home tonight, I think after the game they could have repaired things and said, you know, oh it's part of the game. Not a big deal. But now that he didn't go home this is really going to blow up. They're going to be are you are they going to be able to recover? 00;23;17;05 - 00;23;20;37 Rachel I don't think AJ is going to see it as just game play anymore. 00;23;20;48 - 00;23;28;23 Matt Right. And hopefully they come back at night. I mean, hopefully they show us more of what happens as soon as they get back to camp instead of when the sun comes up. 00;23;28;23 - 00;23;30;46 Leah I yeah, I think they will. I hope they, I think they will. 00;23;30;50 - 00;23;34;06 Matt But anyway, I hope you guys continue to help me support Myles. 00;23;34;06 - 00;23;34;42 Leah Sorry, 00;23;34;42 - 00;23;37;32 Leah I'm not supporting Myles. Sorry. Oh, jeez. 00;23;37;32 - 00;23;50;47 Rachel I think I would say Miles deserves to win out of all five of these. I think I'm rooting for Myles to win at this point or at all for players left because he I mean he played for idols. He has a crazy story. 00;23;50;47 - 00;23;51;30 Leah What you guys have. 00;23;51;32 - 00;23;59;02 Rachel Really doing very well. And I think he deserves the title of Sole Survivor. If he can get himself to the final two, which is going to be tough. 00;23;59;04 - 00;24;02;27 Leah But what about AJ? I guess AJ didn't play as much as Myles. 00;24;02;29 - 00;24;05;29 Matt What about Kaitlyn winning all the immunity. Yeah you know. 00;24;05;34 - 00;24;06;41 Leah And Zara still. 00;24;06;46 - 00;24;20;15 Rachel Saying yeah. The great thing about this Final Four is that everyone has a chance of winning and everyone deserves their spot here. We've seen a lot of seasons where someone's dragged along and it's not that fun, but I think this is a great final four. 00;24;20;15 - 00;24;22;33 Leah Yes, I agree is a separate car. 00;24;22;37 - 00;24;25;31 Matt I can't wait till Sunday to see what happens. 00;24;25;35 - 00;24;46;20 Rachel Yeah. So let us know what you think about this Final Four. Do you feel that everyone deserves to be there? And who do you think will be the sole survivor out of the postgraduates? Let us know on Instagram at survivor, TikTok at survivor and send us an email at eight. Australian Survivor at gmail.com. Thanks and we'll see you next week. 00;24;46;20 - 00;24;46;50 Leah Bye bye. 00;24;46;50 - 00;24;47;23 Matt Bye.  

An episode that dives deep on the truth about autism. Here's what's in store for today's episode: * In today's episode, Matt and Angela dive into the controversial discussion surrounding "profound autism."* It turns out that "profound autism" isn't a clinical term, but rather a label used by the ABA industry to restrict the number of autistic advocates who can speak for themselves.* Calling it "profound autism" is more profitable than saying "level 3 autism" because it creates a sense of urgency, making it easier for the ABA industry to secure funding and promote more intervention-based services.* In this episode, we explore the connection between giftedness and autism, and how gifted individuals face higher rates of addiction and substance abuse.* The autism levels are directly tied to capitalism—how much money you can make often depends on how well you can mask your symptoms.* Our hosts also discuss how terms like "indigo children" and "highly sensitive persons (HSPs)" are often just euphemisms for being autistic.* Then, we dive into the ABA industry, the issues with Autism Speaks, and the impact of helicopter autism parents who prevent their children from learning and growing.* We also talk about autistic pattern recognition and how it can sometimes feel like we're psychic, picking up on details others might miss.* Matt and Angela discuss how pattern recognition can also serve as a survival skill, and how burnout manifests in everyone who is autistic.* We elaborate on how autistic individuals can be more prone to substance abuse, often as a way to cope with sensory overload, social challenges, or unmet needs.* Then, we dive into the concept of being a functional alcoholic and explore the connection between substance abuse and giftedness.* We discuss Dan Harmon, creator of Rick and Morty, and how his autistic burnout led to struggles with alcoholism and missed deadlines.* Finally, we explore reframing autism in terms of "masking levels" rather than outdated "functioning" labels.“What people don't understand is that, when it comes to the autism, we just have the autism. It might have some comorbid characteristics with other stuff - for instance, ‘profound autism' might have some intellectual disability. But it doesn't change the nature of the autism, it just changes the operating system that you're working with. It changes the hardware that you're working with.” - Matt“The autism is the autism. It is the hyper-connected brain. It is the hyper-connected brain. It is the genetic underpinning that changes everything about us.” - Matt“You could be gifted, but God forbid the word ‘autistic' with no qualifiers just comes out of your mouth. I don't know what happens. I think God throws Zeus a bolt of lightning. Something must happen.” - Angela“I have had periods in my life where I actually thought I must be psychic because these things would happen. I'd be like, ‘my god, I think I'm psychic. And then I realized, ‘shit, I'm just pattern matching.” - AngelaDid you enjoy this episode? We explored the controversial label of "profound autism" and how it's used to limit autistic self-advocacy. We also dove into the connection between giftedness and substance abuse, the role of pattern recognition as a survival skill, and the cycle of burnout and underemployment in the autistic community. Plus, we break down the issues with Autism Speaks, the ABA industry, and helicopter autism parents. Tune in and share your thoughts using #AutisticCultureCatch!Show Notes:Harmontown Movie - Related Episodes:Sherlock is AutisticCommunity is AutisticFollow us on InstagramFind us on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyLearn more about Matt at Matt Lowry, LPPJoin Matt's Autistic Connections Facebook GroupLearn more about Angela at AngelaKingdon.com Angela's social media: Twitter and TikTokOur Autism-affirming merch shop This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.autisticculturepodcast.com/subscribe

It's our weekly round up! The best of the week from our National radio show THE PICKUP. Today's ep is unlike anything we have had to record before and are heartbroken by the decision that has been made for the show. Every week we live across the country at 3pm on the KIIS Network. You can listen live on iHeart radio, or catch up here each week!For more follow @THEPICKUP on socials. What's on the show Building resilience in kids Ben joins us from Italy Can you parent another persons kid? We have feelings about Tim from MAFS Bonnie Blue vs a teenager's mum Laura's Beef with Matt You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An episode that advocates for social change!Here's what's in store for today's episode: * Today, Matt and Angela are joined by Halina Brooke, MS, LPC, to discuss autism-affirming social skills.* Halina is an LPC from Arizona whose practice is entirely focused on supporting misfits, oddballs, highly sensitive individuals, and creatives.* We discuss challenges in the clinical autism world, including the discomfort neurotypicals often feel when autistic voices with lived experience challenge their preconceived notions about autism.* We dive into the slippery slope of neurodivergence and labels, exploring how to use labels in a way that feels right for you.* Most social skills groups for autistic individuals focus on "teaching your children to be normal," but Halina's approach is different and stands out by being truly autism-affirming.* Halina's social groups and approach are centered on helping autistic individuals enjoy their environment and experiences, rather than focusing on making neurotypical people feel comfortable.* The goal of Halina's therapy and social group is to help individuals find ways to enjoy whatever context they're in, while also understanding their nervous system's signals and learning how to cope with them.* We discuss the trauma that can result from ABA therapy for survivors and how this group can offer support and healing for those individuals.* Halina's mission in her therapy practice is to challenge the status quo by creating innovative, non-ABA, neurodiversity-affirming social skills groups specifically for adults over the age of 25.* We also talk about how ChatGPT can assist us as autistics in improving our social skills by helping us assess how our words or mannerisms might be perceived by outsiders or neurotypicals.* Our hosts also dive into the concept of "neurotypical packing peanuts" – the idea of having to "pack" an accomplishment with hardships or details that downplay it, so it doesn't come across as bragging.* We discuss autism advocacy, highlighting how neurotypicals aren't advocating for themselves, but rather for the preservation of social norms, and the need to challenge an entrenched system.* Matt talks about the concept of code-switching—having to switch between masked and unmasked situations—and the impact that can have on our nervous systems as autistic individuals.* As we know, autistic masking can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and even near-death experiences. Yet, neurotypicals often focus on urging us to stop masking at all costs, without fully understanding the consequences.* We discuss post-diagnosis or discovery grief, the missteps of our parents, and the process of forgiveness.* Finally, we discuss how, as neurodiversity-affirming advocates, we can make the world safer for autistic people. This includes speaking out about the problematic nature of ABA, while also being cautious, as some ABA programs have co-opted neurodiversity-affirming language.“And that's the big thing about autism and ADHD, because the DSM doesn't allow for internal experience. It's always about how we impact the neurotypicals around us. It's all about how the doctor can observe you and how irritated the doctor is with your choice of conversation topics or how you don't make eye contact or how offputting you are to the observer.” - Matt“You know, the folks who are diagnosed [autistic] and were diagnosed as children, this is the generation that kind of came up with that huge wave of ABA, and when you are constantly told that your way of being is wrong and needs to be fixed, it can leave you with a really ingrained feeling of self-doubt. And so even if you're doing a situation ‘right', like if you have a special interest for a certain kind of book and you come to that book club and everyone else is like you in that way, if you went through ABA as a kid, you're still gonna walk in there with crippling self-doubt wondering if you're doing it right. But these might be your people.” - Halina“If you're very happy and very comfortable being unmasked and then you have to go back into an intensely masked situation, it almost makes it worse because when you're used to having to mask all the time and that's just the norm, then you become accustomed to the chains that you wear.” - Matt“You become acutely aware of the trauma that you've had instead of normalizing it and dissociating and just saying, ‘yeah, everyone gets punched in the gut on Thursdays. That's just how it happens.'” - Matt (on autistic code-switching and cognitive dissonance)Did you enjoy this episode? We talk about Autistic-affirming social skills, the challenges of masking, post-diagnosis grief, and how we can make the world safer for autistic people. In the comments, let us know what stood out to you, and use #AutisticCultureCatch to share your thoughts on social media and connect with other listeners!Show Notes:Halina Brooke, MS, LPChalina@recoursecounseling.comMy Therapeutic Approach ~ Recourse CounselingBook your free consultation here.Call ~ 602.787.0600Ready for a paradigm shift that empowers Autistics? Help spread the news!Follow us on InstagramFind us on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyLearn more about Matt at Matt Lowry, LPPJoin Matt's Autistic Connections Facebook GroupLearn more about Angela at AngelaKingdon.com Angela's social media: Twitter and TikTokOur Autism-affirming merch shop This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.autisticculturepodcast.com/subscribe

An episode that schools you. Hello, I am a listener of your podcast and an undiagnosed autistic. My 12 year old daughter is a diagnosed autistic who has had some traumatic experiences in the educational system since they use the medical model of autism. She is very likely twice exceptional (our school has no gifted program to offer her), but she thinks that her brain is broken because so many things are hard. She probably also has social anxiety. I am writing to ask if you and Angela would consider doing a short podcast episode aimed at teens and tweens about the wonderful ways their brains work, what autistic culture is, why it is so hard to fit into mainstream culture/school, how to make it a little better now, and how it can become SO much better later, especially once you find friends who you click with. She feels pretty hopeless at the moment, and does not have any friends to rely on yet. Thank you for reading.- Autistic Culture ListenerHere's what's in store for today's episode: * In today's episode, Matt and Angela explore a fan-suggested topic: autism culture for teens and tweens. They discuss ways to support an autistic teen who might be facing challenges at school and struggling to fit in.* The education system can feel like a nightmare for autistic youth, often prioritizing conformity and uniformity over individuality.* Our hosts discuss the challenges of transitioning between subjects in school while also navigating the complexities of an unspoken social hierarchy.* Neurotypicals often view autism as a one-dimensional disability, focusing solely on the challenges while overlooking the strengths and positive aspects that come with it. They tend to ignore the creativity, unique perspectives, and valuable contributions autistic individuals bring to the table.* Neurotypicals often follow the lead of a dominant figure, so if middle school girls crown Julie from second period as the queen bee, she effectively dictates who's cool or uncool, what to wear, and the entire social hierarchy—creating a challenging environment for autistic individuals to navigate.* Young autistic children often view adults as equals and believe respect means treating everyone equally. However, someone like Julie expects to be treated as a leader or boss, not an equal—creating conflicts within the neurotypical social hierarchy.* Autistic young boys are often given more freedom to be eccentric, while autistic girls are expected to blend in and keep the peace, conforming to societal expectations.* As a child, you have less control over your environment—things like your school schedule or what's packed in your lunch are often out of your hands. This lack of control can easily lead to dysregulation.* We discuss masking in middle and high school, and how approaching it like a Jane Goodall-esque cultural research experiment—observing neurotypicals as if they were a different species—can be a helpful strategy.* We talk about finding ways to accommodate your body while at school, even if it doesn't look or function the same as everyone else's.* To all the neurodivergent and autistic kids out there: You've got to push through this, because adulthood gets better. Find the weirdos, your people, in school—because they're out there, and they'll make all the difference.* Self-discovery is crucial as a young person, as it lays the foundation for living as a healthy, authentic autistic adult.* We don't change the world by being average—we change it by being ourselves. We owe it to the people who challenged the system, the weirdos of the world, to do the same.“This is why neurotypicals can't understand autism - because they say, ‘well, I met an autistic person once and you don't look like them.' No, because every autistic person is wired differently. The commonality is just that we have lightning brains that are hyper-connected. And this is the reason why there's a very, very high overlap between autism and giftedness because of the hyper-connected brain.” - Angela“If you're a kid who spends your lunch period hanging out in the library talking with the school librarian, you're a bottom-up processor. If you hang out talking to the janitor, you're a bottom-up processor. If you go to the teacher and say, ‘Hello, I brought my stack of Pokemon cards because you mentioned that you were in to Pokemon cards in the 90's, you're a bottom-up processor.” - Matt “That's the difference between masking to be a good girl and fit in and this is how you're going to act by practicing this, it's going to come naturally to you. No, it's not. But if you mask to get through the class and you're doing it from that Jane Goodall perspective of like, this is a research project, you can preserve a little bit of your sanity.” - Angela “I don't understand the concept of high school reunions because the people that I want to see, I stayed in contact with the entire time. I'm not going back to say, ‘yes, I'm 45 and I knew you people when I was 17 and 18. I've lived literally an entire life since then. It's like going back to the 1800's and being reincarnated and saying, ‘yes, the butter churning sure was an excellent time, was it not?'” - Matt“You're going to attract the boring people. You're going to be put in situations that compromise your integrity. You're going to be put in situations that make you compromise your morals. The more you compromise yourself, the more dangerous the world becomes. You need to find the people who will support and love the real you. And if you have to do this under the radar, then by all means do it. But be aware that you do have the cape. You must wear it underneath the costume.” - Matt“Just because they're in the majority, doesn't mean that they shape the world. You are in a better position to make the world a better place just by having existed in it. You are going to be memorable. The average people are not going to be memorable.” - MattIn this episode, we dive into the challenges and nuances of autism culture for teens and tweens. From navigating school transitions and unspoken social hierarchies to finding ways to fit in while staying true to themselves, we discuss how to support autistic teens through these pivotal years. Thanks for tuning in! Share your thoughts in the comments and join the conversation using #AutisticCultureCatch on social media. What resonated with you in this discussion? Let us know!Show Notes:Galaxy High - Ep 1 Welcome to Galaxy High - 1986 CartoonYouTube · DRamos520 Mixed Music & Video24 Mar 2023The Muppets (2011 film)Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Muppets_(2011_...Related Shows:Apple is AutisticGeorge Lucas is AutisticReady for a paradigm shift that empowers Autistics? Help spread the news!Follow us on InstagramFind us on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyLearn more about Matt at Matt Lowry, LPPJoin Matt's Autistic Connections Facebook GroupLearn more about Angela at AngelaKingdon.com Angela's social media: Twitter and TikTokOur Autism-affirming merch shop This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.autisticculturepodcast.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast:Hosts, Dr. Angela Lauria and Matt Lowry, LPP, discuss authentic autistic representation in the character of Elsa from Frozen. They discuss masking, unmasking, ABA, sensory differences, autistic lineage, autistic women, and the heroes journey we all must take if we want to “Let it Go” and adventure “Into the Unknown.” Beyond that, this week's quotes speak for themselves:The wind is howling like this swirling storm insideCouldn't keep it in, heaven knows I triedDon't let them in, don't let them seeBe the good girl you always have to beConceal, don't feel, don't let them knowWell, now they knowLet it go, let it goCan't hold it back anymoreLet it go, let it go—“Let it Go”“They were trying to conceal her because they didn't want the kingdom to know that she had powers. They were trying to make her fit in. To hide, to conceal, to fix. And it's very much ABA vibes.” —Matt“One of the biggest dangers of coming out (as autistic) is being vulnerable and losing your support system…and losing the people that you once thought liked you but just like the mask that you wore. So (unmasking) takes a lot of guts.” —Matt“And this is a big part about Frozen 2 because when we find ourselves, that can be an incredibly lonely process. Because, we have to we have to start shedding pieces of ourselves, one piece at a time to try to figure out—to get to the core of who we really are.” —Matt“You kind of have to settle into who you actually are instead of who you've been pretending to be.” —Angela“That does not happen the day the doctor says, or doesn't say, ‘You're autistic.' Nothing magical happens that day. The magic is like the years and years of work and grief and processing and trying things, all the things you would have been doing.” —Angela“There's often, like, this unresolved resentment because when you finally figure out who you are you're like, holy s**t, why didn't anyone (A) ever tell me (B) love me for who I really was or (C) tell me that I didn't have to hide myself?” —MattDo you relate to Elsa and the songs from Frozen? Tell us in the comments and use #AutisticCultureCatch to share your answer on your social media and connect with other listeners!Show notes and resources:Wiki Fandom: ElsaWikipedia: Frozen (2013 film) Blog: “Conceal, don't feel”: The case for autistic ElsaArticle: ‘Frozen' offers glimpse of autism in girlsBlog: 19 Reasons Why I Am Convinced Elsa Is AutisticArticle: Kristen Bell recalls Dax Shepard confronting her about her mental health Article: Kristen Bell Is Not Afraid To Share That She Takes Medication for Her Mental HealthArticle: Seeking Disney's first disabled princessVideo: Story Of Frozen, The Making Of A Disney Animated Classic (2014) Article: 10 Things You May Not Know About Idina Menzel—The Wicked Movie and MoreYouTube: Hygge (From "Frozen: The Broadway Musical"/Audio Only) Presentation: Is it Weird that I'm Moving to the UK?Other episodes to check out if you liked this one:Episode 07: Apple is Autistic  Episode 09: Fairy Tales are Autistic Episode 26 - Disney is AutisticEpisode 34: Beauty and the Beast is AutisticEpisode 58: The Good Place is AutisticReady for a paradigm shift that empowers Autistics? Help spread the news!Check us out on InstagramFind us on Apple podcasts and SpotifyLearn more about Matt at Matt Lowry, LPPMatt's social media: Autistic Connections Facebook GroupLearn more about Angela at AngelaLauria.com and Difference PressAngela's social media: Twitter and TikTokTACP's Autism-affirming TeePublic merch shop*Note: Transcription technology is still new on this platform. We are aware of the gaps and errors in the transcript and are dedicated to editing it for accuracy as soon as the new technology allows. We appreciate your patience as we work to expand accessibility as quickly as we are able.**TACP recognizes that ABA for autism is harmful to Autistic mental health. We reject the use of ABA therapy and pathologizing language like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and associated functioning labels and the harmful monolith: Autism Speaks. To learn more, please listen to: Episode 20: Sesame Street is Autistic and Episode 24: The Trouble with Temple Grandin. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.autisticculturepodcast.com/subscribe

In this episode, Attorney Nasir Pasha and Attorney Matt Staub delve deep into the complexities of mass layoffs and offer valuable insights, real-life examples, and practical advice to employers grappling with the aftermath of such challenging situations. Nasir and Matt emphasize the critical importance of effective communication when executing mass layoffs. They stress the need for meticulous planning and the development of a clear communication strategy. Drawing from both successful and problematic examples, the hosts highlight the significance of involving HR professionals, legal advisors, and financial experts to ensure a comprehensive and empathetic approach. A key legal consideration discussed is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Nasir and Matt provide a comprehensive overview of the federal WARN Act requirements, emphasizing that employers with at least a hundred full-time employees must provide a 60-day notice to affected employees under certain circumstances. They also shed light on state-specific WARN Act regulations, including California's lower employee threshold. Discrimination in mass layoffs is another critical area examined. They tackle the challenges associated with making fair termination decisions in larger organizations, stressing the need to establish objective criteria such as job performance and seniority while avoiding subjective factors that may give rise to discrimination claims. Nasir and Matt underscore the importance of maintaining proper documentation and objective evaluations to support termination decisions. Severance packages, an integral part of mass layoffs, receive significant attention. Nasir and Matt explore the benefits of offering severance, particularly the release of employer liability. While providing general guidelines, such as one week of salary per year of service, severance agreements for executive-level employees may differ based on individual employment contracts. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Fifty-year low of unemployment. MATT: The Goldman Sachs CEO had roughly 3,200 employees terminated. NASIR: Hopefully it's not spontaneous. MATT: You know, if someone's going to be upset, they're going to be upset. NASIR: Matt, you're right. It's relatively simple to figure out whether you trigger a WARN Act or not. MATT: Nothing good is probably going to happen. This is Legally Sound Smart Business where your hosts – Nasir Pasha and Matt Staub – cover business in the news and add their awesome legal twist. Legally Sound Smart Business is a podcast brought to you by Pasha Law PC – a law firm representing your business in California, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Here are your hosts, Nasir Pasha and Matt Staub. NASIR: All right. Welcome. Fifty-year low of unemployment. That's what we're going to talk about today; also, the other side of the coin which is all the layoffs that are going on in the tech sector but especially in the last few months here in 2023, and in particular how to handle those layoffs from a legal perspective. MATT: Yes, it's no secret to anyone that's been paying attention to the news. There's been a great amount of layoffs – mass layoffs particularly in larger companies. It felt like this was a pretty appropriate topic from the legal standpoint on both ends of the employer-and-employee spectrum to see what exactly is out there and what people can do. NASIR: Right. We've been debating whether to cover this particular topic because we're in a very weird economy right now – at least from my perspective. Despite the unemployment being at a 50-year low, we are seeing lots of news about layoffs. So far, it seems to be a lot in the tech sector, but one of the reasons we wanted to cover this is I think we anticipate that this may start expanding a bit. Hopefully not, but when you're dealing with terminating an employee versus a large group, there are different issues that need to be considered. MATT: Yes, exactly.

Matt Wampler, CEO and co-founder of ClearCOGS, talks about how their company uses data and machine learning to help restaurants reduce waste and increase profits. He shares the importance of customer research and finding the right balance between innovation and simplicity. They also discuss ClearCOGS's growth and their approach to making businesses more efficient, finding bottlenecks and processes, and investing in co-founder relationships.Matt Wampler is the CEO and Co-Founder of ClearCOGS, a company that utilizes POS data and proprietary machine-learning models to help restaurants minimize food waste and optimize inventory management. With his expertise in executive management and a passion for leveraging technology, Matt leads ClearCOGS in revolutionizing the way restaurants save money and improve their operations. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Product Launch: ClearCOGS helps restaurants operate more profitably with data and machine learning. Restaurants make many operational decisions based on feel, which isn't always accurate. As their system gathers more data, it becomes more intelligent and predictive. Focusing on a singular pain point can be more effective than trying to solve multiple problems with a bloated system Investing in maintaining that relationship is essential to business success Onboarding for a new customer went from six weeks to one day ClearCOGS helps restaurants percentage off their food costs and move big needles Resources: ClearCOGS NxtStep Podcast Chef Connecting with Matt Wampler:LinkedInConnecting with Sean Boyce: LinkedIn Email Quotables: 02:13 - “So what we do at ClearCOGS synthesize all of that data down, we look at the day of the week, the month of the year, your short-term trends, yearly seasonality, long-term trends, all these external data points just to figure out for this store.” 07:44 - “Meeting the customer where they are, in my world, at least the world of restaurants, that couldn't be more true. Like there are better ways to do what we do. There are ways to get more accurate numbers. There is not a better way to operationalize or implement it. And we built out a solution that is very, you know, where the customer is and what they need. And I attribute a lot of our success to that.” 08:15 - “Because I see a lot of B2B SaaS products companies, founders trying to almost like invent the future, which I get it right? And there's a time and a place for innovation, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be focused in that area, but at the end of the day, whatever you're building as a solution, you're going to have to sell it to a problem. And ideally that's a painful problem that your target market is currently experiencing.” 15:01 - “It's so easy to over-engineer solutions, and we just assume, you know, add the spinning rims kind of thing, like might as well, like while you're in there, let's automate everything, right? But that singular focus on the top problem is what I've seen be one of the greatest strengths from most B2B SaaS companies that have achieved solid growth, especially earlier on in keeping software simple.” 17:21  Matt: “You have got to shift from product ideas to how do we apply those ideas to sales? How do we apply those ideas to marketing? How do we apply those ideas to relationship management? It's really about where you focus the innovation and, and really try and like constrain yourself on the product side.Sean: Excellent point. And refining that as well too. I couldn't agree more with this is why, when I'm typically doing discovery, or I'm learning more about companies that have done that.” Free Email CourseHow to Build a Profitable AI-Powered B2B SaaS Business for Less Than $750Notes generated by Podcast Show Notes  (podcastshownotes.ai)

“Anyone that knows me throughout my career would see that it's really been about trying to push the boundaries. And in our part of the market, I think we really are driving and pushing the boundaries of what is possible and what clients want,” explains Matt Saur, strategic and institutional advisor, co-founder and partner of Woolery & Co. Today, Matt shares his career journey, the challenges he faced while opening Woolery & Co., and his desires to push boundaries and change the dynamics of client service.  The importance of connecting with other people has always been emphasized in Matt's life. This belief has followed him into his professional life and even inspired his company's values. When he teamed up with Jim, a constructive activist, they both agreed heavily on the value of the human side of business, choosing to keep the firm smaller in order to better serve their clients. Their company's main purpose is on building deep relationships with every client and their business matters, even partnering up with the client's pre-existing stakeholders, advisors, and larger firms as needed. They help see clients through challenging situations such as dealing with shareholder activists, mergers and acquisitions, and crisis management without the conflicts typically seen at larger firms.  Serving family backed companies and family offices requires a different approach from dealing with larger companies and corporations. These smaller companies face unique challenges that are best met by an advisor who is really able to take the time to do a deep dive into their business matters, their needs, and their goals. Instead of shying away from this challenge, Matt chose to push boundaries and change the way things are done in the industry in the interest of bettering opportunities for everyone involved from the clients themselves to their stakeholders.  Quotes “The one thing that I've always tried to do is really go out on a limb and do things that are a little uncomfortable.” (10:39-10:51 | Matt) “Anyone that knows me throughout my career would see that it's really been about trying to push the boundaries. And, I look at what we're doing in the legal world, and obviously, we have a small impact. We're not a mega firm or anything like that. But in our part of the market, I think we really are driving and pushing the boundaries of what is possible and what clients want.” (11:02-11:31 | Matt) “We value the human side of it, and you have to, I think, when you have a model like ours.” (13:19-13:24 | Matt) “A lot of what the industry has gone towards is being reactive, and what we're really talking about is shifting that to be proactive.” (39:32-39:42 | Matt) “You have to connect with people in life if you want to do anything and if you want to enjoy life.” (41:24-41:29 | Matt)  “You have to develop that skill where the client trusts you when you're a second year associate out of law school. And they'll trust for part of the reason that they know the brand, and they know the firm, but at some point, it's gotta be you.” (42:18-42:35 | Matt)   Links Connect with Matt Saur: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathew-saur-01303919b/ Woolery & Co: https://wooleryco.com/ Connect with Chris Batz: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbatz/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theliongroupkc  Instagram: @theliongroupllc Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm  

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI. Do people really love Matt's Azure know-how? Can Google make Bard fit into literally everything they make? What's the latest with Azure AI and their space collaborations? Let's find out! Titles we almost went with this week: Clouds in Space, Fictional Realms of Oracles, Oh My.  The cloudpod streams lambda to the cloud A big thanks to this week's sponsor:  Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world's most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

“Health is a byproduct of the environment and the lifestyle you live,” explains Matt Mancz, Circadian Performance Coach. An athlete passionate about strength and conditioning, Matt sought a career where he could focus on health and athletic performance. Finding gaps in traditional athletic training, Matt discovered quantum biology and now incorporates circadian principles into his life and work.  With Dr. Alex Lee, Matt co-founded and opened Circadian Healing Performance, where they do everything from nervous system chiropractic care to bodywork and massage therapy, all with a circadian foundation in mind. Through his work, Matt understands how connected our energy is to the natural world, which includes spending time outdoors, experiencing touch, and having proper mitochondria function. When you develop simple, light habits, not only will you feel better physically, but you will see vast differences in your mental health. Ultimately, by connecting to the environment and the world around you, you can develop a lifestyle of vitality in the purest, most human way.  When you adhere to quantum biology, your physical and emotional health will improve. Matt follows circadian rhythm principles, but an important distinction is that everything in life is a rhythm, from physical movement to the food we eat, to the light in the day and the darkness at night. When we understand that our health is a natural expression, we can make common sense choices, feeling better along the way. Quotes “I am just a performance coach and a massage therapist who only executes his service in an environment that is aligned with quantum biology and circadian biology.” (17:37-17:49 | Matt)  “Bodywork is so important, and it's a vital part of the quantum equation in health and performance.” (21:17-21:25 | Matt) “You're designed to live in the natural environment. And what that does is unlock all the genetic  potential slumbering within yourself.” (31:52-31:59 | Matt)  “Health is a byproduct of the environment and the lifestyle you live.” (32:46-32:50 | Matt) “If you want to learn about your body, mind, and where it goes and how to bring it back to center, the best place to begin is the breath.” (38:33-38:42 | Matt) “If you have a sound mind, that's only possible if you're breathing properly. That's only possible if you're connected to nature. That's only possible if you're putting good food in your mouth.” (41:30-41:37 | Matt)  Links Connect with Matt Mancz: Instagram: @circadianman To find a practitioner who understand the health principles of quantum biology: www.quantumbiologycollective.org  To become a QBC member and get invites to live deep dives & access to our video library: www.quantumhealthtv.com  To take our 8 week practitioner certification in the science of quantum biology so that you can add it to your existing area of expertise: www.appliedquantumbiology.com    Follow on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook: @quantumhealthtv    Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

EMBRACING THE SUCK DOESN'T WORK OUT.Welcome to another inspiring episode of The Resilient Dad Show. Today we welcome Matt Grace, a former Navy rescue swimmer, professional firefighter, author of Reclaim Your Hero, and father to 2 beautiful girls. He shares the trauma that began in his childhood and how he experienced substance abuse, neglect, and at times physical abuse.Matt discusses his later realization that his parents didn't have the tools to deal with their emotions growing up and how this led to him taking it upon himself to change that for their own children. And lacking a father figure growing up, Matt also shares how the land of Maui provided for him, and eventually, the military taught him a solid foundation for life.However, Matt also talks about his struggle with PTSD after his deployment to Afghanistan and how this almost became the end for him and his daughter. Through God and his love for his daughter, he decided right then and there to be the father that he never had. WORDS OF RESILIENCEAlmost taking his daughter's life was the wake-up call Matt needed - Matt: "I just embraced the suck the whole time until I had my youngest daughter and I nearly killed her. Yep, that's really hard to accept that you nearly killed your child, my five-month-old daughter, because she was crying and I couldn't take it. I didn't know what to do and that, for me, was the change. I said, God, no, no, no. Not today. My daughter's going to have the dad that I never had. And that was the catalyst for me."You need to be vulnerable to be brave - Matt: "You can't be brave without being vulnerable. Think about it. Everybody knows the Medal of Honor winners in the US. Each one of them put themselves up and risked taking live fire. Many of them got shot and killed and were awarded posthumously, but each one of them put themselves out there and said, here I am. Here I am for my brother, here I am for my sister. They made themselves absolutely vulnerable but we award them for their what? Their bravery."Connect with Matt and get your copy of Reclaim Your Hero:LinkedIn | Website | AmazonConnect with Pat:Pat Di Domenico | About Resilient DadIf you liked this episode and were inspired by the journeys it shares, or you have suggestions or your own stories to share, subscribe to the Resilient Dad podcast now and leave us a comment!

In 2020, we saw a lot of employers permanently switching to work remotely. While some have slowly brought their workers back into the office, Goldman Sachs's CEO, David Solomon, has been labeled as anti-remote. However, this wasn't always the case – in fact, he once argued that having employees working from home was "the new norm". On this episode, Nasir and Matt take a look back at how Goldman Sachs's response to the pandemic has changed throughout the years. Full Podcast TranscriptNASIR: Yes, we're talking about Goldman Sachs – the return to office for them. Why Goldman Sachs? Well, they are a huge company. We wanted to talk about tracking them through the COVID response going back all the way to 2020. MATT: You'll give up the ending to this podcast already, but… NASIR: Well, yes, that's true. This is Legally Sound Smart Business where your hosts – Nasir Pasha and Matt Staub – cover business in the news and add their awesome legal twist. Legally Sound Smart Business is a podcast brought to you by Pasha Law PC – a law firm representing your business in California, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Here are your hosts, Nasir Pasha and Matt Staub. NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! Our episode locally here in Houston. Matt has joined me to talk about Goldman Sachs, right? Welcome to Houston! MATT: Thanks! It's good to be here. I always like these in person. NASIR: I feel like I caught you off-guard. MATT: That's fine. NASIR: Let's start the podcast, by the way. We're talking about Goldman Sachs – the return to office for them. Why Goldman Sachs? Well, they are a huge company. They have basically 40,000 employees worldwide. We wanted to talk about tracking them through the COVID response going back all the way to 2020 – February to March of that year – they started locking down through today where now they have more than 65 percent of their workforce back in the office. MATT: You'll give up the ending to this podcast already, but… NASIR: That's true. Well, we're done, right? MATT: Yes. The big reason is their CEO – David Solomon – was pretty well-documented and took a big stance in getting people back in the office quicker than most companies out there, particularly on Wall Street. NASIR: Yes. In fact, depending upon who you ask, some would say he was actually leading that charge and a visionary in that respect. Others would say that he was being too aggressive. Another interesting thing about Goldman Sachs is that, on one hand, they have been on lists of some of the best places to work. One of the reasons is they have huge high-compensation packages for a lot of their employees. On the other hand, they are also criticized for being unethical. You have people complaining about 100-hour workweeks and things like that. Goldman Sachs in its nature is in the forefront of a lot of different issues – employment issues, especially, but also regulatory and these kinds of things as well. MATT: It's not surprising that their CEO took this bold stance in getting people to go back to work quicker than some companies that haven't come back to work – a good amount of them. NASIR: Yes, and everyone has heard in the news. We're talking about companies like Google and Facebook or Meta. I don't think Meta are coming back. MATT: A permanent option. NASIR: There have been others like Spotify and so forth. Especially a lot of the tech companies, they have made a permanent shift. That is something that Goldman Sachs has definitely not done. Frankly, depending upon the company, the industry, what states you are in. I know we have talked plenty of times about when we are dealing with clients in California versus Texas. It's just such a different paradigm. That's really shone itself during COVID because the conversations that you and I were having with California clients about the workforce and COVID was like, “What are some of the things that we can do to make it more comfortable for them to go home to work?...

About MattMatt is the head of community at Lawtrades, a legal tech startup that connects busy in-house legal departments with flexible on-demand legal talent. Prior to this role, Matt was the director of legal and risk management at a private equity group down in Miami, Florida. Links Referenced: Lawtrades: https://www.lawtrades.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsmattslaw/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmattslaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/ItsMattsLaw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flattorney/ duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Logicworks. Getting to the cloud is challenging enough for many places, especially maintaining security, resiliency, cost control, agility, etc, etc, etc. Things break, configurations drift, technology advances, and organizations, frankly, need to evolve. How can you get to the cloud faster and ensure you have the right team in place to maintain success over time? Day 2 matters. Work with a partner who gets it - Logicworks combines the cloud expertise and platform automation to customize solutions to meet your unique requirements. Get started by chatting with a cloud specialist today at snark.cloud/logicworks. That's snark.cloud/logicworksCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Something that I've learned in my career as a borderline full-time shitposter is that as the audience grows, people tend to lose sight of the fact that no, no, the reason that I have a career is because I'm actually good at one or two specific things, and that empowers the rest of the shitposting, gives me a basis from which to stand. Today's guest is Matt Margolis, Head of Community at Lawtrades. And I would say he is also a superior shitposter, but instead of working in the cloud space, he works in the legal field. Matt, thank you for joining me.Matt: That was the nicest intro I've ever received in my entire career.Corey: Well, yes, usually because people realize it's you and slam the door in your face, I assume, just based upon some of your TikToks. My God. Which is—I should point out—where I first encountered you.Matt: You found me on TikTok?Corey: I believe so. It sends me down these really weird rabbit holes, and at first, I was highly suspicious of the entire experience. Like, it's showing ADHD videos all the time, and as far as advertisements go, and it's, “Oh, my God, they're doing this really weird tracking,” and like, no, no, they just realize I'm on TikTok. It's that dopamine hit that works out super well. For a while, it drifted me into lesbian TikTok—which is great—because apparently, I follow a lot of creators who are not men, but I also don't go for the whole thirst trap things. Like, who does that? That's right. Must be lesbians. Which, great, I'm in good company. And it really doesn't know what to make of me. But you show up on my feed with fairly consistent frequency. Good work.Matt: That is fac—I appreciate that. I don't know if that's a compliment, though. But I [laugh]—no, I appreciate it. You know, for me, I get… not to plug a friend but I get—Alex Su's TikToks are probably like, one in two and then the other person is—maybe I'm also on lesbian TikTok as well. I think maybe we have earned the similar vote here.Corey: In fact, there's cohorts that they slot people into and I feel like we're right there together. Though Ales Su, who has been on the show as well, talk about source of frustration. I mentioned in passing that I was going to be chatting with him to my wife, who's an attorney. And she lit up. Like, “Oh, my God, you know him? My girlfriends and I talk about him all the time.”And I was sitting there going, well, there better damn well be a subculture out there that talks about me and those glowing terms because he's funny, yes, but he's not that funny. My God. And don't tell him that. It'll go to his head.Matt: I say the same thing. I got a good one for you. I was once in the sales call, and I remember speaking with—I was like, “You know, I'm like, pretty decent on Twitter. I'm pretty decent on LinkedIn”—which I don't think anyone brags about that, but I do—“And I'm okay on, like, Instagram and TikTok.” And he goes, “That's cool. That's really cool. So, are you kind of like Alex? Like, Alex Su?” And I go? “Uh, yeah,” he goes, “Yeah, because he's really funny. He's probably the best lawyer out there that, you know, shitposts and post funny things on the internet.” And I just sat there—and I love Alex; he's a good friend—I just sat there, and I'm like, “All right. All right. This is a conversation about Alex. This isn't a conversation about Matt.” And I took him to stride. I called Alex immediately after. I'm like, “Hey, you want to hear something funny.” And he got a kick out of it. He certainly got a kick out of it.Corey: It's always odd to me, just watching my own reputation come back to me filtered through other people's perceptions whenever I wind up encountering people in the wild, and they say, oh, you're Corey Quinn at—which is usually my clue to look at them very carefully with my full attention because if their next words are, “I work at Amazon,” that's my cue to duck before I get punched in the face. Whereas in other cases, they're like, “Oh, yeah, you're hilarious on the Twitters.” Or, “I saw you give a conference talk years ago,” or whatever it is. But no one ever says the stuff that's actually intellectually rigorous. No one ever says, “Yeah, I read some of your work on AWS contract negotiation,” or, “In-depth bill analysis as mapped to architecture.” Yeah, yeah. That is not the stuff that sticks in people's head. It's, “No, no, the funny guy with his mouth wide open on the internet.” It's, “Yep, that's me. The human flytrap.”Matt: Yeah, I feel that. I've been described, I think, is a party clown. That comes up from time to time. And to your point, Corey, like, I get that all the time where someone will say, “Matt I really enjoyed that meme you posted, the TikTok, the funny humor.” And then every so often, I'll post, gosh, like, an article about something we're doing, maybe a white paper on commercial contracting, or some sort of topic that really fits into my wheelhouse, and people were like, “That's… I guess that's cool. I just thought you were a party clown.” And you know, I make the balloon animals but… not all the time.Corey: That's the weirdest part to me of all of this is just this weird experience where we become the party clowns and that is what people view us as, but peeling away the humor and the jokes and the things we do for engagement, as we're like, we're sitting here each trying to figure out the best way to light ourselves on fire and survive the experience because the views would be enormous, you do have a legal background. You are an attorney yourself—still are, if I understand the process properly. Personally have an eighth-grade education, so basically, what I know of bars is a little bit of a different context.Matt: I also know those bars. I'm definitely a fan of those bars as well. I am still an attorney. I was in private practice, I worked in the government. I then went in-house in private equity down in Miami, Florida. And now, though I am shitposter, you are right, I am still a licensed attorney in the state of Florida. Could not take a bar exam anywhere else because I probably would light myself on fire. But yeah, I am. I am still an attorney.Corey: It's wild to me just to see how much of this world winds up continuing to, I guess, just evolve in strange and different ways. Because you take a look at the legal profession, it's—what is it, the world's second oldest profession? Because they say that the oldest profession was prostitution and then immediately someone, of course, had a problem with this, so they needed to have someone to defend them and hence, lawyers; the second oldest profession. And it seems like it's a field steeped in traditionalism, and with the bar, yes, a bit of gatekeeping. And now it's trying to deal with a highly dynamic, extraordinarily irreverent society.And it feels like an awful lot of, shall we say, more buttoned-down attorney types tend to not be reacting to any of that super well. I mean, most of my interaction with lawyers in a professional context when it comes to content takes a lot more of the form of a cease and desist than it does conversations like this. Thanks for not sending one of those, by the way, so far. It's appreciated.Matt: [laugh]. No worries, no worries. The day is not over yet. First off, Corey, I'm going to do a thing that attorneys love doing is I'm going to steal what you just said and I'm going to use it later because that was stellar.Corey: They're going to license it, remember?Matt: License it.Corey: That's how this works.Matt: Copy and paste it. I'm going to re—its precedent now. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I see it online, I see it on Link—LinkedIn is probably the best example of it; I sometimes see it on Twitter—older attorneys, attorneys that are part of that old guard, see what we're doing, what we're saying, the jokes we're making—because behind every joke is a real issue a real thing, right? The reason why we laugh, at least for some of these jokes, is we commiserate over it. We're like, “That's funny because it hurts.”And a lot of these old-guard attorneys hate it. Do not want to talk about it. They've been living good for years. They've been living under this regime for years and they don't want to deal with it. And attorneys like myself who are making these jokes, who are shitposting, who are bringing light to these kinds of things are really, I would say dis—I hate to call myself a disrupter, but are disrupting the traditional buttoned-up attorney lifestyle and world.Corey: It's wild to me, just to see how much of this winds up echoing my own experiences in dealing with, shall we say, some of the more I don't use legacy, which is a condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money,' but some of the older enterprise companies that had the temerity to found themselves before five years ago in somewhere that wasn't San Francisco and build things on computers that weren't rented by the gigabyte-month from various folks in Seattle. It's odd talking to some of those folks, and I've heard from a number of people, incidentally, that they considered working with my company, but decided not to because I seem a little too lighthearted and that's not how they tend to approach things. One of the nice things about being a boutique consultant is that you get to build things like this to let the clients that are not likely to be a good fit self-select out of working with you.Matt: It's identical to law.Corey: Yeah. “Aren't you worried you're losing business?” Like, “Oh, don't worry. It's not business I would want.”Matt: I'm okay with it. I'll survive. Yeah, like, the clients that are great clients, you're right, will be attracted to it. The clients that you never wanted to approach, they probably were never going to approach you anyways, are not [laugh] going to approach you. So, I agree wholeheartedly. I was always told lawyers are not funny. I've been told that jobs, conferences, events—Corey: Who are you hanging out with doctors?Matt: [laugh]. Dentists. The funniest of doctors. And I've been told that just lawyers aren't funny, right? So, lawyers shouldn't be funny; that's not how they should present themselves.You're never going to attract clients. You're ever going to engage in business development. And then I did. And then I did because people are attracted by funny. People like the personality. Just like you Corey, people enjoy you, enjoy your company, enjoy what you have to do because they enjoy being around you and they want to continue via, you know, like, business relationship.Corey: That's part of the weird thing from where I sit, where it's this—no matter what you do or where you sit, people remain people. And one of the big eye-openers for me that happened, fortunately early in my career, was discovering that a number of execs at name brand, publicly traded companies—not all of them, but a good number; the ones you'd want to spend time with—are in fact, human beings. I know, it sounds wild to admit that, but it's true. And they laugh, they tell stories themselves, they enjoy ridiculous levels of nonsense that tends to come out every second time I opened my mouth. But there's so much that I think people lose sight of. “Oh, they're executives. They only do boring and their love language is PowerPoint.” Mmm, not really. Not all of them.Matt: It's true. Their love language sometimes is Excel. So, I agree [laugh].Corey: That's my business partner.Matt: I'm not good at Excel, I'll tell you that. But I hear that as well. I hear that in my own business. So, I'm currently at a place called Lawtrades, and for the listeners out there, if you don't know who Lawtrades is, this is the—I'm not a salesperson, but this is my sales spiel.Corey: It's a dating site for lawyers, as best I can tell.Matt: [laugh]. It is. Well, I guess close. I mean, we are a marketplace. If you're a company and you need an attorney on a fractional basis, right—five hours, ten hours, 15 hours, 20 hours, 40 hours—I don't care, you connect.And what we're doing is we're empowering these freelance attorneys and legal professionals to kind of live their life, right, away from the old guard, having to work at these big firms to work at big clients. So, that's what we do. And when I'm in these conversations with general counsels, deputy general counsels, heads of legal at these companies, they don't want to talk like you're describing, this boring, nonsense conversation. We commiserate, we talk about the practice, we talk about stories, war stories, funny things about the practice that we enjoy. It's not a conversation about business; it's a conversation about being a human being in the legal space. It's always a good time, and it always results in a long-lasting relationship that I personally appreciate more than—probably more than they do. But [laugh].Corey: It really comes down to finding the watering holes where your humor works. I mean, I made the interesting choice one year to go and attend a conference for CFOs and the big selling point of this conference was that it counts as continuing professional education, which as you're well aware, in regulated professions, you need to attend a certain number of those every so often, or you lose your registration slash license slash whatever it is. My jokes did not work there. Let's put it that way.Matt: [laugh]. That's unfortunate because I'm having trouble keeping a straight face as we do this podcast.Corey: It was definitely odd. I'm like, “Oh, so what do you do?” Like, “Oh, I'm an accountant.” “Well, that's good. I mean, assume you don't bring your work home with you and vice versa. I mean, it's never a good idea to hook up where you VLOOKUP.”And instead of laughing—because I thought as Excel jokes go, that one's not half bad—instead, they just stared at me and then walked away. All right. Sorry, buddy, I didn't mean to accidentally tell a joke in your presence.Matt: [laugh]. You're setting up all of my content for Twitter. I like that one, too. That was really good.Corey: No, no, it comes down to just being a human being. And one of the nice things about doing what I've done—I'm curious to get your take on this, is that for the first time in my career doing what I do now, I feel like I get to bring my whole self to work. That is not what it means that a lot of ways it's commonly used. It doesn't mean I get to be problematic and make people feel bad as individuals. That's just being an asshole; that's not bringing your whole self to work.But it also means I feel like I don't have to hide, I can bring my personality with me, front and center. And people are always amazed by how much like my Twitter personality I am in real life. And yeah because I can't do a bit for this long. I don't have that kind of attention span for one. But the other side of that, too, is does exaggerate certain elements and it's always my highs, never my lows.I'm curious to know how you wind up viewing how you present online with who you are as a person.Matt: That is a really good question. Similar. Very similar. I do some sort of exaggeration. The character I like to play is ‘Bad Associate.' It's, like, one of my favorite characters to play where it's like, if I was the worst version of myself, in practice, what would I look like?And those jokes to me always make me laugh because I always—you know, you have a lot of anxiety when you practice. That's just an aspect of the law. So, for me, I get to make jokes about things that I thought I was going to do or sound like or be like, so it honestly makes me feel a little better. But for the humor itself and how I present online, especially on Twitter, my boss, one of my co-founders, put it perfectly. And we had met for a conference, and—first time in person—and he goes, “You're no different than Twitter, are you?” I go, “Nope.” And he goes, “That's great.”And he really appreciated that. And you're right. I felt like I presented my whole personality, my whole self, where in the legal profession, in private practice, it was not the case. Definitely not the case.Corey: Yeah, and sometimes I talk in sentences that are more than 280 characters, which is, you know, a bad habit.Matt: Sometimes. I have a habit from private practice that I can't get rid of, and I ask very aggressive depo questions like I'm deposing somebody. If you're listening in, can you write me on Twitter and tell me if you're a litigator and you do the same thing? Because, like, I will talk to folks, and they're like, “This isn't an interview or like a deposition.” I'm like, “Why? Why isn't it?” And it [laugh] gets really awkward really quickly. But I'm trying to break that habit.Corey: I married a litigator. That pattern tracks, let's be clear. Not that she doesn't so much, but her litigator friends, if litigators could be said to have friends, yeah, absolutely.Matt: My wife is a former litigator. Transactional attorney.Corey: Yes. Much the same. She's grown out of the habit, thankfully.Matt: Oh, yeah. But when we were in the thick of litigation, we were actually at competing law firms. It was very much so, you come home, and it's hard to take—right, it's hard to not take your work home, so there was definitely occasions where we would talk to each other and I thought the judge had to weigh in, right, because there were some objections thrown, some of the questions were leading, a little bit of compound questions. So, all right, that's my lawyer joke of the day. I'm sorry, Corey. I won't continue on the schtick.Corey: It works, though. It's badgering the witness, witnessing the badger, et cetera. Like, all kinds of ridiculous nonsense and getting it wrong, just to be, I guess, intentionally obtuse, works out well. Something you said a minute ago does tie into what you do professionally, where you mentioned that your wife was a litigator and now is a transactional attorney. One thing they never tell you when you start a business is how many lawyers you're going to be working with.And that's assuming everything goes well. I mean, we haven't been involved in litigation, so that's a whole subset of lawyer we haven't had to deal with yet. But we've worked with approximately six—if memory serves—so far, not because we're doing anything egregious, just because—rather because so many different aspects of the business require different areas of specialty. We also, to my understanding—and I'm sure my business partner will correct me slash slit my throat if I'm wrong—I've not had to deal with criminal attorneys in any interesting ways. Sorry, criminal defense attorneys, criminal attorneys is a separate setup for a separate story.But once I understood that, realizing, oh, yeah, Lawtrades. You can find specialist attorneys to augment your existing staff. That is basically how I view that. Is that directionally accurate?Matt: Yeah. So like, common issue I run into, right is, like, a general counsel, is a corporate attorney, right? That's their background. And they're very aware that they're not an employment attorney. They're not a privacy attorney. Maybe they're not an IP attorney or a patent attorney.And because they realize that, because they're not like that old school attorney that thinks they can do everything and solve everyone's problems, they come to Lawtrades and they say, “Look, I don't need an employment attorney for 40 hours a week. I just need ten hours. That's all I need, right? That's the amount of work that I have.” Or, “I don't have the budget for an attorney for 40 hours, but I need somebody. I need somebody here because that's not my specialty.”And that happens all the time where all of a sudden, a solo general counsel becomes a five or six-attorney legal department, right, because you're right, attorneys add up very quickly. We're like rabbits. So, that's where Lawtrades comes in to help out these folks, and help out freelance attorneys, right, that also are like, “Hey, listen, I know employment law. I can help.”Corey: Do you find that the vast slash entire constituency of your customers pretend to be attorneys themselves, or is this one of those areas where, “I'm a business owner. I don't know how these law things work. I had a firm handshake and now they're not paying as agreed. What do I do?” Do you wind up providing, effectively, introduction services—since I do view you as, you know, match.com for dating with slightly fewer STDs—do you wind up then effectively acting as an—[unintelligible 00:18:47] go to talk to find a lawyer in general? Or does it presuppose that I know which end of a brief is up?Matt: There's so many parts of what you just said I want to take as well. I also liked that you didn't just say no STDs. That was very lawyerly of you. It's always, like, likely, right?Corey: Oh, yes. So, the answer to any particular level of seniority and every aspect of being an attorney is, “It depends.”Matt: That's right. That's right. It triggers me for you to say it. Ugh. So, our client base, generally speaking, our companies ranging from, like, an A round company that has a solo GC all the way up to a publicly traded company that has super robust legal department that maybe needs a bunch of paralegals, bunch of legal operations professionals, contract managers, attorneys for very niche topics, niche issues, that they're just, that is not what they want to do.So, generally speaking, that's who we service. We used to be in the SMB space. There was a very public story—my founders are really cool because they built in public and we almost went broke, actually in that space. Which, Corey, I'm happy to share that article with you. I think you'll get a kick out of it.Corey: I would absolutely look forward to seeing that article. In fact, if you send me the link, we will definitely make it a point to throw it into the [show notes 00:19:58].Matt: Awesome. Happy to do it. Happy to do it. But it's cool. The clients, I tell you what, when I was in private practice when I was in-house, I would always deal with an adverse attorney. That was always what I was dealing with.No one was ever—or a business person internally that maybe wasn't thrilled to be on the phone. I tell you what, now, when I get to talk to some of these folks, they're happy to talk to me; it's a good conversation. It really has changed my mentality from being a very adverse litigator attorney to—I mean it kind of lends itself to a shitposter, to a mean guy, to a party clown. It's a lot of fun.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: One area that I think is going to be a point of commonality between us is in what the in-and-out of our day jobs look like. Because looking at it from a very naive perspective, why on earth does what is effectively an attorney referral service—yes, which may or may not run afoul of how you describe yourselves; I know, lawyers are very particular about wording—Matt: Staffing [laugh].Corey: Exactly. Legal staffing. There we are. It doesn't seem to lend itself to having a, “Head of Community,” quote-unquote, which really translates into, “I shitpost on the internet.” The same story could be said to apply to someone who fixes AWS bills because in my part of the industry, obviously, there is a significant problem with people who have large surprise bills from their cloud provider, but they generally don't talk about them in public as soon as they become an even slightly serious company.You don't find someone at a Fortune 500 complaining on Twitter about how big their AWS bill is because that does horrifying things to their stock price as well as them personally, once the SEC gets involved. So, for me, it was always I'm going to be loud and noisy and have fun in the space so that people hear about me, and then when they have this problem, in the come. Is that your approach to this, or is it more or less the retconning story that I just told, and it really had its origins in, “I'm just going to shitpost. I feel like good things will happen.”Matt: Funnily enough, it's both. That's how it started. So, when I was in private practice, I was posting like crazy on—I'm going to say LinkedIn for the third time—and again, I hope somebody sends a nasty message to me about how bad LinkedIn is, which I don't think it's that bad. I think it's okay—so I was shitposting on LinkedIn before probably many folks were shitposting on LinkedIn, again like Alex, and I was doing it just because I was tired of attorneys being what we described, this old guard, buttoned up, just obnoxiously perfect version of themselves. And it eventually led itself into this career. The whole journey was wild, how I got here. Best way to describe it was a crazy trip.Corey: It really is. You also have a very different audience in some ways. I mean, for example, when you work in the legal field, to my understanding from the—or being near to it, but not within it, where you go to school is absolutely one of those things that people still bring up as a credential decades later; it's the first thing people scroll to on LinkedIn. And in tech, we have nothing like that at all. I mean, just ask anyone of the random engineers who talk about where they used to work in their Twitter bio: ex-Google, ex-Uber, et cetera.Not quite as bad as the VC space where it's, “Oh, early investor in,” like, they list their companies, which of course to my mind, just translates directly into, the most interesting thing about you is that once upon a time, you wrote a check. Which yeah, and with some VCs that definitely tracks.Matt: That's right. That's a hundred percent right. It's still like that. I actually saw a Twitter post, not necessarily about education, but about big law, about working in big law where folks were saying, “Hey, I've heard a rumor that you cannot go in-house at a company unless you worked in big law.” And I immediately—I have such a chip on my shoulder because I am not a big law attorney—I immediately jumped to it to say, “Listen, I talk to in-house attorneys all the time. I'm a former in-house attorney. You don't have to work with big law. You don't have to go to a T-14 law school.” I didn't. I went to Florida State University in Tallahassee.But I hear that to this day. And you're right, it drives me nuts because that is a hallmark of the legal industry, bragging about credentials, bragging about where I came from. Because it also goes back to that old guard of, “Oh, I came from Harvard, and I did this, and I did that,” because we love to show how great and special we are not by our actual merits, but where we came from.Corey: When someone introduces themselves to me at a party—which has happened to me before—and in their introduction, they mention where they went to law school, I make it a point to ask them about it and screw it up as many times in the rest of the evening as I can work in to. It's like they went to Harvard. Like so, “Tell me about your time at Yale.” “Oh, sorry. I must have forgotten about that.” Or, “What was the worst part about living in DC when you went to law school?” “Oh, I'm sorry. I missed that. You went to Harvard. How silly of me.”Matt: There's a law school at Dartmouth [laugh]?Corey: I know. I'm as surprised as anyone to discover these things. Yeah. I mean, again, on the one hand, it does make people feel a little off and that's not really what I like doing. But on the other, ideally, it's a little bit of a judgment nudge as far as this may not sound the way that you think it sounds when you introduce yourself to people that way.Matt: All the time. I hear that all the time. Every so often, I'll have someone—and I think a lot of the industry, maybe just the industry where I'm in, it's not brought up anymore. I usually will ask, right? “Hey, where do you come from?” Just as a conversation starter, “What firm did you practice at? Did you practice in big law? Small law?”Someone once called it insignificant law to me, which hurts because I'm part of insignificant law. I get those and it's just to start a conversation, but when it's presented to me initially, “Hey, yeah, I was at Harvard,” unprompted. Or, “I went to Yale,” or went to whatever in the T-14, you're right, it's very off-putting. At least it's off-putting to me. Maybe if someone wants to tell me otherwise, online if you went to Harvard, and someone said, “Hey, I went to Harvard,” and that's how they started the conversation, and you enjoy it, then… so be it. But I'll tell you, it's a bit off-putting to me, Corey.Corey: It definitely seems it. I guess, on some level, I think it's probably rooted in some form of insecurity. Hmm, it's easy to think, “Oh, they're just completely full of themselves,” but that stuff doesn't spring fully formed from nowhere, like the forehead of some God. That stuff gets built into people. Like, the constant pressure of you are not good enough.Or if you've managed to go to one of those schools and graduate from it, great. The constant, like, “Not everyone can go here. You should feel honored.” It becomes, like, a cornerstone of their personality. For better or worse. Like, it made me more interesting adult if it made my 20s challenging. I don't have any big-name companies on my resume. Well, I do now because I make fun of one, but that's a separate problem entirely. It just isn't something I ever got to leverage, so I didn't.Matt: I feel that completely. I come from—again, someone once told me I worked in insignificant law. And if I ever write a book, that's what I'm going to call it is Insignificant Law. But I worked the small law firms, regional law firms, and these in Tallahassee and I worked in South Florida and nothing that anyone would probably recognize in conversation, right? So, it never became something I bring up.I just say, “I'm an attorney. I do these things,” if you ask me what I do. So, I think honestly, my personality, and probably the shitposting sprung out of that as well, where I just had a different thing to talk about. I didn't talk about the prestige. I talked about the practice, I talked about what I didn't like about the practice, I didn't talk about being on Wall Street doing these crazy deals, I talked about getting my ass kicked in Ponce, Florida, up in the panhandle. For me, I've got a chip on my shoulder, but a different kind of chip.Corey: It's amazing to me how many—well, let's calls this what we are: shitposters—I talk to where their brand and the way that they talk about their space is, I don't want to say rooted in trauma, but definitely built from a place of having some very specific chips on their shoulder. I mean, when I was running DevOps teams and as an engineer myself, I wound up continually tripping over the AWS bill of, “Ha, ha. Now, you get to pay your tax for not reading this voluminous documentation, and the fine print, and with all of the appendices, and the bibliography, and tracked down those references. Doesn't it suck to be you? Da da.” And finally, it was all right, I snapped. Okay. You want to play? Let's play.Matt: That's exactly right. There's, like, a meme going around. I think it actually saw from the accounting meme account, TB4—which is stellar—and it was like, “Ha, I'm laughing because it hurts.” And it's true. That's why we all laugh at the jokes, right?I'll make jokes about origination credit, which is always an issue in the legal industry. I make jokes about the toxic work environment, the partner saying, “Please fix,” at three o'clock in the morning. And we make fun of it because everyone's had to deal with it. Everyone's had to deal with it. And I will say that making fun of it brings light to it and hopefully changes the industry because we all can see how ridiculous it is. But at least at the very beginning, we all look at it and we say, “That's funny because it hurts.”Corey: There's an esprit de corps of shared suffering that I think emerges from folks who are in the trenches, and I think that the rise of—I mean some places called the micro-influencers, but that makes me want to just spit a rat when I hear it; I hate the term—but the rise of these niche personalities are because there are a bunch of in-jokes that you don't have to be very far in to appreciate and enjoy, but if you aren't in the space at all, they just make zero sense. Like when I go to family reunions and start ranting about EC2 instance pricing, I don't get to talk to too many people anymore because oh my God, I've become the drunk uncle I always wanted to be. Goal achieved.Matt: [laugh].Corey: You have to find the right audience.Matt: That's right. There is a term, I think coin—I think it was coined by Taylor Lorenz at Washington Post and it's called a nimcel, which is, like, a niche micro-influencer. It's the worst term I've ever heard in my entire life. The nimcel [laugh]. Sorry, Taylor, it's terrible.But so I don't want to call myself a nimcel. I guess I have a group of people that enjoy the content, but you are so right that the group of people, once you get it, you get it. And if you don't get it, you may think some parts of it—like, you can kind of piece things together, but it's not as funny. But there's plenty of litigation jokes I'll make—like, where I'm talking to the judge. It's always these hypothetical scenarios—and you can maybe find it funny.But if you're a litigator who's gotten their ass kicked by a judge in a state court that just does not like you, you are not a local, they don't like the way you're presenting yourself, they don't like your argument, and they just dig you into the ground, you laugh. You laugh because you're, like, I've been there. I've had—or on the flip, you're the attorney that watched your opposing counsel go through it, you're like, “I remember that.” And you're right, it really you get such a great reaction from these folks, such great feedback, and they love it. They absolutely love it. But you're right, if you're outside, you're like, “Eh, it's kind of funny, but I don't really get all of it.”Corey: My mother approaches it this way whenever she talks to me like I have no idea what you're talking about, but you seem to really know what you're talking about, so I'm proud of you. It's like, “No, Mom, that is, like, the worst combination of everything.” It's like, “Well, are you any good at this thing?” “No. But I'm a white man, so I'm going to assume yes and the world will agree with me until proven otherwise.” So yeah, maybe nuclear physics ain't for you in that scenario.But yeah, the idea of finding your people, finding your audience, before the rise of the internet, none of this stuff would have worked just because you live in a town; how many attorneys are really going to be within the sound of your voice, hearing these stories? Not to mention the fact that everyone knows everyone's business in some of those places, and oh, you can't really subtweet the one person because they're also in the room. The world changes.Matt: The world changes. I've never had this happen. So, when I really started to get aggressive on, like, Twitter, I had already left private practice; I was in-house at that point. And I've always envisioned, I've always, I always want to, like, go back to private practice for one case: to go into a courtroom in, like, Miami, Florida, and sit there and commiserate and tell the stories of people again like I used to do—just like what you're saying—and see what everyone says. Say, “Hey, I saw you on Twitter. Hey, I saw this story on Twitter.”But in the same breath, like, you can't talk like you talk online in person, to some degree, right? Like, I can't make fun of opposing counsel because the judge is right there and opposing counsel was right there, and I'm honestly, knowing my luck, I'm about to get my ass kicked by opposing counsel. So, I probably should watch myself in that courtroom.Corey: But I'm going to revise the shit out of this history when it comes time to do my tweet after the fact. “And then everybody clapped.”Matt: [laugh]. I found five dollars outside the courtroom.Corey: Exactly. I really want to thank you for spending so much time chatting with me. If people want to learn more and follow your amazing shitpost antics on the internet, where's the best place for them to do it?Matt: Corey it's been an absolute pleasure. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn. For everything but LinkedIn: @ItsMattsLaw. LinkedIn, just find me by my name: Matt Margolis.Corey: And we will put links to all of it in the [show notes 00:33:04]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. It's appreciated.Matt: I have not laughed as hard in a very, very long time. Corey, thank you so much.Corey: Matt Margolis, Head of Community at Lawtrades. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that you've drafted the first time realized, oh wait, you're not literate, and then hired someone off of Lawtrades to help you write in an articulate fashion.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

What is Hypergrowth Mode in Friendship? What happens if someone's not growing and you've grown or you are not growing and the other person has grown; if you have an open mind about it, you can still connect and be together. But that's where you can't be so locked into certain belief systems. So if, let's say you've grown so much and you come back. . I'm like, what happened? And you tell me your experience, then if I'm totally open to also acquiring that growth at that precise moment because of your growth, if I'm totally openhearted about it, I think that that's what keeps a true friendship going. Have you noticed it's gotten easier or harder as time goes by to actually keep in touch with these people who are on either side of it? In this episode, we discuss what happens when people you know who are going through hypergrowth, or if you're going through hypergrowth, these people who are not, can lead to a breakup; which may lead us back to another topic from last week (we did talk about), which was social comparison theory, where somebody's leaving your peer group. https://www.ourfriendlyworldpodcast.com/ Hypergrowth Mode TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] FAWN: Hi everybody. Welcome back. We have no idea what we're gonna talk about. Oh, we don't do we? Aww. What is going on? Hi everybody. Hope you're well. Love you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. What's going on Matt? [00:00:15] MATT: What's on your mind? Okay, here we go. So, back in college I noticed a phenomenon, phenomenon, [00:00:23] MATT: Anyways, uh, it was the most fascinating thing. There would be a girl, woman just starting college. She left her boyfriend back at home, wherever home was, and like clockwork, you could watch this happen. And I watched this happen six or seven times, actually over the course of my four years at university. [00:00:45] MATT: You know, they would tell you how in love they were and how they'd been together for however long it was. In some case it was years and then Thanksgiving, they'd have an argument and it would end on a bad note. Christmas, they'd break up like clockwork. Why do you think that is? And it was literally like clockwork. [00:01:09] MATT: It wasn't. [00:01:11] FAWN: Well, I have found that when you start a fight or you start an argument or you get into an argument, I think it's one's way of ending the relationship when you know it's come to its close, [00:01:24]

This week we sit down with Matt Hawkins, organizer of North Carolina's Croatan Buck Fifty and founder of Ridge Supply. The special origin story of Ridge Supply and ultimately the Croatan Buck Fifty have lead Matt to create an amazing early season event. Episode sponsor: Bike Index  Ridge Supply  Croatan Buck Fifty  Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: Croatan Buck Fifty [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the podcast, we've got Matt Hawkins. Matt is the founder of Ridge supply, as well as the creator of the CRO 10 buck, 50. Oh, super well-regarded gravel race out in North Carolina. I've been wanting to get Matt on the show for a few years after meeting him at sea Otter. And I'm excited to have you get to know the Crow 10 buck 50. I believe there's still some spots available for the 2023 edition. It's one of those early season races. So a great way to get tuned up for a fantastic 2023. Before we jump in. I want to thank this week. Sponsor, bike index. Bike index is a bicycle registry and stolen bike recovery platform. No one likes to think about getting their bikes stolen. I unfortunately have had two stolen over the course One was a BMX bike when I was a kid. And I feel like that scarred me. I've always been super careful about how I lock my bike up, which is probably a good thing, but ultimately, a garage that housed my bikes in San Francisco got broken into and I lost a track mountain bike. Neither one of them were ever recovered. Bike index is really the only game in town that focuses on stolen bike recovery. They've built a platform to blast your bike out to local social media channels. And they can provide you all the best advice on how to increase the chances of success in getting your bicycle recovered it's a nonprofit. All the services are free. All you need to do is get your serial number and add your make model and color to the platform. And there you go. It's like insurance. That didn't cost you anything. Simply visit www.bike index.org and get your bike registered today. With that said let's jump right into my conversation with matt [00:02:10] Craig: Hey, Matt, welcome to the show. [00:02:12] Matt: Hey, Hey Craig, [00:02:14] Craig: I'm excited to get into the Croatan buck. 50. Am I saying it? Correct? [00:02:18] Matt: you are, you are a lot of people say Croatian but 50, but I think they do that just to make me mad. [00:02:24] Craig: Yeah, and we'll get into it. We'll get into it. Cuz I think people are gonna need to get out a map and you're gonna tell us where it is in the country. I, I had to do that myself. I knew it was in North Carolina, but I didn't know exactly where and it's actually pretty interesting part of the state, but we'll table that question for the moment, cuz I was like just starting out by. Just a little bit about your backstory, where you grew up, how you got into riding. And I think we should talk about your company Ridge supply, because I think it will filter into why you created the event and you know, the vibe behind it. [00:02:53] Matt: Sure, [00:02:55] Craig: Yeah. So let's start with that question. [00:02:57] Matt: wanna know? [00:02:58] Craig: Yeah. So, where'd you grow up and when did you start riding and when did you decide, when did you discover drop bar gravel riding. [00:03:04] Matt: Well, I, I my wife and I both are from central Virginia. So up near the Charlottesville area born and raised there. My family's been there a long time, many generations. And I, I grew up in a real rural kind of county, a lot of farming communities there, but we just happen to have a race. That started back when the tour Deon and the tour to Trump rode, they came through our town. And we had a, we had a local race called the tour to Madison, and I did that with a buddy of mine on some, some Huffies. And we started racing and riding when I was really young. I've literally been riding bikes for, for almost 40 years. And yeah, so that's, that's kind of how I started. I, I of course I, I crashed on my first race and and loved it, loved doing it, but I was a swimmer by trade and I swam my whole life and swam through college. So I really picked up cycling after college sort of as my primary. And I've been doing that, you know, every, every chance I get as my soul sport really, since I got outta college, [00:04:18] Craig: Were you, were you more excited about the roadside or did you start off road riding as well back? [00:04:22] Matt: You know, actually I did a whole lot of mountain biking to start and did used to, you know, race 24 hour team races with, with the, with a team and did some road racing and some crit racing gravel obviously didn't exist back then. When I moved here to North Carolina back in oh five. I, I, you know, the first place I went to ride was the Croatan because I could go there at night with lights and be off the road. And it felt like, you know, that's where I could take my mountain bike and I could just go kind of ride. And I didn't really know. CRO, Tan's a pretty big, you know, a surface area and it, it has a lot of roads, but they're not all connected. So a lot of it's kind of sketchy. You're just like, I don't know what's down that road. So we started, you know, exploring a little bit more on road bikes with, you know, 25 sea tires or whatever is probably a bad idea. But we are just seeing, Hey, what's down that road. And I got my first cross bike and started really. Exploring it and doing, doing proper gravel, if you will, kind of before the gravel boom, but more like 2013, something like that. And and yeah, so I was like one of the first people here in our little town to do Strava. And so I made a lot of the segments originally. And and that's kind of how I got into, got into gravel was the Croatan was, was here and then everywhere I've travel. That's the bike. I primarily will take, you know, I ride a rodeo labs trail donkey now, and I'll just everywhere. I'm gonna go. I'll take that. So I can, I can ride road or, or gravel or whatever suits a fancy, [00:06:08] Craig: Yeah, exactly. When you first started on Strava and it probably sounds like the same vintage I did. When you created a segment, you could actually name it, right? Like you could name, you could name the, you name, the climbs, all the climbs. You could put your own names on them. [00:06:22] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. My, my mother-in-law sends me things all the time. Bless her heart. If she's listening, I love her to death, but she'll just send like a text message with some, with some cycling related news article and. If you, if you're like us and you follow cycling, it's things that you've already heard two or three days before, but when they hit the mainstream media and maybe my mother-in-law would see it, I would always be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But she sent me this article about Strava, which I'd never heard of before. I think this was 2011. And I kind of clicked on it. I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. And I thought, well, I wonder who's using it around here. and I, I, I downloaded the, it might have been a beta app or something at the time. And, and of course there was no segments anywhere everywhere. I went for the first six months I was telling you gotta try this, you know? And Yeah, I made all, I made all the segments in the beginning which was kind of funny. And tho the GPS on your phone back then was horrible and it, it was all squarely lines looked like spaghetti everywhere. And so, yeah, Stravos come a long way with better head units and yeah. You know, all that stuff. [00:07:28] Craig: Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. So it sounds like the Croton is, is actually rideable from where you live right now. Is that [00:07:34] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So we are, we are surrounded by it's 200 miles a road gravel road. And it's right here. It's five, five miles from where I'm sitting right now, so I can ride over there linked together all I can handle and, and come back pretty and it's open, you know, year round. There's no closures. It's they're public roads. [00:07:57] Craig: And to position it. So it's in North Carolina, but very close to the coast is what I saw. [00:08:01] Matt: Yes. Yeah. So we're, we're in Eastern North Carolina. It's totally flat. There's zero elevation. And the Croatan is what's called a pacoin. So, pacoin is like an elevated section of low lands. So there's a lot of water in. In the Croatan and it has nowhere to go because there's no elevation and there's really no drainage. So what they did was back in the sixties They dug canals to create the roads. So they would go in there, they would scoop out, you know, along the left and the right side, create these canals for drainage and that, and they'd put the earth in the middle and then they'd elevate that section for the roads. And so a lot of what we're riding on is you know, as gravel roads that were built in a swamp essentially. So, that. It's pretty cool. Like when I first started going in there and riding, I was a little bit like, because you, you can be like 20 miles from nothing, you know, which it's really hard to say that, especially over on the east coast, you know, if you're in Montana or something. Sure. You could maybe, but like out here, man, you can't be that far from civilization. And we have this beautiful, you know, national forest that is like kind of weirdly isolated We can, we have it right here in our backyard, which is, which is great. So this is a [00:09:24] Craig: Yeah, isn't [00:09:25] Matt: to start a start a bike race. [00:09:27] Craig: Isn't that one of the, that's just one of those amazing things about having a gravel bike. You can just sort of explore and get into these pockets of wilderness. And in, in this case, pretty large pocket considering where you are now in, in the, in the four, is there, what's the canopy, like, are there large trees in there? Are we looking at kind of [00:09:45] Matt: Yeah. So Eastern North Carolina is filled with pine. And a lot of it is plantation planted pine. So RO you know, long, straight rows of, of pine Warehouser and places like that own. Ridiculous amount of land down here with just pine trees and the Croatan is essentially mostly that except for there are maybe six pretty big lakes that are in the Croatan. And then there's a lot of, you know, tributary, swamp creeks that are coming in and out of that, when we. A lot of rain here, which, which is pretty often it's heading towards the coast, which isn't that far away. It's just that we, we tend to we te we tend to fill the sound is right here, where we're at. So we have the sound and the ocean in a barrier island. That's like 25 miles long. So, it's all connected. And you know, it's three miles off the beach basically is where the, where the place starts. [00:10:48] Craig: Got it. And are there other kind of offroad recreators in there? Are there, you know, jeepers and four wheelers and [00:10:55] Matt: Some, some of that, mostly it's hunters in the, in hunting season. And other than that, honestly, it's, it's pretty much just for us. There, none of the roads really connect to each other. So we, we get to use them. A lot of days when I go out there, man, it's like, I can't believe, you know, just it's like, it's just, it's all. It's just you. And that's, that's, that's a blessing for sure. It also means that the roads aren't maintained as well as they could be. And like we had the, we had hurricane Florence sorry, if you hear that helicopter, just the sound of freedom here. We got the Marine Corps here. So, the hurricane Florence in 2018, which. Yesterday 2018. I mean, we just got devastated and we still haven't had the roads fixed since then. So that's been four years. You, you just can only imagine the amount of potholes and damage and stuff that's there, but that's what makes our race a little interesting too, is that you never know what the roads are gonna be like [00:11:56] Craig: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [00:11:57] Matt: the new change. They're like a lot. [00:11:59] Craig: before we get into the race itself, let's talk a little bit about Ridge supply and what, what led to you founding the company and the vision? Cause I've when I heard the story, I found it super interesting and frankly made me want to just jump on the website and order some socks. [00:12:13] Matt: I appreciate that. I, I need that. I need that. Yeah. If, if, for folks who don't know, I, you know, I own and operate Ridge supply, which is a which is a cycling apparel. Running apparel brand. I'm a one man show, so I I've got no employees. I've been doing it seven years and it's an online, only business. We, we, we primarily sell direct. So you know, the pretty much the only place you can get our product is, is at our our website. And I, I, I ship everything myself. I started doing. Back in 2015 and I didn't know what I was doing. I, I, I knew that I had I had a pretty good job at the time. And I, the, the, the quick story is I, I got I got run over by a pickup truck while I was riding my bike. And it was a hit and run and I was sort of very, very fortunate to be alive and. Acutely aware of that in the hospital that a lot of folks wanted to know if I was gonna keep riding my bike. And I, I immediately that I had to resolve that was just like, of course I was, I wasn't, it was never like, I'm scared of riding on the road. I, I certainly was aware of the danger prior to this happening. And I knew that that day I was wearing all black. and that's kind of the easy color to find in cycling apparel. Everybody makes black apparel. And I knew that if I was gonna continue to do it, I wanted to try to figure out how to do it safer. And so while I was laid up with a broken pelvis, I started doing some research and I put two sort of premises together. One was that Blocked color was more visible than solid color. And what that means is if you have the brightest, you know, pink or orange, that neon pink or orange, and we, we love it in our products. If you put it by itself and you stick it down the road like you would see from a car, you might, you might not know what that is. It, it, it looks like. anything could look like a road sign. It could look like whatever. It could just be a bright thing that you're not quite identifying yet, but when you put blocked color together like a dark color, a light color and a bright color, it catches the eye in a way that makes it stand out. It's not necessarily as. As the solid bright color, but it's more eye-catching. So that was one premise and was sort of a scientific premise there. And the other was bio motion mechanics. And what that means is that the human, the human brain recognizes another human's movement. And when that, that happens, that that brain will then acknowledge that that's a human and treat it like a. and I think what happens in cycling, the phenomenon that we all experience when we're riding is we're not treated like humans at all. And it isn't because people are driving around saying, you know, oh, these Kirsty cyclists, you know, it's actually that when they're driving, they're just not acknowledging that, that thing that they see is. Another person. It's, it's just an object. It's not, it's not dangerous. But when you think that that's a person, you notice it's a person, you will, then you don't wanna run somebody over. You know, that's not what anybody's trying to do. Then you will start acknowledging that that's person treat 'em like a person. So I took those two premises together and I said, well, I knew defeat is here in North Carolina. I had been to visit. and I was kind of their neon poster child after my accident. And I realized like I could make my own sock. All I had to do was make 72 pair and. I took the most trite design. If you, if you're seeing this on YouTube or something, it's right behind me. But I took the blue Ridge mountains that I grew up with in central Virginia. Everything is blue Ridge, blue Ridge, blue Ridge. It's the most trite non-original thing I could have come up with, but I'd never seen it in a sock. And so I took that design and a contour line also was something I had never seen. I only has it really seen straight. They're easier to knit straight. Or vertical line. So I took that contour line. I made this five color sock and that was my idea was like, if I make a bright eyecatching multicolor sock and it's moving all the time there, you get your bio motion, you get your most visible. And and yeah, so that's what I did. I mean, I. I, I did that in 2015. I, I had no idea what I was doing. I thought, man, if I could just sell these 144 pair that I ended up buying the first time I maybe I could do a sock of the month club or something. I no idea how to ship them nothing. And I made a phone call to a buddy who owns a bike shop. And he was like, oh, this is great. You know, I'll buy six pair. And I called another buddy who owns a bike shop. And he was like, oh, I'll order 18. And I was like, oh my gosh, whoa, I've sold 23 pair. What am I gonna do? You know how I was just panicked. And so I, I, I really worked hard for like a week and I like created a website and did got the shipping integrated and I did all these. Back in 2015, these tools were just becoming available to people like me, who really didn't know what they were doing, but pretty dangerous on a computer, but like, I can't do code, you know, and I could do all these things, like sort of cookie cutter and just like work hard at it and do it. And so that's, that's how I was, it was just dangerous enough to, to get 'em sold. And then I sold them within two weeks and then I was like, well, I'll just take that. And I'll reinvest it in a new, new color and I just keep flipping it. And that's how my business started in 2015. And I literally never put another dime into it. I bet I was able to do that for a while, while still having a regular job. And then yes, slowly but surely it's grown to the point. , you know, I think a lot of people think Ridge supply is a lot bigger than it is. But you gotta sell a lot of $17 socks to make a living. And I'm fortunate to sell a lot of socks. So, we that's, that's what I do, which is kind of, kind of crazy when people ask me, like, what do you do? I'm like, I sell socks and they're like, well, what do you do for a living? I'm like, I sell a lot of socks. I don't know. I mean, that's the deal. [00:18:43] Craig: I, I love that Matt. And for the listener, like I'll put a, a, a link to Ridge supply, so you can check out the color ways and whatnot. And I think it's the type of design that once you see it, as you said, you've, you've iterated on the color ways. Numbers and numbers and numbers of times now. And there's lots of different options there, but the core elements are generally the same, that skyline design that you've talked about early on from the blue Ridge mountains. So it's super cool and visual. And I think I also heard you mention to others that, you know, you, you do find that people talk about their socks, which I think is, is interesting. And you know, in probably a great way that has, has helped the company. [00:19:20] Matt: Yeah. A AB I mean, absolutely. I had no idea. The. The a community nature that was being created. And then the, the virals, not the right word, the personal connection that the Sox would make with other people out in the world. Like I'm always blown away at the number of new customers that rich supply gets every month that I'm not, I'm not advertising to get them. They're they're coming through grassroots. You know, people on a group ride, people, seeing something on Instagram, people telling somebody else about 'em and that excitement around it is something that is, is the blessing of why this is actually a business. And isn't, wasn't just something I did. And , and, and it, and I can't take credit for it because a lot of that is timing. And the MIS the, the mistakes or risks that were taken early on with the business that worked at the time when nobody else was really doing that now in revisionist history, it looks like, wow, you really knew, I didn't know what I was doing, you know, like, so, I, I can't sit back now and be like, yeah, look at this. I, I, I still just in awe and my wife and I will look at each other sometimes and be like, what is going on? Like, we , we both had, you know, Big time jobs and corporate blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden it's like, we're sell socks for a living. And, and, you know, it's bizarre. It's a bizarre life, but I think I got the best job in the world for me, you know? So [00:20:59] Craig: Yeah, that's amazing. And I, I do, I mean, I think as a consumer, we all appreciate like the transparency and authenticity of business owners. Like now that I've heard the story, the origin story about why the SOC design is the way it is. You better believe if anybody asks me about those socks or says like, oh, those are kind of cool. I'm gonna tell them, oh, they were designed for increased visibility. And like, there's no doubt in my mind that customers relay that story if they hear about it. Because it's just, so it's just an interesting talking point. Like most socks are boring. These aren't. [00:21:33] Matt: and I appreciate that. And you know, you, can't not, everybody can listen to a 45 minute podcast to let me get long winded about telling that story either. So it's, it's hard to, it's hard to get that message out there. I assume everybody knows it, but of course they don't. And so I'm, I'm happy that you've. You know, you, you brought it up because it's, it is a, it's not marketing. I it's the last thing from marketing, it's really the, kind of the core design philosophy of what I do. It, it, isn't just, it's either mountain related, you know? So like the names, the style, the design is kind of related. It also has that five color. I try to do five sometimes I can't, but. And once I that's my brand identity, I don't have a logo that people recognize. I don't have a text that somebody's like, oh yeah, it's it's that. And when I started that in 2015, nobody was doing that. And so when you see my socks in a picture, they really stand out because of that branding. And that I've I've I like to say like, You know, like a dog, like peed around my tree. So many times, like you come near that tree, you're like, oh, that's where it supplies tree. Whoa. You know? And it's because that's what , that's what that did. And I didn't know that's what was gonna happen. But now I, I, it's funny, like I have like, Social media watchdogs out there. You know, if somebody does anything with five colors or contour lines, I get these text messages. Like they're stealing from you. You know, it's, it's not that there's only so much you can do on a sock. That's not really what happens, but that's, what's made it unique. Is it it, you can tell what it is without seeing the words or some, you know, a swoosh logo or. [00:23:17] Craig: Yeah. I love it. I love it. I'm in the listener. Well knows that I can geek out about the basic business behind any enterprise. Cause I love it. I'm fascinated by it, but I definitely wanted to transition to the Caran buck 50. And learn, learn more about the event. So what, when did you get the idea for it and what was the inspiration? Why, you know, it's a lot of work to put on an event as you can attest. And why did you tackle that? [00:23:42] Matt: Well, I mean, ignorance is is a great motivator to do something ridiculous because I had no idea. I had never, I don't think I'd ever volunteered for a race and nor had I ever put one on I'd done a lot of them. And I just knew that I knew that our area was kind of unique. Gravel was something that it hadn't quite taken off. There weren't a lot of big events outside of, you know, like Mid-South and dirty Kansas at the time. And there was really no, and there's there still aren't many events on the east coast, outside of like Vermont. And so I knew we had the Crow team here and I. The better part of six months or so, just kind of riding the Croatan, giving a feel for it and, and trying to come up with something that could work. The, the one challenge we have most, because we're on the coast, you can't go in our case south, because we're south facing, which is kind of strange. They don't, we're like long island, you know, when you go south, you go into the water. So. We don't have options for loops. You kind of go into the Croatan and the way that it's structured with its lakes and its swamps and stuff, some of the roads just don't go anywhere. And they're really kind of like fire access. So we couldn't do like a, a traditional loop, like you would normally like almost every course is. So we had to do an out and back. That's interesting. Nobody really does that. And I wasn't sure people are gonna like that. And so I kind of wrote it enough. So I was like, you know what, I don't hate this. I could do this, you know, and enjoy it. And it is different an out and back's always different. It's going another direction, a different view, different thing, different turns. So, but yeah, in 2017, I, I did that. I, I had a. A buddy at the time that was helping me kind of promote it. And we got it started. And, and we had 250 people, I think in 2018 come and do it. And I like I've told some other folks too, like I had no idea what I was doing and a lot of bike races, you know, you just kind of show up, they start you and then you finish. Sometimes there's timing. Sometimes there's not. If you're not on the podium, you just kind of, you know what I mean? Like there's nobody there to finish. I finished races before here, locally, where I got back to the finish line and there was literally nothing there, you know, I've won event like that where I'm like, there's no finish line. There's nobody to, to document it. You just ride across and you're like, I won. You don't win anything. You're just the first person to finish. So with this race, We just winged it that first year it was a success. People loved it. We do start and stop at the Speedway here, which is, which is one of our crown jewels. We, we have a a, a NASCAR short track. If you don't know what that is, it's essentially like, you know, less than a half mile track. And it is. they call it the nicest one in the country. And the reason that is, is it's built like a, like a Speedway where it's got, it's got like eight or nine bars. It has grandstands, it has towers. It has a restaurant in the middle. It's got a garage. It's I mean, it's, it's amazing, but we, we are able to use it for our start and our finish and it, and it provides this ambiance about. The start and finish in a way that is real communal and has the right vibe. And it's right beside the Croatan so short, little, little paved section to get out there and then you're in the woods. And just that combo together was a good, it just worked in 2018. [00:27:33] Craig: Yeah. And was it 150 mile race? Or did you have other [00:27:37] Matt: Yeah, no. So we have three. We call it the buck 50, because there's 150 mile race. We have a race called the buck, which is a hundred miles and we have a race called the 50. That is 50 miles. W the first year we basically had a course that was almost 50 miles and we did one lap, two laps or three laps. It's a mass start. Everybody started at the same exact time. And we had. We had sections of the course. It changes every year, the course changes a little bit every year, but that first year we had this section of road that was really primitive and abandoned road that was, had a lot of potholes, a lot of mudhole and we called it Savage road. And that was a section that was about three miles long that really broke the race up. It was the, it was the animated piece. And that was a big hit. We were able to use that the first two years. And since then we haven't been able to use it, which is fine. And we've changed the course a little bit, but now, now we have three races. The 50 uses that same out and back to start. And then the hundred uses a 60 mile loop and then a 40 mile loop. And then the buck 50 uses 2 75 mile loops. So what's kind of nice is we have all these people out there in the course, and it kind of is three different courses, but there's a big section of the course where it's it's everyone uses it. So unlike a lot of races, we have a lot of back and forth traffic. So, out there on the course, you will find other riders heading the other direction that are 40 miles. You know, away from you in the race. But the way that we stagger it and that provides a lot of, we found that that provides a lot of positive comradery. Yeah. There's that small group in the front, that's drilling it for the race lead and they're not waving it people. But everyone else seems to be really encouraging of the other groups. And that community aspect, I think, is something unique about our race that people really like. [00:29:49] Craig: Yeah, that sounds super interesting. And I agree. I mean, there's, it's very few races where you double back on yourself and see other people. And it, it's fascinating as, you know, as a mid packer to see. to get an opportunity to see the front front leaders of the men's and women's race go by. That's a lot of fun and inspiring to see. [00:30:06] Matt: Yeah. And I think makes people feel a little bit safer too, you know, if you had a catastrophic situation you're, you're not alone. The Croatan is very remote and you could be. You wouldn't be out there by yourself forever, but the way our race is set up, you know, you're not alone very long. And I think people, like, I think people like that. [00:30:26] Craig: For sure. You talked a little bit about how the terrain was laid out early on in this conversation. What type of equipment do you see people riding? What kind of tires, et C. [00:30:36] Matt: Yeah. You know, the more I've tr traveled around and don't know other races and stuff, I, people that have never done this race, they actually, they just don't believe that the terrain, this terrain exists, you know, and they've never really ridden terrain like this because it is it's perfectly flat and what that means for you is that you never are able to coast or, you know, there's no climb, so there's no dissent and you never stop peddling. And in the course of a 50 mile, even just a 50 mile ride, it can really drain you when you do 150. It is a, it is a serious effort. So as far as gearing and stuff is concerned, you could literally ride. , you know, you could ride road gearing here and be fine. But a lot of folks, you know, this is a great single speed course, because if you get the right gear, that's, you know, the right cadence you want and can get you at the speed you wanna go, you don't need to change your gear. So it's a perfect course for just grinding out on a single speed tires. You know, we've got really good surface area or surface that is not like sharp rocket rocks at. It can be a little Sandy at times. So a little bit of volume is important, but I mean, the race has been one on like 30 fives and 30 twos. So I wouldn't ride it on a 32 myself. I'd rather I ride like a 38. And I feel fine on that, but I ride a slick out here all year round. So even, even if it's wet a slick is fine. Our corners. Our corners are a little Sandy. So tires tend to not do anything for you. You just gotta take 'em a little gingerly. If you go in a corner too hot, you're just gonna eat it. But we don't have many corners, you know, so a lot of the roads are straight and you're what you really have to do is find your line. That's the other thing you can't ever explain to somebody until they come and do it? We have. We we, you call 'em potholes, but like we have small indentations, like a pothole in the gravel and they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And so imagine you're in a group of 800 people and you're nine, 10 riders back. You're not gonna see any of that. And all of a sudden, you're just like, bam, you hit the bottom of this pothole with your rim. It becomes this thing where as the course opens up and as people start to spread out, picking your line, it's like a snake, you know, and it just winds around and, and the groups are all doing it. You can be on the left, you can be on the right. If you're in the middle of the road, it is a nightmare because there is just no way that you're not gonna have some catastrophic pothole in your way. It, it's a weird kind of way to race your bike. But one really cool thing is like, you'll never calm down and just like tune out. You have to be on the Razor's edge mentally the whole time. And I think that's actually a great way to grab a race, you know? Cause if you're just like, you always talk about people, like I just had to grind through this thing, which is so boring. Like this course is not. It's flat and it's an out and back, and that sounds boring to people until they do it. But then when they do it, you throw in these potholes it's, there's something special about it. [00:34:03] Craig: A heck of a lot of peddling and a heck of a lot of attention required. It sounds like [00:34:08] Matt: Yes. [00:34:09] Craig: when you think about the event, were you looking to put something on the calendar that attracted sort of a highly competitive crowd or what was, what was kind of the vibe and intention of the, the race design in your mind? [00:34:20] Matt: Yeah. You know, I, I set out to create something that could be the first gravel race you've ever done in the 50. That is like, You know, like, even if you're going pretty slow, you can complete that course in four hours. And I felt like four hours is like, you know, if, if you're really riding and training, some, you can do that. Even if you never train more than two, you could still pull out a four hour effort. The buck 50. Was always gonna be a challenge just from a time perspective, because like even the fastest people who are blazing this course at like 21 and a half miles an hour, they're still in the seven hour range. And that is that's goes all the way up to 12, you know, depending on who who's doing it. What I tried to do was make a race. and this is the magic of the Croatan being flat. If you're the, if you're the, the person who just wants to come out and experience it and ride, you can line up against, you know, Ian Boswell, who's gonna go, maybe win it. And you both have. An equally rewarding experience. It isn't that the person in the back is just lollygagging. The course they're gonna have to do something really special for them to complete it, but the people at the front are gonna get this unique experience of a March race that doesn't have crazy elevation. Doesn't have, you know, high altitude doesn't have extreme weather and yet it's. But it's just hard enough for wherever your fitness is at. And I think that's one of the sweet spots and we don't bill it. I know it's called the buck 50, but it, we split it about a third. So we have, you know, a third of the people sign up for the 50, a third of the people sign up for the a hundred and a third of people for the buck 50 and. One of the unique things about our race too, is like, we let you switch the distance up until a month out because people will sign up and then they'll be like, ah, my fitness, isn't what I want it to be. Or they maybe have a great winner and they're like, you know what? I wanna do. I wanna bump up from the a hundred to the 150. So we allow people to do that and change it on their own. And that's, that's been a big, a big blessing because it, it, we were seeing 150 people. Change, which is a nightmare for a race director to have to deal with all that. So we just let him do that one bike edge until January. [00:36:53] Craig: Nice. Yeah. It's interesting that March date on the calendar, I think it's like, it's such a great focal point for your energy. Like through the winter to say, oh, I gotta, I gotta stay fit. Cuz I wanna do something big in March and it just sets the table for a great year on the bike. I think if you're fit at that time. [00:37:10] Matt: Yeah. I think people that we, so registration just opened up yesterday and on, on the 15th of September and it's a long way out, but it really isn't. When you think about your holidays. Your new, year's all these things. And people do use this as their carrot. I know I do. I use it as my, I gotta get on swift. You know, I gotta do another workout, even though I don't ride it. I just know that that's what people do and then they, it's not, you wanna come outta your, come out of your, you know, to start your season at the buck, 50 Andy blazing, but you know that you don't really have to perform at a weird, you. Extreme level, you just have to grind and that's, that's kind of a neat way to start your year too. And I think, I think it's worked for people that really wanna set, you know, set a goal, an early season goal and then pick up their June and, you know, July things later, cuz they built that base. [00:38:08] Craig: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like from your description that the, the race track has just created this very important piece of infrastructure. For the overall event, how are you kind of harnessing that? Obviously like a lot of gravel events try to foster a nice after race party or an event or experience for the community. How do you kind of manage that? And, and what should we expect when we show up? [00:38:32] Matt: Yeah. You know, we're, we're, we're super blessed. We we've got all of these things in this background where you're you're you're on this NAS. You know, short track it's paved. It has a pit lane. We, we have the finish line there, right? Where, right where the the vending is and the food and all that stuff. So it's this communal effort once you've, once you either are coming through for a lap, you get to see everybody or at the finish right after you finish you're right there. And it's been an interesting. It's evolved, but it's been an interesting environment because we also have free camping there on site. So basically like you can literally come in there the night before pitch a tent inside of the track, wake up, you're basically at the start finish line and start the races re reminds me a little bit of the, some of the mountain bike events that you get to do or camping's involved. But we, we offer, you know, meal afterwards and beverage, we typically will have like a, you know, a, a beer, a partner that'll that'll have beer. We do like. A, a full catered buffet style meal, which, which is kind of nice because just some, you know, where we are. It's not like we got eight, 900 people. There's not a lot of restaurants and stuff, you know, you can't just like, say, Hey, go get yourself something to eat. We kind of have to provide it. So we do that. And the big thing that because of Ridge supply and because of who I am as a business person, if you will like. I've always made. I've always tried to set out to make this race a value, even though it's not inexpensive race. There's. I feel like there's peer races that are of our size or bigger that are more expensive. And the return that you get from the buck 50, I've always tried to maximize the return and make every decision that we make. I say we, that I make about the race is rider focus. Because I think what happens with race directors and I'm not pointing any fingers at anyone else, I'm saying this happens, happens to me. You get this registration, you sell your registration, which is great. Then you have to provide services with that, with the, that revenue and the amount of services you provide. There's like a minimum and a lot of folks stop there. They're just like, this is all you gotta do. . And what I try to do is give back enough a in services, but also in product, we give away a huge swag package. Nobody does this, but I do it because a that's what I do. I sell stuff, you know? But like this year, when you come and do this race, you're paying for the entry, but you're get, you're gonna get basically a, a, everything that we do is fully custom just for racers too. So it isn't like you can buy this on this, on the website or. Somebody printed a cooi and gave it to you. It's like you get a custom pair of socks. You get a custom race tee that is not like your typical race tee. It's a legit piece of garment. You get a finisher's hat. When you finish, that's specific to your race, you're gonna get a pair of gloves that are custom long fingered, hand up gloves that you're gonna get. You may get some other things and I'm not gonna say out loud what they are. Those things all add up. It's well, over a hundred dollars worth of stuff. You get a meal afterwards, you get beverage afterwards, you get free camping. It isn't about what you get back, but when you do all those things, and then the value of the race experience in itself is what it is. And people do really enjoy doing this event. I hope that they tell other people about it and then they wanna come do it again. Otherwise, you know, it's a giant waste of time. I've found that from, from a race director's standpoint, if, if it stretches me a little bit where I'm just kinda like, oh man, I got, you know, when you have 900 people, every dollar that you spend is a thousand dollars, you know, and those add up very quickly. And there's a lot of times that that feeling that you have, you're like, well, I don't have to do that. They won't, they don't really, you know, you don't really need that. That's almost the, the surefire indication I need to. And I, the one thing we don't do that a lot of big races have, I don't really have a whole lot. I really don't have any corporate P partners. I don't sell sponsorship. Nobody's presenting this. And I like that because it keeps it, the vibe is the right vibe for March. I don't think a March race should feel like the world championships of anything. It's like, bro, you're just coming outta hibernation in the Northeast. This is your first time to see the sunshine and you wanna ride your bike, but you know, you, you don't need all that pressure yet. And so we try to keep it like that. And I think it's translated. I think the, the race track does provide that. And that's kind of what we use it for. It's just a backdrop. We really don't, you know, you do get to ride around it and finish and you come in and out of it to do your pit. But yeah, I'm not sure if I answered that question correctly, but [00:43:35] Craig: You you, you, you did for sure, Matt. No, I love it. And I do think, you know, by my likes again, like it's come to me through a number of different sources that this is a fun event. If you can get it on your calendar and you're close to the east coast where you can get there. So I think you're doing all the right things and I'm, I'm happy to have you on the podcast and just hopefully expose this race to a broader audience. I really love the idea. Encourage encouraging people to travel, to ride gravel in different parts of the country. Cuz as you expressed early on in this conversation, it's such a unique part of our country that has these funny little attributes that you're not gonna experience elsewhere. [00:44:14] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. It, it is it, when you live here, you're kind of like, why would anybody want to come here and ride our little gravel and then you make the bike race, and then everyone's like, It's amazing. And you're like, really? Is it, you know, and, and that's kind of been an eyeopener too, is that you realize that it is unique. The art terrain is unique and I've, I, I spent a lot of time in Vermont. I I spent a lot of time in Colorado, kind of all those kind of areas. I'm like, you can't mimic those things. They're just, they are what they are. And they're amazing. It's just that what we have is just. Squished flat and you can get away from everything in a way that is just kind of bizarre. You know, there's no homes, there's no buildings. There's no nothing. You're just on a gravel road in the middle of a forest, as far as your eyes can see. And that's kind of cool. [00:45:04] Craig: Yeah. And thank you. Thank you for just putting a hand up in creating this. I mean, it, I always like to express that sentiment to advent organizers cuz it's, it's hard, hard work, but I know it's, it's a virtual, it's a love story to your local community in the, the trails that you've explored the last few years. [00:45:22] Matt: I appreciate that, man. Yeah. I mean, I would do it again if I, if I knew, but if I knew it was this hard, I would think really hard about starting it. I'm glad, I'm glad the ignorance is, is prevalent for me. [00:45:35] Craig: it, it totally is. It totally is. I don't think you start a business. If you know everything you're gonna have to go through and you probably don't start an event either if you know everything that's in front of you, but cool. Thanks again, Matt. I really appreciate it. [00:45:48] Matt: Craig. Appreciate it. [00:45:48] Craig Dalton: That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel rod podcast. Big, thanks to Matt for coming on board and talking about his backstory for Ridge supply and that amazing sounding Croatan buck 50 race coming up in early 20, 23. Big thanks to bike index for supporting the show this week. And big thanks to you for listening. I may not say this enough, but I very much appreciate you listening to the show. And making me part of your gravel cycling experience. If you're interested in connecting with me, you can visit the ridership that's www.theridership.com. It's a free global cycling community where you can interact with gravel, cyclists from all over the world. If you're able to support the show, ratings and reviews are hugely appreciated. Or head on over to buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride. If you're able to contribute financially. Until next time. Here's to finding some dirt under your wheels

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the first part of our conversation with Matt Handler, President and COO of Coralogix. He introduces how Coralogix operates in the observability space and their unique way of organizing "digital exhaust."He talks about how they help clients migrate from legacy as log data is constantly growing at a rate faster than revenue. Matt discusses how their technology lowers this cost to allow companies to scale. HIGHLIGHTSCoralogix: Analyzing and optimizing "digital exhaust" for observabilitySelling to fast-growing mid-sized companies and PLG for smaller companiesMarket expansion and new products QUOTESGo-to-market requires people who execute and operate well - Matt: "You have to screw up enough to get successful and then, honestly, if you can really prove that you can scale and execute, there are a lot of financial-minded folks and that's very much needed in our industry. But people that can execute and operate a business, which Randy was great at, is really important."Lowering the cost of digital exhaust and allowing companies to scale - Matt: "The key to observability is being able to look across distributed architectures, especially in today's world, and understand where you've got performance issues, or if you have an issue, how do you identify and fix it?"Starting with two markets and being smart about expansion - Matt: "We're really trying to thread the needle of smart growth with our company but not overgrowing and just trying to throw a bunch of salespeople to drive ARR that aren't really productive. We're all about productivity and optimization." Find out more about Matt and check out Coralogix's open positions in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthandler/Website: https://coralogix.com/Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

Flowers evolve to be attractive to bees so that they can pollinate and they can reproduce themselves, which is if there's a lot of competition in the flower world, this is why you have such stunning orchids. It's because there's so much competition for bees because they can only pollinate so much in a day; the brighter and more colorful flowers attract the bees.But where did the perception of color come from and why is there such angst about color in our conversation and our lives? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/friendlyspace Transcript [00:00:00] Fawn: Color is a wild thing. It comes up a lot. It's very complicated. Yes. We're recording, honey. I I've always been confused by it in photography terms because each color has a certain temperature and it's so scientific. Why are I have so many questions? And we have so many topics I wanted to discuss today, but I'll try to stick it to one. Stick to one thing, not stick sticking to one thing, but I don't know, is this what started our color conversation? I was telling you about this person that I really like his artwork. I really like on Instagram and I usually don't follow or want to buy paintings. You know, I don't even hang up our own artwork because be cause I feel like there's so much information and there's so much loudness happening, not loudness as in aesthetics, but loudness as an information and talking that's happening. I feel like the furniture talks to me. I feel like when there's art or a photograph, well, photograph is art, but when there's something on the wall, it's constantly communicating with you and I need some quiet, right. Because I'm already; bear with me folks, but I already feel like even just sitting, I feel like I'm hearing and understanding, or at least taking part in whatever is happening in the world, I'm hearing it. You know what I mean? Does that sound totally off the wall? I don't want to sound too. Woo. [00:01:40] Matt: You know, for me as a individual, I don't like wearing logos. I don't like wearing logos on my shirts. I don't like wearing logos on my jackets. I don't like wearing, you know, let alone a band name on it. [00:01:54] Fawn: That's because it's talking to other people it's not talking to you. Is it talking to you? [00:01:58] Matt: The thing is, is that I feel the need then to defend whatever it is I'm wearing. So like it's like I could never get a tattoo because I'd have to defend that forever. [00:02:10] Fawn: That's a different subject. What I'm saying is things that speak to you. I guess tattoos are speaking t

Matt Faircloth is the co-founder and president of the DeRosa Group, a real estate investment company that specializes in buying and renovating residential and commercial properties. Matt and his wife, Liz, started investing in real estate in 2004 with a $30,000 loan. They founded DeRosa Group in 2005 and have since grown the company to managing more than 370 units throughout the east coast. DeRosa has completed more than $30M in real estate transactions involving private capital—including fix-and-flips, single-family home rentals, mixed-use buildings, apartment buildings, office buildings, and tax lien investments. He is the author of Raising Private Capital, has been featured on the BiggerPockets Podcast, and regularly contributes to BiggerPockets' educational webinars. In this episode, Matt shares his background in real estate investing, and a roadmap for investors looking to raise more private capital to close more deals. Additionally, he talks about the reality of running a real estate business.   Episode Links: https://derosagroup.com/ https://www.instagram.com/themattfaircloth/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdfaircloth/ https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/contributors/mattfaircloth --- Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today with me I have Matt Faircloth, author, podcast speaker, co-founder, president, investor, syndicator. He does a lot and we're gonna hear a ton from Matt about what he's been doing in the real estate space, and what he's currently putting together and actually closing on today. So let's get into it.   Matt Faircloth, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me.   Matt: Michael, I appreciate your time and having me on your show, man. Thank you.   Michael: Absolutely, absolutely. So I know a little bit about you but I would love if you could share with our listeners who maybe have never heard of you. They've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, who you are, where you come from, and what you're doing in real estate?   Matt: Where did you come from…   Um, it's cool that my company's called the DeRosa group and I just love saying this, that we're a company dedicated to transforming lads real estate through real estate transforming lives to real estate. We can get into that in the show if you like. I… where I came from, let's see, I grew up Baltimore, bopped around the East Coast for a minute. Before I landed in Philly, met the woman of my dreams because she put Rich Dad Poor Dad in my hand, and we were still dating, that got me to read that. And that that gave got me to drink the entrepreneur Kool Aid, which I guzzled and quit my job in 2005 to start a real estate company, bumped into a lot of walls, you know, did a lot of it, made a lot of mistakes, made some money and then and then just built it and grew over time and just learned how to run an effective real estate company through the school of hard knocks. And now I've been doing it for 16 years and just apply what I've learned over the years, you know, attracted more and more the right people who work with me and build what I think to be a phenomenal brand now.   Michael: Oh, that's awesome, man. That's awesome. You said that once or twice before I can tell it just rolled off your tongue there so nicely.     Matt: You know, this is not my first podcast. Sometimes people ask me, let's just get real, screw it, man. Let's get real right now…   Michael: Let's do it.   Matt: What I get I go on a lot of podcasts and when you go on a lot of podcasts, people tend to ask the same questions, Michael, right and so when they do, it's almost like I'm that guy, I'm the DJ sing in a DJ booth and then in the in the DJ booth of Matt's brain. And then people ask like, Hey, Matt, tell me about your first deal and I'm like, okay, let's get the first deal track pull the first track.   Michael: Go, pull the file.   Matt: You know, yeah, go pull the file, first deal, right. Tell us about the first time that you raise money, tell us about a mistake you made. Okay, let's go ahead skip, let's go pull up mistake file eight. Okay, let's write that file out, right. So it's more fun to go curveball. You know, like…   Michael: Totally   Matt: Yeah, that was a good curveball in the first five seconds of the show that you and I went down right and you into it, you can't help it you end up just going to a script a lot of times you know talking about things on podcast over and over and over again and I was it that a want to be plastic like that, but you end up like, if I've told that story six times the seventh time it starts to come off the same way over and over again, right.   Michael: I totally get it, and I hope that today is not one of those repetitive podcasts.   Matt: You're getting not to be that show already man, you are curve balling, I love it. Keep it up!   Michael: Well as a follow up Matt, what's your favorite mammal, man?   Matt: It's good one, I am, okay, growing up, I have an eight year old, right, so my eight year old is always: Daddy who would win… I wish he was here because you and me, we would have a ball right now… Daddy who would win when a colossal squid or a great white shark? And I'm like Simon, first of all like, but he'll even be like a gorilla or a colossal squid and like girl is gonna drown buddy battle…   Give me more data, that would depth are we talking about the ocean? Are we talking about like 3000 gorillas... To you question, I probably go a gorilla, if I had to pick or, or maybe I don't know why, but growing up I loved Black Panthers.   Michael: Mm hmm. Okay, pretty majestic animals.   Matt: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, the majestic, they are majestic animals. Yeah, so that would be my favorite, those are my two favorite man…   Michael: I love it, well so real real quick change because we're already on this rabbit hole. You know that there was a show put on by I think NatGeo or discovery that answered your son's questions they would pit these two animals together in a simulation… like that exists…   Matt: You can google and they would show cuz he would be like, daddy who would win a saltwater… It's just you can google saltwater crocodile versus great white shark…   Michael: Great white shark, I saw that episode…   Matt: It's good, it's good, right. Good job displaying well you see the saltwater croc would try and take the deathroll on this or do that...   Oh, he was my son's itch was scratched with that, you know. I don't know, why he is up to the Komodo dragons. Komodo dragon versus anything you can name, that's what you want to talk about…   Michael: That's a battle royale this century… Oh my god. I love it.   Matt: Well, dragons are badasses man, these are like, there they are… Would you know that?   Michael: Yeah, that's the kiss of death, yeah… Matt: It is! Not only the monstrous lizards like little dinosaurs, but they also the venomous bite, you know…   Michael: It's such a ridiculous concept like, oh, let's take two of like humans worst fears, like, long tailed long tongue lizards, and then give it venom, sounds awesome.   Matt: Right! Give it nasty teeth. Yeah, like a really weird awful roar and give them venom, too…   Michael: Oh my god, so good.   Matt: They're nasty creatures, man. Good thing that'll make them in North America.   Michael: I know, I'm stoked, I'm stoked. All right, well, if we bring it slightly back towards the real estate, you know.   Do you want me to do a whole podcast on mammals like komodo dragons… So you started a company, your real estate company in 2005 and when people hear that, I think it might be ominous to some people, you know, what is a real estate company mean? And so what was the transition, like, I mean, like, what is the DeRosa group do first and foremost and then what was that transition, like going from just owning stuff on your own to now I have a business focusing on it?   Matt: That's interesting, you know, that man, um, interesting concept, because a lot of people out there are running real estate investing, like it's a gig, you know, like, or it's like driving Uber, you know, you could just decide to not do it at some point, you know, I mean, it's not a gig, it's a real estate investing is a business because it's a marathon, unless you're wholesaling or just doing a deal here and there something like that. Not for nothing. This business… the business of real estate investing is a business and you should treat it as such. And we didn't always do that the first couple years, I treated it like a hobby and I bumped into walls and did a bunch of different things but like once I really got my legs underneath me, as a real estate investor and really found the calling found the purpose and got and got and got focused on real estate investing. I got clear that it's a business that is like a living animal it's a it's a living thing…   Michael: It's a living Komodo dragon?...   Matt: Real estate investing is like a Komodo dragon, right, it needs food, you know… It can have a venom's bite and can be nasty and shit and can get the fuck out of you. And a lot of people are scared of it, you know, right… Yeah. People read articles about it only exists in certain places we can keep going. But it is something that needs, you know, if you want to grow real estate investing business and sustain yourself in this, in this industry, and not just make it a hobby, you have to have a company that's got you know, clean books and has a purpose and has a mission and has roles and responsibilities and job descriptions and stuff like that, because there's sucky things in real estate you have to do and it's like, well, you know, and you could look on Instagram. And if you look on Instagram for real estate investing, people think that it either means you close deals every day, because it's the people every time people close stuff, they put it on Instagram, or they go to it's like, Instagram thinks that for real estate investors, all you do is close deals, go to conferences and go on vacation That's what you see people doing on Instagram, the real estate investing, right? But there's actually like, this sucky part of real estate investing, which is sitting on your desk and answering emails and you know, just corresponding and looking for deals and swinging and missing and dealing with knucklehead tenants and stuff like that that want to, you know, recently Michael, we had a tenant, had his girlfriend come in and he must have done something bad because she went, put all his clothes on his bed, dumped gasoline on the bed, lit it on fire, walked out.   Michael: Mike dropped…   Matt: This is what happens, that's real stuff, you know… That did not make on Instagram unfortunately, you know…   Michael: No, that wasn't the highlight reel.   Matt: Living my best life, look it's amazing…   Michael: Well, so you bring up a really great point that and that it should be treated like a business and I, I wholeheartedly agree. But so what about all the people out there that are just getting started that could never see themselves as a business owner as an entrepreneur but hear about real estate investing as a great side gig like you mentioned that what about what about all those folks? Where are they left?   Matt: Okay, they need to decide if they want to do it full time or not, right…And there are people out there that have a day job that they love and it's, it's probably something that's very fulfilling to them, or maybe they went to school for a long time, like a doctor or an MD or whatever. I mean, Jesus, those folks go to school, God bless them for like another 12 years after they get out of college, right? So why would they change careers, right? They want, there are people that really in their heart of hearts probably ought to go passive for real estate investing, as a side gig and as a way to build wealth. And there are people that that are doing it because they want to build up the passive income and become a business owner out of it. So you got to choose if you want to be an investor or be, let's remember Robert Kiyosaki Cashflow Quadrant book, right. Yes, ESBI, remember that thing?   Michael: Mm hmm.   Matt: Do you want to be a B or an I, B= business owner, I= investor. And if you're willing to put in your time and and you know, quit your day job eventually become a business owner and that's what you need to do. But unfortunately, people, a lot of people misunderstood Kiyosaki, to think that to be a real estate investor, you have to be an active operator, you have to do it full time. You can make the passive income all you want as an I-quadrate investor and just passively invest in things. And I think that that's, I think it's probably the most misunderstood function in a lot of his books, people that quit their job that really should have never done that they should have just passively invested their way to financial freedom.   Michael: Yeah, okay. And let's talk about that for a minute because you wrote a book about raising capital and I think capital is so often the biggest obstacle for people, the biggest hurdle people overcome. So do you see the kind of this roadmap for people? Where if passivity, is it really time is the goal, right? That's what everybody is after and we get there by either usually being a B or an I, by being at B that sounds terrible, don't be a B. So if people are capital is their obstacle, using real estate as a active vehicle to then take a backseat and invest passively?   Matt: Yeah, well, that's I mean, my book talks about that and then it goes back to like, let's just keep walking to the B and I road, right. So if you're a B quadrant business owner, we're rising D quadrant business owner for real estate, and you either want to do it full time, you already are doing it full time, then at some point, unless you win the lottery, or unless, like, you know, you just got a silver spoon in your mouth, and you got billions of dollars waiting on the sidelines, from your friends from your family or something like that. You're going to need capital, right? You're gonna run out man you are. And so on the other side of it, you've got I quadrate investors, and they have either retirement accounts, real estate equity, cash, any of those things that they want to put to work and not have to put in the time to make that money, you make that money, do what it's supposed to do, you know, then they can those two can marry up the B quadrant business owner of real estate versus the quadrate investor that wants to make a return on their money without trading money for time. Those two can have a really happy partnership. My book talks about all those things, how those two things can get structured together and how the why in my book are called the cash provider, as SI quadrant investor.   Robert Kiyosaki is a good guy, but he probably sue the hell out of me if I use his terms of my books. I didn't use that, I did, I did the the deal provider and the cache provider. The deal provider is the D Quadra business owner, the cache provider is the I quadric investor.   Michael: Okay, awesome and what is your book called?   Matt: Raising private capital. So funny Michael you asked that it happens to be right here behind… They can get it on Amazon or they can get it on biggerpockets.com.   Michael: I was just gonna ask. Alright, so it's called raising private capital and without giving the book away. What can people expect to find in it?   Matt: Along with a lot of my personal story on on you know how I got from guy that quit his job in oh five to you know, running a company that runs that owns, you know, multi 1000 doors of multifamily real estate. It's got that journey in there. And and that but also it's it's got a lot of tools and lessons, it's a how to really on how do you look in your own personal network as an investor, I'm sorry, as a B quadrant designer, it's how to look in your personal network to find the money, you need to do deals because you don't have to go to private lender, or you don't have to go to hard money lenders, you know, if you go and go more corporate level, or sell your soul to get the money you need for the deal that you're trying to do. You can look in your own network to find that money and raising private capital talks about how to find the money you need for deals in your own personal network.   Michael: Okay, all right, Matt can we do something kind of a silly exercise?   Matt: Please.   Michael: Can you because, I think a lot of people are really nervous to have that conversation and I think they feel slimy or gross. Can you pitch me on a deal that you're putting together as someone that would be in your your kind of sphere of influence? Let's let's see. Let's see what that sounds like and feels like.   Matt: Well, it depends if you're accredited, or not, Michael, because if you're not accredited, we have substantial relationship. But if you're accredited, I can talk to you, I can do a Facebook ad that you notice, right? All joking aside, let's pretend you and I are friends. We already know each other you already like and trust me, because I'm me, right and my book recommends that those are your first targets. You know, and that so hey, Michael, how you doing today?   Michael: I'm doing pretty good, what about you, man?   Matt: I'm awesome, man. Hey, listen, I happen to remember you saying that you were working over a company XYZ. You did a great job, didn't you. It's good. But you better get an opportunity to come up with ABC Company. And I'm really grateful for that you were able to move over to that did take on that new job. How's it going?   Michael: It's going really well. XYZ was terrible, ABC is infinitely better. Thank you so much for man, remembering you've got a killer memory.   Matt: No, it's great, I swear to you… I also barely remember going further, Michael, is that XYZ day as much as you hated what they did, and you know, and I'm so grateful you got out of there. But XYZ had a great comp package they did as I remember, you told me they paid you a really great 401k program.   Michael: Yes, yeah, it was pretty.   Matt: Those markets been taken off lately, right. So no, it's maybe maybe hit a top here and is starting to get a little squirrely and everything like that. So I want to tell you that we did you happen to know, Michael, you can take your retirement account and invested in things not Wall Street, you know, in that retirement account you have with XYZ company because you don't work there anymore that retirement account could be put to work in real estate. Did you know that?   Michael: I had heard that. But I didn't really know that I could do anything about it…   Matt: Well, you can now that you've left XYZ company, right, you can take that retirement account that they have, and they probably were paying you and lots of company stock, take the chips, man, take the chips off the table cash in, sell that company stock and roll that and roll that retirement account, which is now by the way was a 401k. Now it was an IRA. And you can roll that IRA over to a third party IRA custodian and you can do all kinds of cool stuff you can buy, you know, shares of companies, you can buy your own your own real estate investments, you can lend that money out and you can also invest it in deals like we have, I, we are right now Michael buying 670 units in two states, five apartment buildings in two states. That's the deal, we're in the middle of right now, produces phenomenal returns, produces, we're going to fix these buildings up and we're going to refinance them over time and as we refinance them, we're going to give some of that money back to you to your retirement account. So you can then take it and parlayed invest in another stuff. It's a great return.   I know a lot of people that we work with are really happy with work that we've done as a company. So you and I should talk further as a matter of fact, I have some Ira custodians that can handle this whole thing for you, if you'd like, I'd like to introduce you to a few of them that I love. You know, and then they we do a lot of work with them. So they give us white glove treatment. Can I introduce you to them for you?   Michael: Yeah, that'd be great, man, thanks so much for doing that. I appreciate it.   Matt: Yeah, and I'm going to mail you the offering. And if you don't, if you're not happy with my, if you don't like the returns, and you're you're nervous, whatever, it's okay, I get other things I can send you over to, I really want to help you build your wealth while I build my business. Because we're building a great real estate company and we're, our mission is to transform lives through real estate, I want you to help me do that. By me helping you earn money with your retirement account. Well, we do the work. So we can do that for you. And if it doesn't work out, that's okay. I have plenty of other friends for this awesome network called biggerpockets.com, you should check out and you can look on BiggerPockets to and find other things to invest in, like private loans and other cool things that can show you that are not real, like that real estate that I mentioned, even though that's a great deal. There's other things you can do to and I'll hold your hand the whole way. What do you think?   Michael: Oh, sign me up, man, I'll be looking for your email.   Matt: Cool, no problem.   Michael: Man, that was awesome. That was so so so good.   Matt: Thank you, thank you…   Michael: So firstly, for first and first and foremost, you've now got to send me that email because I'm sold. But secondly, what I love about what you did is the conversation felt very much, let me help you, let me put provide value for you educate me around what I could do with my retirement funds, which I might have not even been aware of, and then to tell me how you're able to help me, before even the you being helped in the process, being able to your own deals be my financing was even mentioned.   Matt: Yeah, well, so is a few facts, right, um, of the $10 trillion, that's currently in IRAs, right now, not 401k, it's just IRAs of the $10 trillion, it's out there. 4% of us invested in anything else outside of Wall Street and so if you're looking to get your capital game going, the easiest low hanging fruit, and the thing that everybody has is a retirement account that has if they've got a job, and they used to work at one company, and they now work at another company, their retirement account, they had the first company is now eligible to get rolled over to an IRA. And with the big run up the stock markets had it that's what you should be talking to people about, is like, hey, you used to work over here. Now you work here, don't you are you got laid off, you quit whatever it is, they don't have you there them a job. Now they just have to use to have a job. It's such an easy, low hanging fruit conversation and it speaks to their needs too. Because everybody's get a little squirrely and where Wall Street's going, it's just been a great run. You know, it's had a great run over the last 12 years. But now it might be time to pull a few chips back. So I think that that's something that's probably the most underutilized conversation out there. For those looking to raise money, is to talk to anybody that's got a job about investing their retirement account with them with their real estate company.   Michael: That's so good. I think so many people when when thinking about having that conversation, think, well, I don't know anyone who has money, because they might not be in cash assets or liquid assets on the you know, in a taxable account, but the retirement side of things brings into focus a whole another option.   Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can and there's other ways you can go about it, too. You can kind of sniff out, my book talks about like how to sniff out people that are in your network that likely have a lot of cash. What does what are the signs that a lot of cash leaves, you know, my book talks about that, my book talks about, there's another vehicle that they can they can invest with you and as those are people with free and clear real estate.   Last time I looked, Michael 30% of America owns their home, their primary residence free clear 30%. You know, but they don't. It's not it's not to get paid to ask a different color when it's paid off. It's hard to tell. Like all the purple houses in America are free and clear. Yeah, no, I don't know. So, but my book talks about the signs to look for free and clear real estate. And I also can tell you, here's the free clear real estate conversation. Here's the those with cash conversation and here's the retirement account conversation to have. I just pulled that into my playbook because it seemed like the most obvious one to go for is retirement account is probably the most, it's the most underutilized one. But I think it's the one that's most unnecessary right now, in today's world.   Michael: That makes so much sense, that makes so much sense. Matt, you mentioned before we hit record here that you are actually in the midst of closing the biggest deal that you've ever done to date today. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that looks like?   Matt: That was a by the way, Michael that was it bullshit. That was a real deal. I was pitching you on for your retirement account when you were working for XYZ comm your XYZ IRA could be invested in the deal that we're closing part of right now. Yeah, it's 670 units. It's in it's in two states. It is a five apartment buildings and we're closing two of those today. The other three close in a couple of weeks.   Michael: Amazing, okay, and what attracted you to this deal?   Matt: Um, that okay, so two of the buildings are in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and that is a company that is city we're already heavily invested in and it's a city that's showing phenomenal growth, 14% rent growth last year, RD on pace to do at least 12 this year percent rent growth and this owner hasn't increases rents in the last two. So he hasn't seen any of the rental upside that's been happening, the rent growth has been happening in that market has not been realized on those properties. So great opportunity, we already have property management in that town lined up and Lexington we own six other apartment buildings. So we are a niche down company. We're not going to just invest anywhere that is a good deal. We invest in super specific markets, so those are there were three markets Lexington, Kentucky, the Piedmont triad in North Carolina, and in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, of all places. Those are the three markets that we're in. That's it   Michael: If it works, it works…   Matt: So…I like about it. I also like that it's diverse meaning like it's it's different geographies, different management strategies, even different property conditions. I like all those things about it that it brings a lot of things to the table, that make it more of a stable asset.   Michael: Okay, okay..   Matt: But it's stable investment, like stable here, but poised to go up.   Michael: Okay and we've had a lot of folks on the show recently talking about passive investments. And you know how you're really evaluating the operator more so than the deal itself. But can you give folks listening some tips about how to evaluate maybe the deal? I mean, what, what details of the deal itself should people be looking at to feel comfortable?   Matt: Yeah, um, you should look at…, I'll tell you why I'll tell you, what people will do to make their deal look better than earlier is, you have to look at what their exit criteria is. That meaning like, they might be saying, okay, we're going to buy the property for this number, and then we're going to invest this and then we're going to sell it for this, like that nine times you paid for it, then you investors aren't going to make any money till we sell it, or you're not going to make very much money until we sell it, if the majority of investor returns are projected to come through the sale and the end, the syndicator is assuming that the markets gonna stay very stagnant, that cap rates are gonna stay down and streets gonna stay down, yada, yada, then they're kind of making a lot of assumptions that may or may not come true. So that's one thing to be concerned over. So make sure that they're conservative that their crystal ball is is, you know, that they're looking into has some conservatism's as it in it, because that's one thing. That's one thing, as indeed a syndicator can do is they can predict that the markets going to be super favorable at some point in the future when they go to sell and that makes the deal look really good right now.   Michael: Right, right…   Matt: Yeah, make sure there's a lot of there's some experience on the team that have been it's okay to have new new and to work with new people, because we're all new at some point. But make sure somewhere on their team, there's some deep, there's a deep bench of experience.   Michael: That's great, that's great. Yeah, no, I love those points, I love those points. I think I've seen that too and a bunch of syndication deals like oh yeah, we're gonna buy it at a six cap and we're gonna exit at a three cap and it's like, really look.   Matt: Phenomenal… 22% IRR man, what's the cash flow? Oh, it's only gonna pay like 3% cash on cash. But you know, magic fairy dust, get sprinkled on the deal, and it's gonna get sold and you're gonna make you're gonna triple your money. You know, three right now when I sell it, and that's how it's gonna go, right… When the crypto rises, you know…   Michael: No, that's a great point, those are great points, Matt. And I'm curious to know what do you you know, in your book, I'm sure talks about this but for anyone listening, that's thinking about starting to raise money but doesn't really have experience. They've you know, they've got the hustle, but they don't have the experience and they don't have the capital. You know, what should those people be doing right now?   Matt: Okay, I'm getting smudge get as much exposure as you can. Some folks do that through investing some some people that I know, that are very successful, syndicators now got started investing in other people's deals to learn the ropes, right. And that's it, do that get some exposure, we know why you can to other people's deals, you know, network, do what I did. But to start small, like we're on our 50 we're closing, this is our 15th syndication that we've done. But our first syndication was a guy my wife went to college with put in 50k into it into one into a deal that we did, we bought two single family homes with his 50k, right, that was our first syndication. So you can start small, find the one person that has some capital to work with in your in your network, and do a deal and then expand it out, do another deal, expand it out, do another deal, expand that out, do another deal. So for those that are looking to get started, it's okay to start small. It's not sexy to start small, but it's also okay and there's a lot further there's there's a lot smaller distance to fall and a lot easier to course correct on a small deal than it would be to correct on a behemoth issue first. Michael: Yep, I think that's such a good point, I think that's such a good point. I know I've spoken to people and I thought, well, my first deal would be a 10 year multifamily, because multifamily is the best everyone's talking about it. It's like yeah, okay, well, have you done a single family deal? Well, no…   Matt: I'm telling you, I hear people like, oh, I'm gonna do 100 unit multifamily deal. You know, like, that's my first deal I want to do, I've never done a deal before my life. But I want to close 100 units is my first deal. I get it and I want that, too for you, you know. But you might have to bang your head against the wall a lot. Where you could just go and syndicate a duplex right or syndicate like get your Mama to go give you a couple give me a couple of dollars and you and your Mama would go buy a duplex right, you know…   Michael: But then I can't post it on Instagram. No one wants to see me my mom and me doing deals…   Matt: I can't fake it till I make it that right, you know, or pose next to the Lamborghini that I just bought because I've been, I've been investing in real estate for the last few months.   Michael: So good. The last question I have for you before I let you out of here is, you were talking at the beginning of the show about how you did all these things and kind of rally different directions and then you really niche down and you got really focused. How did you do that? I mean, how did you, what did it take for you to get hyper focused? Because I think so many of us as they get started real estate like, oh, I could do long term buy and hold or I could do flipping or I could do wholesaling or I could do burr investing. And there's so many different ways to go. How do you know when you found the right one?   Matt: Well, first of all, Michael, I just got I just get tired to get my ass kicked, you know…   I'd like to wholesale deals going on at for fix and flips going, I was buying a bunch of rentals and everything like that, and it wasn't sleeping awake, you know and I was doing everything media doing a mediocre level, any of those three things that I was doing, I was involved in some other stuff, too. Any of those three things that I was doing could have gotten to me to my financial goals. But the mistake that I made with all this tribe was doing a bunch of things, mediocre lee versus doing one thing really well, right. And so I found that I was, you know, good at being a landlord, because with the landlord properties that we had raised very well. And it's also good at raising money and explaining what I do land lording in a very simple fashion to people and so I was like, okay, well, I'm awesome at those two things. Let me just focus on those. And the more I focused on those, guess what, Michael, the more money I made, like, money's good. I like making money. I do enjoy my family. You know, that's good. So how about anymore, though? Yeah, I'm not good at managing contractors, some too nice that I believe them when they tell me that their car broke down. And that's why they couldn't show up on the job site, but they still need me to give them 10 grand, you know, and I believe them. Okay, here you go. And that, so I just knew I didn't have people in my network to outsource that to at the time and so it made sense. I had tried partners to run that fix and flip division, my company didn't work out. So I needed to abandon the things that weren't working, and focus on the things that were and for those that are looking to niche down and focus. It doesn't have to it doesn't have to be apartment buildings, believe me, don't listen to Instagram does not have to be apartment buildings. It can be other things, I promise.   But figure out what you were calling your core genius, right? Your God given talents, what are you gonna call it, figure that find out those and how you can best bring those to the real estate table and even better, how they are benefiting your business today. And then just easy, Michael, do more of that. How about that, there's two more of those things, if it's working, you do more of it, and less of the things that aren't, you know, it could be that simple and that's kind of how we grow in and I found people that were able to sit in the seats that I needed for me to focus more on raising money and more on the land lording , and I'd filled in those seats and I got it, you know, tight and I expand that up and I was like okay, land lording is amazing, but I could probably scale faster if I outsource that and hire third party management companies. So we did that I could focus on raising money and I could focus on building the team and enrolling and inspiring and being the leader of my team. Now that's really all I do is I lead my team and I raise money and I talk to you…   Michael: I love it, I love it. That, this has been so much fun Matt, if people have questions for you want to reach out to you are interested in investing in some of your deals, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?   Matt: There's a ton of stuff on my LinkedIn bio. My LinkedIn is the Matt Faircloth, I'm sure there's plenty of other Matt Faircloth in the world but my Instagram handle…   Michael: You stake your claim…   Matt: I've claimed it, there also the Instagram I'm the only Matt Faircloth, @themattfaircloth and there's a there's a link in my bio on Instagram and there's a ton of stuff there you can go and invest in my and you can hear about investing in deals with us if you're an accredited investor you can join our mailing list because you do a non-accredited deal sometimes for those that are that we have a preexisting relationship with so you can join that list or you know hear more about that. You can buy a copy of my book there you can you know join all kinds of different cool things we have going on and Masterminds webinars, all that jazz is on the link in my bio on Instagram.       Michael: Sweet, well Matt thank you again, man, from Komodo dragons to passive investing, this has been a blast. I'm sure we'll be chatting soon.   Matt: My family and I play a game at dinner called: True two truths and a lie and I'm going to slay it right in two true and a lie there that I was on an interview and me and this guy talked about Komodo dragons. Nobody's gonna believe that. But I totally got my family, totally gonna crush them at true two truths and a lie tonight…   Michael: I love it, I love it. Well, I am glad I could be a part of it.   Matt: Thank you.   Michael: Awesome, take care man.   Alright everyone, that was our episode. A big thank you to Matt for coming on. It was super fun from Komodo dragons to real estate syndication. I didn't think we'd be able to get there but we kept it on the rails. As always, if you liked the episode, please feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is you get your podcasts and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Happy investing!

It's the near future.  You're on a road trip across the country.  At some point, you realize you're tired and lower your seat for a nap.  You go ahead and take one.  In the meanwhile, your car nearly silently glides onward, ever attentive to the road. On this quick bite of an episode, your Data Center Therapy hosts Matt “You think that's air you're breathing?” Yette and Matt “We Hope You Enjoy the Ride!” Cozzolino talk about Artificial Intelligence, the Metaverse, 3D movies and Washington state drivers. You, our dear listeners, will also get the Matts' takes on: How the world might look without Facebook, and how Google and Apple develop similar technologies (but ostensibly implement them way differently!) How things like voice recognition and augmented reality have evolved over the years from initial attempts to now When (or if!) Tesla and other auto manufacturers will ever achieve fully autonomous self-driving and why it's valuable Join us on this forward-looking chat and challenge yourself to see into the future as the Matts have here.  For those folks clamoring for more enterprise best practices and technically focused content, get ready friends, for an exciting interview with IVOXY's new Security Consultant, Mr. Quinton Barber.  As always, be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever you find your quality podcasts.  Thanks for listening and see you (virtually?) on the next episode of Data Center Therapy!

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 ★

Timestamps:The most difficult part in file retrieval(1:17)Eliminating the problem of indexing (8:46)Evolving with technology and maintaining client relationships (15:47)Future quality of life features(23:52) “If you're not evolving exponentially with the technology that comes out, you're gonna fall behind or you're not gonna be able to capitalize on opportunities that are  really out there for you.” - Mathew Dragatsis Mathew DragatsisWebsite: www.scansearch.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathew-dragatsis-b218883/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScanSearchDAMTwitter: https://twitter.com/scansearch Mathew Dragatsis, Scan Search Document ImagingMathew Dragatsis has been the Founder of Radiant Solutions Corporation and CEO of their new product, Scan Search. He has almost 30 years of experience in document imaging and has served many different kinds of organizations with their document imaging, management, and retrieval needs.  LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathew-dragatsis-b218883/   Have comments, questions, or concerns? Contact us at feedback@1958lawyer.com Episode Transcript:Ron Bockstahler  0:29  Welcome to the show everyone, good to have you back. We have a little bit different show today. So it's gonna be talking to a good good friend of mine. In fact, if I can think back about 20 years ago, Matt was a client of mine. So he started off as a client, Matt dragados. This started his firm in 2001. But he was doing the head of another firm before that, that he had sold. He ran for four years. And he's in the imaging scanning imaging technology field, and he has an amazing product that he's got out on the market today. So Matt, I'm gonna let you jump right into it. Kind of tell us what you got it. Let's talk about your history, though. Cuz you've been entrepreneur, you've been running your company for over 20 years. Tell us how you got here?Mathew Dragatsis  1:10  Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. First of all, I really appreciate it. Yeah, we started radium solutions back in 2001. And basically, that company was formed to provide solutions to all sectors, to allow companies to scan in their documents, extract the information that's on those documents, and then do something with that, basically, you know, if you're an accounts payable department, we're gonna extract all the pertinent data, and store that and allow you to, you know, retrieve that document based on that information. And that'll kind of lead in the scan search as well. But that's what we've been doing for probably the last, you know, 20 years or so, we've done things with law firms, as well. But it's always been scanning your documents, and I'm sure the, the audience who can relate to this, scanning your documents, all of your case, files, what have you, and then you know, look at the screen, and then basically index those, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're going to tag them, you're gonna, you know, index them and tell them how to retrieve that document based on a case file, a customer name, maybe social security number, what have you. And that's a manual process to do that. So we've been doing that since 2001. We've got companies in many different sectors, including government, big and healthcare. And, you know, that's basically what we've been doing, and been quite successful at it for all these years. And then I'll kind of lead in a scan search. So after, you know, almost 30 years of doing all this, in realizing that the most expensive part of these systems is not the software, and it's not the annual maintenance, and it's not, if it's the size, the subscription, gets the manpower to tag those documents, if you're gonna put a document in the system, right now, basically, all you can do it, let's say you upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, you can do a search on the file name. And if you happen to know a date range, maybe the date range is pretty limited. And you could put them in folders and kind of do that. But to actually get to your documents, it's a struggle. And it's even more of a struggle to get them in there to be able to index them from an imaging system. And there are several imaging companies out there. But the fact remains, there's that indexing process. So if you're going to scan 1000 documents a day, you're going to have two or three people spending all day long indexing those documents, because you need to be able to retrieve them on the important date of the time those documents. So I'll sit around one day, and I'm thinking, Well, you know, I'll use a case file number as an example. Typically, you're gonna have a field, that's going to be called case file number, and you're going to type in, we're trying to OCR and validate that it's correct that information in that field. So I was thinking to myself, why do we need to know that that case, file number is a case file number? Why do we need to know that? Can we just search for it, like we do Google and find a Google, you know, webpage based on, you know, some loose, you know, searching criteria. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this, if we could do this, this eliminates the entire indexing process, which is the most time consuming and expensive. So we put a little pencil to paper, and we kind of design this thing to work that way. And it took us almost, I'm gonna say almost two years to bring scan search to market. But in that time, we realized, wow, this is powerful stuff. And you know, part of the process was, Who's your competition? Is anybody doing it? How big is the marketplace? And we actually hired a firm to do all that for us. And they came back and they were like, Well, no, there is no competition doing this, how you're doing it, there are products that you could put together, you have to have the wherewithal to do it. And they're very expensive to bring this to the marketplace. But we figured out a way to do it as one package. Okay, so basically upload your documents, we process them in the cloud, you search by anything on those documents. I mean, that's as simple as it could possibly get. And so you know, about two years later, we actually, you know, formed the company scan search, and that's an entity now, and we provide this solution as a says, In other words, you can go to our website, sign up, and we've got a free trial. We've actually have a free version of it for smaller versions, if you want to try that out. And you're able to basically within minutes set up your department or your customers or your deposit Stories are your folders, whatever you want to call them, and start uploading documents to those sections of the system. And within minutes, you now have those documents accessible, full text, any word or phrase that's on there. And I guess, stop and think about that for a minute. That's pretty powerful. Because right now thatRon Bockstahler  5:17  will rub, you jump through 20 years pretty quick there, Matt. Let's so you know, look, I've known you for a long time. You've actually been into moto CLI for a long time. But it didn't. I never put it to, like scanning and OCR searching of a document. And so I think your business has evolved as every business I think has, I mean, 20 years ago, we didn't even think about the technology that we have today. Right? So right, you were thinking this 20 years ago, but you've kind of evolved, you've evolved, you know, the technology has evolved into what you are today, right? So this is why this came to market is you know, a lot about this industry.Mathew Dragatsis  5:54  Yeah, you know, like I said, to jump through that pretty quick, but that is pretty much all we've been doing. But you know, the technology has evolved, we've evolved with it, you know, in the beginning, in the very beginning, we can only do scan documents that we created. So they would be credit card applications, they would be insurance claim forms, they would be oh geez, you name it anything that you would fill out Omaha Steaks with our customer, there are there things that you fill out to order steaks that used to be in the magazines, and you send it in, but our system would read all that we did a deal. I won't name any names, but it was a government agency that dealt with a documented immigrants. And basically, they had a form that they had to fill out. And we did hundreds of 1000s of these a week for the IMS basically, and I won't tell you the firm that we were working with, because I can't but you know, that was a form that was filled out and sent in. And then we started dealing with kind of unstructured data, we got away from the remember the comb, and you put the letters in there. And, you know, the little circles that you would fill in and all that, you know, that's how we got our start. Now, that doesn't even exist anymore, that to my knowledge when you get to these high end systems. So now it's a lot more artificial intelligence, intelligence has come into play, where you know, we are trying to look for certain fields and look for things to put in there. But it's nowhere near perfect. I mean, it's far from it. But that's what we've been doing up until Scan Search. And yes, it has evolved quite a bit. But I just knew there was a big jump that we could take to to to make this the process of retrieving documents. That's really what we're giving our customers way easier. And I couldn't put my thumb on it for a while. I'm obsessed with this. So you know, what I've been thinking about for years, how do we make this better? And why we've seen all kinds of attempts with other companies, that sort of different sorts of things. But we're the first we know we were the first today anyway, are we happy, but they're really offers this all encompassing, simple, simple package, you sign up, you set your system up, it's a 10 minute process, if you have three different departments in your organization, and you want to have their own documents separated for security reasons, organizational reasons, what have you, you set up, you immediately start uploading all your documents.Ron Bockstahler  7:58  And I want to, I want to put this in a box because you know, most of my worlds in the legal industry. So we work with a lot of attorneys 1000s of law firms. And you know, I look at two boxes, I have ediscovery software, you know, we my firm, we use war room a lot, which is an ediscovery. Platform. And then you know, some people use a disco or relativity. So we're not really we're not talking about that correct? We're talking about Box or Dropbox or Microsoft product, SharePoint. OneDrive, or what Google so we're actually looking at a product that's more it's a document repository for anyone, but with the benefit is you can search by any word within that document.Mathew Dragatsis  8:46  Yeah, so let's just compare, we'll use Dropbox as an example. And it's going to be the same for Google Drive, or what have you, let's just say that you somebody sent you a wet signature scan PDF, and you're gonna store that in Google Drive, you're gonna upload that, and you're gonna probably put that in a folder for that, whatever, whatever case customer would have you. And if you want to bring that document back, you've got to go to that folder and look for it physically scroll to find it for a search by the file name, because they only find by file name for a scan image, or a neatly produced PDF, which would be a scan image to PDF. That's what you do with Drive Dropbox, or, you know, Microsoft products and have you would have it was ours, you do the same thing, you upload it. And but we can take it one step further. We now look at that document and we say okay, here's what's on the document. Let's make it available by any word or phrase, it's on that document, not just the filename, you can search by the file name as well, obviously today, but we take it away way, way more robust, a robust step forward by saying you can read the document back based on anything that's on it. Now. Sure, on the to avoid confusion here. If I upload a Word document, I can search for every single word at a time there but that's not what we're talking about. We're Talking about the documents that are either scanned or produced as a neatly natively produced PDF. Those documents, it cannot search on because it doesn't know what the words are. It's an image, it's a picture, it's the same thing as you took a picture of you and me, we uploaded it. It's that that useless when it comes to bringing it back. So what we do is we take it and we like I said, we do a full text analysis of it and make the all those words and phrases available to the user to bring that back. And what does that look like, maybe you want to bring back every document on a certain case, and you've got a particular word, the social security number, a case file number, what happened, whatever it is, if you type that in there, just that they're gonna get back every document. But if you bring if you type in that, and let's just say a particular word or phrase that you know, is on a particular set of documents, you type that into Google, you're gonna get only those back. So it's, it could be as refined as you want it.Ron Bockstahler  10:52  I love this. So I hadn't told you this, I signed up, I went, knowing you're coming on the show, I went and signed up for a user account with search scan. And I uploaded a few documents, personal documents might have one of my great little article there. My daughter wrote last year, why yell so much. And so I knew there's a couple words within that document. And I was able to type that word in I want to once emotionally. And it's a PDF that I basically just moved over into search scan. And I was able to search by the word emotionally and pull that document out of that. And I thought that that's slick. Now that's something that I can't do right now with OneDrive.Mathew Dragatsis  11:32  Yeah, oh, no, no, no, no, I mean, that was any of them. And the thing is, you can type in multiple words, or multiple phrases, and it'll bring it back, you know, think about in your mind what you're thinking before you do your search, just type that in, and it'll bring everything back.Ron Bockstahler  11:46  And look at this as a way to mean, first of all, it's a very secure, let's talk a little bit about the repository. It's a very secure repository, it's gonna be the same platform or similar as what you're gonna get it Box or Dropbox or OneDrive, it's just gonna have this added benefit.Mathew Dragatsis  12:00  It's a big added benefit. Yeah, I mean, store documents are just sitting there, it's the value comes in when you can get it back. Right. So yeah, if you want to talk about, you know, our security, that was a big, big important factor with any cloud based solution that holds data or documents. So we look to Microsoft, you know, to solve that, for us, we told them, we want the highest level we could possibly get. And so with scan search, when you're setting it up, you have the option to enable two factor authentication. And what that means is, or MFA with another multiple factor authentification is, before you sign in the first time, you have to either give them your phone number or your email address, and we're gonna go ahead and when you go to sign in, it's gonna, you're gonna get an email with a code, we've all seen this before, and you try to get it now you're in there, it's the highest level that you can pretty much get in this realm of security, because new security was going to be huge for HIPAA, and you know, things like, very sensitive data documents. And so that was because everyone's gonna ask, well, how secure is it? Well, according to Microsoft standards, we're about as secure as you can get with Microsoft as your little plug for Microsoft. Right? So you know, we have that added redundancy we have, it's just a great platform, and it's bulletproof. I shouldn't say that. It is well proven, you can get it.Ron Bockstahler  13:15  Right. Let's go back a little bit. You've been an entrepreneur. Now for 20 plus years, your business has had to evolve. They clearly have done a really good job of doing that. I think I'd known you a good portion of those years. Talk about being an entrepreneur, what are some of the struggles you've gone through? Because a lot of our listeners or your solo attorneys or small firm attorneys are just entrepreneurs that are gone through what they're going, you've been successful now for over 20 years? Tell us? How have you done that? And what some of the changes you've seen, and you had to adjust your business model?Mathew Dragatsis  13:43  Oh, yeah, that's huge. Great question. So I think as far as being an entrepreneur, I think one thing that I realized, not early enough, because we all have struggles going through these beginning of companies is that you really got to think down the road, you can't be a reactive person, when you're running a business, you really got to be strategic. And so I really went from being so excited as a young man starting, you know, the first company and then this one, and you know, you get caught up in all that it's a lot of fun, it's a lot of fun. But you get caught up in the moment, and you're not thinking, you know, a year or two down the road, typically. And I think over the years, I've personally mature to a point where I'm really looking at what to what's gonna go wrong. What's gonna go wrong, in two years from now, what's going on five years from now, you know, or what's gonna go right until I can act on it, and know it and see it. So I'm gonna say I spent a lot of my time and day is really thinking about not what's going on right now, although that's a part of my job. But part of the artwork of being entrepreneurs, we're we're going to take this, you know, where's that runner pointed? And you got to be on that. You got to be thinking that all the time, because things are coming at you all the time. And you know, what's the old saying, you can't control the wind, but you can adjust the sails. There is no truer statement and you're gonna have to burn your dodge here and your zag there and zig and that's, you know what you do? So that's as far as I was speaking to someone ensuring there's that's what I would say is that that goes, as far as maturing, you know, technology wise, you know, that's a full time job in itself. I mean, you know, technology grows exponentially. I'd love to show you some of the systems that we originally put in. I mean, they were like Atari, I mean, do you think video games now it was back then, you know, the first iterations of these OCR software is you actually need to connect the dots, you know, so you had, you know, you had your son, nine dots. And if you wanted a four, you basically did that. And that's because that's how sophisticated the lack of the OCR software was. And I go way back with a lot of these companies that develop these products. And, you know, we were just, we were, this was the cool stuff, all fax paper faxes coming in, you know, and you skate crazy stuff anyway, now, it's just so much further. So really, you know, if you're not evolving exponentially with the technology that comes out, you're gonna fall behind, or you're not gonna be able to capitalize on opportunities that are really out there for you, as a business owner, when you're buying technology.Ron Bockstahler  16:00  That's a great point, Matt, because I think, you know, people hear and I talk to the attorneys I work with, they're like, Yeah, we're not going to fall behind, because we're going to be taking care of our clients. But what you just a second part of that is, you're not going to capitalize on really what's out there, you're gonna miss out on opportunity. I know, we all we all work, because we love to work. We're also here to make money. You know, I like a lot of the terms, if you're not saving $250,000 A year before taxes, rethink how you're doing things. Because the truth is, I mean, if you're making that kind of money, you should have a program in place, it's protecting that money. But if you don't, then you don't sit and say, Hey, I got a goodness, perfect, because it's really not. And if you're not keeping up on this technology, as you're talking about today, and you do this as a full time job, so this technology is something you do his full time job, I can't keep up with it, I got to turn to someone like you to say, Hey, what's going on in this this world? And when I heard about this product, I was like, wow, that, that's pretty cool.Mathew Dragatsis  16:57  Yeah, I mean, and that goes back to, you know, you talk about that, relationships are huge. I mean, if you're a law firm, and you're kind of running the it part of it, you don't have the relationship, these people that you are watching them grow, like myself, and you want to stay in touch with those, whether it's for something like this, or whatever it might be. So I'm gonna say some of my six most successful customers have a team of vendors that they grow with. And you know, my job is always come up with new technology and be able to provide that to whoever. And I've got a list of, you know, 20 customers that I've been working with for since the beginning, 20 years. In fact, we just put a big one of these systems, it wasn't the SAS version of it. In a company, I've been dealing with this gentleman for probably 17 years now. And we have our conversation two, three times here, what's new, he calls me, I tell them, and they're great customer, but a lot of customers like that. It's the relationship with your vendors, that you know, they're there to sell to you, they want you to be educated. So you'll buy from them to make money. I mean, that's really leverage that leverage these people to help you become successful, and your goals.Ron Bockstahler  17:59  And that's where you got someone that's good. On the other end, that vendor partner, that's a good vendor partners thinking long term, they're thinking down the road, because they don't want to just have a deal with you today. They want to deal with you. You know, I mean, back when I first started out of college, I was selling copiers and the whole mentality. I mean, if you get caught up in it was day to day, but the truth was, if you sold a customer today, and you stay in touch with that customer, you're selling them again, in three years, maybe two years, they're gonna expand, they're gonna need another one, or they're gonna replace the one they have. So it's a, it's a repeat business. And once you get in, and you do a really, really good job for that client, and you're always taking care of them. And like you said, talking to him 234 times a year, you're building that relationship. And it's the same as you got a law practice, you might have a law practice and corporate law that that client uses you occasionally. But if you're always in touch with them, they're always going to come back to you if you do a good job. That's repeat business. You're not going to buy that business again, right? No, got market, you don't spend any money, that business is there for you.Mathew Dragatsis  18:54  Yeah, you better have your magnet on the refrigerator.Ron Bockstahler  18:57  Yeah. Gotta be in front of them. It's a it's a long term game, and you got to have that mentality. And it seems like that's, I mean, I know, I've had that when I got you started a year before? I did. Yeah, yeah, I just, I keep that mentality.Mathew Dragatsis  19:11  You have to and I'm learning, that's where we're marketing scan search way differently than we've traditionally marketed traditionally, you know, I'm selling big systems, you know, a quarter million dollar $2 million systems out there that are going in, and they're gonna have that system for five to 10 years, 15 years, I got some customers from the beginning that are still using the system. And that was a very, that was a of course back then, you know, you're wearing a suit and tie and you're bringing doughnuts in and you're having coffee and dinners and that that whole process completely changed. Okay, so now I get customers that I don't ever talk to because we're marketing this as a says, and I'll get to my point in this just a second but the people are signing up now I didn't mean I won't meet now if it's a gigantic customer doing a million documents month we're gonna want to meet them and and nurture that relationship but if otherwise, but we're going to constantly stay in contact with these customers via email, podcast posts, you You know, Merry Christmas emails, whatever, whatever postcards, whatever it's going to be, he got to be in front of these people all the time. And this is a new way of marketing for me. So we hired a great marketing firm, they're doing a phenomenal job, but they're putting us in front of several 100,000 people a week that are seeing our ads. And it's amazing how people will go from seeing an ad, very few sign up the first time, I mean, very few, very small amount. But we're at the our average, right now, they see that as seven and nine times for the actually sign up. So that means that they, we had to get in front of them seven, nine times to make them our customer. And then you have to keep doing that, obviously. And so this whole new way of marketing, and you and I have talked about this in the past, it's a radical departure from the way that we used to do business. I mean, there's no more hamstring. It's kind of bizarre. I mean, everybody is, and all I do is I sit in front of the dashboard, or I should say I check it daily, and seeing what's going on, you know, we're like, yeah, we're looking down the road to see what's trends, what's not going right, what's going right. But it's very bizarre to me to do business this way. Because I'm like you, you know, I used to traverse the industrial parks in Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois, with boxes of donuts, knocking on doors and those days, that although that was a lot of fun. But young kids do that anymore.Ron Bockstahler  21:11  I don't think you know, one thing you said that I don't think has changed is you had to be like a touches how many times you have to touch a prospect before they became a client and is usually in that six to eight range. So that doesn't seem like that's changed. You still got to have that touch. It's just the touches coming in a different way.Mathew Dragatsis  21:26  It's a different media, I mean, completely different. Yeah.Ron Bockstahler  21:29  No talk, I want to talk to the our attorney listeners because that's primary listeners much attorneys is, you know, getting a new client isn't someone you just like, if it's a referral, and they need a need today, but generally it's they need to stay they know about you, they see you they see your name, they start to in their subconscious, they start to build that trust in you comes comfortable, right? Because let's face it, we all say we trust someone, we don't do a ton of research. Because it's something major, we're not doing a whole ton of research, we start to believe that we trust them because someone told us we could or we seen their ads, and we've seen them a few times and all sudden they're built into our subconscious. And then when I actually need something, and I see that they say it's the attorney yet and I'm gonna get divorced. Boom, I'm calling them and I feel comfortable calling them. And I think that hasn't changed those touches. That's still the same. And it's it's interesting that you brought that up?Mathew Dragatsis  22:22  Well, if you think about it, we're still looking at we're still watching videos, they're just not TV commercials now their Facebook ad videos, or their tic tock or their what have you. So it's still a human being talking to you. I mean, it really is, that's our biggest thing is our videos, and our ads, of course, brands all linked to a video. I mean, that's kind of the thing, we want them to see our video because that's still a human face and voice that's talking to them about our value proposition. So yeah, you're right, that hasn't changed at all. But, you know, in the old days, Ron would be you'd be URI sitting in front of them, you know, across the desk, having a cup of coffee and explain to them, you know what your value proposition is? But yeah, this is just a river Max had drum from MTV. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. Okay. It's kind of like this is kind of like that now. He was like a virtual guy. That was I don't remember he was selling I'm sure it was video ads or whatever. on MTV. Some of your younger listeners, they're not gonna get no idea. Yeah, virtual here. It was a virtual human basically it it was hilarious. But that's the that's kind of what it reminds me of. I see my own ads. So it's not me. We've got, you know, the ads and actors and all that. But it's not real. It's a video that's being played, but boy, it sure does seem real.Ron Bockstahler  23:32  That's amazing. It's amazing where things are, and they're gonna keep continuing. Now let's talk about sketch search. Your products been out on the market now for how long? Seven weeks, seven weeks, you've got great activity you guys are I know you're building up really quick. So we're lucky to have you. I appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us. You've got new stuff coming on. So your products continually evolving?Mathew Dragatsis  23:52  Yes. Yes. A lot of cool stuff coming up. So like, can I touch on that for a minute? Absolutely. Okay. So originally, you were able to just upload documents, which in itself was a great way to do it super easy. Go to your directory, upload a million documents. And next, you know, they're all available planning word or phrase. So and that's great. But if you a lot of people get most of their documents emailed to them. So you know, they're going to get a scanned document, maybe it's been turned into a PDF, but it's got a signature on it. But we need to be able to, you know, put that in the system to store it, but we also need to get it. So right now, instead of downloading that document to desktop, and then maybe uploading it to our system, you basically get an email address for every department you have, or every box, whatever you want to label every file folder, probably not that close. But anyway. So now you're able to just take that email, look at the document and then just forward that email to your place where you're storing documents. And then that's it. There's no more that step of downloading and uploading again, that was going to be pretty important, obviously. So we released that a few weeks ago. It works great. I mean, you could just go through all your emails, and anything that's attachment on it, forward it to your scan, search email address, and that's all you do. That's all you have to do. There's never printing it. There's Never filing it. There's never scanning it. There's nothing, there's no downloading it. It just simply forward that email and we take care of the rest for you. Yes, you,Ron Bockstahler  25:08  Matt, you have tutorials out there for all these things.Mathew Dragatsis  25:11  Yeah. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. And it's, yeah, we put a lot of effort into our video production, it took forever to get done, but it's done. And if you go to the website, you know, you can see all this stuff, scan search.com, by the way, anyway. So we did that. That's how that's working. Right now we've got, we're gonna run the answering our viewer, right now we want it right now, when you search for a document that brings the document back, and you can then go ahead and search within the document and things like that. But we want to do it where when you This is one of the things we're working on now, where when you do your search, it comes back the document, the words are highlighted, and it takes you to what you searched on. Basically, we think that's a pretty cool feature that we're going to put in there, and I can't give you a date, it's gonna be available. But that's going to be big, it's not really necessary to do, but we think it's gonna be a nice feature to give to the customers. And then we talked about in right now in the drawing board is integration with other repositories. So we think it'd be very slick, to be able to go to Microsoft's OneDrive and search for what you're searching for, and be able to bring your documents back that way, or Google Drive or Dropbox, or vice versa. You know, these, we all have API's, which is basically a connection that makes other applications talk to each other. So you could go to, you know, scan search. com, log in search for what you're looking for, and it'll bring you back your scan documents that you uploaded or emailed or what have you to us. And everything else that stood out, you know it through. So we're working on that now that design is not solidified. It's a it's a big one to integrate with these these things. But we're hoping sometime, you know, next year, we'll have that and that that'll be nice. Is it necessary, no. But again, a nice feature to be able to give to our customers just kind of tie things a little bit better together. Because right now we do not, and we probably never will do it because we don't want to reinvent the wheel. But for Word documents, you know, we were talking about scan search, upload your document, search any word or phrase Great. Well, you can then now with electronic document, meaning a Word document or an Excel document, if you're in Google Drive, you know, they've got docs and in their spreadsheets and what have you. So if you upload a Word document to Google Drive, and you search for word or phrase on there, it'll bring the document back. But along with that you upload a scanned document, that document is invisible, you'll never see it unless you know the file name of it. So we'd like to maybe at some point in time, you know, bring all that together, just to make it more seamless, we're in the business of making things easier when it comes right down to it. And we use technology to do that. So these are just some of the things down the road that we're looking, we want to have to do it, we're coming up with a bulk upgrade, or a bulk upload the download a little chrome extension or a little app on your desktop, and you can upload millions of documents cuz we're gonna have customers, you know, I have customers now not using this, but our own technology. You know, I mean, we've got one customer, they upload a 12 million invoices a year, that's a lot of documents. And, you know, we're going to get them converted over to scanners. But it's a process. It's a big undertaking process wise for them. But everyone's on board, why we show them this? They're like, Oh, my gosh, where was this 10 years ago, you know, and another thing is, so that's the things that we're working on many other things as well. That's one of the key things we're working on, I guess the message here is, we're going to consistently try to make it better, you know, people working on the development, the design, or the user experience, and then just constantly rolling this out. The nice thing is, you know, we come up with idea, we design it, we test it, we make it ready, we push it to production, we're done. In the old days, you had to call 300 customers and go to every one of their servers and and do the upgrade, which was, you know, it took a year to do that sometimes. So, so this, yeah, it's, you know, it becomes available, you know, pretty much immediately, which is nice.Ron Bockstahler  28:49  Well, this is great. It's been I look, I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us a little bit about being an entrepreneur, but you know, really about scan search and talking about technology that's really changing the way we're doing things. I think it's gonna be a pretty big winner for you guys, for everyone. I thinkMathew Dragatsis  29:03  I'm seeing this. I've been doing this for 30 years scanning, extracting data, what have you. I mean, it's a great technology. I'm obsessed with it, I always have been. I truly believe that this is a disruptor in the industry that I've been in all this time. And the reason I say that is twofold. One, no one's doing it to the feedback we're getting far exceeds my expectations of what I thought we were going to get with this. And so with that being said, I think we've got a very disrupting to the industry product here.Ron Bockstahler  29:28  That's great. I wish it's great to see a mnemonic client from 20 years ago, doing great and going on a good friend of mine that I enjoy drinking some beers with. So Matt, I wish you all the best of luck and hopefully we'll get out and start touring some small cities and in some of those brew pubs we we well, thanks for coming on yet. Wait, so let's Matt You can reach Matt go to scan search.com That's the best way just go check it out. scanners.com you can reach Matt directly. Mount even What's your email Matt? What's the best way to contact could,Mathew Dragatsis  30:00  you know I'll tell you what did you want to do just enter gases at scan search comm that's how you can reach me directly. That's my personal email. But also there is a 800 number on the website asked to talk to me. And it'll get forwarded to me if you want to have conversation.Ron Bockstahler  30:15  But once we've had macro, match the CEO of scan search.com been doing a long time. And once again, man, I've known you many years. So I'm really, really happy to see this great success. And I wish you allMathew Dragatsis  30:25  appreciate the time I really appreciate you get in front of me the people that are going to run Thank you. Absolutely.Ron Bockstahler  30:29  Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to everyone next week we will be kicking off our marketing I guess it's gonna be look like marketing. Two months, we got a lot of marketing coming your way. So stick around and pay attention. We'll talk to y'all next week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Neal Amrhein is the founder and CEO and Matt Erickson is the CTO of My Goat. My Goat is a subscription mowing service for commercial properties. They use robotic mowers and elegant software tools to make turf care easy, convenient, and affordable. Follow Neal on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-amrhein-9398969/). Follow Erik on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-erickson-153fish/). My Goat (https://mygoat.co/) Follow MyGoat on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MyGoatCo), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MyGoatCo), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/my-goat-inc), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjV3ITbDvfqhQGIImFL5T7g/featured), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mygoatco/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is a couple of people from a company with actual robots. It's Neal Amrhein, the founder and CEO, and Matt Erickson, the CTO of My Goat. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. So tell me more about this idea that you are robot-agnostic? Are you helping people choose the solution that's right for them? Or do you have go-to vendors? NEIL: We do. So my philosophy, having spent a number of years in technology selling hardware and even software solutions, is that one thing that my experience has held is that hardware gets better, faster, and cheaper. And for us to invest in a hardware platform or have customers invest in a hardware platform, I liken it to my early adoption of high-definition televisions where in 2003, I was one of those guys that spent $2,400 on a 42-inch Sony Wega TV. And now you can get a 70-inch with a lot more technology and so forth for about $300 at Costco. So my feeling about hardware is it gets better, faster, cheaper. It's really the software that makes the difference in terms of how you leverage it. So we engage about 6 to 12 different hardware manufacturers that make autonomous robots from robots that are 27 to 35 pounds up to 1,200 pounds and all different variations in between. And then, we extract the communication tools so that we can help our users who are formerly the groundskeepers become technology groundskeepers. And they are now interfacing with the concept of autonomous robots that are mowing commercial properties 24/7, which we would actually call maintaining versus mowing. So we use nighttime, you know, day, night, rain or shine. So that's why we're robot-agnostic and welcome the latest and greatest designers and developers of hardware. We've got some folks that are just totally focused on designing, and developing, and building awesome autonomous robotic mowers with solar panels or great things that are going out there. And we're the software platform that brings it all together. CHAD: I totally get what you're saying about the progress of hardware and wanting to be in the business of creating value on top of that. How do you make sure that you don't take on the business risk of one of the manufacturers just providing the solution that you're providing? NEIL: Chad, we don't look at a business risk if there's a manufacturer that's going and selling autonomous robotic mowers. We welcome that, in fact, because that helps us with the adoption process. The idea of having, you know, Roomba is the de facto vacuum cleaner that goes randomly in your house. But there are half a dozen other hardware devices and opportunities, and they're all selling it. It's really how are you managing that Roomba? Which is also the subscription component of the Netflix part of our business, which is that Roomba may be a shark next year. It may be something else the following year. For our customers, we select the best hardware for their particular property, whether it's a golf course. They may have an autonomous robot that's manufactured by XYZ for the tee box and another one for the fairway, and another one for the greens. They just pay a monthly subscription for access to the software to manage those particular hardware pieces and optimize that hardware. And that's something that Matt will talk a little bit about. But we really have taken the approach that robots are just like cars. They'll sit in your garage 20 hours out of the week, but they're actually effectively useful 168 hours a week. So how do we maximize that and utilize the hardware itself? And that's what our software does. And of course, with that, we share that information with our customers and our users to continue to make it more efficient. CHAD: Thanks, Neil. Matt, what does the software stack actually look like that you're all putting together? MATT: So we got to talk about the technology so Laravel, PHP, MySQL. We host in DigitalOcean. And we have a WordPress front end, but the back end is all Laravel PHP. CHAD: And so it's in the cloud for all the customers? MATT: Yes. CHAD: And then how do you communicate with the fleet? MATT: So we connect through APIs. The hardware generally has an API that can give us status updates at various intervals. So we aggregate that information back. And then, we present a web-based solution dashboard that includes different views. We can get into the different users and how we've tried to meet their needs and drive workflow for them. But at a high level, we've got some graphical dashboards. And we also have some very tactical workflows for the guys. We call them shepherds taking care of our goats on the ground. CHAD: I know that you said it's autonomous, but how do you communicate with the robots when you need to? Is it radio frequency locally, or is it cell phones? MATT: So the robots actually come with…they have both GPS and cellular connectivity. So we have pretty good real-time connectivity with the robots. So we can remotely control them. We can park them, or we can send them back to their charging stations, different features like that. You can adjust cutting height, things like that, remotely. We also use just text messaging, SMS for communicating with shepherds. It's kind of real-time feedback. So yeah, let me dig in a little bit, the autonomous idea of the robot. Yeah, we want them to be autonomous. And we work with our shepherds, groundskeepers so that each of the goats works in a pen, an area defined by that in the ground kind of like an invisible fence dog wire type thing. But basically, we work with the shepherds, and we have this training certification process. But basically, they can get that pen to an area where really what we shoot for about 72 hours of the robot should be able to operate autonomously within that pen for about three and a half days. And then shepherds will be instructed to move that robot to another pen for about three and a half days. Usually, one robot is taking care of…it ends up being about two and a half days. And that's kind of the way the software solution is driving that efficiency of people time as well as robot time. The robots can mow 24/7. They take care of the grass. They maintain it, as Neil mentioned earlier. So it's not throw the robot out once a week kind of thing. You have to change your thinking. A lot of what we deal with when we go to a robot solution over that traditional status quo mowing we really have to help people through that thought process of this is not how it used to be. It works differently. But yep, that's kind of the solution. CHAD: I feel like I need to ask, even though it's going to be a little bit of a tangent. MATT: [laughs] CHAD: How did you arrive at the name of My Goat and take the leap on a quirky name like that? NEIL: Yeah, it's a great question. [laughs] First of all, I think that I first saw one of these robots through a YouTube video about three and a half or four years ago. And you may or may not know this, Chad, but there are about 3 million of these things that have been sold since 1995. So this is not bleeding edge technology in any way, shape, or form. When I saw it on a YouTube video, it just kind of hit me that wow, these things are out there doing their thing day or night, rain or shine. And interestingly enough, the market, I guess the landscape market, the residential side, was somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 to $80 billion that we were targeting and looking at. And as far as the goats, I had talked to some early folks who were marketing folks, and we just settled on Goat. And then we put my on the front end of it. And before we knew it, we had My Goat. And as we've evolved from just a cool robot-centric organization that's using software, we've evolved into an organization that's really teaching shepherds how to become interactive with the goats. And it's taken a life of its own. The blades are called teeth. CHAD: [laughs] NEIL: And those are some of our…of course, the goats need to be brushed. They don't get washed, or they don't get sprayed down with water, but they get brushed. And there's the whole the operating system is the heart and all kinds of stuff that's been going on. CHAD: Well, I feel like with a name like My Goat, if you're not going to commit and carry that branding through to everything, what's the point? [laughter] NEIL: Right. Yes, it has taken a life of its own. And it's interesting. I don't know that it's the most catchy name for a software technology company. But it's certainly gotten some folks' attention, and it's helped. Let's put it this way: our marketing team really enjoys everything about what they can do with it. CHAD: Well, and there's something to having a brand and carrying that through in the naming that causes ideas to resonate with people and makes them special. At the end of the day, you're mowing lawns. And so making it special and communicating that you have something special, I think, is something that people can do regardless of what their product is thinking of ways of doing that. NEIL: Yeah. And I would add that I think the only pushback we've received on the name is probably from some of our high-end golf course users and prospects who don't want to turn their golf course into a goat track, so to speak. CHAD: [laughs] NEIL: But that's probably the extent of it. But overall, it's been well received without a doubt. And as we're focused on the software component of interacting with autonomous robots, our software development mentality and our vision is that it may be the same thing applied to 500 Roombas inside of a million square feet at a fulfillment center for Under Armour. And instead of having 50 people cleaning the floors, you may have five people managing 500. And how do they do that effectively and efficiently? So there's really a business-focused component of the vision that I've had for the business. And that's helped me, along with many others, to get us to where we are. MATT: I'm just going to jump in. You're right; the name sticks and people really adopt to the shepherd mentality. We get a lot of requests for shepherd crooks. [laughs] They all want a shepherd staff. CHAD: So along those lines, when people are considering working with you, what are some of the questions or concerns that they have about a solution? NEIL: Sure. So it's disruptive, Chad. I think I could probably start by saying the traditional way of maintaining or mowing commercial properties is that you have a big guy and a big machine, and how fast does it go? How much noise does it make? How many grass clippings get blown all over the place? You get in, and you get out. And then you start over. So in the state of Tennessee, where we are here, it's about 34 to 36 weeks of mowing a year. In Michigan, it's 17 to 22 weeks, depending on where you are. In South Florida, believe it or not, I know there are only 52 weeks, but they're mowing 56 to 58 times a year. So it's the frequency of going and mowing and blowing, right? CHAD: Mm-hmm. NEIL: We're changing that by saying, why be worried about the weather? Why would you be worried about darkness? Why would you be worried about noise regulations when you can have the grass maintained all the time? So that mentality of maintaining essentially two football fields a week up to three football fields a week with less than 35 minutes of labor. There is nothing in comparison. There's nothing you can compare with the traditional what we call the status quo to make that happen. So the labor efficiency and improvement in labor productivity is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the cost savings and the financial payback. So because we are so disruptive, a lot of what we do, and a lot of the time we spend, and one of our core values is being educators. So back to your question about manufacturers selling their own proprietary hardware; absolutely, the more the merrier. We welcome. To me, the sign of success and progress is not the small city block that has one gas station but has four gas stations on the corner. It just now means there are cars that are driving around. And so, I embrace that level of competition. I believe iron sharpens iron. And folks who are traditionally in the landscape space who have made trimmers and blowers and chainsaws are now finding a little bit of competition with folks who are now solely focused on making unbelievably efficient autonomous robotic mowers, or cleaners, or robots in general, which is, again, we're not crashing giant robots although that's the name of your podcast. [laughter] We're not trying to crash them or break them. But it is certainly the foundation for where we are. MATT: Hey, Neil, you've got a good analogy. I think analogies help explain concepts. So you want to run through your airport analogy with the runways and the different airlines? NEIL: Yeah, I could share that with you. Thanks for reminding me. So my philosophy about…we sell subscriptions that are based upon a geography, Chad. CHAD: Size of geography, you mean? NEIL: Yeah, the size of the geography. So it's about a football field, give or take. Based upon some limitations with technology, we put invisible dog fences in the ground, and we charge our users, our subscribers by the particular pen or the number of pens, and then there's a ratio. So much like in an airport, we're not selling flights; we're selling runways. And those runways are accessible by all kinds of…you may have 30 terminals at the gates, and you may have five different airlines. And each of those airlines has a different brand and name, but they're using multiple hardware components. Those jets are maybe McDonnell Douglas, or maybe they're a Boeing or whatever it may be. All of that is fine by us. What we do is we have the software that runs the gates, the terminals. So you have Southwest in terminal two and Delta in terminal 32. And they're using our software to figure out how to get the baggage on the planes and get those planes off the ground so they can make money for their businesses. So we look at it that way. And that's kind of where our IP rests is in that spot in that place. And, again, there'll be other airlines, whether it's Allegiant or whomever buying more Boeing planes. But ultimately, they'll all need a runway, and the software that manages the process and the workflow is what we're focused on. CHAD: So, is the total cost of ownership of autonomous solution typically lower than what they are doing today? NEIL: It is, specifically, the labor improvement is generally about 3x in terms of improving the efficiency of the labor. So if you talk about an average groundskeeper who may be responsible for mowing, if it's a perfect day outside mowing nine acres a day and they are out there five days a week, they may have efficiencies of maybe up to 40 or 45 acres a week. With our solution, that is increased to about 135 to 145 acres a week where they can maintain about 70 mowers, 70 autonomous robotic mowers, or 70 goats as we call them. They'll herd 70 goats with the same full-time employee. So that's one aspect. With that, the immediate reaction is, well, you're eliminating jobs. We're actually redeploying jobs. I'm a builder. I'm a job creator. I've had 4,800 folks work for me in my home care business over the last 12 years. And so, I'm a big believer in improving and deploying folks in areas that we don't have robots. So, for example, there's no robot right now that's pruning trees or making up a sand trap, robots that are planting flowers or putting mulch in a flower bed. So those kinds of jobs are still out there. We're just making the traditional idea of throwing somebody on a mower in the middle of a cemetery or golf course or open space and having them manage that through our software platform sitting in their F150 pushing start and stop or pause and doing other things. CHAD: Instead of riding on the mower. NEIL: You got it. MATT: A lot of our potential customers come to us because (we kind of touched on that) there's a labor shortage. It's hard for folks to find people that want to ride zero-turns. So to Neil's point, we're not about deploying robots, kind of one for one replacing jobs. It's basically we're taking the labor force that we can get, that we have, and we're retraining them to be more efficient through these robots. Pretty age-old story when you're talking about industrialization. But the idea is we haven't displaced workers. They're not hiring fewer people. They're taking everybody they can get. And they're doing all of that value add. The groundskeepers now have time to go out and do the mulching and the landscaping, trimming, improving the property. A lot of these groundskeepers have a lot of pride in their property. And they would rather be doing the items that to them are a value add and beautification projects rather than just riding a Back 40 or a zero-turn. We had one shepherd say, hey, it's really helped his back. Riding a lawnmower is kind of rough. And walking around every now and then helping out a robot is a whole lot easier of a physical life for you. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So I saw on the website because of the kind of solution and the scale that it's at, it seems like you have a few different key customer bases. You want to talk about that and whether you knew that going in, or did you find them along the way? NEIL: Yeah, that's a great question. So we came out of the gate initially with early investors. We were focused on what we considered was the low-hanging fruit in the residential space. So we had designed and developed the operational and financial template to actually have shepherds who were employees of My Goat. And we would have the Goats sold in a subscription model to residential customers. And then we'd have the goat stay on a property and then get moved, et cetera. But we learned very quickly that business to consumer and residential customers it's not that impossible; it just was not as low-hanging fruit as we had thought initially because folks leave rakes in the yard. And anytime a goat comes upon a rake, it's going to get trapped, and therefore it needs to be rescued. And you have to send a shepherd out, et cetera. Or somebody decides to put a new vegetable garden, and they break the wire that's in the ground. They're just a bunch of…, or there's a dog chasing the robot or a little kid out there, or somebody stops it. So those required a lot of…it didn't make the robot autonomous. So we pivoted in late 2019, early 2020 into the commercial space. We expired all of our subscriptions to residential customers and went completely into the commercial space. And we had had some success with some golf courses and some cemeteries. And we've gained a lot more momentum now with cities and counties, regional airports. But large open areas that are a minimum of five acres, typically we would run a pilot or a preview with at least 12 to 14 acres. But the biggest restriction, of course, when you get into those large open areas is electricity because they've been traditionally maintained or mowed by gas-powered machines. So back to your other question about where the savings is and the payback period, and how we have an immediate impact. There's an operational savings that is pretty quick in terms of the return because we flatten out a lot of the ups and downs that a traditional landscaper has. So let's take a golf course, for example. The average golf course spends about $80,000 per hole per year and depending on the course, 45% to 60% of that is spent on mowing, mowing machines, and people involved. And we're able to take that, and they're hiring temporary people in March here in the south, and they have them here until October. So they're having to go through that cycle every single year. So if they can flatten that operational expense out by redesigning the golf course and having…and maybe it's not 100%. Much like a Roomba, you still have to get the corners and the edges, maybe with a broom if it doesn't get into every nook and cranny. So it's not a 100% solution. It's not for every application. But as we moved into the commercial space, we found a greater payback period not only on the cost of the gasoline is...you know, take a zero-turn mower. And again, I say that's probably our greatest competitor is institutionalized thinking to say, this year we're going to buy a big green, big red, or big orange machine for $16,000 or $18,000, Kubota, Toro, or John Deere. And we're going to do the same thing we did last year. We're going to find a guy who can operate it. We're going to put gas in it, and we're going to run it around. Well, you put hours in those things, and they're very costly to maintain if you hit a root. So you've got to make sure that you can't run a 1,800-pound mower when it's been raining for three days. So what do you do with a fairway when it's soggy or any other commercial area that could be…or a hill that could be dangerous. So we've found a lot of application and then, of course, the environmental part of it, Chad. So the average zero-turn emits the equivalent of a carbon footprint every hour it's running about 300 miles of a Toyota Camry running. So they haven't become more efficient. And then you've got noise regulations and so forth in a lot of communities. And even in California, they're moving in the direction of I think it's 2024 where gas-powered and oil-powered landscaping blowers and tremors, et cetera, are not going to be allowed, or you'll be fined for using them. So that's the third component of where My Goat has seen some opportunities in the commercial space. CHAD: You mentioned that they can run at night. So they must be quiet. They must be. NEIL: Yes, they are. And it's not the traditional…you're not making as much of a mess. Some of our cemetery customers have mentioned that the fact that their trimming has been reduced by up to 50% because they're going up and over markers because they only weigh 27 pounds. They're mostly plastic and rubber. They're not doing any damage to vases. So they're having a cost reduction in that regard but also with the uprights. Folks have their family members in a particular private estate area where they may have an upright, and if you have a zero-turn mower out there throwing and splashing grass clippings, you're likely having to go out there again with more labor and take a blower and clean up the mess that the mower made. So these little small operational components along with the experience. Again, back to the cemetery, you're asking about why we're there. We know that industry very well. And we know that the experience that loved ones want to have when they're out there celebrating life and grieving across a 40 or 50-acre property. They don't want to hear a zero-turn. So you're turning those things off three or four times a day for those services, and you're having that individual parked a quarter-mile away. No longer is that an operational challenge or a concern because all of these robots are being controlled, start, stopped, and programmed through our software. CHAD: That's really cool. So you mentioned investors and the early pivot away from residential to commercial. What does your funding story look like? And what phase did you get to when you took on investment? And let's start there. How did you find your initial investors? And what phase were you at when you did that? NEIL: Yeah, that's a great question. So we went through the traditional friends and family and moved into an angel round, but really I started my first company…bootstrapped it. And so, I wasn't really proficient in raising money in the traditional sense. I had an idea, put a business plan together. And I talked to a couple of folks and just told the story. To be honest with you, Chad, I wasn't really asking for money. I was more or less asking for advice. And then a number of folks were like, "Are you taking money? I'd like to take an equity position." And so, we structured the business and the shares on a pre-revenue valuation. And then, within 14 months, we were able to double that valuation. And we're now opening a new round here and a Series A with a valuation that's nearly five times our initial valuation. So we're making a lot of progress because we have, again, it's an annual recurring revenue stream. It's a subscription model. And what we did with our investors in the early rounds is many of them came on, and they just wanted to be silent. They were not interested in having an opinion. They wanted me and my team to run it. So that's been very helpful. So that's where we are in 2022. We'll be opening and closing a Series A. And I certainly can get more specific with others about that if your listeners or audience are interested. CHAD: So when you think about a Series A, what will you be using that for? What are your next scaling goals? NEIL: My commitment to my investors in the previous two rounds has been to sales and technology, so sales, business development, and technology enhancement to the software, so hiring more developers, scaling that team. Matt's leading the vision, and we've got a number of other folks who are involved in the user experience. But again, because we're a software company, it starts with a demonstration that's usually 15 or 20 minutes that can be scheduled through our website at mygoat.co. And it goes from there. On the sales side and business development is telling the story. In those verticals, we're interested in building out potentially even reseller markets with other industries that are aligned with us. We've had some very high-level conversations with folks that sell electricity for a living. The Tennessee Valley Authority we became an early preferred partner with them and because they have carbon credit that they can offer and sell to their customers, their local power companies. And they're in the business of selling power. And we're in the business of providing subscriptions that require power. CHAD: What are some barriers to continuing to scale? Do you have geographic barriers? NEIL: I have self-imposed geographic barriers, [laughter] So it's a Neil Amrhein barrier. But overall, our barriers, our challenges really are; I've never heard of these things before. Do they actually mow? So we get through those conversations fairly quickly. But depending on who we're talking to, it also becomes a fear. People fear change and especially things that are disruptive. So our barriers, once we get through the fear, is we don't have any electricity here on this golf course, or this city park, or this regional airport that there is unlimited electricity. So we can pull whatever electricity is necessary there. So it is really the barriers of education, just like anything that's truly disruptive in an industry that's been doing the same thing for 45 or 50 years. CHAD: So you already talked about how you view potential competition from manufacturers, but how do you view competition in general? Is there other competition out there? NEIL: The biggest competition we have is institutionalized thinking, which is doing the same thing we did last year. So that's a battle that we have every day. I like competition because I think it makes the end product, and the customer is the one who benefits the most from having lots of people in the market no matter what their angle is. We like our position because, again, we're not the hardware manufacturer. We're able to work with others. We're the financial advisor that gets to work with the insurance guy and everybody else, where all your money is with your college buddy who's managing it, et cetera. We're agnostic. We're putting it all together. So it benefits everybody. And those who make and manufacture these robots get the benefit as well because it's part of the subscription process as far as that's concerned. But the more, the merrier. A lot of people come to me and say, "Well, I saw an autonomous robotic mower out on this lawn or in the neighborhood here." And that's good for us. CHAD: Matt, I assume that being robot-agnostic means that you need to integrate with the different systems. Does that have challenges? MATT: You know, not really. Robots are, as far as the autonomous robotic lawn mowers, they're pretty much telling us the same thing. There are status updates; there are battery updates; there are GPS coordinates. It does tend to be a pretty common data set that we're seeing. So it's been a lot easier than I thought. When you think about…data integrations are always the top challenge you have. It's worked out a lot better than we thought initially. CHAD: Well, that's great. Has there been anything surprising the other way which was something you thought was going to be easy turned out to be a lot harder? MATT: Yeah. We've had a manufacturer that actually had a tiered concept in their data availability. They weren't giving us all of the data that they had. They were saving it because they were running their own kind of hey, you can use home automation techniques to integrate with your residential autonomous robotic lawnmower. Hey, if it's raining at your house, we could park your robot. So they were kind of hiding some of the API from us. We were able to work through that. But I think that goes to one of your questions about concern around competition from the manufacturers. They're really not looking at this from that niche that we're hitting, that commercial perspective. Maintaining one Roomba in your house is the analogy I use. You kind of know where he gets stuck, and you go find him. And that's okay. You don't need a lot of software for that. But that analogy Neil mentioned, if you have 500 of these guys running around a warehouse, or for us, we have property with 50 robots on. How do you know which one right now -- CHAD: And the space that that takes up. MATT: Right. Right. CHAD: You can't see them all necessarily even. MATT: [laughs] Exactly. You can't. You can't just walk around and see everyone and visually check. You need that software to be efficient to know; oh, there are three things I need to do today with the robots. Let me plan that out, and let me take care of it. So I think, like Neil said, the manufacturers out there they're making lawn equipment. They're making lots of different hardware. And to them, fleet management is really where is my hardware right now? [laughs] That's the extent of it. And they can't think about a property that needs maybe two or three different manufacturers of hardware because properties are not one homogeneous set of type of grass. There are always different needs, different features on that property. So there's always that idea that we're going to need a couple of different manufacturers, maybe. So, yeah, it's really interesting. For me, I think it's we're really hitting a home run in an area that there really aren't any other competitors exactly in our niche. And if there are, I think the industry for us what we do is at a place where we need more adoption out there in the world. [crosstalk 34:03] CHAD: Do you ever hear from early adopters? People who say they've either already bought autonomous mowers and they're struggling to manage them, or they really want to, and they're coming to you to do it? NEIL: That's a great point. I have a couple of thoughts here because you guys are going in a lot of different directions here. MATT: [laughs] NEIL: Chad, the short answer is when people buy anything early on, they're going to have the proverbial challenges of who supports it when it breaks? Who do I call? What happens next? It just goes on and on and on, whether it's a hardware platform, and that's mostly the case, or it's something else. It's what does that support look like? So the early adopters when we talk about their experiences, and this is one of the things I would say is probably our biggest challenge is that we have created a learning management software platform, a video library of how do you work with robots? We know that they're going to get trapped. There is no doubt that a 27-pound autonomous goat if there is a lightning strike like there was here in Nashville last night, they're going to be tree limbs that are down. And there'll be goats that are trapped. And it's going to take a human being, a shepherd, to be notified via SMS alert to proactively go to that spot on that property across 50 or 100 acres and rescue that goat. And it's just a matter of these kinds of things happen environmentally. So we talk about, when we talk to customers, about their utilization of the goat. And we talk about optimizing their property. It's not really that the goat doesn't graze or the robot doesn't work. It's what are the restrictions and the environmental challenges that are in front of it? If there are erosion issues around a marker or in a large open field, and if it's a really well-groomed practice field or intramural field, it's likely going to be aerated. It's going to be very flat, et cetera. But most commercial properties are not that way. So the goats actually have a tendency to go out, and they're going to find all those environmental challenges. And it requires a human being to go out there and fix them. Because if the environmental challenge is that there's a hole and on a horse farm, it's going to be there until somebody throws some dirt in it. It's just the reality. And that goat is going to find that environmental challenge every single time. So there is a learning curve that goes with it. There's a level of patience. And I think you mentioned what's our challenge? Our challenge is letting folks know that it's an evolution, not a revolution, as far as what your property is going to look like. I spent a number of years at the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, and we talk about property health as is it a two-star property, a three-star property, four-star property, five-star property? We recognize that a lot of commercial properties are going to just be a two-star. But potentially, they could be a three-star property. Or if it's a cemetery and you've got a goat that's maybe found environmental challenges on a cemetery, it also becomes a liability or risk for family members who go visit their loved ones. So now we're using the robot proactively to improve the status of the property as opposed to saying, well, it just gets trapped every time it finds a hole or every time there's a situation that goes on. So it does require an active level of engagement and maintenance. And the philosophy has to be changed so that groundskeepers are now checking their phones or being alerted at 7:15 in the morning. And they may go rescue Billy, the goat, because a lot of folks name their robots. [laughter] They're going out there, and they're in pen 34,27, 31. And then at lunchtime, they may have another two or three of the same goats that were trapped, need to be rescued, and then again at 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon. So it's a maintenance mentality as opposed to a mow and go mentality. So that is philosophically a big change in terms of their mindset. CHAD: So what's next for My Goat then? You mentioned the Series A. Is there anything in particular on your radar that you're either worried about or are looking forward to? NEIL: Looking forward to more folks like your audience and listeners hearing our story. I'm in the business of telling our story. And I welcome, again, the competition because that means there's validation for what's going on. I don't think we're going to stuff this genie back in the bottle, so to speak. It's going to be hard for me to believe that five, six years from now, folks are going to be out there firing up a push mower that they just bought at Lowe's when they can buy something at Lowe's that's $250 for a residential robot that they get to use. Same thing on the commercial space. I don't know what it ultimately looks like from a vision perspective. But I think our challenge is continuing the messaging, the adoption, enhancing the payback period. It is really just like any good technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, et cetera. I mean, that combination. I hold the position, Chad, that I don't really think any technology is being developed or new per se since the invention of the internet. It's the application of the technology. It's what are people doing that they weren't doing before? We have the communication tools with 5G or what have you that we didn't have five or six years ago that we can now ping our goats every 15 minutes and find out what their status is. And then we can report that back to the user and say, "Hey, your optimization or utilization on your hardware and your subscription is X, Y, and Z. And your return on investment is six months to 16 months." That's where I think it elevates the conversation of efficiency and changes the game. So our next steps are continuing to get the message out, embrace not only users but industries we haven't thought about. I mentioned horse farms that just came on my radar screen not too long ago. We've had some success with cities and counties. You can imagine…everything one of our core values is green is good, and time is a number. So you just drive down the interstate, and you can see so much green everywhere as far as opportunities ahead. And there's plenty of room for lots of people to play in this space. We welcome more and more of probably the designers and developers that you got on this podcast to come up with the latest and greatest hardware and make those APIs available for Matt and his team to integrate and continue to grow. CHAD: That's great. If folks want to reach out to you to either learn more or see if you can work together, where are the best places for them to do that? NEIL: Sure. Let me first direct them to www.mygoat.co. And there are a series of areas there where it's either click on a demo now or information. Our phone number is listed there as well. I'll also give you my email address, which is Neil, N-E-I-L neil@mygoat.co, so neil@mygoat.co. And Matt's is just matt@mygoat.co as well. And those are probably the fastest way to connect with us. And if they put in a quick subject line your name and your podcast, it'll bubble everybody to the top a little faster. CHAD: Wonderful. Thank you both for joining me. I really appreciate it. MATT: Absolutely. Thank you, Chad. NEIL: Thank you for having us. CHAD: And I wish you all the best. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guests: Matthew Erickson and Neal Amrhein.

Matt Courtois and I talk about how to incorporate movement into language classes.Ross Thorburn: Matt, welcome back to the podcast. To start off with, why is movement important? Because I must admit, it's something that I try to include in every lesson I do, whether it's teaching kids or adults or even doing training for teachers, so for you what why is it important?Matt Courtois: It's important for a few reasons. First is, a lot of parents and students sign up for courses at learning centers, because they want something that's more interactive and fun. That's one reason, I don't necessarily think that's the most important.I think, with young learners, they have a lot of energy as well, and sitting and listening to a teacher for an hour is not a realistic expectation, they do need to get up and move around to work off some energy.Ross: If you watch what students do when they're unsupervised. For example, if you teach kids and there's a break in the middle of the class, watch kids playing when they're not being supervised by a teacher, they're probably usually running around, so if you force them to sit down, you're going against the natural flow of what they want to be doing.I don't think that means you mean to get the kids running around all the time, but I think need to get them at least doing what they would naturally do some of the time.Matt: You can see them in classes with young learners especially, you can see their legs start to shake, like at that point, they can't focus on learning, they're focusing on staying in their seats and not running around. That's what they're focused on. They can't focus on whatever it is that teachers talking about. I don't think that's necessarily the most important reason. To read the rest of the transcript, click here

Time flows strangely in the era of the pandemic.  Sometimes you go out on what seems like a four hour walk, and barely two hours have passed.  Or you might sit down on the couch in what you thought was the morning and suddenly it's 4PM and you have no idea how that's even possible.  Here on this podcast episode is a rare change up for Data Center Therapy; there's almost no mention of the datacenter!  Instead, Matt “Bonjour” Yette and Matt “You have a Rendezvous with a uPnP problem?” Cozzolino melt away thirty-five minutes into what feels like a quick ten minute catch-up with a friend about their home automation adventures.  The Matts talk about Home Assistant and HomeKit here, but this time, it comes loaded with stories about compromises (for the sake of home automation) and the “buyer beware!” security implications of the technologies they've played with.  We promise: it's still a fun one. You, our curious listeners, also get to hear: Which robotic vacuums and mops have the Matts looked at (and bought?) How automating things can truly just shift around tasks that you do instead of eliminating them. What happened at a bank inside of a grocery store that made Cozzolino rethink what duties workers have nowadays? For the network propeller heads, you'll get to hear about some of the backend technologies and protocols (like mDNS, or the Avahi daemon on Linux) powering some of the newer devices and applications emerging.  Gadget-loving listeners who love a good debate can rest soundly knowing the Z-wave versus Wi-fi tech battle continues unabated.  Listen in for the latest on cutting-edge home tech with the Matts, and as always, be sure to like, share, and subscribe wherever finer podcasts are found.  Stay safe, get automated (but stay secure!) and keep a lookout for our all-new episodes, DCT friends!  

Welcome back to another episode of Data Center Therapy where the topic this week is all things security related.  With your hosts Matt “You sure you wanna kick that can down the road?” Yette and Matt “The answer is: It Depends!” Cozzolino, the intrepid DCT Duo has a quick and fun but also informative podcast all around Information Technology Security this week. In this episode, the Matts answer a few white-hot, timely and relevant questions such as: Is the sole purpose of SD-WAN to reduce costs by eliminating proprietary networking circuits? Is there a way to implement a SIEM without full time engineers manning a security NOC 24x7? In a zero-sum budget game, what's the solution to security issues - endpoint protection, firewalls, multi-factor authentication (MFA), or microsegmentation? Join us on this fast and light run through the landscape of security technologies, where you'll get a high-level overview of the technologies and solutions that the Matts work with and prescribe for the folks they help.  As always, the Matts keep it funny and refreshingly frank, so give it a listen and if you like it, be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever finer podcasts are found.  Thanks for listening and stay safe, stay informed, harden those security postures, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Data Center Therapy!

Allen: All right, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast today I have with me, Matthew D'Ambrosi .He's one of our passive traders. And he's gonna be telling us how he got started and how he's doing pretty well right now. How are you doing, Matthew? Matt: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Allen: Cool. Cool. So how'd you get started with Option Genius?  Matt: Well, I have to actually go back, it's been quite a journey, I have to say, you know, it's more like a 15 year journey for me. Allen: Wow. You know, I was given a book by my sister at age 30. And I was a young guy, and I was just more not interested in reading books just kind of floating through life, didn't really have much direction. And the book was called "Automatic Millionaire" by David Bach. Allen: Okay. Matt: In that book, I wasn't really interested in reading it, but she handed it to me. So I said, at least go through it. And I started thumbing through and I came upon a compound interest chart. And it showed, you know, you're 19 years old, and you put $2,000 into an IRA, or Roth IRA, and you did that, and you continue to do that, it would be well over a million by the time you're 65. So I was caught immediately by that. And that's kind of where my journey began. So I took that information, and started reading more books. And I came across Dave Ramsey. He's kind of like a financial soldier, if you will, you know, to get out of debt. Yeah, kind of get your stuff together. And I started, I always thought about making money and you know, retiring early, it was always a thought of mine, it was a gold mine, it was definitely what I wanted to do. And I always felt like 65 is when I would do it just like everybody else. And I continue to read more, I read numerous articles and books. And about two years ago, I went to a workshop, and I was learning how to invest. And they introduced me to options and selling options. And I was told that everyone else was told, you know, it was risky. Don't touch it. There's a whole another world to me. Allen: Have you done any stocks or options before that? Matt: No, absolutely not. Allen: No stocks either? Matt: Not really, you know, I was more into mutual funds, I had gave my money to an advisor, I just believe that people had your best interest. And they're great advisors out there. I'm not saying they're not. But it really started me to take a hard look about how money is handled. And you're much better off if you take the plunge and believe in yourself and start looking into deeper and see that they can really work out for you if you're willing to take or have the interest really to go and look at that. So I started paper trading. And then I was wondering who else does this so I started searching. And then I came across your name, and I have to hand it to your master marketer. I've never had anyone hit my inbox like you. So I started listening to all your podcast, taking little by little, you know, all the information that you give out there and started little by little paper trading. And then I started making money slowly, you know, doing one contract, then adding two. And then now I'm pretty much on my goal to replace my income. And that's my ultimate goal so... Allen: Awesome. Matt: Just a regular guy, you know, I just kind of happy to be here. I'm really happy to be here today. Because I want to get the message out that you know, you're teaching just normal people like me, who have no experience at this. And it's really a wonderful thing if you're willing to get a hold of your fears and take a stab at it. Allen: Right. So you started about two years ago, you said? Matt: Yeah, about two years ago yeah. Allen: Oh two years ago. Okay. And you're still working? Matt: I am, yep. Allen: Okay, what do you do during the day? Matt: So I'm a forklift driver and it's tough work. It's very laborsome. And trading has allowed me to look at money in a different way. I just don't look at money as scarce as it was. So it's a whole different mindset. Allen: Yeah. So how do you find time during the day to trade? Matt: Generally I don't go until about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I go on to 2:30 at work so I spend the mornings pretty much studying and paper trading and learning and then even after work at 11 o'clock, sometimes I'll be up till 1am or so learning as well and paper trading and trying to think about things and whatnot so.. Allen: So you're all in? Matt: All in, absolutely. They say burn the ships and I burnt them. Allen: So what was your first trade? Matt: First trade I did was credit spread. I did far away from the money for about just one contract and I made like 18 bucks. It wasn't much but you know, you're, you talked about the options continuum. That was in that stage where I was very nervous and you know, you have these feelings and you feel like you're gonna lose all your money. And that's not true, if you study and really take what you have to teach, and I took it very slow and got into it. So after that, after you do, there's something about to do first live trade, it kind of clicks with you like, okay, that wasn't so bad, you know, not the think of the worst that can happen. So, yeah, I did it. And it's been a, you know, I'm gaining confidence each and every week. And, yeah, we just continue to evolve on that continuum. Allen: Cool. So if I can recap. So basically, you want to get into investing because you didn't like where it was going. And you didn't want to wait around till 65 to, you know, have a nest egg and retire and have somebody else in charge of your money. So you started looking at it for yourself, and you've been putting in time you've been studying, researching trading, paper trading? What else is it that you want to achieve, besides just the money aspect? Like what what is it about the trading that is, you know, speaks to you on a deeper level? Matt: Yeah, I think the main part and it's different for everybody, for me, it's actually you know, as you get older, you realize you don't know how much time you have on this earth. And, you know, you start looking at things like, Hey, you know, the time is right now. And if I can find a way to free up some time, I'm going to seize it, because I never want to look back and say, "Hey, you know, I got to 65" I'd be glad if I do. But to spend time with friends and family, I got, you know, parents are almost in their 80s, I would love to just free up just a little bit of time and already am and I'm already you know, I already feel successful. And that, you know, I found something that I can do and free some time up and actually see them. Allen: Okay. So when you say you feel successful, what does that mean in numbers? Matt: Numbers to me, it's like just even $500. And it's different for everybody. There's no doubt. I mean, $500 extra dollars a month is successful to me. It gives you just a little bit of breathing room. I'm a simple person, I don't need a lot. I drive a 2200 accord. I mean, it looks like it's gonna fall off the road. I'm not a man to really, you know, I love great things. I would love to get in a nice, wonderful car, but it's not the main driver for me. The main drivers just to spend quality time family and friends. Absolutely. Allen: Nice. Nice. Okay. So would you mind sharing how large your trading account is now? Matt: Yeah, I started with in the brokerage account, I started about 2 Grand, and I'm already up to about 16 right now. Allen: Wow, in two years? Yeah, that's phenomenal. Matt: Yeah, I mean, I'm also adding to it too, but.. Allen: Okay. Matt: It's amazing to see the compound interest grow. And I haven't been really calculating it like dollar for dollar. But I'm just more really tuned into just being successful and working through the trades. And not really focusing so much on, you know, $1 amount just being, "Hey, let me get this tray. Let me monitor it. Let me look at it. Let me learn from it". If I have any problems, if I look at it as a learning experience, I have to continue to go I want to be in it forever. You know, I want to continue to I want to be that guy standing, you know, 10 years, 15 years from now and still doing this. Allen: Okay, so you don't want to be a forklift driver anymore? Matt: No, I say, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of people who listen to podcast saying I hate my job. I do not I actually enjoy driving a forklift. I just don't want to drive 40 hours a week. Allen: Okay. Okay, so what type of strategies are you using? Matt: So right now I'm doing a lot of bull put spreads, I've ventured into bear call spreads. I'm also doing covered calls. I haven't done any naked puts yet. So I'm really kind of looking at some companies and, uh, you know, I want to know more about the companies and look at stable companies like you teach us and start doing options off of them. So, it's an ongoing process and what amazes me that you don't need to do a lot of different strategies to be successful. Allen: Right, right. Right. Okay. What's your if you had to only pick one, which was your favorite? Matt: At the moment, it'd be a bull put spread, but I have a feeling that's gonna change. Allen: Yeah depending on the market. Matt: Also venturing into into oil, like you're teaching in your program. Allen: Cool. Yeah. Welcome to that program. Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely the next level of stuff. You know, it moves faster, and it's more leverage. So the numbers are bigger. Matt: Yeah. Allen: Cool. So have you tried anything else that didn't work? Matt: You know, I've done about 60 trades so far. I've lost one. And I got out early, it would have worked out. And it was my first time losing money, but I look at as a big lesson. You know, there's a lot of feelings. I listened to one of your podcasts where you talked about how you lost and the feelings that surround that. Right. I think you have to kind of reevaluate and find the lesson in it. And the lesson I found in that trade was that I was trading too heavy. I was a little bit. I was actually doing too many contracts. I was a little bit too uncomfortable. Matt: So that it was is a really good learning experience to say, Hey, you know, I'm not really comfortable risking that much money. Let me just pare it back a little bit. And think about what I want to do here, so.. okay, that, you know, the experience of actually getting out of a trade out of our live trade because you know, your bloods pumping, and you're like, Okay, you know, am I hitting the right buttons? And I get now it's a little different than paper? Of course. Allen: For sure. Yeah. But did you say you did 60 trades and you only lost on one? Matt: Yes so far... Allen: And these are all real money? Matt: Real Money, yes. Allen: Wow. And what's your strategy? How are you doing that? Would you find that trading plan? That's amazing. Matt: You know, it's a lot of listening. I've read so many books, listen to podcasts, listening to education, I kind of go, I'm a very conservative person. So I trade very conservatively. So about 90% out or more, I try to get at least 23 cents, 22 cents, and then just move my contracts up as I feel comfortable taking that risk. Allen: Okay so if I heard you correctly, you are trading at about a 10 delta spread? Matt: Yeah, usually. Allen: And then you're trying to make about 5% on each trade? Matt: Yeah, but between four and 5% Allen: Between four or five? And how long do you stay in the trade? Matt: You know, it's almost embarrassing, but that's the level of how you get better. I really have my you know, you talk about your AHA moments, and one of them was mine. I didn't know you could get out of the trade. So I was always thinking you had to be there until expiration, but that's not obviously not true. So that was a big one. For me, I have to honestly say that, you know, when you're learning this, you just don't think of you don't know everything. Right? And I was like, oh, my goodness, you can actually get out of these trades. So I learned to get out. So you know, that's a benefit in my world, once you know how to get out, it takes a little bit of fear out. Allen: So when do you get in? How many days to expiration to get in? Matt: Generally, I'm between 28 and 35 days or so. Allen: Okay, and what how many trades at one time do you have on? Matt: I really try to do only as many as I can comfortably watch. I try to do maybe one a week. So about four trades at most that are going on? Allen: Okay, so four trades at one time. Okay. And so how much would you say you're making on a monthly basis? dollar terms? Matt: Well across two accounts. So I trade in my brokerage account, I trade under my IRA, I rockler. Right? I'm averaging about 1000 a week now? Allen: 1000 a week. Okay. That's amazing. So within two years, you're up to 4000 a month. And you're saying your account value is roughly around 16? Matt: Roughly 16. And then, you know, in the Roth IRA, it's considerably higher, but that's not money I really want to put a heavy risk of short term trading, but I do trade there. Allen: Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. No, that's, that's crazy. And you're saying that you're almost to the point where it's getting close to where it's gonna replace your income or equal your income from..  Matt: Yeah I mean, I have no qualms about it. I my goal is to get make $5600 a month. And I know my number and but it's all about, you know, I guess one of the big reasons for me coming on is that you just have to trust the process. And you have to actually become in love with the process not be so result driven. I mean, it's important, you know, we all want results. But if you can find a love for the process, I think you're that much better?  Allen: For sure. Definitely. Yeah. Because, you know, like you said, You've been putting in the time you wake up and you work on it. And then after work, you know, tired long day, but you still sometimes you still get it and to look at it being you wouldn't do it if you weren't like happy and excited. It's really something to find something. I feel like this is a point in my life where I really found something I love to do. And I really do. I really love this. And, you know, it's, I just want other people that are just regular people like me, and people come all the time and say, you know, you can do this and do that. But I am I tell you to my core, I'm just a regular person, I drive a forklift. And if anyone can do it, you can do it. And thank God, there are people like you have to teach this stuff. Because I would have killed 20 years ago to have someone guide me through just hitting me across the head of the board and be like, Hey, you know, listen. But that's not how life works. Allen: Right, no, yeah. You know, when you're ready, the teacher appears kind of thing. You know? Matt: It really is true. Allen: Yeah. Yeah. So the biggest thing that surprised you when you were doing this stuff, besides that you could get out before expiration? Matt: Oh, yeah, that was a big one. I think it's coupled with what other people say but also with what I think is that you can trade on something that you don't own. I think that's a big thing for people. Because we're just conditioned to be like, you know, if I can trade something, I have to own it. And that was a big like, wow, for me, for trading. You know, also the covered call as well. Allen: Okay. And so what was your biggest challenge? Matt: The biggest challenge for me was overcoming your fears. I mean, it's, it's definitely a big fear. And I don't take it lightly. Because, you know, we all worry about losing our money, we worked so hard for it. I mean, I work 40 hours a week just to make the bills and do everything that we want to do, we want a better standard of living. And it's very scary  you know, you can think about losing all that money and a flash, and that's really fearful. And I think that's the biggest obstacle, but be to be able to papertrade it and learn from people like yourself that have gone through it. And like, they say, taken the arrows is all much better. I mean, you know, it's like, I talk to people, it's like, you're in a forest, and you don't know which way to go. And it's like, you have someone like yourself or someone else that has gone through this. And we're like, Hey, here's the path. You know, over here is a ditch over here, you know, there's a lion, go down this path, and you start to understand otherwise, you're just flailing around, and you'll be lost in that forest forever. So, you know, it's just one big journey, to be honest with you. Allen: Yep. Yep, yep. Yep. So is that the biggest thing that helped you overcome the fear? Got me a lot of people have that fear. You know, it's like, oh, my God, if I do this, what's going to happen? What if I press the wrong button? What if they take this away? What if you know, something, I do something wrong, my wife's gonna kill me, you know, how did you besides the paper trading was that the biggest thing that helped you overcome the fear? Matt: I think also, the actual structure of a credit spread, you know, knowing that when I have a set amount of money, that it's risk, I can only lose like, $500 in a trade or 480. That really helped me, okay, I was like, Okay, if you're uncomfortable, overall, losing $480 in this trade completely fails. And that's all I'm gonna lose. And I wrapped my head around that, then I can get past that barrier. And I can trade more and learn how to trade. I think initially, you just have in your mind that you're gonna lose all your money, which is not true. If you, of course, you I mean, you have to study and you have to pay attention. None of this is easy or simple. But you got to put in the time, I'm not saying you don't. But if you really want to, and you're, you have conviction, and you have desire, there's no reason why you can't do this stuff. Allen: So what do you think the future holds for you now? Matt: Well, I hope all good things. I mean, I go on with the, I hope I go in with the attitude. I'm really happy and excited to be part of the the oil, that's a whole another, the oil blank check trading program. It's a whole another world for me. And, you know, I kind of feel like, it's traded like options, but it's very different. And then I have to get in there. And it's like, you know, I'm back at the beginning a little bit. So I got to get him up to speed and learn that it's a whole another world. So you go through those feelings again, in a different way. So I'm kind of in the beginning, but I'm very hopeful for the future. And I just want to continue to be consistent and profitable. And that's all you can ask for. Allen: Yep. Yep. So would you recommend Option Genius to other people? Matt: Absolutely. I mean, I sing your praises almost all the time. I one of the big reasons is that how accessible you are. And you know, whenever I had a question, you guys are on top of it. I mean, I couldn't ask for any quicker response. And if you have a problem, you feel like someone's right beside you. And I really appreciate that. So yeah, I've absolutely, I would tell anyone to go to you and learn from you learn from you on the program.  Allen: Yeah, we try. I mean, we're not perfect. And we don't work weekends. But some people, some people are like, Oh, I bought this thing on Saturday. Why haven't I got it yet? I have questions. I'm like, Oh, we don't work weekends, you know. See that's part of the job here. You know, I talked about it on the podcast, and the books and everything. It's like freedom. You know, that's the ultimate, the ultimate goal is freedom. And however you define it, yeah, the time to do what you want the money to do what you want, and you just, you know, if you want to go here, do this, or whatever, buy whatever you want. Like, I'm so happy and excited that you're feeling a taste of that, you know, it's like, "Okay, if I'm going to work, I'm going to make X dollars, but I can always be laid off". I can always get hurt. I can always, you know, get sick. I mean, so many people right now are getting sick and they can't work and they're all scared because they don't know what they're going to do. And you know, the fact that you're you found something that you can stay at home, press a few buttons, and you understand it and you're like, Okay, intellectually, I can make this work. And you put in the time in the effort. I've seen that. So kudos to you for that. Because I've seen a lot of people. They're like, Oh, yeah, no, no, this is supposed to be magic. I'm supposed to hit the Escape key and I'm supposed to get money coming out of my computer. Well, it doesn't work that way. You know, you have to put in time, effort, thought process. You have to do it over and over and over again, which you've done for the last two years. You've been putting your dues in I mean, obviously you're not done yet. Right? You still got a long way to go. Matt: Oh, yeah, absolutely my goal is never to be complacent. You know, never think I've no at all, because I do not. There's people out there that are very smart, intelligent, people that are learning, I always look at life, you can learn somebody, something from everyone, just like all the people, all the books that I've read, if you can get one good thing out of them, you can learn something from them, you're all the better. You know, I just learned to not look at one thing as the way there could be multiple ways. But you know, you have to take the good and almost make it your own as well. You know it, but it's on you. And you as you get older, you realize that it is on you to make this decisions. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and just hope you know, I wake up at 65 and I'm retired. So it's a process. And luckily, I fell in love with it. Allen: That's great. That's great. So let's say you get your goal and you're making 5600 a month from your trading. You still going to work? Matt: I think initially I mean, you know, it's a wonderful question to answer. I think initially, I would go with part time, because I like I do like my job. I do enjoy driving a forklift. But um, it would allow me to do some other things that I would want to do in life. I mean, I like gardening, I like painting, maybe learn Spanish, I always want to learn Spanish, you know, and I could put my efforts towards that. It's just, it opens a whole another world for you. And I mean, it really does. And it gives you a chance to maybe go into some things that you never dreamed that you would be. For instance, after this, I'm going on a boat, I would never dream that I would learn, I always didn't want to drive a boat, I was afraid to drive a boat, I was afraid I was gonna to crash into a dock. But I'm a member of a book club now. And I'm going to go out my wife after this podcast and get on a boat. And I'm learning how to drive and docket and it's like I believe trading is broad and open that world for me. Because I'm no longer fearful making mistakes. And I'm going to learn from them. And, you know, if I crashed into into a dock, so be it. I'll learn from it. And I'll get better. So that's the way I approach life now. And I think trading is a big part of that. Allen: Oh, that's wonderful. So the fact that you've been you've had some success in the trading has given you confidence in other areas of your life. Matt: Absolutely. That's something I can ever believe. Yeah, absolutely. Allen: That's so beautiful. Okay, so let's say one of your fellow employees at Costco, you're at Costco, right? Yes, yeah. So if one of your fellow employees at Costco comes up to you and says, Matt, man, I got to do something. You know, you told me you talked about trading a little bit, how do I how do I get started? What do I do? How do I make sure that I don't lose money? Matt: Well, go to Option Genius. But I would more so I would tell them that, you know, it's a process and you have to put in the work. There's no shortcuts. And you know, people say that all the time. And you have to really believe that in your heart, and you have to put in the work. And thank goodness paper trades out there. And you can make mistakes and learn from them. And just keep trying. And then when you're ready, do it. Somy advice is to absolutely take it slow. You know, everyone's different. You could paper trade three months, six months, but don't be hanging up for a year paper trading. I mean, you want to get out there and try. So but do it with a little bit of money that you're finally losing, and then just go on from there and reevaluate your process. So that's the advice that I would give them. And, of course, I want to help everyone out there, you know, because I have co workers that are in the same, I know the grind they go through each day. They're hard working people, they're looking for the same thing I am that they're trying to look, you know, to better their life or help people that are left to right of them, and get through and improve it. And, you know, this is out there for them. So I've just tell it, take it slow, be patient. I mean, it's very difficult to be patient, especially this day and age. But if you can harness that patience, you can achieve what you want to achieve. Allen: Well said, Well said. Yeah, I mean, you know, the cool thing is that we've I guess since you started, I think you've been sending us emails every once in a while. Matt: Probably a little crazy. Yes. Allen: Yeah no it's okay. It's not crazy? I mean, you know, I bombard people with email, we generally like to sometimes people, some people get three emails a day from us, it's like crazy. We need to work on that. Matt: I'm one of those people. And I'm like, wow, I'm like, man this is something else. Allen: There's too much going on. Yeah. So we need to work on a little bit there. But you know, so it's been fun to watch your progress over the past. You know, it's like, I try to if there's a trading email or whatnot, I try to read those. And if I don't answer them, at least I try to read and see what's going on. And I've seen your emails come through, and it's like, you know, this guy, he's getting it, you know? And whenever you ask a question, it's like, there there are some people that they're nice about it. And then there are some people who are like they expect the moon and the stars and everything in an email like, "Hey, I'm on your list. I want you to tell me every one of your secrets". Like how am I supposed to do that in an email? Matt: Yeah that's impossible. Allen: We share that for you. Like we could have a course about that. It would be like a 20 million-hour course. I could share everything and bring an email. I'm not writing all that stuff. But the fact that you took it slow and methodical and whenever you, you did the work. And then when you had a question, it was specific to that particular thing. So you could tell when I'm reading, I can tell, okay, this guy is actually trying to learn, he's actually trying to trade. And this has given me a question based on his actual experience. So I mean, that's in, you know, for those of you who are listening and be like, Oh, well, I asked a question, I didn't get an answer. Or, you know, he didn't give me a complete answer or whatever. It also depends on, you know, how you approach the question how the question is asked, and if it's gonna make sense or not, because we do get inundated with trading questions, and how do I do this? And how do I do that? And without proper background, we can't even give individual moves. Legally, we can't give individual advice. But even trading questions, it's like, okay, if I don't have the proper background into what you were thinking, when you were looking at a trade, then I can't give you a, you know, what I would do even because if I'm looking at a chart, and I think it's going to go down, and you think it's gonna go up, whatever I tell you, it's gonna be the opposite. And you'll be like, that doesn't make any sense. So I love the way that you have approached this. And you've been, you know, slowly, methodically, you pick something you realized from the beginning, you knew what you want it, you knew your why you understand, you know, compound interest, you understand how that works? And it's not going to happen overnight. How long do you think it took you until you started becoming like, consistently profitable? Matt: I would say about three or four months where I felt consistent, you know, first, you know, you could say, Oh, you know, it could be you just not, you're not sure until you really feel like, okay, I can repeat this month after month. And third kind of understanding, you know, not only the positives of a trade, but also the negatives, and you start kind of wrapping your head around it and start feeling comfortable, but not complacent, then you start, you feel like you're on the right road, so that that feelings and the results probably about three to four months for me specifically where I felt confident about the trade. Allen: Okay, and you trade the same stocks over and over again? Or do you choose different ones every time? Matt: I'm looking, you know, basically the same. You know, I tell the story, way back, I bought Airbnb, you know, an IPO, which stands for is probably overpriced. And I consider it as a mistake. But my wife and I did a covered call together, and we literally push the button together. And we're like, we made like, 500 some dollars off of that. And I was just like, we were just like, baffled, like, wait a minute that actually work. Like we just got paid for that. And we're just like, How can that be? So, you know, I read books on covered calls and things like that. And, you know, there's there's downfalls of covered calls as well, the dark side as you speak. And it's important to, to learn all the different strategies. But the point is, you don't need to know a ton of strategies to be successful, I think it's important for the viewer to focus on one and get really comfortable before you move on to other things. And I feel that's kind of where I am with oil now I'm comfortable with a trade and now unwilling to go into another world, and kind of explain that or, you know, explore that, and I'll take that slow as well. And, you know, it just starts being well, and overall process and you bring it together. And it's all about learning and what a beautiful thing. Allen: Yep. Yep. Very beautiful. So, and there might be some skeptics listening to this. And they'll be like, Well, you know, the last two years, we've had a really good bull market. So are you prepared for choppy market volatile market? down market? bear market? How would you adjust to that situation? Allen: You know, I think it's, I look back, I'm actually reading your book right now, how to hedge, you know, all the hedging strategies, and what I always call my replay in my mind, what will I do if there's a big crash, and I don't think you can ever, you know, fully prepare yourself, but there's a lot of things that you can do. I think the most important part of that is knowing a valuable company, it's knowing what kind of strategy you're going to use, you can never do bull put spreads continually, because you're going to get hit at some point. Right. So again, learn how to do a bear call spread and do some different things to hedge your position. So it you know, that's education by itself, but there's definitely some big things. You know, you got to look at each thing of, you know, a comfort level and then continuing education. I definitely am. I'll continue to get better at that as well. Allen: Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, there's no way to tell which way the market is going, you know. Matt: Sure. Allen: I mean, we've been lucky that we've had a nice fed induced (inaudible) rally recently, the last couple years. But again, we don't know how long that's going to last and what's going to happen after that. But as somebody who has been doing this for, you know, a little bit longer than you have. Matt: Much longer. Allen: It's good to be able to, like you said, you know, understand the different strategies as well. And you said you've done you know, two or three of them and you've, you've practiced them over and over again. So that when things do change, that you can also see that coming and then you can change with it. So You know, I was talking to someone earlier today, and we were talking about and he was, he was asking about iron condors. And he's like, yeah, you know, I've tried honor condors didn't work at all. So how do you make them work? I said, Well, you know, every strategy doesn't work for every person. Some people might like one strategy, and they're really good at it. And somebody else, their brother might try it. And their brother might be horrible at it. You know, it's different risk tolerances, and different personalities will tell what strategy you should work on. And so.. Matt: Yeah, that's really fascinating. Like you said earlier, you know, we talked about how you can get the same trade as somebody, it just turns out different. And I think it's, it's fascinating in psychology, and it's also how, you know, you think of a trade and everyone's into individual to that trade. So it's pretty interesting. Allen: And you said, you had studied psychology, right? in school? Matt: Yeah, I have a degree in psychology from the University of Alabama. And, you know, I just, I never knew what I wanted to do in college. And it's interesting, I find myself using it. Now. I it's the psychology of the markets. And I think about how why people sell and why people buy and, you know, a lot of it's fear based, sometimes people that are very smart, do stupid things. You know, you just think that it's not that way, but it is very true. So it's, it's a whole, I never thought I'd be using psychology, but I do. I'm fascinated why people think the way they do. Allen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. It's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, I've been a big fan of psychology, just trying to understand myself, you know, and most of the time, like, you know, when we try to figure out, okay, hey, this stock went down today, what happened? A lot of times, we can't figure it out. I don't know, there's so many. There's so many background factors. But I think the study of psychology really helps in the big picture thinking, you know, you might not be able to figure out exactly why a stock moved up and down, depending on if there's some news about it. But the overall market like, hey, if this happens, then this is how people react. And then this is how they think. And then this is what happens in the stock market. So it's definitely a learning experience. And something that comes with years of experience, as you get used to it, say, Okay, I saw this happened. So I, I expected this to happen because of that. So it's really interesting. Allen: I really appreciate your time, Matthew, and just wanted to give you one more, you know, like hey, is there anything else that last words that you want to share with our audience?  Matt: Just I encourage people that are, you know, maybe thinking just like how I am, you know, they're out there working everyday life, and they just don't think that this is possible, and I just wanted to really encourage them to, you know, take a shot at it. And really, you know, if you're really interested in it, and put your 100% into it. And, you know, you could really surprise you on the other end, what life has to offer to you if you really get into it. And trading is a wonderful way to do that. So I'd really encourage people of all walks of life to try to better their situation, I think it's a great, great avenue to do so. Allen: Right. And you got started again, how? Just by reading a book? Matt: Yeah, I was just really looking at a compound interest chart. I was just, I just looked at it. And I was like, man, I could just kind of see the overall plan. I was like, I didn't know, you know, you know, everyone wants to be rich, and they want to have enough money. And it was a different feeling. At that time, I was young, and you know, mostly when you're young, or just want to get things and accumulate things and, you know, burn the world down. And that's not the case, as you get older, usually, you know, you, you find out what's really important. And to me, it's time with family and friends. And once I saw that chart, I could see the kind of overall kind of structure if you will, what I want to do. And then now as I got into it, I started filling in the blanks and seeing what way to get there. And trading is really kind of sped that process up. And I'm very excited about it. Allen: So do you see yourself like, okay, hey, you know, and this year, or this keeps up and you know, this age, I'm going to be a millionaire or 100 millionaire or something like that-  that doesn't appeal to you, right? Or does it sometimes? Matt: You know, like, I have a goal of turning you know, our money and making a million dollars. And that's, I wrote it down and seven years, I'd like to do that. If I don't get there, I'm not going to be upset about it. Like I said, you have to be happy about the process and excited about the process. And long as you're generally heading the right way. You can't help but be happy. I mean, if there's little setbacks, but if your general trajectory is moving forward, that's all you can ask for. And we're excited about that. So, you know, the number is less of a issue to me, as I get into it, you know, it's a great thing. And it's a great byproduct of what we're doing. But I think you just got to really look inward and be contentment and what really makes you happy in life, whatever it is you'd like to do. So, you know, money is just a tool to get there. And I I really feel that at this age, you know, it took me 20 years to figure that out. But yeah, it's exciting. Allen: Yeah, I totally agree with you and I'm excited for you, man. It's Just like, you know, you just get started now it's just, it's just up from here, you know, it's just the sky's the limit, and you know, a million dollars one day, you're gonna be like, Oh, that was nothing, you know? Let's go for 3, let's go for 5. Matt: You know, if not, I always say, Hey, you know, I can be happy I took a shot at So, you know, yeah, I left everything on the table. And that's what you have to do. And I couldn't be happier about that. Allen: But you've gotten it done. You know, it's not, it's not like, You got lucky, you've been doing it for consistently, you know, over and over and over again. And yeah, we've had a good market. And that helps. But you know, every market can be a good market, if you know what you're doing. So the fact that.. Matt: I'm very worried about that, because I started investing in 2009. Okay, so I've never seen a crash. And I know that and I'm aware that and I also look at, hey, what are my feelings going to be? And I try to read books about it, and listen to people and talk about their experiences, because I want to know what to do in that situation. So I could, that's a continuation thing for me. I mean, I know I have not been in a crash. That's all been up for me. And but I do know that I have to be wary of that. And I have to have a plan for that. And that's what I'm doing right now. So, you know, I don't want to get complacent and that I'm winning and winning and winning, because losses could be around the corner. And I just gotta know how to mitigate that process. Allen: So and see, I mean, just that comment right there. That's like, you know, this guy knows what he this guy's got a head good head on his shoulders. You know, he's not he's not overconfident. And he's not like, Oh, yeah, this is gonna happen for the rest of my life. I'm just gonna make money every month. No, I mean, I've been looking at it from all different angles, and you've been practicing and trading and different things. And you said, Oh, yeah, I've been doing put spreads. But I'm also doing call spreads, you know, because eventually, I'm going to need them. So it's like, yeah, there you go. That's it. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you do it the right way. You're doing it really the right way. And you started small and you're, you know, slowly, slowly, you're increasing. But you're still sticking to, you know, something that's manageable. You're not Oh, like you said that one trade I had. I mean, oh my god, out of 60 trades you've only lost one that's like, incredible. I never heard anybody do that. That's like, Well, can I give you my money? I want to go sail around the world here. You just take it in, take care of it for me. Matt: You can't have it back on if I lose it? Yeah. Allen: No, I think you'll be okay because you're getting prepared for it. You know, you're not blindsided. It's like, yeah, this is part of it. I've seen it. You know, you've maybe you haven't seen it yourself. But you've heard of it. But you're not. What are you like, 45 years at? Matt: I'm 45 Allen: Yeah, so you've been alive when there has been crashes? And oh, yeah. and stuff, you know, the.com bubble, everybody still remembers that? No, tell you about that. And, and stuff like that. So it's not like it's something completely out of the blue for you. If somebody was like 15 years old, or 20 years old - they're like, Oh, yeah, you know, I've never seen America crash. It's never gonna crash. But yeah, it's there. And you are, you're rounding out what I, you know, like, it's like, it's not just, you focused on something you learned about it, you practiced it, and you're like, Okay, this is working. Now I need to add to it, I need to add another skill, I need to add another skill. And you're, and you're still adding, that's the coolest thing that you're still growing, you're still learning. And you're still humble enough about it, so that you're like, you know, hey, I'm still working. And I work hard, and I have a good job, and I like it. But I would like to have more. And then eventually, I'm gonna work part time. That's really cool. Yeah. Matt: I actually parallel investing with running a marathon. You know  running marathons is a very difficult process, and it takes a lot of work. And there's a lot of dips along the way, and at times you feel like quitting, and there's a point of elation, and you have an angle. And I kind of feel like that kind of parallels my trading style. So I know that there's going to be, you know, mile 15 is going to be horrible. And mile 18 could be even worse. And then you get the mile 24 and you're like, elated. It's almost at the end. And that's kind of how investing is, you know, you have great times and you have terrible times. And you have to, you know, when you're training, you're accounting for all these processes along the way. You know, what shoes do I wear? How do I do this? If it rains? How do I count for this? I don't feel good. How do I account for that? What did I eat? all that stuff is very similar to how trading is in trading really, you learn a lot about yourself, just like you do in marathon running. I mean, you learn about what you're really made of, and the risk that you take and who you are as a person. So I think there's a lot of parallels there. Allen: Wow, yeah, I've never run a marathon but it sounds horrible. Matt: Yeah, I mean, people are like, they're either they do it or they want it done. I've got the bug. I was crazy. I decided doing but um, I don't do them anymore. I maybe maybe have one or two. I mean, I will see but uh, you know, I want to keep my knees going into my 50s. Allen: Cool. All right, Matthew. I really appreciate it. This was great. I mean, it's wonderful to see you know, somebody go from knowing nothing to making you know, four grand a month trading part time. And, you know, it's like, Hey, I can do this. If you can do for you can eventually do more, and it'll replace your income and make all your dreams come true. So kudos to you for getting in the path, taking the risk, and trying it out, learning, spending the time, and I hope that people listen to this and they're encouraged by it, they're inspired by you, I mean  when I heard your story, I was like, "we gotta get Matthew on the show". You know, forklift driver to early retiree. Matt: Yeah I hope so. I appreciate you guys and I can't thank you enough, you and your team, that there's actually people out there that teach this stuff and actually care about people, because there's a lot of people that don't have it all and I really appreciate that. Allen: Thank you Matt: Yeah I'm sure your viewers appreciate it as well. Allen: Yeah thank you for hanging out with us. Matt: Alright, thank you. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

Today we are kicking off a new series thinking about parenting kids in different age groups. Our special guest for this podcast is Shelly McCulley and she will be talking about parenting littles.    Show Notes: Family/Surviving & Thriving with Infants Survival Tips  Daily walks or a stroll with baby - literally keep moving  You don't have to get up at the crack of dawn for it to be a meaningful quiet time It doesn't have to be quiet or an hour long, it just has to be a genuine time between you and the LORD, where you simply ask Him to fill your cup for that day  There will be a season where you can deeply dig into the word of God, but you may not be in that season right now. Whatever season you're in, I'd encourage you to choose to read Truth!   Listen to Christian music or classical, something to allow your brain to ruminate on truth or give your brain room to think  Pray - Pray out loud, in your head, with your kids, for your kids, etc.  Time with the LORD Look at you! That little precious cherub just nailed you in the head with a Jenga block and you didn't yell!  There's having a rough time today! But you're choosing to be calm! You don't have to enter the crazy! They're out of control, but you're not!  I'm not the person I thought I'd be, but I pray I'm becoming the person God wants me to be, and that's way better.  It is pleasing to God to live a quiet and faithful life; I am responsible to him for what He has entrusted me with.  Positive self-talk  Find a mom who “moms” like you and spend time together Find a mom who is a little bit ahead of you and spend time together  It takes a village, but you have to build the village  Find Your People  This may not be your season to go on a mission trip or lead a ministry, but look around where God has placed you, for people to impact  Minister to the “everyday people” in your life People want to be seen as people - who can you remind today, that they matter?  Minister to other moms, even the ones that “mom” differently than you  Minister to other children  Help with your neighbor's kids!  Volunteer in kids ministry - great way to meet other parents, see other kids your child's age, and develop the muscle of shepherding little hearts Place to serve  See them - eye contact, notice something new they're doing/saying/enjoying - write down funny things they say or do, to remind yourself of their personhood - enjoy your kids!  Sustain - keep them warm, dry, & fed. Sometimes that's enough!  Shepherd - teach them truth; you may not be the memory verse a week mom, but maybe you're the mom who calls them into the living room to pray when someone asks you to pray for them, or you choose to read books that speak truth, or you teach them hymns or songs about Jesus, or you involve them in service, or you answer questions they have  Keep the Goal Simple: See & Sustain & Shepherd   Structure for Sanity with Small Children Everyday What would bless you today?  Ask husband, partner, etc. and share  It would bless me if the kids were bathed It would bless me (me) if I could put our youngest to bed tonight because she falls asleep the fastest  Once a Week Gift of 2 hours away (Matt & I trade off, example 12-2, I take 3-5)  Coffee/lunch with a friend Shopping  Hit golf balls (Matt)  You may not be able to swing this every week, but if you build it into your rhythm as a family, it becomes a blessing and a joy to everyone  Kids - personalized time with mom/dad  I'm primary caretaker - matt gets to have 2 hours with them to just be dad  Once a Quarter Weekend Away Without Kids Matt - better than me, visits his family, live far away - always takes Cohen  Ex: Visiting college friend in September  Creates a space in your budget and your mind to spend time with people that you want a relationship with, who aren't in your everyday sphere of life    You can do this! God chose YOU! Not the mom that has on a clean shirt every time you see her or the mom who throws elaborate bday parties (God loves her too) but he chose YOU for THIS child.    Children are a blessing (Psalm 127:3 - children are a heritage, a gift, a reward) but God never intended for you to walk this road alone. In fact, you can't. Invite Him into your everyday life, invite everyday people into your world, and watch God use your little years for His glory! 

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 ★

With any new product, building brand awareness is key. But when your new product is something the world has never seen before, well, you need to do more than just make people aware, you have to educate them, too. As a DTC company, you might have a direct line to your consumers, but you still need to be able to show and teach them as much as possible, and then be there around the clock to answer their questions and hold their hand through the process. It sounds like a lot of work, but when the product is changing the game completely, you have to be ready to get your hands dirty. And that's just what Matt Wall and I chat about today, who is the co-founder of Principle Faucets. Principle Faucets is a DTC brand that has created the first fully-integrated foot pedal system which not only saves water, but is more hygienic and improves faucet functionality. Matt dove into how he and his co-founders brought their foot-pedal faucet to the market, the amount of time it took to test and tweak to make it fit consumers needs, and then he goes into the process of what's it's been like to actually get it in front of people — a task made much harder when the pandemic caused them to shut down their mobile display unit. Here's a sneak peak on what Wall had to say: it takes finding the right niche within the industry and then hyper-targeting your search and marketing terms toward that audience to be successful. Plus, Matt tells us how to market the environmental benefits of something like the Principle Faucet across all different geographies,who are experiencing various degrees of climate change. Enjoy this episode and use the code UPNEXT20 for 20% off on your order at Principle Faucets!Main Takeaways:What's Your Niche?: It's easy to get lost in the deep sea of products that come up when they search a random keyword. You might see people finding your product or website, but the conversions won't be what you want. By dialing in on keywords and long-tail search phrases, you can more easily target the people who are actually looking to buy your product and then get them to convert.Never Before Seen: When you think you have built a better mousetrap, you still need to do market research to see if consumers want what you have to offer. Bringing a brand new company into the world with a brand new product no one has ever seen before is a risk, and you have to do your research before you take the bet to go into a market with a product no one actually wants or needs.Ease Them In: If your product requires consumer education or a change in behavior, it's wise to build in some tie back to what they are already familiar with. Asking a customer to do something completely new is scary, and will turn people off. It's better to give them a way to do a gradual implementation into their daily lives. 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:Hello, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles CEO at Mission.org. Stay on the show. We have Matthew Wall, who currently serves as a co-founder at Principle Faucets. Matt, welcome.Matt:Thank you. My pleasure to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited. So for anyone who is not going to see video of this, Matt is sitting on top of a mountain at Lake Tahoe and it was teasing us with the view so we can all be very jealous and just let that sink in for a second. That's a first on this interview by the way.Stephanie:So before we dive into Principle Faucets and what it is, I want to hear a bit about your backstory and what even led you to where you are today.Matt:Sure, absolutely. So water conservation was always a big thing for me growing up something that my parents instilled in us myself and my sister living in California, dealing with droughts. And that was a very common thread with both my wife and my co-founder John Porteous. And we just wanted to do something that had impact and was meaningful. And in about 2015, we decided to really change gears and do something different with our lives for a few different reasons. And we bounced around a few different ideas and what stuck was finding a way to use water better in the home. It was something that we were familiar with at that point. My wife Lauren is an avid cook. Again, the water conservation stuff on our side, we just really wanted to do something that was meaningful with our lives.Matt:And we kicked around some ideas and came up with trying to add a foot pedal to a faucet. And at that point the idea just took off and we deviced prototypes and testing them a little bit, our homes and one thing led to another, we got a good response from some of the people that we shared it with. And gosh, we're now 2021 and we just launched the business in October of last year. So it's been a whirlwind, but we've really enjoyed it.Stephanie:Wow. So tell me a bit about, I'm just imagining you and your wife and your other co-founder all brainstorming. What were you guys doing before you even had this idea? Where were you working at?Matt:Sure. I worked for a small startup in the Watsonville area of California. And it's not your typical tech startup, but it was a small company that was started up. I was the first employee outside of the CEO and owner. So that experience in itself was really cool to see a business start and grow from basically zero revenue to there were about 20, $30 million by the time I left. So the exposure to that business was, I've carried a lot of my learnings there through to this business itself. And my wife Lauren actually was diagnosed with colon cancer about the time that we started talking about doing stuff different. So that was a very interesting awakening and really just lit a fire under us. And the fact that the reality of how short life is and all that stuff.Matt:So for her, she really wanted to kickstart her life and do something that's a bit more meaningful at the time. She was a stay at home mom and taking care of our lovely children. And my co-founder John, he has a law background. He was working at the DA's office. And I think in Modesto, California, but none of us were really just loving what we were doing. And we all just wanted to do something that we could just wake up and smile about in the morning and know that what we were doing, had a meaningful impact on the stuff that we really cared about most in life.Stephanie:That's awesome. That's such a good mix of people with different backgrounds and having urgency around it. And anytime, oftentimes you hear it, like the big ideas there are you're right there. There's always something that's there to stop you. I don't know if you've heard that when talking to other entrepreneurs, but there always comes something where it's like, are you willing to go pass this? Are you going to let this set you back? So I love that.Matt:Absolutely.Stephanie:So tell me a bit more about Principal Faucets. So I know it's a foot pedal. Are you constantly peddling? What does it look like as a user?Matt:Sure. The concept that we designed is an integrated system for a kitchen faucet. We have two product families and the integrated full kitchen faucet system is a standalone system. And it comes with our signature kitchen faucet, a little control box, and then our foot pedal that goes in the [Tokic] area of the cabinet. And we also have a adapter system that you can combine with an existing faucet that you already have in your home, in the kitchen or bathroom. So if you're not doing a remodel or needing to replace a faucet, this isn't a great option for you. Excuse me, to get all the benefits of a foot pedal. And the way it works is it can start and stop the flow of water. And it can also regulate the flow of water, like a gas pedal. So when you're working at the sink and you just need a little bit of water, you have all of that flexibility to get full stream and little stream and everywhere in between.Matt:And we really designed these systems to not necessarily replace the existing traditional hand operated way of operating a faucet. We just wanted to give you another option to accomplish those tasks. And I'm sure we'll get into it, but through a lot of the testing we've done and the water savings trials, it's really been interesting to see how people gravitate to using the foot pedal like 60 to 80% of the time, because it just makes a lot of sense. It really frees you up to do all the things you do at the sink a little bit quicker and faster. And then with the foot pedal shutting off the water automatically, as soon as you take your foot off of it, it captures all of those little bits of wasted water in between the stuff you do at the sink. So it's a really interesting win-win interaction with people who use the water and just interact at the sink. So those two products are where we focused right now, and we have plans to expand and move into some different stuff in the future, but that's still to come.Stephanie:I'm just imagining that all my sinks, everything having that, because I mean, like, have you ever measured the amount of germs on a handle? That's the first thing that comes to my mind of like, why are we touching these things in the bathroom? And there was a great skit when COVID first started around hand washing and this guy goes to the bathroom sink, washes it, and then looks around and realizes he touched the faucet afterwards, starts watching it again. Then he realized he touched the soap handles. Then washes his hands again. It's like everywhere and touching things. I'm like, why didn't we do this before? It was just always touching things, of course we're not clean.Matt:Yeah. It's been a really interesting and unfortunately with everything that's unfolded around the pandemic and over the last year. And so the hygiene aspects of our system have been front and center for us in our marketing, as well as just in the overall importance of having something like that in your house, it really does, and is a great solution for exactly that problem. Having to touch the faucet. You can walk right into your house, step on the pedal, wash your hands. You never have to touch anything. And it's great for adults and kids. And it's been good.Stephanie:[inaudible] not holding. I always take my twins. They're 16 months. I'm trying to hold them into the sink to wash them off while messing with the handle. And I'm like, there has to be a better way, there is. That's awesome.Matt:There is, yeah.Stephanie:Tell me about the early days of starting out. I mean, you just launched last year. What has that looked like?Matt:Oh, it's been a lot of work. For us at this point, it's all about driving brand awareness and getting our message out and getting in front of as many customers as possible. So we've been putting almost all of our efforts into just finding very crafty and unique ways with the pandemic to get out and show people the product one of the last January. So January of 2020, just right before everything hit. John and I, we built these beautiful mobile display units. So it has our two products on it, beautiful cabinets, it's modular, so you can wheel it in and out of places. And we had this grand idea, this traveling road show that we wanted to do, we rode down farmer's markets and go to offices and take it to everywhere, any place we could stick this thing and just show it to people, get them to come up and test it.Matt:It's fully functional. So it has a pump inside, self-sustaining electricity, all that kind of stuff. So you could really come up and use it, see it firsthand. And we were so stumped and then everything came crashing down. So...Stephanie:Man, that's a bummer, but it's ready for you now. The market is ready now.Matt:It is, it's beautiful. Yeah. So we really, we love the idea in our kind of direct to consumer model. We want to do that roadshow, we want to be the traveling salesmen again, that connection to our customers. There's no better person to be able to convey the importance, the value and the benefits of the product better than we can. So it's been really cool. We've, had a couple shows this year now where we've been able to take it out and actually gets up and it's been great. It's been a lot of fun. People get such a kick out of the whole concept of being it's a little show. I mean, you do the whole dog and pony thing. So it's been really cool. We're looking forward to doing a lot more of that.Stephanie:That's awesome. So what are your, how many units are you selling today? Was there an inflection point where you changed something in your marketing or you did something a bit different when all of a sudden it's like, boom, now we got to catch up?Matt:Yeah. We were pretty lucky that we pulled in a pretty good amount of product before the pandemic hit. So we've been pretty good on our inventory, but we've seen some pretty steady sales increase throughout the last year with the booms in remodeling and construction. So that's been a really great sustainer for us. I mean our product on our next round of production, we're going to be expanding into two other faucet lines. So we're really excited about that. And that's actually going to be, we should be placing those orders in just a few weeks, which should be here for the basically fall and winter time of this year.Matt:Iteration and changing of the products themselves. We have some stuff that will be changed in this next round, but we've been really happy with the way that product has performed at this point. We have had just great reactions for people who have purchased the product and installed it. And yeah, we're really happy with it at this point.Stephanie:Okay, cool. So when it comes to the product iterations, are you hearing feedback from the customers around different things that they need or was it more internally driven?Matt:No, it's been both. We try and keep in pretty close contact with our customers. We do follow up calls so often as long as they're receptive to them. Using the system, it takes a little bit of kind of, there's like a bit of a breaking in period. So it takes about a week to get used to it, using the pedal. And then once you do that some of the feedback we hear from our customers about it, they hate going to other people's houses because they walk up to the sink in the foot pedal, and they're just trying to tap on the ground to try and get the water to start. But product itself, some of the changes and iterations we want to make are about how the foot pedal itself installs or the toe kick. That was one of the sensitive areas for us in designing the product.Matt:There could be a lot of variation in cabinetry. There's no standard toe kick size. And you look at a modern kitchen versus a traditional kitchen and the cabinetry all different. So we built in an adjustable system so that you can get the foot pedal to the right height and position it optimally for comfort and use. But there's still some work to be done there. I think in getting that more universal for all applications in the cabinets and so forth. The outside of that, we really haven't run into a whole lot of requests for additional features or actual iterations on that the physical product itself, we have had asks for other finishes and designs and that kind of stuff. And it's really painful at this point because there's so much that we want to do with different designs. And I mean, sky's the limit with decorative plumbing stuff. But we got to start somewhere and grow the business and get there.Stephanie:So why did you guys choose to stay strictly D to C or now you starting to think about exploring retail or other spots to sell as well?Matt:When we originally came up with the concept, we knocked around a lot of different ideas and we looked at big box stores, distribution and so forth, but it just never felt right to us. Again, it went back to like, we just didn't want to be another faucet company that wasn't who we were. It, wasn't why we were doing what we're doing. We really wanted to feel like we're a company that really cares about what we're doing. And the way that we felt that was best was to be the first thing people saw when they came to our website and who they talk to and who they dealt with and who was able to handle their customer service questions or warranty issues or product questions. One of the things that's been really fun working with customers, we offer basically free live video demonstration, so you can schedule it to us and we'll set up a camera and use that mobile display unit that we have and walk through.Matt:And it's just so great to see, and the magic between having an intimate conversation with somebody who is interested in and really gets the concept and the importance of it. It's just been very rewarding and fulfilling for all of us. But I think as a business, long-term it's really hard to say. We would like to stay direct to consumer for as long as we can. It just makes sense for us right now. It's and yeah, it's been great.Stephanie:Yeah. So if you're going to stay in that area, I'm thinking like SEO has to be huge, even trying to get up to compete with people like best faucets. If someone sees a foot pedal, maybe they're like, "Ah, that's the wrong thing." So how do you go about reaching new customers and educating them quickly of like, "You could do this instead." It seems like a lot of things you have to think about, and it's not just competing with a traditional faucet. It's like, you have to do both things at once.Matt:Yeah. It's been tough. The faucet industry itself is very consolidated and there's a lot of Moen and Delta, Kohler. They control about 70% of the all sales within the decorative plumbing industry and they pour tons and tons of money into their ad placements and keyword placements and so forth. So we've been doing a lot of work in just trying to optimize our products in that area. So when people are searching for us, we don't want them to search for faucet and have our product come up every single time, we've have really had to narrow in, on our keywords and the short keywords and multi phrase keywords and long tail keywords to get people really want to search for a foot pedal faucet, or are looking for water conservation foot pedal faucets, or those different iterations so that we are able to show up.Matt:We end up spending a lot of money when we first started doing some online marketing, and ad placement stuff where we would get just tons and tons of clicks, but no conversions because they just, people would type in foot pedal and faucet or they'd type in foot pedal control. And things for pianos would come up or pumps for yeah. All kinds of stuff. And so we ended up... That was one of the first areas where we figured we had to dial in and really focus in on that. But outside of that, we're trying to get as much content out there as possible to not only on our website, but just with others. So on social media, Facebook and so forth just to help build some of that the organic growth for us, which has been good, but it's a tough game. There's a lot to do.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, you're innovating in a new market and trying to prove and show people why they need something. We've had a lot of brands on who have the same struggle around like having to educate a consumer. I mean, we had bidet company on here and they talked about most Americans don't think that's even something they would ever need. What channels or pieces of content are you finding are performing best they're going to help with that.Matt:Yeah, a lot of it's just around comparing water usage, which was one of the easiest ways for us to show the savings for the product. It's just showing somebody using a traditional faucet and somebody using our faucet system and the visuals of seeing how much, just no data, no nothing, it's so night and day between the two different systems and just the ease of flow of use. So that's actually been really effective for us. And just capturing and showing what the true nature and difference of that system is versus a traditional faucet. So that's been very impactful. And then in addition to that, delicately using hygiene as some of the ways of showing additional value of what you can bring to the home.Stephanie:Because I was thinking I would lean so hard into the hygiene piece because I had this one image in my head of, it was a piece of bread and it was a teacher who did this at school and they put their hand on it unwashed. And then the other one was maybe wiped down with water. The other one may be used, I don't know, what is it called? The one without water, Purex or whatever. And if there was hand washing with soap and she put them in a bag and left him for seven days, and then it was just the picture showing the seven pieces of bread and what the hand print looked like, very disturbing, maybe realize how gross my hands were, if they're unwashed and even how most ways don't even work that well. And it's interesting to see how just one piece of content was literally ingrained in my brain. And it's been like seven months. You can't get it out.Matt:Yeah. It's on the hygiene side of what we've been doing. It's been, kind of a balancing act because we don't want to scare people into thinking like you have to have our faucet. That's not why we're doing what we're doing, but it is an absolute benefit of having the system in the home. The one really weird twist to this all is when you're marketing things that claim to be hygienic or improve hygiene or kill germs, there's a lot of regulation and requirements. You can be considered a pesticide product. And when we first started marketing our product, there were some issues where we came across where we weren't allowed to show the product online in certain areas because we were being flagged as a pesticide products and it blew our minds that a faucet system would even be considered as a pesticide product, but in the verbiage and the way that we were talking about germs and helping to not spread germs in the home, washing your hands before, so that's been an interesting road to navigate.Matt:We've really kind of had to just do some very kind of common sense type of marketing with the hygiene stuff. You come home, you don't have to touch your faucet. It helps reduce the spread of germs in your home because it's pretty self-explanatory when you really boil it down.Stephanie:Yeah. Oh, interesting. I never even knew that was a thing that you can get around. Yeah. Promoting hygiene. Okay. Have you all explored Amazon or have you not really even thought about that yet?Matt:We have, we're actually selling on Amazon now. And it's been pretty good. It's been an interesting set up process. From the merchant standpoint, Amazon's designed for multiple people to sell off single product pages as a conglomeration of a bunch of people selling the same products so that you get the best price, but we're the only one out there selling our product on Amazon. So we had to go through and do a lot more of the setup process and go through. And the whole pesticide thing that I mentioned was actually as part of what Amazon had us do and go through and acquire. So that took a lot of thinking and figuring out as to why that was happening. But yeah, we got it. Amazon's a great tool for small companies. We plan to stick around there as long as it works for us. And sky's the limit, it's just a matter again, of paying for contents and getting your product placed out in the right spot.Stephanie:Yeah. It seems like there could be so many moments you could create for your customers too, after they buy, just like things like a little card maybe that has a note on the sink, that's like, look down your pedals below for your water, for any of their guests or something. How have you guys thought about shaping the experience, the unboxing experience and then creating joy even afterwards.Matt:Yeah. We focused a lot on the product itself to make a product that was worthy of what we were doing. Quality-wise, construction-wise, materials so that when somebody does get it home and they open it, it looks and feels like something different, something that's a little special. So if we have done some investment in that, the packaging and unveiling of the stuff, we have some really nice dark foam and some nice packaging on the boxes and stuff, which has been a really cool thing to see and fun thing to develop. Long-term, we have tried to build in some features actually to the faucet system itself that allows either new users or existing users to use both the inside of the hand operated valves on the faucet or the foot pedal.Matt:We designed the system. So you never really have to choose one or the other for the Principle Faucets system, the kitchen faucet, the faucet has all of the existing capabilities of the hand operate valve, that's all there, doesn't change. There's nothing you have to do to switch back and forth between the foot pedal and the hand operated valve. So if somebody comes over your house who is not familiar with it, they can walk right up to it, use a hand operated valve, do everything they're used to doing. And if they want to explore a little bit, they can go down and start to use the foot pedal too. One of the features we built into the pedal well to help with the user experience was this, we call it our tapta flow feature, and essentially you just tap the pedal quickly and it'll actually allow the faucet to run continuously without having to keep your foot pedal on it.Matt:So if you're filling a pot of water, you want to feel the same to do dishes. You have that ability. So you're not tied to the sink. If you want to use the foot pedal on that way. With our adapter system, that can be connected to any existing faucet in the kitchen or bathroom. We also built in a feature for that system that allows you to default back to the existing hand operated valves indefinitely, if you choose to, and it's basically, you just tap it twice. And that way, if you have people coming over, using the bathroom or in the kitchen, and you don't want to deal with it you just tap it twice. And all of the function goes back to the faucet as well. So we really tried to bridge that gap so that, new users and existing users don't have any issues with trying to do what they need to do.Stephanie:I could see eventually customers being like, "I don't even want the hand operated piece. Everyone needs to use it this way and just take that off."Matt:I mean, it's been fascinating to see how people gravitate to use the foot pedal. I mean, it's blown our wildest dreams. And the beauty of that is that you get all of the water savings by using the pedal. We'd done some water savings tests when we were initially going through some of the product developments. We did eight homes here in Central California, and some of the homes were multi-generational, they had grandchildren, parents, or grandparents, and some were single individuals. I mean the whole gamut apartments, condos, houses, and we found that the water savings compared to an existing faucet was up to 44%. And when we dove into the data a little deeper, we found that the homes with the highest water savings were the ones that with the biggest water wasters prior. So it really helps the people that ended up using more water save the most which is really a great sign for the impact that the product might have in the future as we get into more and more homes.Stephanie:Yep. Oh, that's really cool. Do you ever have issues with the messaging for consumers outside of California? Because I'm thinking when I'm from Maryland, we really didn't think about water conservation. We didn't have droughts. And I remember moving to California in the Bay Area. I was like, whoa, this is a thing we actually might not have water, what? I mean, I heard about people in Mill Valley area saving their shower water, and doing other things with it. And I was like, this is a new thing for me. So how do you guys go about crafting the message so it connects with people all throughout the U.S.?Matt:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the droughts here in the West are horrible, some of the worst on record. And then you have severe storms and flooding on the other side of the U.S. So the way we've crafted and are working on that message to really join them together is that they're both the products of the same thing. So the droughts here are the product of carbon emissions and global warming and climate change. That's affecting the West in this way, on the East Coast where there's too much water and too much rains, it's all the product are the same, they're all symptoms of the same thing. And for us saving water whether you have too much of it, or you have too little of it, it's all benefiting and helping out the same problem.Matt:It's cutting carbon emissions, it's reducing amount of chemicals that go into the environment by reducing the amount pumped water that needs to be actually treated, transported to your faucet and then goes down your drain without even being used. And then the chemicals that need to be used to treat the water when it goes into the waste facilities. So it's interesting when you think about the two polar opposites of it, but they're all from the same problem. So that's how we've had to craft it. We all need to do what we can do, every little bit counts. And if you can save water at your faucet, it's only gonna help the problem.Stephanie:Yeah. That's such a good explanation. And one that I've never even really thought about, okay, what happens when the water goes down the faucet and all the things that go into it to make it come back again. And yeah, that's a really good way to message it.Matt:Yeah. There's a lot that that goes into treating water, a lot of chemicals and stuff. So, using every bit in a way that counts really helps cut down on all that stuff.Stephanie:Yeah. Very cool. Were there any big bets that you've made over the past year that you weren't really sure if they were going to pay off other than the mobile unit that you guys are wheeling around because that one paid off now, but anything else that comes to mind?Matt:So big bets that we've placed around the business. Being a smaller business as we started and grown, capital's king and trying to figure out how we want to best use some of that money towards marketing and where we wanted to put it into either PR or working with influencers and doing paid content type of stuff. Putting the, I mean, every dollar that we've put into those areas has paid off massively and we didn't go in blindly. We took our time and really tried to find people that got the product and were in similar head space around conservation, water savings, cooking because those are the people who really get it and find the most value in it. So when we've been able to reach out to those people and have them share that message with their base of followers that has actually putting them out of money that we put into that area, it was a good bet. And I'm glad that we did it.Stephanie:Yeah. It sounds like a lot of the themes around your business have been around niching down, niche down with the right people over PR and content is down on the keywords and really getting down to the perfect audience and consumer who's ready to hear that message and ready to buy before going big to everyone.Matt:Yeah. We're a brand that nobody's ever heard of before and we're selling a product that no one's ever seen before. And we found out really in early development when we sat down and just pitched the idea to people, to see if there was going to be a market for this thing. And if somebody had done it beforehand, where did they fail? Where did they succeed? It was really interesting to see how people connected with concepts. And we talk to professional chefs who do a lot of cooking in the home, and they're like, "I've been waiting for this thing forever. How come nobody's done this?" And we talked to people who are doctors and dentists and like, "Oh yeah, I have those at the shop, we use those all the time." Of course, that makes sense to have that home. It just hygiene and efficiency.Matt:And we talked to mothers with kids, fathers with kids, and it all came down to the fact that they would just be like, "Well, why has nobody done this before?" It just makes a lot of sense. And that really helped instill in us the fact that there could be a need for this out in the market. And we ended up going to some trade shows early on just to snoop around because we had getting no experience in the industry at all. We knew nobody, no manufacturers. And again, just pitched the concept to a bunch of the people were there. We were super scared somebody was going to steal the idea out from under us. So we were very coy about it, which is probably silly. But it was interesting to get their feedback and hear what some of the biggest manufacturers in the industry said about it.Matt:And we approached them and early on say, "Hey, we have this concept, is there anything, do you guys want to partner with us or is there any interest in looking at this, we'd love to come talk to you about it." And it's funny. They just never got back to us. Never wanted to hear about it, but-Stephanie:They will. Now.Matt:Yeah, they will now, but even the retail showroom, we stopped in and talked to a bunch of people all over California just about how they show products and discuss it with their customers in the stores. And another one of the reasons why we wanted to go direct to consumer was because of some of the limitations around actually explaining our product to customers in those environments. And in the big box stores, you're just another box on a shelf.Stephanie:Yeah. I was imagining [inaudible] Home Depot, just like a little foot pedal being next to all these faucets and being like, I think this is another mile.Matt:Yeah. And even in retail showrooms... to show people and have them really understand the value of it. You got to use it, or you got to see somebody using it. And that was definitely one of the driving factors for us to want to just be like, we got to put videos everywhere of this thing. We got to build this traveling road show. We just got to show as many people as possible how it actually works, have them come and use it because that's how you connect with it.Stephanie:Yeah, how long was that time period of researching the market and asking questions and having people look at it?Matt:It was a long time. We started first developing this product in 2015 and it was just tinkering around in the garage. I've always loved goofing around and stuff and tinkering and whatnot. So we just decided to do it ourselves. And we build a proof of concept in the garage. Brought it into our kitchen, hooked it up, look terrible, total Frankenstein, hoses and stuff going all over the place. But it probably had about 60% of the functionality that we have in our product now. So it was a pretty good gauge on using it and understanding it. And at that point, that was basically the limitations of our capabilities. So we hired some engineers, excuse me, we hired some engineers to help us of take it to the next step, develop a true prototype that worked like, functioned like what we wanted to come to market with.Matt:And those were the prototypes that we use for the water savings trial here in California. So we had several of those made up. That was probably about a year long process at least. And once we had those prototypes built and got all this feedback from people using them in homes all over, we took a pause at that point. We could have gone and just try to find somebody to manufacture it really fast, but we didn't have the confidence we really thought we needed in order to go forward. So we ended up going to a trade show ourselves and exhibiting with these prototypes. And we built a display unit very similar to the one that we have that we're using for the road show. And we doctored up the display unit with some other prototype boxes and stuff.Matt:So it really looked nice and clean, like a finished product, but it was all frankensteined in the back and using our prototypes. And we basically told people that we were ready to manufacture and gave somewhat of a misleading understanding of where we were in the whole process. But we wanted to see what industry folks, people who were in showrooms in the Home Depos and big box stores of the world, they all came by and they took a look at it. And the response again was just so far above and beyond what we expected that people were like, "Can we get on a waiting list? Where do we sign up? When are these gonna be developed? Can we place an order now?" I mean-Stephanie:Wow.Matt:... we were so unready for all of that, but it was great. And it really gave us the resolve we needed to go forward and find someplace to manufacture this and get it to market. So at that point, after that showing to the industry, we found some folks that well kind of to back up a little bit, we wanted to originally manufacture the product in the U.S. and unfortunately, we talked to large manufacturers here in the U.S., we talked to some OEM manufacturers here in the U.S., and they were either so busy or they just didn't want to deal with a new person or a company that was going to have small volumes to start off. It's a new product, we never developed anything like that before. So we ended up meeting some people at the trade show who put us in contact with some people in China. And we went over there and met with a bunch of different factories and found some just amazing folks to help us manufacture it over there.Matt:And that whole process was a whole story in itself because both faucet manufacturers over there, they're great at building faucets. I mean, there's good and bad factories all over the world. Thankfully we found one that was just a great, great group of people and really focused on quality materials. They were great at faucets, but didn't have a lot of experience in electronics and our systems, kind of a little bit of both. So we had to go in and to go find another manufacturer for just electronic components. But of course the manufacturer is doing electronic components, doesn't want to do any water testing because that's not what they do.Matt:The faucet manufacturer doesn't want to do electronics assembly. It's not what they do. So we had to put together this group of not only components, but manufacturers over there, get them to work together which wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be, but it's been a learning process for sure, because the assembly process for electronic components assembly, the little control box that we have, it needs to be tested for watertight, seals and function, but we had to come up with a way to do that with air testing at the electronics facility, and then come up with a way for our faucet manufacturer to then combine to a final testing of the product to make sure everything worked still watertight and all that, but do it in a way that the water wouldn't interfere with some of the electronic components.Matt:So we ended up doing some iterations kind of, as we were manufacturing with electronic components in particular dialing in adding some actual hardware to the control box itself to allow the manufacturers to speed up the process, make it more reliable. And it was great. I mean, the factories, they have everything you could possibly need to help prototype and do stuff, add components, test components. So it was really cool to see, and we really enjoyed a lot and still do it working with those folks.Stephanie:That's great. I mean, I love that story because so many people right now hear of these DTC companies, just rocket chips, just easy. It looks easy from the outside. And I like actually hearing a real life story of like, "Nope, took a few years, took a lot of testing, had a little hesitancy," and yeah, I mean, that highlights what building a company actually looks like most of the time.Matt:Yeah. It's the most enjoyable thing I've ever done, but it's also the scariest thing I've ever done hands down.Stephanie:I feel that, I feel that. Outside of porter bodies, how they have those little pump sinks, did you ever get one of those and be like, "How do you work?" To figure out maybe like how they function and then have any good takeaways from that one?Matt:Absolutely. We bought and test tested all kinds of stuff. We, I mean, you name it valves, Mike Raj was just an absolute disaster. We had pumps like that physically applying pressure to the pump to get the water to flow. There was pneumatic valve that we were testing, hydraulic valves that we were testing. And it was really interesting. They all pointed us to one direction and we ended up going with an electronic system instead of something that was more mechanical. The issue that we found out with doing something more mechanical, like those pump valves or other industrial metal valves that you can buy for kitchens and so forth. They're very simple themselves they don't require any electricity, but the issue we found with those is if you're going to make a product that is going to be successful in a residential setting for people in homes who have expensive cabinetry, expensive flooring, those other methods were very invasive and destructive to the cabinetry themselves.Matt:If you tried to install them even in new construction, but specifically in existing cabinetry, you had to cut holes, you had to plumb water lines underneath the cabinets where these could happen. You'd never see them until it was a disaster. So we wanted to keep all of that water connections and areas that could leak. We kept them up out from underneath the cabinet, inside the cabinet, where you can see everything, you can know where everything's connected. And we just run a very simple communication line down to the foot pedal itself. So not only do you not have to cut holes in your cabinets, but the foot pedal itself just installs with a couple of screws, you retain all of the existing cabinet space that you have, because Lord knows, we put a ton of stuff under our kitchen cabinets, whether we choose it all or not, is still there.Stephanie:Only one that look under there right now, it's been there for a long time. It's not coming out.Matt:Yeah. In that whole process of really coming up with the way in which we wanted to use what technology you wanted to use, to make it all function correct. We wanted to go something electronic for those specific reasons. It just allows you to install the whole system in a much easier way as well. And we set out initially to design the product so that it a DIY enthusiast, your average we can wire could go and install it in their home. They're capable of into going to Home Depot or Lowe's or something like that to buy a faucet, install it. This is going to be absolutely no brainer for them. But of course not everybody is going to do that. I know plenty of people who just don't wanna install faucet. So we also-Stephanie:[inaudible].Matt:Sure. I mean, it's just the reality of it all and it's all of the connections and fittings that we use to connect to your existing water lines and faucets and so forth and house they're all standardized. So it's all very easy for a plumber to come in and hook it up and know what to do.Stephanie:Yeah, that's awesome. That's the route I would choose unless there was a very easy YouTube video. Maybe I would attempt it. I don't know.Matt:Yeah.Stephanie:Depends how I'm feeling that day.Matt:Yeah, exactly.Stephanie:Where do you all want to be in the next year? What are you most excited about?Matt:Oh man. I'm actually most excited about getting some of our new designs in production. We've had a lot of requests for additional finishes and additional designs and even expanding some of our additional hardware that comes with the faucet systems themselves because people have been asking for it and it's been frustrating for us because we're like, "We know, we know we wanted to," but as you grow a business, you got to kind of do it incrementally make sure you're at the right point and then pull the trigger on it. So I'm very excited to see this next wave of products come to the market and then see how they do, it's going to be great.Stephanie:That's great. All right. Well, let's move over to the lightning round when you're on, is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Matt:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. What one thing do you think will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Matt:I think the biggest thing that'll have an impact on ecommerce in the next year is going to be finding ways in which we can reduce shipping costs. That's been a big barrier for us. It's expensive for everybody. So I'm looking forward to innovations that will be coming to lowering and speeding up product delivery.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. I've heard that a lot throughout all the interviews, so you're all thinking on-Matt:Somebody is going to... Who's working on that.Stephanie:I know. Come on, come on the show, tell us about it. What is the best advice you've gotten since starting this business?Matt:Wow. It's to go with your gut. Collectively between Lauren, myself and John, we've hired a few consultants here and there to help us, and they've been very good at helping guide us in certain areas where we're just deficient in that training or information. But it's really interesting when you look at it and you're like, yeah, that's what we wanted to do the first place. But it, yeah, that's...Stephanie:That's a good one. Even if it takes a few consultants to tell you and you're like, "Oh, okay, I'm just going to go."Matt:You just got to go, you go with your gut.Stephanie:Yeah, what's up next on your reading list or podcast?Matt:Ooh. Up next on my reading list is a book called Conscious Medicine and it's about microdosing different types of psilocybin and a few other things to, how to incorporate that in and use it. I've experimented that stuff over the last year actually, and had some great experiences.Stephanie:Cool. I'll have to check that one out. Sounds good. All right. And then the last one, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you in your whole life?Matt:Ooh, man. Probably marry me. I would have to thank my wife for that one. That is by far and away the nice thing. Yeah. I owe a lot to her. She's the woman behind the man for sure. Where I'm off and they are, we work really well together and I'm blessed to have her as a partner in business and in life. So I got a lots of thanks for her.Stephanie:Yeah, that's amazing. All right, Matt. Well, this has been such an amazing interview. Thank you for joining on the top of a mountain. It's been fun just watching what's behind you. Where can people find out more about you and Principal Faucets.Matt:Yeah. You can check us out at principlefaucets.com, got a bunch of good information there. You can explore around and as well as on Instagram just @principlefaucets.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Matt:Thank you. Really enjoyed it. 

The roundtable interview with Matt and Caleb Maddix and a small group of people who are trying to change the world. Enjoy part three of this special 4 part episode series. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to The Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you've been enjoying this series so far. This is The Roundtable of World Changers, a conversation I had with Matt and Caleb Maddix, and a whole bunch of young entrepreneurs, who are literally out there trying to change the world. This is part three of a four part episode, because the conversation went for three or four hours. And so, this episode's also going to be about 40 minutes long, and it's the next set of questions they asked me. And if you've listened to the last two, you know that these guys ask a lot of questions, in a lot of different directions, and angles, and went all over the place. And I think this time is probably 01:00 or 02:00 in the morning. And so, the questions started going from everywhere, from business, to relationships, to families, and a whole bunch more. So I hope you enjoy this next episode. Here's some of the bullet points of things you're going to learn about. We talked about the 10 commandments of marketing. I talked about my very first mentor, and a thing he taught me, not just to make money in the short term, but how to build a business that now has lasted me for almost two decades. I talk about one of my friends and mentors, Daegen Smith and something that he taught me. It was so simple, yet it's been the key to help me get thousands of people a day to join my email list. We talked about leadership, delegation, scheduling. We talk about, as you're building a team, understanding people's unique abilities. Talked about how much time you spend thinking about the future. Talked about proximity with billionaires. We also talked about how to balance your business and married life, so you can be a good husband and a good father, which is something that I stress about all the time. We talked about a principle that I learned from Stacey and Paul Martino, that has been one of the most powerful things I've learned, which is called demand-relationship. I talk about that. We talk about some relationship tricks, for those who are either married or getting married. Some of the newlyweds, and the engaged couples, were asking some questions about that. Hopefully I don't get in trouble for sharing some of my tricks. We talked about knowing what your values are, and your priorities. Talked about being vulnerable, and being honest, versus staying positive through challenges. We talked about some of the biggest principles and things I learned from Tony Robbins, including how to change your state whenever you need to. And we talked about my 12 year relationship with Tony Robbins, and all the things behind that. We talked about... I don't want to spoil any more. You guys, this is a fun interview. And hopefully, you've been enjoying these so far. So with that said, we're going to cut to the theme song. When we come back, we're going to take you guys immediately back into this conversation. This is, again, The Roundtable of World Changers, part three of four. Matt Maddix: Let's say there was a Russell Brunson 10 commandments. You know how God had one. Russell: Thou shall build a list. Matt: Yeah. How high is this in the 10 commandments? Russell: My first mentor, Mark… Matt: And what would be some of the Russell Brunson... Let's come up with some of them. Like, "Thou shalt..." Russell: We need some stone tablets. Matt: "To all the funnel hackers, thou shalt and thou shall not." I want to hear- Russell: That would be a fun presentation, actually. Matt: Yeah, that would be, actually. Caleb Maddix: That would be. Russell: That would be cool. Matt: Dude, you need to do that. Russell: Come back from the mountain, we have 10 things. Matt: Yeah, seriously. Caleb: Wow. That'd be awesome. Matt: No, the five 'thou shalts', and like, "Thou shall..." and then- Russell: "Thou shall..." Matt: ..."Thou shall not, no matter what..." What would some of those be? Russell: That could be a really cool presentation, actually. Well, so I would say, in my first venture was Mark Joyner, and he was the one... So in context, in history, 18 years when I started, Mark Joyner... I don't think it's probably known. He's brilliant. But he built a company, and sold it off. And at the very end of his career as a coach person, I got to meet him and get to know him a little bit. But I remember, at that time, Google AdSense was this thing that came. And so, if any of you guys are old enough, just try and remember the Google AdSense days. It was insane. They were software. You click a button on software, it would pop out of site, pop out another site. And these sites would make anywhere from 100 to $1000 a day. And you just keep clicking this button, it would pop out another site. And so, people were making $1 million a month. They had teams in the Philippines, that these guys just clicking the button to build the software. It was just... But it was all fake. But it was tons of money. Insane amounts of money. I had friends making so much money. And shiny object, very shiny object, the most sexy shiny object of all time. You click a button, you can make $1 million. That was it, that was the pitch. And it was true. Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Russell: For so... Everyone I knew. Can you imagine that? Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Russell: If I go back in time, 18 years ago, I would move to the Philippines, I would hire everybody, and we would just click buttons. And I would've been- Caleb: Wow. Russell: ...a billionaire. It was- Caleb: Wow. Russell: It was insane. That's how Google got people adopting the AdSense program. So people would put ads on every single site, every single everything. And so, I'm getting in this game, I'm seeing this, and I'm morons making insane amounts of money. And I was like, "Ah!" And Mark had just become my mentor, the very first time, and he's like, "That's going to go away. Focus on building a list." I'm like, "But this guy's a moron. He made $1 million last month clicking a button. No strategy, no brains, no nothing." He's like, "I know, but it's going to go away. Focus on building a list." I'm like- Matt: Wow. Russell: But- Matt: Seriously? Russell: "He's clicking a button. Building lists is hard." He's like, "Build a list." I'm like... And I remember fighting him and fighting him, he's just like, "Dude, trust me. I've been on cycle. It's going to go away. Just focus and focus." And I was so upset, but I listened because I do that. One thing I pride myself on, I'm very coachable. Coach tells me something, I do it. I obey all giants with helicopters and stage presence. Matt: I love it. Russell: They tell me to do it, I do it, right? So I was like, "Ah, but there's free money in piles-" Matt: Even when it's hard- Russell: "All right." Matt: ...you do it. Russell: So I did it. And sure enough, I was doing that, and doing that, within six months, this things collapsed, disappeared, destroyed people's lives. Because you're making $1 million a month clicking buttons, what do you do? Especially as a young kid. Matt: Spending that much money. Russell: You're buying Lambos, and Ferraris, and helicopters, and pilots, and girls, and insane amounts of money. And then it disappears overnight. Devastating, ruined these guys, ruined them, so many people. Matt: There's no skill behind that at all. Russell: Yeah. And I had a list, and I just coasted through it. Right? And I've looked at the SEOs, every single up and down, up and down, through the years, and I just listened to Mark and just focused on building my list, focused on building it, and- Matt: So you still feel that as strong today, as when you heard it? Russell: 100%. Matt: Even then. Russell: 100%. That's one of our KPIs. How many people doing lists today? Every single day. Matt: Really? Everyday? Russell: Everyday. Because I did it for a long time- Matt: Even now, you're saying? Russell: 100%, everyday. John Parkes everyday sends me a number. “How many people joined our list yesterday?” That's all I want to know. Caleb: What's your guys' email open rates? Russell: It fluctuates. 20 ish percent. Caleb: Okay. Russell: Around there. But it was funny because I remember, I had forgotten that lesson after a while. And if you guys know Daegen Smith, Daegen, he's getting back in the game now. He's brilliant. But I remember I had a list, and I was my money off of it. I wasn't focusing on it. And I remember he asked me a question, he said, "How many..." It wasn't, "How many people are on your list?" Because that's what most people ask, "How big's your list?" But he asked me a different question, which input output, right? Matt: Yeah. Russell: The question was, "How many people joined your list today?" And I was like, "I don't know." He's like, "Go look right now." I'm like, "Okay." So I log in, and look at the thing, it was like 12. And I was like, "12?" And I was like, "Is that good or bad? I don't know." And he's like, "Let me show you mine." And he showed me his, and it was like 1400. And I was like, "You had 1400 people join today?" He's like, "Yeah." "Wait, how'd you do that?" He's like, "I just look at it everyday. And when I look at it everyday, somehow it grows." And I was like- Matt: Wow. Russell: "Okay." So then, everyday, after I log in and look at my thing, it was like 12, I'm like, "Ah." In my head, I'm like, "Fricken Daegen had 1400. I only 12." Caleb: Yeah. Matt: Wow. Russell: And also, I was like, "What do I do to get people to join the list?" Matt: Yeah, start optimizing. Russell: And then, your mind starts thinking differently, and all of a sudden you start focusing on it. And it's crazy. I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs, that have been in my world, who have gone up and then come down. And what happens, mostly, is they do something, they build a big list, they stop adding fuel to the fire, they have this list, they sell things to the list, the list atrophies, and eventually starts shrinking and dying. And then, they don't know how to build lists, the business crashes and dies. Matt: I hope you guys are really listening. Really. I mean, he's- Caleb: That's powerful. Matt: ...saving your life right now. Russell: The question, the goal, every single day, is that, because it's a fuel to your fire. And what happens was you stop putting fuel on the fire, and it doesn't die immediately. So you're like, "Oh, I've turned off Ads, so I'm good. But I'm just going to focus on emails, let's focus that." But just every email you send out, your list atrophies, shrinks, dies. And then, eventually, it'll just die. And so, yeah, if you're not consistently, constantly feeding the list, every single day- Matt: And once you have the list, what's the biggest mistake people make with their list? Russell: They don't email it. Matt: Yeah. Russell: They're scared to... You think it's too much emails. It's not, it's the opposite. It's that they don't email. Caleb: Okay. Russell: Minimum of three times a week. Closer to everyday. Matt: Wow. Russell: If you talk to Daegen, it's twice a day, everyday. Matt: Really? Caleb: What other KPIs do you have sent to you every single day? Russell: I want to know how much we made yesterday, striped. Because first off, it's cool to know. Caleb: Yeah. Russell: But second off, also it's like, I want that number to be bigger everyday. So it's like, actual money in the thing, how many people joined the list today, and how many books are sold, how many ClickFunnels members. Those are the ones for me. Our teams have other KPIs they focus on. But those are the ones I care about. Matt: So out of 30 days, when you hear the numbers, how often are you pissed and how often are you like, "Yeah."? Russell: Nowadays, it's always pretty good. Matt: Nowadays, it's like, "Woo." Russell: Because it might go up or down a little bit, but the numbers are big enough, that it's just like, "That's so crazy." I remember... Anyway. I remember just the growth of ClickFunnels, because you know Stripe dings every day with your numbers. I remember when we started going, it got to the point where it's like $10,000 a day, I was like, "$10,000 a day is insane. That's just so cool." And then, it got to a point where it's like $20,000 a day, and then 30, and then $50,000 a day, and then $100,000 a day, and then 150, then 200, 250, 300. I'm just like, "This is insane to me, that this is a daily thing that come..." it was just... Anyway, that's when it got just weird. And it makes me mad because Todd made a commitment to me, that as soon as we passed $500,000 a month in sales, he'd move to Boise. Matt: And he didn't yet? Russell: No. So... Matt: You were out of there already. Russell: And then, I was like, "Well, we have $500,000 a day." And then, he still hasn't come. So I don't know. Some day. Do you think Todd will ever move to Boise? Speaker 4: Plus I'm curious if I could pop in to ask a question. Russell: Yeah, feel free. Speaker 4: I've always wanted to ask someone of your stature, that's done as much as you have, impacted as much people as you have, and really built the business that you have. So I'm curious on your take on leadership, building a team, delegating, and your schedule and how you go about scheduling your day, and prioritizing what's important for you, as a business owner, and what you delegate to your employees and their responsibilities as well. So leadership, delegating, and scheduling. Russell: Good question. It's interesting because I would say I'm not the best leader on my team, by any stretch. And so, it was interesting because I spent the first four or five years with ClickFunnels as the CEO, trying to do my best with it. But it wasn't my unique ability, is leadership. I feel like I'm good at leading a community, but I struggle a lot more with employees and teams, internally. And so, about a year ago or so, I handed the reins to Dave Woodward, to be the CEO of ClickFunnels. And he's been amazing. Man, what he's done inside the company has been awesome. And I think a big part of it is understanding, at least for me personally, I was trying to be a leader, and trying to develop that, but I wasn't the best at it. And I think sometimes we think it's always got to be us. Like, "It's my company, I got to be the CEO. I got to be the leader. I got to do these things." It's understanding that a lot of times there's people who are really good. Who's the best you could find to be that? Or any part of our business. You know what I mean? It's a big part of it. The second thing is, if you've studied Dan Sullivan at all, one of his biggest things is unique ability. That's the thing. What's your unique ability? What's everybody's unique ability? And I think when you start a company, it's tough because it's like everyone's in charge of everything, right? I'm the CEO, but I'm also taking out the garbage, I'm also doing... everyone's Speaker 4: Yeah. Russell: ...doing a little bit of everything, which is cool. When you're scrappy in the beginning, that's important, and everyone's doing that. But as you grow, that starts hindering you more and more and more, where we had people who are insanely talented, who if I could just get them doing this thing, 100% of the time... And that's when it got to the point with ClickFunnels, is that my unique abilities are writing, are being in videos, are building funnels, doing the... Those things are my unique abilities. Caleb: Engineering. Russell: Yeah. And I was spending maybe 10% of my time on that, and 90% of the time in meetings, and trying- Matt: Wow. Russell: ...coordinate people, and leadership. And it was stressful and it was hard. Matt: And you were draining. You were probably drained doing that. Russell: Yeah. And I was miserable, that was just... I wasn't good at it. Not feeling good, like, "Ah, I'm not getting through to people. I can't figure this out." But I felt like I had to own, I had to be the guy, I had to do the thing because this is my baby, this is my business. And the last 12 months has been crazy, because I handed it to someone who actually is good at that, that is his unique ability. And I'm watching company structure, and meetings, and KPIs, things that I was never super good at doing, and consistently having it all happening now. And now, I'm in the marketing department again, and I'm building funnels. People are like, "What do you do all day?" I'm literally in ClickFunnels, building funnels. "No, but you have funnel builder..." No, I'm literally in ClickFunnels, building funnels. I didn't start this business because I wanted to be a CEO of a big huge company. I did it because I love building funnels. I'm an artist, when it comes down to it, this is my art. Matt: Wow. Russell: And that's what I get to do now. And it's amazing. So Dan's got Fridays we book out, and we spend videos, he's got a whole bunch of YouTube videos, we film five or six YouTube vlogs last week, on Friday. So we have that times blocked out to do that, right? I'm writing my next book right now, so I've got my mornings blocked out to write books, because that's when my mind's got not a million things so I can do that. And then, after morning comes in, after I do my wrestling practice, I come in. And that's my teams there, and that's when we're building funnels. I got my designer and my copywriter, the people, and I get to facilitate that. And I feel like the... What's the guy in the orchestra, the maestro? Caleb: Conductor? Russell: Yeah, like I'm the conductor, I'm conducting all these talented people. And everyone's bringing... And I'm alive, and it's exciting. And at night, I can't sleep, because I'm excited again. And so, I think that's the biggest thing, is taking the pressure off yourself if you're not the best leader. That's okay. What are you the actual best at? And success, in business, I think, at least for me, I always thought I had to be the best at everything. And it's the opposite, where it's like, "How do you focus on the thing you're best at? And get the rest of the people around you." Speaker 4: Yeah. And it gets- Matt: And it's... You had to have been willing to let go of your ego, man. Or you wouldn't have been able to grow so much. If you try to do it all yourself... Caleb: So I have a question. How much time do you spend actually thinking about the future? Because it seems like, from what you've told us, you're very dialed in and obsessed on the process, and that's how you've gotten to where you are, up to this point, because you're in love with the game. How much of your time do you spend thinking about the future, and what's on the horizon next year, five years, 10 years? Does that cross your mind? Or what does that look like? Russell: It's interesting, I can't remember who was talking to about this... The further out you look, the fuzzier it gets. You know what I mean? And so, I think for me, it's like we have... I know where I want to go, but the in between is really, really fuzzy, right? It's hard to know. And so, it's like I know... For me, the last big boat was $100 million, the next one's a billion. So we know there's the thing. But it's so far from... I don't know the steps to get there. You know what I mean? And so, for me, it's more like, "Well, here's where we're at." In fact, that was my... We had a chance, last month, to go spend a day with Tony Robbins, and we each had a chance to ask him one question. So that was literally my question, just like... Matt: What was your question? Russell: My question... It'll be a blog soon. Not yet though. No, but it was basically like, "We've gotten to this point, and I know to get to the next goal, the things we've been doing are great and they got us to this point, but I have to think differently to here. I don't know how to think differently. How do you think... It's not another book I'm... Is it a book? How do I think differently?" And what Tony said, that was... it's a very... He said a lot of things, but one of the big things was like, "Proximity is power," like, "You have to be in proximity with people who have already accomplished the thing that you're trying to do." And it was interesting because I look at the path of how I grew ClickFunnels, I did that 100%. I was like, "All right, who are the..." and we found the people, got proximity, and then grew it to this point. So eventually, we kind of coded out of the people who I was aware of. So I asked Tony, I'm like, "Well, where would you go to?" And he's like, "Well, if it was me," he's like, "Who's built the billion dollar company?" He's like, "Marc Benioff." And he started naming all these different billionaires. And this and that, all these things. And I was just like, "I never even assumed those people could... I could be..." it seems so far away. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's..." Having a proximity to those people, and start thinking differently, because I don't know the journey but they've done it. Because someone in our world, and like, "How do [inaudible 00:16:13]?" I'm like, "This is literally a 13 minute project. There you go. [inaudible 00:16:16]." It's like I've done it so many times, it's not hard, right? But for them, it's like this is the rocket science to figure it out. And then the same way with these guys who have built billion dollar companies. So now it's trying to proximity to those people, and trying to get around them, and trying to figure out the journey. So the first thing we did, literally, I got out with Tony, Tony gave the answer to the question, and I knew the first guy I needed to get into proximity with. So I texted Dave, Dave called him up, we brought him on retainer. And now, we've got him an hour a week, to get on the phone with him and just ask him all of our questions. And have him introduce us all the different players at that next level. So a lot of it's that. Dave, who's the CEO, was very focused on all the... He's very much like, "Okay, first, to get to this goal, we have to have everyone here, here, here. These are the percentages, the numbers, all the..." Those things stress me out, I hate spreadsheets. He's always got spreadsheets. But he comes back with all the spreadsheets, I was like, "All I need to know from you is... Because I'm going to be building a funnel. What's the goal? What do you need from me to be able to do that?" He's like, "We need more ClickFunnels trials." Like, "Done. I can... Okay. That's where I'm going to focus my energy." And then, it's like, now I can creative on that piece, because I know this is the metric that I can do, with my skillset, to drive it. And everybody's got a metric, right? The traffic team, everybody's got a metric. But for me personally, it's like the only thing I actually affect in a short term, micro, and then I can focus all the creativity and effort on that, while trying to figure out how to shift my mind set to be bigger, to... Caleb: If Marc Benioff offered you $1 billion for ClickFunnels, what would you say? Speaker 4: Good question. Russell: I'd ask him for five. Matt: Good response! Rob: Can I ask you a question, outside of business? Matt: You asking a question? Oh. Rob: Yeah. Matt: Oh, go ahead. Rob: So I remember you were talking about your wife earlier, with how you wanted to get her the couch. Me and my fiance actually met at ClickFunnels, at your event. Matt: Yeah. Rob: So- Matt: ClickFunnels wedding. Russell: No way. Rob: So what I'm curious about is- Russell: Am I going to be the best man at the wedding? Caleb: I told you, you've got to come, I'm like, "You've got to invite Russell." Rob: So what I wanted to ask you is, obviously you run a nine figure company, and there's a lot that goes into that, how do you balance with, let's say, number one, your wife and then your kids as well? And then, what is your secret to a really successful marriage, that's worked for you? Matt: Dude, what- Rob: I think that's something that many entrepreneurs have good marriages that don't really get asked about. So I was just curious about that. Matt: Yeah. Russell: So I hear three questions in there, right? So balance, happy wife... What was... There was a third one? Caleb: Kids. Rob: Yeah, just balancing it, running a company. I mean, you do all these things, you also have a wife, you have kids. Russell: Yeah. So I would say a couple things. So number one is balance is this thing that we all, for some reason, in our mind, we all seek after. But everything great in my life has come from times of radical imbalance. When I wanted to become a wrestler, I wasn't a great wrestler because I was balanced, it was because I became radically imbalanced in that thing. Matt: Dang. Russell: It became the most important thing in my life, and everything else suffered. But I had to do it to be considered successful. When I met my wife, we didn't create a great relationship because we were balanced, I became radically imbalanced. And all my time and effort and focus was on her. And that's why it became great. ClickFunnels, same way. We built ClickFunnels, I was not balanced. We had to become radically imbalanced for a season, to focus actually to get... So that's the thing to understand. In anything great in life, you can't do it in a point of balance. It's radical imbalance that causes greatness. Matt: And that's golf. Russell: And so, you got to be okay with that. But it can't be for forever. It's got to be something that goes, and it comes and goes. Because people who get radically imbalanced for a long time, they can lose their family, they can lose their kids. Rob: Was there a point where you had to tell your wife, "Hey, this is what I really want to do."? Russell: A lot. She had to- Rob: And she had to just- Russell: ...be on board with- Rob: ...get on board. Russell: She had to get on board, yeah. And if she wasn't, I had to say, "Okay, what's more important?" If it was her, then I had to say no to that. And there's been many opportunities in my life I've had to say no to. Rob: What's that dynamic like, being that guys are together, just as far as working out just normal little things? Russell: So I- Rob: Just decisions, those kind of things. Russell: Yeah, well, marriage, you're going to find out, it's hard. Just so fully aware. No one told me that, going into it. I was like- Matt: Yeah. Russell: I was like, "This is going to be amazing. This is going to be the greatest thing in the world." And it is, it's awesome. But man, it is way harder than I thought. Rob: Just to be a person. Russell: Yeah, someone's... I, actually, I would highly recommend Stacey and Paul Martino have a course that my wife and I have gone through the last year, and it's amazing. There's a principle they teach about demand-relationship. If you just go through their... They have a 14 day quick start, it's like $100. But if you just learn the principles of demand-relationship, what they teach. The biggest game changer in a relationship I ever... Of all the things I've studied... Rob: Why? Russell: It is amazing. Rob: What was your take-away? Russell: The principle of demand-relationship is that, throughout history and society, the way that most of us get things done is that... So in a relationship, there's a power player, and there's someone less, right? And if I want my wife to do something, I'm going to demand, like, "I need you to do these things." Right? And that works, until the other person has the ability to leave. So prior to divorce being a thing, men, throughout history, have had a dominant relationship over women. They used to manage and get what they want, and women couldn't leave. And so, it was a horrible thing, right? But they couldn't leave. As soon as divorce happened, boom, it started happening. Right? When parents come over to their kids and give demand-relationship, as soon as the kids are able to leave, it breaks. And then, breaks his relationships. And so, that's the problem, is that for the last 5000 years, that's been our DNA, that men force women to do these different things. And that's what the demand-relationship is. Their whole training, their whole course, everything they teach is the opposite of demand-relationship. How do you create a relationship, where transformation happens through inspiration, not through demanding, and chasing. And it's tough because, for all of us, especially men, it's been so ingrained in our DNA that if we want something, we... That's how we do business, how we do things. But in a relation, especially an intimate relationship, it's the worst thing that could possibly happen. And that's what we all do. So it'd be worth... I'm hoping she writes a book some day, because it's... In my new book, I have a whole chapter, actually, teaching her framework on in demand-relationship. What's that? Rob: Were you high school sweethearts? Russell: College, we met in college. Rob: So she was with you before you started... Russell: Yeah. Rob: ...and had the huge success- Russell: Yeah. Rob: ...basically. Russell: Yeah. Rob: What was that transition like, from you guys, I guess, being... struggling, and you guys stay together- Matt: Good questions, Rob. Rob: ...to now- Russell: His mindset's on this. Rob: Yeah. Russell: Going into it. Rob: What is that like? I'm just curious, because I mean people don't really talk about this, I guess, a lot. Caleb: Relationship genius. Russell: Yeah. And it's different, because some relationships, both the people are in the business, some aren't. My wife's not involved in the business at all. She... Rob: Oh, okay. Russell: ...doesn't understand it, and she doesn't want to be part of it. And that's okay. It's like sometimes that's been the biggest blessing for me, sometimes it's been hard. Caleb: Yeah. Russell: Right? Sometimes I see the power couples, who are both in the business, and it's really, really cool. But I ask them, and they're like, "Sometimes it's a great blessing, sometimes it's really hard." So there's pro's and con's both ways. But I think the biggest part is just, this has been good for our relationship, and at first we didn't always have this, but it was like... Just figuring out how to get... You both have to have that same end goal, otherwise you're fighting against each other, right? And so, when we were building ClickFunnels and stuff, it was hard at first, because she didn't really... She's like, "What are you guys doing? You spend all this time and..." didn't understand it. And it was tough because I was trying to explain it. And luckily, for me, is that Todd was part of this too, and his wife was kind of struggling. So they had each other to kind of talk through it. But it wasn't until the very first Funnel Hacking Live, where... Because my wife had never been to one of my events before, anything we'd really... She knew what kind of we did, but not really. And she came to Funnel Hacking Live, the very first one. And she didn't come down at first, because she didn't realize what was happening. And she was doing some stuff, and then, she came down with one of her friends and walked in the back of the room, and saw all the stuff. And she started just crying. She was like, "Oh, this is what you're... I had no idea this is what was happening, and what was..." And then, it became real for her. And that was such a huge blessing for me, because now, the next time, it was like, "We have to work hard for this." Or, "We're planning for..." whatever, she was able to see this is the fruits, and like, "Oh, that's why you're doing it." Now, if you notice, my wife's, every Funnel Hacking Live, front row. She doesn't understand a word we're saying, but she's there, she's paying attention, because she's like, "Look at all the people, and their lives are changing, and impacting." And now, it's different, where when I got to do work, work late nights, or whatever, she sees the vision, and she's on board with it. So it makes so much easier. The other secret I learned is if I tell her, if it's like 05:00 at night, I'm like, "Crap, I got to stay late tonight." And I call her at 05:00 at night, nothing good can come from that. It's better if you just go home, right? If I know Wednesday night, I'm going to be working late, I tell her Monday. Like, "Hey, Wednesday night, there's a good chance I'm going to be late." And then, if I tell her that, she's totally cool with it, right? But you don't tell them the day of. It'll destroy your marriage more than anything. Matt: That's good wisdom. Russell: The other secret, this secret don't put on camera, I don't want my wife to... Matt: Is that right? Russell: Yeah, if I have any inclination that people are coming to town, or something's happening, I always like, "Just so you know, next week, Matt and Caleb are coming to town. There's a good shot we might go to dinner at night, just so you're fully aware." And she's like, "Cool." And then, it's fine. The other secret, this is the real one. So don't share this outside this room. Speaker 4: This is the off camera one. Russell: Yeah. So especially after... For my wife and I... So we started having kids, the same time I started this business, right? And so, I'm traveling, I'm going to events. And she's at home with the kids. And so, we never traveled before, so I'm going on these vacations, I'm meeting these cool people, I'm in hotel rooms. So every night, I'm getting back, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh." And I'm like, "Okay, I met so and so, and then..." all these things I'm so excited, so pumped about these things. And I'm telling her about stuff, and she's at home with twin babies, miserable, tired, horrible, feet hurt, body hurt. And I'm out having the time of my life. Matt: Yeah. Russell: And I'm thinking she's going to be pumped for me, right? Matt: Right. Russell: No. And for probably a year or so, I was just like... And then, one day, I remember I'm at some event, and I get cornered by people. And then, introverted Russell's like... anxiety, and it was horrible. And somebody cornered me in the bathroom, and asking me questions while I'm peeing. And it wasn't even... At least, sometimes, most of the time, they fake pee next to you, so at least it's not awkward. He was sitting next to me, watching me pee. I'm like, "Can you at least fake pee?" And so, anyway... It was so bad. And I got home that night, and I call her on the phone, and I was just like, "It was horrible." I went off about how horrible it was, and I was miserable. And she's like, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry." But then, she was cool. It was awesome. And I was like, "I didn't get in trouble." And so, the next time I went out, I got home that night, call her, I was like, "Oh, it was horrible. My feet hurt, my back hurts." Anyway, and I've told so many people this, entrepreneurs and friends, who do that, and they shift... Because they don't want to hear you're having this... Anyway, is this truly good or not? I don't know. It saved my marriage. Matt: Is it true? Russell: Literally saved my marriage, and it saved so many of my friends, who… so many of friends, who had the same thing. They want to hear the stories, but not in the moment. When you come back home later, you tell the stories, they love it. But in the moment, when they're miserable, and you're having fun, it is not... First time with Tony Robbins, when I walked on fire, I call her that night, I'm like, "I just walked on fire. Waaa!" And I hear the kids screaming in the background, and she was angry. And I was like, "Huh." And I'm like, "Cool, I'm sending you to walk on fire next month." I sent her to walk on fire, and then she was on fire. But it was like... Caleb: She's like, "No." Russell: Later, she wants to hear, but not in the moment, because it's just like... Anyway, so- Rob: Yeah. Russell: ...that was- Rob: Makes sense. Russell: ...life changing for... Anyway, so... And then, the other thing is just you have to understand what your values are. I learned this from Tom Bilyeu at a level that was fascinating, recently. But- Caleb: Who was that? Russell: Tom Bilyeu, he runs Impact Theory. Caleb: Oh, okay. Rob: Impact Theory. Caleb: Gotcha. Russell: But he writes out his values, but he prioritizes them. So his number one value is his wife, number two... And he has the values written out. And so, when a conflict comes in place, or he gets asked to speak at a huge event, speak for the Queen of England, or whatever, but it's the same weekend as his wife wants something. He's like, "My wife trumps the value... 100%, she trumps it. So the answer's no, and it's not hard for me to say no." Caleb: Wow. Russell: And so, it's figuring it out for yourself. What are your values? Personally, with your family, the wife, everything like that. And you define them, and then it's like there's no question. That's what hard, is when you value something here, and your spouse values something differently, and the conflict of that is what causes the fights, right? But if you get on the same page, like, "Look, this is number one, two..." You have these things, then it makes it easier to navigate those things, because it's like, "No, I understand this is one of the values we have together, as a couple, you should go do that thing." Or whatever the thing might be. So anyway... Caleb: That's awesome. Russell: But marriage is one of the hardest things, but one of the most rewarding things, at the same time. So it's worth it, but it's a ride. Go through demand-relationship, man. That's- Rob: That's a great point. Russell: ...so good. Speaker 4: I got a question. Rob: Yeah, go ahead. Speaker 4: So two big things that I heard from you, amongst your story, you were talking this positivity. When you were doing great at something, or you learned something, you're so excited about it, you're so positive, but then there's this other part of you that's very vulnerable. Russell: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 4: And so, you experience anxiety, or you have challenging days, or you're discouraged. How do you find the balance between those, of being vulnerable and being honest with how you're feeling, versus, "Hey, this is a challenge. I'm an entrepreneur, I can overcome this."? Matt: Right. Speaker 4: What's the balance? Russell: Yeah. That's good. One of the... Everyone who's met Tony has a story about how Tony's changed their life. But one of the biggest things that I... There's three or four things that I got from Tony, the very first time I went to his event and I heard him speak, that had a huge impact on me. One of the biggest ones was state control, understanding that. Have you ever heard him talk about the triad and things like that? Speaker 4: Yeah. Russell: I'd never heard that before, and I remember watching him do these things on people in the audience. And it was fascinating. He took a lady, who was... He picked somebody in the audience who was suicidal, and he's like... It was the weirdest thing. And he talked about the triad, right? There's three things that change your state, right? There's your language, there's your focus, and there's your physiology, right? So he takes someone, he's like, "I need someone who's suicidal." He takes this beautiful girl. I remember, we were up in Toronto, so then he takes this girl, and he's like, "I need you to get depressed. Not a little bit depressed, clinically suicidal." She's like, "What?" He's like, "Just get there in your mind. Whatever it takes, get dark." And you see her state change, right? And he keeps pushing her, and keep pushing her, and he gets her to this point. And anyway, it's crazy I'm watching this. And I'm kind of freaking out, because I'm watching him do this to this girl, getting her to a point... And soon, she's bawling her eyes out and everything. And he's like, "You got to get deeper. Get darker. More miserable." All this stuff. And you see him change this girl's state. And all of a sudden it stopped. And finally, it seemed like forever, finally he stops and he's like, "Everyone look at her. Watch her. Look at this." He's like, "What do you notice? What's her physiology?" You see her body, you see tears, and all this stuff. And you see her just broken. And then, he's like, "What do you say?" And he goes through the whole triad with her. And he shows that. And he's like, "Now I'm going to show you how quickly you can shift this." To the point where it's like... Anyway, it was crazy. And then, he shifts it, and he starts taking her back through, shifting the physiology, shifting her shoulders, shifting everything, shifting her meanings, shifting focus, shifting what she's saying. And he gets this girl, within three or four minutes, to literal ecstasy, it was crazy watching this. And you see her, where she's laughing... the opposite side of it. And I'd never seen somebody like that, the flip of emotions, how easy it was, by just shifting these three things in her. And it had such a profound impact on me. Caleb: Is there video of that? Russell: Not maybe the one I saw, but he does it at every UPW, he does it... I'm sure there's YouTube videos of it, as well. But if you type the triad, I think he calls it the triad or state control, things like that, you see it happen. But I saw that, and I was just like, "Oh my gosh, I never realized that we had control over that. I thought my feelings were my feelings." Like, "Here's your feeling." Like, "Okay, crap, this is the feeling I have today." And after experiencing that, I was like, "I could actually change this." I didn't know that. And it's interesting because I think sometimes when we're depressed, or we're sad, or we have these things, I think some of us like it. I've had times before, I don't want to be happy. I'm enjoying feeling miserable. And sometimes, I sit in there because I enjoy, because we do, it's weird. It's messed up. But I felt that. I'm like, "I could change this but I don't want to." But other times, I'm like, "I have to change it." Now that I've learned that. It's crazy you can shift your state, and you can do that and show up the way you need to be. And one practical example of how I use it a lot is, when I get home at the end of the night... And this kind of comes back to your question, I think, earlier, too. How do you do all the things? And I told you this yesterday. One of the things that I got the biggest, from being around Tony Robbins, the most impressive thing about him is when... Tony's got... As busy as any of us are, take that times 10, and that's Tony, right? He's the most busy person ever. But if you have a chance, a brief moment with Tony, where he's going to say a million things, and you have a second with him, he is the most present person I've ever met. The world dissolves around it, and it's just him and you, and there's nothing else. You can tell. And he's just zoned in on you, and it's this magical experience. And as soon as it's done, he's just gone, he's on the next thing. But that moment, he's hyper-present. And so, for me, when I'm doing things, it's like... Like, when I get home at night, at the end of the day, park my car, I walk in, and there's the door before I come into the house. And sometimes, I'm anxious, I'm thinking about work, and thinking about stuff, I'm stressed out, the FBI sent me a letter today, Taylor Swift suing me, whatever the thing is. And I'm like, "Ah." And then, I'm like, "I'm going to walk through that door, and I can't do anything about it now. My kids are there, my wife's there." And it's just like, "Okay, I got to change my state." And right there, before I walk through the door, I change my state. Get in the spot, and then like, "Okay, here we go." And I walk through the door, and it's like then I'm dad. And it's different, right? And so, I think it's learning those things. Because it's not... Your feelings are weird, they're going to show up in one way or the other, but the fact that you can control them, which I didn't understand or know how. But as soon as I realized that, it's just like, "I don't have to be sad, or miserable, or anxious, or whatever. I can actually change those things in a moment, if I understand how." And that was one of the greatest gifts Tony gave me, was just understanding how to do that, and seeing it in practical application with somebody. And now, it's like I can do it myself, any time I need to, if I need to. Matt: How do you act around Tony Robbins? Especially from the beginning to now, because you guys are close now. He probably looks at you like I look at a lot of these guys, that are Caleb's friends. I look at them like nephews, these are like... I'd do anything for them. And I know that... I can see that's how Tony starting to look at you. But take us from the very first time, because he didn't he have you come to an event, ask you a bunch of questions, take notes, and then just leave you hanging, or something like that. Tell the story, real quick. Russell: Oh, man. Tony's so intense. I still get scared to... It's still like, "Ah." Anyway, every time I see him, it's just like... I don't know, it's weird. His presence is- Matt: He still makes you nervous. Russell: Oh, yeah, for sure. But the very first time... So yeah, it was... I don't know, it was probably 04:00 in the morning. I don't even know. The shorter version of the long story is they asked me to come meet him in Toronto, at UPW, same event as this whole experience happened. So I went up there, and supposed to meet him one day, and it shifts to the next day. And if you ever work with Tony, just know if he tells you he's meeting you at 10:00, it could be like four days later you actually meet. You're on Tony time. Yeah, it's- Matt: That's just how it is. Russell: It's crazy, yeah. Just waiting. But it's always worth it, so you just wait and be grateful when it happens. But anyway, so we finally get to the point where we meet, and I have to drive 45 minutes. This is pre-Uber, so I'm in a taxi to some weird hotel. And we get there, and then me and his assistant stand outside for another hour, waiting in the lobby. He kept looking at his phone, nervously, like, "Ah." He's like, "Okay, Mr. Robbins' ready to meet you. Let's go." So we run up the stairs, we go to this thing, we walk in this room, and there's- Matt: And this is the first time you ever- Russell: ...body guards everywhere. First time I ever met him, yeah. Yeah, he's like a giant, comes and gives me a huge hug. And we sit down, and he's like, "You hungry?" I'm like, "Yeah." And he was vegetarian at the time, so he's like, "Get Russell some food." And brought me out this amazing plate of... I don't even know what it was. But it was... I was like, "If I could eat like this is every night, I'd be vegetarian." Because it was amazing. It was- Caleb: It was? Russell: ...insane. And then, got his tape recorder out, he's like, "You okay if we record this?" I'm like, "Yeah." So he clicks record, picks out a big journal, he's like, "You're Mormon, right?" I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "I love the Mormon people. When I was eight years old, I went to a Mormon church and they told me to keep a journal. I've kept a journal ever since. Do you mind if I take notes while we talk?" Matt: Wow. Russell: I'm like, "Eh, okay." So he's recording, taking notes, and then he drilled me for an hour. Just like do, do, do. Just like- Speaker 4: And how long ago was this? Russell: This is 13, 14 years ago. Speaker 4: Okay. Russell: Anyway, it was intense. And I can't remember what I was saying, I was so scared, I'm second-guessing everything I've said. And then, he's asking me numbers and stats, because we were trying to do this deal with him. And it was so scary. Matt: So he was just drilling you with questions, and just trying to- Russell: Oh, like crazy, yeah. I'm trying to just... Yeah, dude. Anyway, it was crazy. And then, he had to go back to UPW to speak again, so he's like, "You want to drive with me?" So I'm like, "Yeah." So go down, and jump in his Escalade together, we're in the back seat, and we're driving. And it's just crazy. And I remember he asked me a question about this one... I won't say the person's name because the story isn't positive for the person. But he asked, he's like, "What do you think about so and so?" I'm like, "Oh, that person's really cool and really talented." He's like, "He's a very significant..." and he just talked about six human needs, earlier that day, so I was very aware of here's what the needs are, right? And he's like, "Yeah, I don't think I'd ever work with him, because he's very significance driven." And I was like, "Oh, that make sense." And all of a sudden, I was like, "Ah, Tony is reading my soul, right now." I was like, "What drives me? I don't even know what drives me. Does he know what drives me?" Like, "Oh my gosh, am I significance driven?" I'm freaking out, like, "Ah." And all I remember is panicking, thinking, "He knows more about me than I know about me, at this point." And all these things, I'm freaking out, we're driving in his Escalade. And we get to the thing, and he's like, "I got to go inside. Thank you so much, brother. I love you." Jumps out the car, shuts the door. I'm sitting in the Escalade, like, "What just happened?" Matt: It was that fast. Russell: It was insane, yeah. Matt: It was just like- Russell: And then, the driver's like, "Do you want to get out here? Do you want me to drive you somewhere?" Like, "I don't even know where we are." We're in Toronto somewhere, that's all I know. And so, it was just the craziest experience. And then, I don't hear from him for four or five months, nothing. And I'm like- Matt: What were you thinking? Did you think- Russell: I was like, "He must've hated me. Maybe I failed the test. Am I significance driven?" I'm freaking out about all the things. And then, one day, I get this random... It was actually my wife and I, we were celebrating our anniversary, so we were at... It was a StomperNet event, but we took her, it was this cool thing. And she'd just gone to UPW. I sent her like three months later. So she walked on fire, and she was like... And Tony talks about Fiji there, so she was like, "Someday we should go to Fiji." And then, we get this call from Tony, and it was like, "Hey..." Or it was Tony's assistant. Like, "Hey, Tony wants to know if you want to speak at Business Mastery in Fiji, in two weeks." I was like, "Tony Robbins..." I started saying it out loud so Collette could hear me. "Tony Robbins wants me to speak in Fiji, in two weeks?" And Collette, my cute little wife, starts jumping on the bed, like, "Say yes! Say yes!" Caleb: Aw! Russell: And I was like, "Yes, yes, yes. Of course, we will." And then, we're like, we've got three kids that are all toddlers at this time, and like, "Can we bring kids?" They're like, "There's no kids allowed on the resort." I'm like, "We've got three little kids." He's like, "Ah, all right. We'll figure it out." So I hang up, and we're like, "We don't have passports for the kids, we don't have anything." So anyway, it was chaos, we're freaking out. We ended up getting them there, they literally built a fence around our... The Bula house, where's Dan at? The Bula house we were in. They built a whole fence around, so our kids wouldn't die because- Caleb: Did they really? Russell: ...there's cliffs off the back. Yeah, it was crazy. And then, I'm speaking to this room, and there's less than 100 people. I'm speaking, and Tony's sitting in the back of this room, I'm like- Matt: While you're speaking. Russell: ..."I thought he was not going to be here. This is really scary." Yeah. And he's paying attention the whole time. Matt: Does it make you more nervous? Russell: He introduced me, he brought me on stage, which was like... I still have the footage of that, it's really cool. He brought me on stage, which was crazy. And then, I remember, because in the thing we're talking about lead generation, I was talking about squeeze pages. And afterwards, he got on. He comes up afterwards, he's like, "Yeah, I heard squeeze pages don't work anymore. Is that true, Russell?" He's like, "People say they're kind of dead, they don't work anymore." And this is, again, 12 years ago. And I was like, "Who told you that? They totally still work." Which is funny, because we still use them today. But he was just like, "Somebody had told me they don't work anymore." And I was like, "They..." anyway, "They work, I promise." But anyway, and then I don't hear from him for five years, and then something else happens. It's just weird, these long extended periods of time. But then, every time, every moment, I tried... Five years later, it was a call, it was like, "Hey, Tony's doing this thing. He wants your opinion on it." So I spent like two or three hours with his team, consulting, giving feedback, as much ideas as I could. And like, "Cool, thanks." And then, nothing for two years, and then something else, and then... Little things keep happening, and happening, and can do more and more together. And then- Matt: What did you learn from that? You think that's just- Russell: A couple things I've learned. Number one, I'm sure you guys get this a lot, people who want to work with you, they show up and the first thing they show up with is, "All right, I got an idea how we can make a bunch of money together." Right? They always come, and want to figure out how they can take from you. And I was so scared, and grateful, I didn't ever ask Tony for anything. The first time I asked Tony for anything ever was 12 into our relationship, after Expert Secrets book was done. I had just paid him $250,000 to speak on our stage, and just finished the interview promoting his book. And I was like, "Hey, I wrote a new book. Do you want one?" Matt: Wow. Russell: And he's like, "Oh." And he took it. I'm like, "Cool." And then, a week later, I'm like, "Ah, will you interview me on Facebook with this?" He's like, "Sure." And then, he did, and that video got three and a half million views on it. It was crazy, coolest thing ever. But it was 12 years before I asked him for anything. And I had- Matt: Wow. Russell: ...served him at as many different points as I can. I think the biggest lesson from that is that... And I get it all the time, people come to me and it's like they're trying to ask and take. It's just like... I get it, and it makes sense. But it's just like, "This game's not a short game. If you do it right, it's your life. This is your life mission." Right? Matt: Yeah, that's good. Russell: And so it's just understanding you're planting seeds, and you're serving, and if you do that, eventually good things will happen. And something may never happen with Tony, and that's cool. I do stuff for a lot of people, and nothing ever good ever comes from it. But hopefully something does. Sometimes it's indirect, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's just karma, or whatever you believe in. But if you just always go with the intent to serve, not to like, "What's in it for me?" It just changes everything. And then, if you do that, if you lead with how to serve, stuff comes back to you. But if you lead with trying to get stuff, it just doesn't work. The energy's different in the whole encounter. You know what I mean? Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Russell: So I'm sure you guys have felt that with people, when they first come to you, and it's just like, "Ah." Matt: So is there a point where you... You went to his house. Russell: That was cool. The thing I can say is it was really cool, because most times when I'm with Tony, you're around people. In Fiji, it was fun seeing him, because he's more personal and stuff like that. But it was really special in his home, because it was him and his wife, and it was cool. It was fun just seeing him as him, like as a kid. And even my wife, like, "He seems like a kid here." He was so excited, and showing us his stuff, and all the things. Matt: Ah, well, guys, listen. Russell: Anyway- Matt: A few more questions, because I mean, man, you've been at it for almost two hours, dude. I can go all night, and I know he could. But Brea Morrison, give it up for her for letting us be here. Thank you so much.

The roundtable interview with Matt and Caleb Maddix and a small group of people who are trying to change the world. Enjoy part two of this special 4 part episode series. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Seekers Podcast. So I have got to ask you, what did you think about episode number one of the World Changers Roundtable? Hopefully, you loved it. There were so many things covered in that 42 minutes. Anyway, we are moving on to the next part of this interview. As you know, this is going to be broken down into four parts because they kept me there, handcuffed to a table, until 3:00 AM. I'm just joking. They didn't really. But, the question was so intriguing, we were having so much fun, we just kept going and going until finally I was like, "I have to fly out in three hours. I need to get back to my hotel." But now we're going to go dive into the second part. This next episode is probably another 30 to 40, 45 minutes or so as well. So these are some things we'll be covering in this one, which is really fun. We talk about, number one, why my business partner, Todd Dickerson, is so amazing, and hopefully give you ideas about if you're pursuing opportunities and trying to land your dream job or partnership or whatever. Number two, we talked about personality profiling, how we actually are hiring here at ClickFunnels. We talked about where my love for learning came from. We talked about transition for me, going from an athlete to a business person and a marketer. We talked about some of the lessons I learned from Lindsey Stirling, things I was not expecting to hear from her that totally changed everything for me. We talked about people who intrigue me, my interest in health and bio hacking. We talked about is there anything that happens inside of this business that gets me as excited as what I felt in wrestling. We talked about what thing is close, but nothing actually has ever hit it. We talked about the first Two Comma Club Awards. We talked about how to upgrade your identity as you grow. We talked about the fact that you have to cycle and fail and rebuild in your businesses. We talked about the launch of ClickFunnels and how it wasn't just the fact that I was a genius, because I wasn't. There are so many things. Talking about the grace of God and how it tied into the launch of ClickFunnels. We talked about some of my early products, like Zip Brander and Forum Fortunes. We talked about my Christmas Grinch sale, which was the very first big sale, big launch I ever did, to my little tiny list that made enough money to cover Christmas for my wife and I when we were first getting started. We talked about becoming worthy. We talked about list building, how it's better than buying ads, and a whole bunch of other things. It's amazing, this could be 40 courses all wrapped into one super podcast episode. So if you liked the last episode, I think you're going to love this one as well. And I've got two more after this, coming back, going deeper into this conversation with the Roundtable of World Changers. So, that said, we're going to cue the theme song. When we come back, we'll dive right into the second section here of the interview. Matt Maddix: Dave and Todd, I mean, just wow. Those dudes are like... But what about those guys? Russell: So here's Todd's story. So the real long story short, I bought some software, it was coding Ruby on Rails, didn't know that. Bought this company with the last... I didn't have the money. So I borrowed money, bought this company, coded on some platform we didn't know, and I was like, "Screw it," right? And I tried to hire people to fix it, nobody could fix this platform until finally I was leaving the office one day. I literally emailed the people saying, "Turn off the servers." We lost all of our money to this company. They shut it down. And I'm walking out of the office and I had this impression of like, "There could be someone on your email list who knows Ruby on Rails." I was like, "That's weird. I had a bunch of internet marketing nerds. There's no one that's like, 'Ruby on Rails...'" Anyway. It was starting with the impression from God, I stopped, turned back around, set the computer to open back up, sent an email to my list. "If you know Ruby on Rails, I'm looking for a partner. I bought a software company and it's not working. Please send me a message." Send. Matt: And that's all you said? Russell: Yeah. And lo and behold, three years earlier, Todd bought some random thing from me, happened to be on my email list. He built the website three or four years earlier that was making six figures a year on autopilot. Hadn't worked in four years. Just hanging out relaxing with his wife and his daughter. And an email comes in and it says, "If you know Ruby on Rails, I'm looking for a partner." He's like, "I know Ruby on Rails. I can be Russell's partner." Emails me back. And at first I see him and his beautiful wife and I'm like, "There's no way he's a programmer. There's no way." That was literally my thought. But he was the only person that responded back so I was like, "Okay, well, here's the login to the site. Fix it. I don't know what to do. I'm not a coder." I went to bed, woke up the next morning. He's like, "Cool, I fixed the site. Plus I found this, this, and this. And I changed this. And I moved these things,", and all of this stuff. He's like, "It's working now. Do you have anything else you want to do together?" I'm like, "Huh." And so I give him another project, another project. And for an entire year Todd and I worked together, and never once did he ever ask me for money, ever. Matt: Wow. Russell: Not a penny. And I remember he started finding Boise to work on a project together ... Matt: You're telling me he worked for you for an entire year? Russell: For free. More than a year. Caleb Maddix: Why was that? Russell: I don't know. I found out later. He'd gone to Robert Kiyosaki at this event and he said, "Find someone who's doing what you want to do and work for them for free." So he told me that years later. I didn't know that. Matt: Todd, if you're watching dude. I love you man. You're legit. Russell: And so he kept coming and he started coming to Boise and we started becoming friends. The smartest developer I've ever met. Literally the smartest person I've ever met. I'll go that far. Just genius. And he'd come out to Boise and we'd work on projects and ideas. We tried to launch a couple of things. None of them really worked. And we were just trying stuff. He was just always there, always serving, always doing stuff. And one day were in Boise and I was looking over his shoulder cause we're looking at stuff and I saw his email. And there's all these emails from some recruiting site or something. I was like, "What's that?" He's like, "Oh, it's people recruiting me for a Ruby job." And I was like, "Do you get a lot of those?" And he's like, "I get three or for a day." I'm like, "Really? Are they good offers?" He's like, "I don't know. Let's check it out." He opened it up and the first one was like $400,000 a year starting salary. I'm like, "What?" The next one is $350,000. The next was 5 ... Insane things. I'm like, "Why don't you do that?" He's like, "I don't want to work for them. I want to be your partner man." I'm like, "What?" And then I all of a sudden had this realization that I hadn't paid him in a year. We didn't have much money at the time, we're still at the backside of a business failure when we met. I'm like, "I can pay you maybe $50,000 a year. Can I pay you that?" He's like, "Whatever." So I told our little bookkeeper, "Pay Todd $50,000 a year." And they're like, "Okay." So he did that and next year we're paying $50,000 a year. We're doing stuff and we have more things. Started to get a little success here and there. Making more money. Back in Boise again. And I'm like, "Can I pay you some more?" And he's like, "Whatever." Matt: So he wasn't ever just asking? Russell: Never in his life has he asked me for money. Ever. So we bumped it up to $100,000 a year because that's what we got, the year before that, after a year or two working together. And then, it was crazy, the day Leadpages got the first round of funding for $5,000,000, the same day Todd was flying to Boise. And he gets the email. It's east coast so he's two hours ahead. He's awake and on the plane, he sees the email, forwards it to me, and then jumps in the plane. He's flying for four hours. I wake up. I see the email and I was like, "Leadpages? Got 5 ..." I was like, we built landing page software in the past. I was perplexed and angry. And then Todd lands. And Todd, he's a little guy, he comes into the office all angry. He's like, "Leadpages got 5 million!" He's like, "I can build Leadpages tonight. Do you want to build lead pages?" I'm like, "Yeah. Let's compete with Leadpages." He's like, "All right." Matt: No way. Dude. I love this. Russell: This is like angry Todd. I love angry Todd. I like all Todds, but angry Todd is the best Todd. Matt: Is it? Okay. Russell: He's just pissed because he's like, "I can build this tonight. Everything thing they got we can have done tonight." So we're getting all ready. What should we call it and everything. And then he's like, "Wait, we're building this. You want to add anything else to it?" And I was like, "Oh. Yeah. What if it did this? And what if it did this?" And we spent a week in front of a white board saying, "What if it did?", and we mapped out ClickFunnels. Matt: So you're talking about a week where you guys just locked in and you were just having fun. Just doodling and whatever. Russell: Yeah. He's like, "Oh, I can do that. We can do that." We're brainstorming all sorts of stuff so we map the whole thing out. Matt: Did you know at that moment you were onto something big? At that moment right there, when you guys were like ... Or was it just still like ... Russell: All lot of people have tried something like that. I tried before other people tried. No one had done it. So I was kind of skeptical but Todd's like, "I can do this. This is easy." I'm like, "Okay because I tried it ..." He's like, "No dude, I can do it. This is easy." So I was, excuse me, optimistically hopeful because he's a genius but I was also nervous. But anyways, we map it out and then we bought Clickpros.com. I wanted to call it ClickFusion because I own ClickFusion, but we'd had three failed businesses called ClickFusion. All of them failed and Todd was like, "No. It's bad karma. We can't." I'm like, "But the logo is so cool dude." Matt: I love it. You love the logo. Russell: And he's like, "No, we can't." He's like, "It's got a jinx on it or something. We can't do that. You have to come up with a different name." I was like, "But ClickFusion is the coolest name ever." So we're trying things. Click everything and then ClickFunnels. We're like, "Ah." That was the thing. We're so excited Matt: Who first said it? Do you remember? The words ClickFunnels. Caleb: It's almost like God saying, "Let there be light." Russell: I would assume it was me but I'm not positive. I'll have to ask Todd on that one. Caleb: Well, when you said it, was it instant? Like fire? Russell: It was insane, it was available. Matt: Oh, you know that feeling, right? Checking domains. You're like… chills. Russell: How has no one thought of this before? And so we got it and I remember I was driving him to the airport at the end of the week to take him back home. And we got to the airport. Boise airport, It's a small airport. So we pull up to the thing to get out and you can tell he's probably nervous waiting. And before we get out of the car he's like, "I really want to do this man. I'm excited." I'm like, "Me too. Me too." He's like, "I don't want to do this like your employee though. I want to do it as your partner." And in that moment, I was just like all the fear of ... I'd tried partners in the past. It hadn't worked. All this stuff and all the everything. And it was just this weird thing of just all the emotions were hitting me as he sat in the car, about to get out the car. I have 15, 20 seconds before he's going to to go. I was just thinking about him. I was like, he's never asked me for money. He's never done anything. He's served. He's given everything. I was just looking at him. I was like, "All right let's do it." He's like, "Cool." And he got out of the car and he's gone. Matt: Wait a minute. So at that moment? Is was that quick? Russell: That was it. Matt: It was a gut feeling that you just knew. That he was ... Russell: It was him. Yeah. And I was literally... I said this on stage at Funnel hacking live, outside of marrying my wife, it was the greatest decision I ever made. Matt: Yeah. I remember you saying that with tears. Russell: Yeah. Matt: Why though? I'm curious because it's not just ClickFunnels. Russell: He's amazing. If you look at our personality profiles, it's fascinating. We have the same personality profiles. The Myers-Briggs. Except for one letter's different. Where I'm a feeler he's a thinker. And it's been magical as a partnership because we both have so much respect for each other that we don't try to fight each other. And it's very much like if I wanted to do something, I'm like, "This is what I want to do. This what I'm feeling. What do you think?" And he'll come back and be like, "Well, I think this." And so I come up from feeling instead of thinking and it's really cool. So sometimes his thinking will trump my feeling. And I'm like, "You're actually right. Let's not do that." Or vice versa. Where he's like, "I'm thinking this." And I'm like, "I don't know why but I feel this." And he'll be like, "Okay." He respects that. We just have such mutual respect that we've never been in a fight. We've never argued. We've never had problems. It's been amazing. Matt: Wow. Russell: And he's similar to like we talk about with Dan. He went back home after us white boarding that, sat in his basement for five or six months and built ClickFunnels by himself. Caleb: Really just by himself? Russell: 100% by himself. Caleb: No other team. No other dev? Russell: It was just him. And the right before we launched, we brought in another partner, Dylan, who built the front-end editor and did a lot of the UI. And so then it was those two as we got closer and closer to the launch. And then for the next year it was just those two that did everything. And then after a year, we started bringing in other developers. But it was 100% Todd. Matt: Wow. Russell: He's amazing. In all aspects. You know you have friends you think they know everything about everything. That's like Todd except he actually knows everything about everything. You ask him anything and he's just like ... I don't know how he does it. And I'll always fact check him, like, "Oh my gosh. He's right again." He's brilliant. It's amazing. Matt: So for those of us who have partners or are maybe going into partnership, what's your best advice? And what do you feel like he does right that other partners don't do? Russell: I think the hardest thing with partners is typically we want to partner with someone who is just like us. We did a podcast most recently. Dean, Tony and I, right? We've done two partnerships. Both partnerships made it through the launch and they stopped. Made it through the launch and stopped. The podcast was like, "Why?" I love Dean. I love Tony. They're amazing. The problem is that me and Dean had the exact same skill set. Matt: Oh. Russell: And so the problem is that both of us are right. We both understand it right, but we do it differently. And so it's like You have two people, and so typically you want to partner with those people who are like you. You're like, "Oh, we think the same. We should be partners." But that's not necessarily the right thing because then you've got two alphas with the same skillset, and someone has to win and someone has to lose. And it's hard. Whereas me and Todd, we have different skill sets. There is never a winner or a loser. We can both win because different skill sets, both the same mission. It's really easy. So I think the biggest thing is you're trying to find the yin yang. You're not trying to find someone who thinks like you or acts like you. In fact, this is true in most hiring processes as well. I used to have people like, "Send me a video if you want this job." Right? So I get these videos, and the people that I wanted to hire were the people like me. I'm like, "This person's awesome. They think like me. They're a genius. They're amazing." You'll hire them, and within a week I'm like, "I hate this person." It's horrible. So we started shifting the way we do our hiring based on personality profiling instead. DISC profile drives most of my own personal hiring so I know that I'm a high D, high I, high S. No C at all. Right? And so the people I need to hire around me are high S, high C. The problem is the people I who I watched their videos and I'm pumped, they're high D, high I. So I'm like, "Yeah. These people are awesome. They're charismatic. I'm going to love them. They're drivers, they're awesome. Worst employees ever. Matt: Right. Russell: Right? So when people send us this profile, first I find the right profile and then from there I do interviews. Because if I interview ahead of time I get sold by the people who sell and then they're horrible employees. And so I make sure they're high S high C, because I know that if I talk to high S high C, I'm going to be kind of bummed out. Like, "Oh, I don't know if this is the kind of person that I'm going to jive with." But they're the best people to surround myself with because I'm such a high D high S. I'm a creator. I'm throwing things up in the air and I need people who are S and C, who are faithful finishers, who are going to take the things, capture them, and make sure that it's amazing. Matt: Do you feel like businesses and entrepreneurs are making a mistake by not having their employees and their team take these tests? Russell: 100%. I have a new company we're launching all about personality profiling because I'm such a big believer in it. Matt: Really? Tell me why. Top three reasons. Russell: It's in all things in life. If you're going to be a partner. If you're going to date someone. Understanding who they are is such a big part of it. Right? Because we think everyone sees the world the same way we see it and it is not true at all. The way you see it, the way we all see is so different and so if we don't understand that at a deep level, then I get upset by what you do and at what everyone's doing because it's like, "Don't you see what I see?" And the reality is no they don't. So if you start understanding people better ... In fact, the software can be called Understand About Me. It's a place you go and you take all the personality profiling and it gives you a page that can show somebody this is me. So in five seconds I can understand you perfectly they're like, "Oh, now I know how to work with you." Because I understand what you are, what your beliefs are, what your values, all the things I need to know about you, I can find it really quickly. Where normally you're going to go years with somebody before you understand them. I can look at a thing and get pretty dang close in a minute. Matt: Wow. Russell: Now I know hot interact with you and spend time with you and work with you. Things like that. Caleb: Question. Where does your love to learn come from? Because one of the things I noticed from being around you, it's always like yeah, so I had this moment where I geeked on this and I geeked out on this. It was health and suppliments, and marketing and personality types. There's all these different things you geek out on. Have you always been that way? Is it like you geek out on marketing, you saw the rewards from it, and you're like, "Wow, what if this goes into other areas?" Where does that come from? Russell: Yeah, I didn't always have my life. In fact, I had a fascinating conversation with Tom Bilyeu about this, because when I was growing up in high school I always thought I was a dumb kid. I thought I was an athlete, so I focused there. I thought I was an athlete, so I was a wrestler, that was my identity, that was where I focused at. I thought I was dumb. Because of that, straight C student high school and college, my cumulative GPA graduating from college was 2.3. Straight C's and one B maybe somewhere in there, right? Because I was a dumb kid. When I got done I ended my wrestling career, so I stopped being an athlete, and I was like, "Oh crap." I started to learn this business stuff and I don't like to read. I'm a dumb kid. What do I do? It was fascinating. Tom told me, because I had this epiphany, I'm not actually dumb. He's like, "Actually, the reality is you probably really were dumb. But then you changed, right?" So for me it was like I shifted. It was fascinating. Do you remember the Funnel Hacking Live where we had Lindsay Stirling perform? One of my favorite parts of that, she did a whole performance. If you guys don't know, Lindsay does violin dancing stuff, and afterwards I had a Q and A with her afterwards. I had this question I was so pumped to ask. I was waiting for her just to like, the question is, she was on America's Got Talent, and I think she took 7th place. When she got kicked off, Pierce Bronson or whatever said, "You've got no talent. You're no good." Whatever, right? So I was like, do you remember that time when he said that? What I thought she was going to say was, "Yeah, I proved him wrong. Yeah." I was like, "What did you feel after that?" She's like, "Yeah, I got home and I realized he was right. I wasn't very good. So I went back and I started practicing and I started working harder and eventually I became good enough." It was like, oh my gosh. I got chills when I was saying it again. Matt: Yeah. Russell: I remember when Tom said it to me, he was like, "You probably were dumb." I was like, "I was." Because I wasn't reading things. So with marketing that was the first thing for some reason that caught my attention, that got me excited, right? And then if you look at my DISC profile, ROI is my highest value. I have to see ROI in something or I don't want to do it. So when I saw an ROI on this reading, I was like, "Oh my gosh. I read a book, I got one little sentence, changed a color, made more money. Oh my gosh." That is where it started, 100%. I started learning that and I started getting obsessed with those things. As this business grew for me I started being more, I always joke that crazy people got attracted to me, right? The best health people, the best fitness people, the best in every market kind of came into our world somehow. So I started getting to meet all these people. When you're around someone who's the best in the world at the thing, and they start talking about the thing, you can't help but be like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." Right? You zone in on that. So whenever I meet someone that's amazing and I have a chance to talk to them like this I just geek out. Like when I met your dad the first time with you guys. That's when I bought your parenting course and everything. I was just like, I saw you and I saw him and I was like, "I want that." So I started going down that rabbit hole, right? I met Anthony DiClementi, I was like, "I love this guy. I have respect for him, I love him." Every time he talks about anything, he fascinates me, when he talks about something it fascinates me. I have to look down those things, right? When people fascinate me, the things that fascinate them start fascinating me and that's when I kind of go down those rabbit holes. This person is so intriguing and fascinating. What makes them that way? What are they doing. It's interesting. I'm not a good question asker. You guys are so good at question askers. I've never been good at asking questions, but I'm really good at watching what people do and then seeing it and trying to go down the rabbit hole. What are they doing, why are they doing it, that kind of thing. Caleb: He's a true master in it. You can just tell. What are some things you want to take the time to geek out on? I'm sure you see something and you're like I want to get on that but it's not a priority, I've got to do this. What are some things, if I had a week or two? Russell: Just free time with nothing else involved? Caleb: What's the next thing you're going to geek out on? Russell: Oh. I would say every probably three years I get re-excited about SEO, for some reason. I start going down that path again, because I love it. There's times in my business when that was the focused. It's not now at all, but I went through a couple ... Brian Dean's a real cool SEO guy, couple guys… I started dabbing my toe in again and I'm like, I just want to get back into it so bad. Right now SEO is actually our number 11 lead source as of today in ClickFunnels, which is amazing. So we handed SEO the first four or five years, now we're focused on it again. It's doing really well for us. I want to go deep there because I like that. Anyway, I haven't had a chance to do that. Any of the health stuff really, really fascinates me. Matt: Why? I'm curious. Why are you drawn to that so much? The health stuff. Russell: Because I've seen with myself ... My history is I got in wrestling, at the PAC 10 tournament was my last actual wrestling match. My wife was giving herself fertility shots in the stomach during PAC 10 so the next month se was pregnant. So I got done wrestling, got done competing, got done running, got done lifting. All my athletic career ended, and then my wife got pregnant. She's eating for three kids, and I'm pumped because I don't have to work out right now, she's hungry, I'm hungry, we're eating. We just kept eating and eating. So over the next seven to eight months my wife gained like 60 pounds, I gained like 60 pounds. We were doing it together so who cared, it was amazing. Then one day she has two babies and she loses like 45 pounds and I'm like, oh crap. I'm stuck here. Where did you go? This for me? Matt: Yeah. Russell: Thank you. Then at that time the business was starting and I was stressed out trying to figure it out and I didn't get healthy again. I just was in that state of being 65 pounds heavier for years. But I didn't know the difference, I didn't know that I felt differently, because I'd never been in a spot where I spent eight hours sitting behind a computer, so I didn't know what good felt like or bad felt like. I knew if I tried to wrestle I'd puke, so I was like I don't feel like I'm an athlete. I just felt normal, I thought. Eight years in I was like, I don't know, I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, "Oh, what happened to you?" You know what I mean? I'm sure hopefully everybody's had a chance. I was like, huh. It was hard because in my head I knew how to work out, I knew how to train, I knew these things. Finally I was like, "I need to get a trainer." So I got a trainer for the first time. I'd never really done that before. Started going, and got me from I don't even know, 27, 28% body fat down to 12% in a matter of seven or eight months. I looked better, I felt better, but what's crazy is I could work twice as hard and twice as long. I wasn't tired. I was like, "I can keep going. My brain's on fire. This is amazing." Matt: Wow. Just from the ... Russell: I had no idea until I lost all the weight. All of a sudden it was just like, I can do so much more. I think, when I first met Anthony DiClementi the first time I was like, this is my problem right now. I am at work all day slaying dragons, doing all these things, I have this energy. I get home at night and my two little twin boys are there, and my little daughter, and I'm spent and I have no energy. How do I still be a present dad and how do I have these things? The next tier was the bio hacking stuff. How do you do these things? How do you increase energy? There's so many ways to do that, from light therapy to supplements to sleeping to sound to breath, all these crazy things that seem stupid. The first time Anthony's like, "We're going to do breath work." I'm like, "We're going to breathe? That's your bio hack? We're going to breathe together?" He's like, "Yeah, it's going to be amazing." I'm like super annoyed. What's the ROI on this, I've got to get back to work. So he sat me down in our gym. You've been in our wrestling room. He sat me down and he's like, "You have to sit because if you're standing you'll hit your head and you'll die." I'm like, what are you talking about? He sits me down and we do these breathing exercises where he's yelling at us and screaming. All this stuff is happening. If anyone's ever done deep breath work it's nuts. We're doing this thing where we're supposed to do this heavy, heavy breath work until he's like, what's going to happen is the world is going to ... Has anybody done jiu-jitsu here? Been tapped out before? Matt: Yeah. Russell: So you get choked out. What will happen, the carotid artery gets choked and the world starts shrinking like this. If you take pressure off it, it comes back to life. If you don't, it goes darker and darker until it disappears and you're gone, right? If you've never been choked out, that's what happens. It's a really fun experience. But you have the minute when you see it shrinking around you and then it's gone, right? He told me that's what's going to happen. You're going to breathe so much that the world around you is going to start shrinking. If you don't stop you're going to pass out. So we go all the way to where it starts shrinking, stops, and then when you hit that point you let me know and then you hold your breath for as long as you can. He's like, "How long can you hold your breath for?" I'm like, "Maybe a minute." He's like, "You'll do it for at least five." I was like, there's no way. So he says sit down, we're doing this breath thing, we're going like crazy and sure enough the walls start doing weird stuff. I feel like I'm on drugs. I'm sweating like crazy. We keep doing it. He's yelling at me. All of a sudden the world starts closing around me, I'm like, "What is happening?" And then he stops and is like, "Hold your breath." He starts the clock. I'm sitting here holding my breath forever, looking around. We had three or four of us guys all doing it at the same time. I'm freaking out. And then it starts getting quieter, things are slowing down, we're sitting there and then he's like let some of the pressure out but don't breathe in. Let pressure out, pressure out, pressure out, keep doing that, and it gets done and the stop clock is over five minutes. I'm just like, I just held my breath for five minutes. Matt: And you didn't even know it. Russell: Insane. And then the rest of the day we were on fire. It was just like, whoa. Right? We brought a cryo-sauna at our house and we go freeze in the cryo-sauna and the rest of the day you just feel ... That's the thing I love now, these little weird things. Light therapy, breathing, weird things that just seem stupid. You do it and you can go longer, you can think better, you can do stuff. All those things just get me so excited. Anthony's fun because he randomly will just ship me weird stuff in the mail. Just the weirdest things. It makes my wife so mad. It just shows up. There's a big old box. She's like, what's this from? I'm like, I'm hoping it's from Anthony, it's going to be amazing. Just weird things. Tons of stuff. I love that kind of stuff because the ROI on it is crazy. They're always these weird things. I have this headband someone sent me. You put this headband on, you put an app on and you start working and it just makes you not tired, makes you focused. These weird things. How does this work? I don't know. And they're like oh, it works because the waves over here sync your brain and change your brain waves and the creative state and all these things. I mean, I don't know how it works but I just wrote two chapters. Caleb: Do you do breath work every day? Russell: No, because it's so intense. If I had a coach who could walk me through it. I have a recording of Anthony doing it and I almost dread it because I know how hard it is. By the time you're done you're sweating. Caleb: I've got to get that recording. Russell: I'll get it to you. By the time you're sweating, you're like what just happened? I just breathed for five minutes. It's weird. Anyway, I would love to understand it on a deeper level but I don't understand a lot of the things now. Some of them I've gone deep on, but a lot of them I do without knowing why. I hate it because my wife will be like, "What's this do?" And I'm like, I don't know. Matt: Just love it. Russell: One of my buddies, Preston Eli, he wrote this blog post, he called it the Warriornaire Workout. In there he explains part of his morning workout. He's like, why do I do it? He's like, because Tony Robins does, and I obey all giants who fly helicopters and have stage presence. That quote goes to my head all the time. People ask me, why do you do that? I'm like, because I obey all giants who fly helicopters and have stage presence, that's it. I'm like, I don't know the reason why, Tony says so, therefore I will do it. I would like to understand it at a deeper level so I have a better response than I obey all giants with helicopters and stage presence. But that's a pretty good reason. Anyway. Matt: Real quick, does anybody else want to throw in a question for Russell? Anybody else here live with us? Caleb: Let me ask one more real fast. Because I want to. I want to ask this. We were just having sushi, I was asking you, what are some of the favorite periods of your life? One of them you said was wrestling, which I found funny because by far one of my favorite periods is baseball, which people wouldn't expect because obviously I've been on stage and all this other stuff and that should take the cake. But those moments when you're just on the field, you're in the zone, there's nothing better. Where, with what you get to do now, whether it's being live on a webinar or being on stage or whatever it is, where do you get the same feeling of wrestling? Do you know what I mean? You know, the feeling in your chest? Russell: Today while we were in line at the grocery store I talked to your dad about this. I said that the best feelings I ever had in my life were from wrestling. The feeling of winning a hard match that I wasn't supposed to win and getting your hand raised, I never felt something like that, that felt as good as that, ever. I've been searching in business to find that, and I've never found it. Speaker 3: Do you feel like sports is like business in any sense? Matt: Good question. Russell: For sure, yeah. There's a lot, for sure. What I was going to say is the closest I've ever gotten to feeling that is when you serve at an event and you see a table rush and you see not only people where they get the a-ha, but enough of an a-ha where it gets them to get up and to move. That's the closest I've ever felt to that. It's not as good, but it's the closest I've ever felt to that. Which is why I love doing the big things. I get a glimpse of that. Caleb: How close? Scale of one to 10. Wrestling's a 10. Where does that rank? Russell: If wrestling's a 10, I'd say it's about an eight. In fact it's interesting because when I first started in business I was racing for that, trying to find it, trying to find it, trying to find it. It took me years before I was like ... Matt: Is it disappointing? Russell: For sure, yeah. We launch today and make a million dollars and it's like, huh. That sucked. What else have we got. Give me something else. Matt: Exactly. Russell: The money goal is always what I thought was going to be the thing, and those always were just like, huh. In fact, literally one of the main reasons I did the Two Comma Club Awards, for me I need, maybe it's just from a decade of my life someone grabbing my hand and raising it. I was like, entrepreneurs need that. No one raises our hands. Two Comma Club Awards, for me, is me lifting their hands like you did it. I needed that, they need that. That's one of the main reasons I did that, because that's the equivalent of that. Anyway. Matt: How many millionaires have you created? Russell: This year we passed 1,000 people that won the two comma club award. We're over 120. Matt: How does it feel to say that? To say it? You know how sometimes it's like so many people that have passion or goals or huge dreams and visions, rarely do they really celebrate what's happening on the journey. Do you find yourself ever getting where your vision is so big and your passion is so deep that even saying things like there's 1,000 millionaires. Dude, that's huge. Man, 1,000 people that are millionaires because of you. Russell: I think the first time I really got that, probably the most impactful time, was the very first Funnel Hacking live that we gave away Two Comma Club Awards. It was the third Funnel Hacking live. It was a couple of months before that we had the idea of a Two Comma Club and an award, talking about that. I legitimately didn't know. I wonder if anyone in ClickFunnels has actually made a million dollars. I don't even know. So Dave went back and the database guys went through everything and I remember he came back and was like, there's 79 people right now that made a million dollars. I was just like, are you serious? Matt: Was it a boost of confidence? What did it do for you? Russell: It was one of those things, looking back on me doing these events where two people showed up and nobody showed up, hardly anybody, where I was so excited about this? I was like, how come nobody cares? To now it was like, this is actually, I've talked about this long enough people are believing it and now they're doing it. You start seeing it, and there's the fruits of it. In my mind I was like a million bucks, even then, ClickFunnel was new, I was like a million dollars is hard. Most of my friends I knew were like made somewhere near a million dollars. There were people who have been in this business for a long time. A million bucks is a big deal. That was most people's goal still. The fact that 79 people had done it, that was just weird to me. I think that was the biggest one, the realization that just like, oh my gosh. It's not just a theory and I think it works, it's working. It's working at a scale that was unfathomable to me at the time. 79 people. To go to 200 and then 500 and then 1,000 is crazy. Matt: What was your question, buddy? Speaker 4: You're talking about how at each level of success you hit, some of your mentors hit that ceiling, right? Because of the posturing, right? So ultimately I feel like when you get to a new level of success it requires you to upgrade your identity, your self image. What have you found is the number one routine, what's your process for upgrading the identity, upgrading your self image? Because I think that's so important because it can either hold you back and have you self sabotage and not take action and go after what you want, or it's going to be the thing that keeps you at that level and continues to propel you forward. What's kept you ... Russell: That's good. It's weaved through everything, right? The one that's the most obvious external, especially in our world, because you see marketers, most people when they first start selling whatever it is they're selling they're bragging about themselves. Here's my ad, here's my name. It's all about them, that's the first tier of it. And then the second tier, when they start having the realization, I feel like is when they stop talking about themselves and start talking about the people they've helped. Speaker 4: Mm. Russell: You see externally. You don't hear me talking about how much money I make. I'm not like, oh, check out what I got. I talk about all the other people. It's like, that's next year, is that. And then for me the third tier now, which has been really cool, is talking about Lady Boss, right? The success story isn't Kailin, it's Kailin's customers, right? So it's like that next tier. What you're talking about is like the external version of that. There's a lot of internal things that you've got to deal with, but you'll notice it shifting in people when you look at just their messaging and what they're saying. From the way they podcast, they video, they market, their ads and everything, it's the shift of it's not about me, it's about them. It's not even about them, that's the external version of it. Internally I think it's really, it's what we talked about, I can't remember why, but we brought up yesterday or today I had this really successful guy I met one time who the first time we met he was like tell me your story. So I was telling him the wrestle posturing story about how great I was. He was like, no. Tell me about the time you failed. So I was like, well, I'm in the middle of one right now. So I told him let me tell you. I told this whole thing. I remember afterwards I was so embarrassed. He's going to think I'm an idiot. You know, that fear? He was like, good, you cycled. I was like, what? He was like, I will not work with entrepreneurs who haven't cycled at least once. Because if they haven't then they still believe their own bio, right? I think that's the biggest thing, the internal version is that. The first time around, before you cycle, you think it's all you. I know for me it was. I remember doing this the first time, I'm like, I am a genius. I'm the smartest guy in the world. And then when it collapsed I was like, oh, there's a lot of things outside my control. This is not me. There is a team, there's God, there's all these other things that are making this possible. There's a scripture, I can't remember where it's at, it's the Bible, Book of Mormon, but it says you can either be humble or God will humble ... Ah, I'm misquoting it by far. But it's like God will humble people. You can be humble or he will humble you. So it's like, looking at that, I'm like round two I'm going to be a humble person because I don't want to be humbled again, right? Matt: I still feel it. Russell: This is not me. I understand, I look around now and it's 100% like there's no way I would be where I am right now if Dan Usher didn't make videos the way he does. There's no way I'd be here right now if Todd Dickerson could not code software the way he does. There's no way, all these things are so many people. Matt: You're so right. Russell: Then there's so many success stories that inside of it there's just so many people. And then there's the grace of God. I just look at the timeline of when ClickFunnels came into the market. I've now got funnels for a decade, nobody cared. Then all these things were happening, we started having the idea for ClickFunnels, started building it, we're creating it, and then literally we go to traffic and conversion, Todd's halfway done building ClickFunnels, and Ryan Deiss stands on stage in the biggest event at the time and he spends the entire four days talking about funnels. Talking about how funnels are the greatest thing. Everybody's like, what's a funnel? They're all taking notes. Me and Todd are like, does he know we're building? He's talking about funnels. He's talking about funnels like crazy. And then the next day everyone gets home from traffic and conversion and everybody that day, the next day 8,000 funnel consultants pop up. Everybody's a funnel consultant. Everyone is on Facebook talking about funnel consultants and teaching funnels and all this stuff. We're like, oh my gosh. Todd, get this software done, everybody's talking about funnels right now. So he's coding like crazy, all this stuff is coming around, all of a sudden everyone's like, millions of funnel consultants, everyone's doing it, and all of a sudden we're like, hey, we created this thing called ClickFunnels, here it is. All of a sudden all of the consultants and all the people and everyone came and we were the only platform. I look at that, as smart as I think I am, there is so much grace and timing. If I'd launched a year earlier, a year later, it would not have hit the way it did. 100% it was the timing of all these things that have to happen. If it wasn't for that ... I can act like I'm smart, I'm a genius, but man, there's so much divinity that came into all the things. There's no way it could happen without that. Anyway, just understanding those things. Matt: What did you learn when you were cycling? Russell: So many lessons. Russell, you are not that good looking. Or cool. Or anything. Matt: It's basically not about you, right? Yeah, I feel that. So what was hardest? What were the tough lessons? Caleb: How many times did you cycle? Russell: Two big ones for sure. Matt: Really? Do you mind sharing? Russell: Yeah, the first time was after I was trying to figure this thing out. I remember one of my buddies was like, you're making money online? I'm like, yeah. He's like, that's cool. I'm like, do you want a job? He's like, what? I'm like, you're the first person I know who's interested. I'll pay you to come hang out with me. He's like, all right. So I hired my friend. He's like, I have some friends too. I'm like, okay. So I start hiring all these people because I want someone to talk to. Anyway, it was really bad. I ended up having a whole bunch of employees nobody knew how to do anything. I didn't know how to train anybody. I was hiding in the room trying to make money to pay payroll while they're standing outside like, do you want us to do anything? I'm like, don't talk to me, I've got to make money to pay your payroll. They're like, we can help. I'm like, I don't have time to explain anything to you. It was horrible. I built it up to the point where it was just like, I was launching a new thing as fast as we could just to pay payroll. As an entrepreneur, you kill something you get to eat, right? It's like the greatest thing in the world. Employees, they want to get paid every two weeks whether they killed anything or not. I did not realize that until they were like we need money and I'm like, but we haven't made any money. They're like you have to pay me. I'm like, what? I'm so confused. Like, okay. Anyway, it had grown and we didn't have a model, sustainable. Speaker 3: You just launched stuff to see if it works? Russell: Yeah. When I was by myself it was like, I had an idea today, let's try it. You launch it, it makes some money, sweet. And then it was like, I made 20, 30 grand. It was my wife and I, so it was like, that lasts nine months. You know? Caleb: What did you sell? Obviously I know the potato gun backstory. You said I talked about funnels for like a decade before that. What were you selling during that decade leading up to ClickFunnels? I know it's an inordinate amount of stuff. Is there anything not even close to funnels, like something ... Russell: Yeah. The very first, pre-potato guns, my very first big idea was ... Back then what everyone was doing, you know who Yanik Silver is. Yanik would write a book and then he would sell the resale rights to the books. Someone else would buy it and they could sell it. I remember I got online, I saw these books, I bought a book from Yanik and I'm like, I can sell this. I bought a book from somebody else. I was buying all these eBooks I could sell. But then inside the books they would have links back to all their sites. I'd sell the book and I was like, I made 10 bucks selling the book. And then inside the book Yanik is selling his thousand dollar course and seminars and things. They make all this money. I'm like, I got 10 bucks. He made like $1,000 off of me selling his book. I remember being mad. I was like I wish there was a way I could brand this ebook so that before somebody opens it and sees his ad they'd see my ad. That was the first idea I ever had, ever. So my first product was called Zip Brander, it was this little thing that would take an ebook and it would brand it. You open it up and it popped up an ad. You see the ad and you click a button and it would take you inside the ebook. It was my first thing. We launched that and I sold 20 or 30 copies of it. But that was the first money I ever made, it was amazing. I had a customer list, I was like this is amazing. And then the way I was selling those, I was going to forums. This is pre-Facebook, so all you little kids, before Facebook, before MySpace, before Friendster, we used to go to these things called forums. They were these things where people would talk all day. So we'd go to these forums. One of the rules in the forums is you could comment all you wanted but you could have a signature file. At the end you could have like, Russel Brunson, check out my new software Zip Brander. I'd go to these forums and I would just spend eight hours a day answering questions and asking questions and everything. People see my ad on every little thing. My footer was on everything. That's how I was selling Zip Brander initially. I was in 50 forums posting like crazy but I couldn't keep up with it. I was like, man, if I could create a software that would manage this whole thing, that would be amazing. So my second product is called Forum Fortunes. It was this little software that would manage your posting on every single forum. You post and you could see if someone responded back on Forum 49 it would pop up and you're like, oh, you can go find it and go back and comment and keep the discussion. I made it for myself and then we started selling that. We sold more of those because I now had a little customer base here and went bigger. After that it was the next. It was always what's the next thing. That's kind of how it started back in the days, little tools and things like that. Speaker 3: How do you know when you're shooting all these bullets, how do you know when you shoot a cannonball? Matt: Good question. Russell: The thing about it initially, I had been married, I was making zero dollars a year as a wrestler, so for me to make $600 in a month, that was a cannonball. That was insane. I thought I was the coolest kid in the world. $600 was insane. So I did four or five little things. I remember it was Christmastime and I remember my wife wanted to buy a couch and it was a $2,000 couch. I was just like, oh, I can't afford that. I don't have a job. I'm getting sick to my stomach. I had this idea, what if I do a sell and just sell a whole bunch of crap that we had. I had a bunch of eBooks I bought rights to, a couple of things I had created, so we made this Grinch sale. I remember I wrote the copy, it was like, it was the Grinch Before Christmas or something. It had a picture of the Grinch and his heart growing three sizes, I don't know. I wrote this copy. My wife and I had been married a year, she really wants a couch, I can't afford a couch, so if you guys buy this, if I sell 32 of these things, I can buy her a couch and put it under the Christmas tree. It will be amazing. Caleb: You said that in the copy? Russell: In the copy, yeah. It was the reason why. I still have the page, I can show it to you. I know exactly where it's at, I can show it to you. So I had the whole page and then only an email list of like a couple hundred people at the time. I still had an affiliate program, so at the top it had an affiliate link. So I sent an email to my list and went to bed that night. Someone on my list was a guy named Carl Galletti, I haven't heard about Carl in a long time. He was a big famous copy writer at the time. Carl went and saw the thing, bought it, and started affiliating. So he joined the affiliate program, he was like this is awesome. He took that email, sent it to his entire list of this huge thing. So I go to bed. I wake up the next morning, we're at $10,000 in sales. Matt: How much before you went to bed? Russell: Oh, like $30, $40 or something. I was like, what just happened. Did I rob someone? I didn't know what happened. I looked at my email and there's all these people who were like, hey, I bought two of them, I hope you can get your wife that couch. Oh, I sent it to my friend. All these people. Because Carl promoted it, all these other people who follow Carl saw it. Carl is like it's converting like crazy. Tons of people are buying it. I'm freaking out. I'm going to wrestling practice trying to answer customer support. I'm late for practice, I ran into wrestling practice, I get back out I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I made like $600 in sales." I'm freaking out. Anyway, the whole thing goes through and over that, I think it was a seven day sale or something like that, we made $35,000. Which is more money than I'd seen in all my lifetime combined times 100, right? I paid probably 10 grand in affiliates. We made, I don't know, $25,000 that we got to keep. I was like, "Oh my gosh." I told Colette, and Colette's like, my wife. I love her. She doesn't understand the business part of things at all. I was like, "We made $25,000." She was like, "Is it illegal?" First thing. "Are you going to go to jail? Is it illegal?" I'm like, "No, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure." The first thing I did is I went and bought the couch for her, for Christmas. We got it back, I got a picture of her, sent it out to the list saying thank you so much, you got the Christmas gift, the couch. They all celebrated together, all the people. I was like oh my gosh, this is the greatest game of all time. This is so much fun. I was like, what's the next idea, what's the next thing. It was like that, these little things. After that one was done now I had way more customers, all these people that had bought my product knew who I was now so the next thing was easier so it incrementally kept growing and getting bigger. Somewhere along the line I launched the potato gun thing. Upsales of things. We didn't call them funnels back then. We called them sales flows or sales processes. Talk about your sales flow, what's your sales flow. Caleb: Sales flow. Russell: I remember Dylan Jones was our partner at ClickFunnels. Before Todd we tried to build something like ClickFunnels, we called it Click.com.com, which is a horrible name. But Dylan's, I still have all the UI images, and in there we had a whole section for sales flows and all these things. It's like, this was the first ClickFunnels. Because Dylan was on the UI eventually on ClickFunnels anyway, but we literally designed something like this five or six years earlier. Just crazy. Matt: Do you think that all those little failures and all the trying and that kind of energy is what brought you here today? Russell: For sure. It's the key. I wish I could grab everybody because everybody's like, okay, I'm waiting for my ClickFunnels, or I'm waiting for my thing. They're waiting and they're waiting and they're waiting. I was like, the reason why I got this thing was because I didn't wait. If someone were to give me ClickFunnels initially it would have been bankrupt in 15 minutes, right? You have to become worthy of the thing eventually. You don't become worthy by waiting, you become worthy by trying. And trying and trying and trying. Eventually, if you keep doing that, over time, then God's like, all right, he's going to do it. He's built 150 funnels, now I'll give him the idea. Matt: Wow, that's powerful. Speaker 3: How much more did you feel that all your other friends are in the same game? Matt: I hope you guys take there's more that's caught than Todd. That's some gold in what he just shared right there, what you were just sharing. But go ahead. What was the question? Speaker 3: I was just saying how much more would you fail if all your other friends were playing the same game? Russell: All my friends were like why are you launching more stuff? Why do you keep doing things? They do like one product launch a year. They got so annoyed. They were like, dude, stop doing stuff. I'm like, why would I stop doing this? This is so much fun. It was just confusing to me. Why don't you guys do more? Everyone, they make money they'd just be done. Caleb: Why would you keep doing more? Was it genuinely like one funnel away? Like this next funnel's the one. Were you just like you sold yourself on it, this is it, so you keep going? Or did you just really enjoy it? Russell: Well each one I thought was. Each one, every time I was so surprised, like this is amazing. That was the one. The next one's bigger. Oh my gosh, that was even better, who knew? And then I just kept going from there, you know what I mean? So I wasn't waiting for ClickFunnels or anything like that. I was just enjoying the journey every time. It was so exciting. Eventually it was like, oh crap, who knew that that was going to do what it did. Caleb: Was it all emails? Was there any ads or was there anything to scale the traffic? Russell: First 10 years was 100% emails, partnerships. There wasn't ads back then. I mean, there was Google ads, but the first initial Google slap happened about the time I was getting started. Prior to that a lot of guys I knew built their email list off of Google ads and then the slap happened. A lot of them had lists. I started getting to know those guys, going to events, meeting them, so that's how it started initially was tons of that. And then there was this big gap for years where paid ads weren't a thing. Some people did banner ads, but it wasn't consistent. It wasn't like it is nowadays. It was harder. You worked harder and all the stuff wasn't there. Mostly we focused on ... If you didn't have an email list, you weren't playing the game. It's like, who's got lists, how can you build lists, what can you do? Matt: You still think that's true to a degree? Russell: 100%. That's why the traffic seekers book was so important for me to write, I feel like, because most of the people in the game today have been blessed with Zuckerberg's simple Facebook ads that make the game easy. Matt: Wow. Russell: They've never focused on building lists. I was like, you guys, just so you know, Zuckerberg is going to screw us all. It's going to happen. Matt: Yeah. Caleb: It will happen. Russell: It's like, if you don't have a list you're all screwed. I've been through this for 18 years now, I've been through five or six cycles. I've seen people who made millions of dollars who now are not online. The people who have waded the storm the whole time are all the list builders. They're the ones who survived. Everyone else who's good at ads, they come and they go and they come and they go.

Inside Online Language Teaching: Conversations About the Future That Became the PresentGet 10% off online teacher development courses at NILE. Use this link and the discount code: tefltraininginstitute10Support the podcast by buying us a coffeeFor more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website: www.TEFLtraininginstitute.comSign up for our mailing listWatch as well as listen on our YouTube channel Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses How to Get Your Students Talking to Each Other (with Matt Courtois) Ross Thorburn: Matt Cuortois, welcome back.Matt Cuortois: It's always a pleasure, Ross.Ross: Great. Today we're talking about student interactions, getting students to talk to each other, basically. Why is this important?Matt: Back when you and I started teaching, the way that my boss or trainer addressed this issue was to talk about teacher talk time. They set up this target where I, as the teacher, would only be able to talk 20 percent of the time. 80 percent of the time would then be left for students to talk to each other.That whole thing isn't a great paradigm because it is flawed in its logic. I've seen classes where when the teachers didn't talk, that didn't mean students were talking. It was just awkward silence a lot of the time.Ross: Right. The flip side of the teacher talk is the student talking time. Of course, it's the same thing. Just because the students are talking doesn't mean they're actually learning.You're going to think about the quality of student interactions. We're talking about students actually saying meaningful things to each other and, really crucially, the other student having reason to listen to what the other person's saying.Matt: I do think still though that goal of having students talking 80 percent of the time is a good goal.Ross: Yeah, absolutely. Once you get beyond being a complete beginner, where you can't really say anything, then that makes sense.Let's talk about some of these really simple ways of getting students talking to each other. One of the simplest things is an information gap. This is something you hear a lot about with adults.With kids, one of my favorite ways to do this is you get half the students facing the front of the room, half of them facing the back of the room, put some information on a screen at the front. The students who can see the whiteboard have to describe that information to the other students.Again, the most simple way I can think of doing this is, you have a coloring in sheet with some really, really simple vocabulary, like animals. The teacher version on the board, everything's already colored in. Hopefully the colors are weird.Let's say we've got a pink dog, and a green cat, and an orange zebra. The student facing the board has to describe that to the other student. That other student has this blank coloring sheet. They just need to listen to that other student and color it in.I think this works for a few ways. Obviously, you have this gap there, but one of the other key things is that the student doing the coloring in has a reason to listen to the first student. Also, really, really importantly, the first student can see if the second student has understood them or not.If you've colored one of those animals the wrong color, I can see and then I can say, "No, no, no. [laughs] Not this color. Color it in something different". That's when a lot of learning tends to happen is when those bits of communication break down because students have to focus on grammar, or form, or pronunciation to try and make that meaning clear, to resolve the misunderstanding.Matt: There's also a really important point you made there about the students need a reason to listen. Whenever we talk about a communicative lesson, we think of students talking, talking, talking. Communication is not just talking. That's half of it. The other half needs to be filled with somebody who's listening.Ross: This also makes me think of something else. In any activity like that...Let's say this is a coloring activity, very common with kids. You're also rarely likely to have enough pens or pencils or crayons for every kid in the class, to be able to have all the colors that they need.It's also a great opportunity for kids to use English to ask each other for these pens and pencils. You could say to the kids, "What do you say if you need to borrow this pain from someone? Blue, please. Yellow, please." That's another great way of building communication into classes is by not having enough resources for every individual student.Matt: Now you're getting into students really being able to learn a lot of important values for their life. They need to learn, at this age, how to share. They need to learn how to listen to each other. Without that communication in class, without these kinds of activities where students need each other, they aren't going to learn that in your lessons.Ross: Now we can get into things about teaching students the language, of, for example, when you don't understand what someone else had said in one of these activities. You can say, "I'm sorry. Can you say it again, please? I don't understand." Those are also things that you really need in real life a lot of the time.Matt: That language that they're learning, by going through this process, is a lot more useful than, in your example, a pink elephant or a pink...What was it? A pink dog. They're learning those words. They're also learning these really useful phrases that they'll need throughout their English classes, throughout other classes, and then in their real life. You need to learn how to repair a conversation.Ross: I know with a lot of language like this, teachers find it very difficult to present. There's no flash card for, "I'm sorry," or "I don't understand," or "Say that again, please." These things can be quite difficult for teachers to teach.If you do these activities regularly with your students, you can find, by monitoring, times when communication hasn't worked. Afterwards, you can say to the class, "What happened when you didn't understand?" You could do this in the student's first language, for example. "What did you say?"You might say, "I heard Johnny say to Mary, ' [non‑English speech] ,'" or whatever in their first language. You say, "How could we say that in English?" Then, get those things on the board. "All right. Fantastic. Now, swap roles. Do the activity again. This time when you don't understand, use these phrases on the board."Matt: What's great about that is that you're teaching them words that they needed. They needed to know how to say that in English, but they didn't know how. You're not just teaching them words that the coursebook writer and Cambridge decided they needed.Ross: A very typical thing in a coursebook is you might have a dialogue that's on the first couple of pages of one unit. The idea is that by the end of the lesson, the students will be able to use that dialogue. What you just said there, you're really getting away from that.Matt: I've seen so many lessons where, basically, there's person A and person B. They're not necessarily directly reading off of the script from the book, but they have it memorized. That's not really a roleplay. It's not even really communication. They're not actually saying anything that the other person needs.Ross: A quick tip for role‑plays is you can give students a little role card to say, "you're angry" or "you're happy" or "you just won the lottery." Then maybe afterwards, we say, "Can you guess how was the other person feeling?"Matt: Yeah. You're listening to a lot of the...not just the words also. You're listening to how the person is saying the words.Ross: I can't remember where I heard this. I remember an example of this for adults was some sort of boring shopping role‑play. They said, The shopper, you are the ex‑wife of the shop owner, and you didn't know this was his shop. Now, go and do the role‑play." That just makes it so much more interesting.Matt: After they do that role‑play, it gives people a lot to think about. How did that affect the way the person spoke?Ross: After doing any one of these things, it's always a jumping off point for summarizing the task. Let's say, to go back to the coloring in one earlier, you could just say to the students, "What color was the dog? What color was the elephant?" Then, you're getting a little bit of production from the students and checking.You can say, "I heard that you say...What color did you say this was? You said it was light blue? OK. What's the difference between light blue and blue?" Start to use that to teach a bit more language. The thing you said there with after our role‑play, "How do you think the other person was feeling? What things did they say that was different from the original role‑play?"Matt: Not only can you do them, you need to do these things after a task. Ultimately, it's about communication, and it's about practicing language. What language did they use? How could they use that language better? Was there any language that they should have used that they didn't use?Ross: A couple of tips for that. Maybe one is, let's say that we've just told the students a bunch of ways to give suggestions. After getting students to give each other suggestions, you could say, "Well, which of these phrases did you use? Which of them did you not use? Tell us why."Another tip for getting students would be to focus on some of these things or have more information to talk about afterwards. You can have a third role in any of these activities we've talked about, which is an observer. Write down what you hear the people saying.You could either say, "Write down any mistakes you hear afterwards. Write down any examples of the first language that you hear. How could we say those things in English?"All these are ways of doing what you said earlier, Matt, which is finding gaps in the students own knowledge and filling those in a very personalized way.Matt: The way a lot of teachers naturally teach is that they want their students to be producing error‑free sentences. If you're teaching this way, where you're throwing students in and having them do this, they're going to make a lot of mistakes.You really need to put a lot of effort into creating an environment where students feel comfortable to make mistakes. Don't have them memorizing the entire script before they say it. You push them along that process of getting them to that point of being comfortable with actually communicating in a second language.Ross: If you do that, and the students make those mistakes, that's good. That's when you can actually teach them these bits of language that are going to help them better next time.Matt: You've identified whenever they make a mistake, language that they need. You've identified a teachable moment.Ross: [laughs] Absolutely. Let's talk about actually doing some of these things in reality. For an information gap activity, like the one we mentioned earlier, where one student talks, and the other student listens and does something. A good way of introducing that is just for the teacher, the first time, to be the person giving the information.Matt: If you're teaching in an environment where you have the same students every week, that doesn't need to happen in one lesson. In the first lesson, you, as the teacher can be describing these animals, and the students are coloring it in. They're receiving. They're working on their listening.A week later, in their next lesson, maybe you can have a couple students try it out. The next week you can have the other students trying it out.Ross: I feel another loophole with some of these activities is that students can often use gestures to get a random or pointing. Just to go back to my example again earlier, you could just point to something and say, "Blue."Really important with these, just to say to, for example, the student whose describing you have to sit on your hands while you're describing. A tiny little difference, but all of a sudden, it means that you can't use gestures, or you have to try to do all of this in English.Again, how do you know students will do it? If you've got a big class, you might want to pick one or two students who were a little bit more outspoken. You ask them to be police and walk around, and then remind everyone to speak English, and catch them up if they're ever speaking any L1.Matt: I've seen it a million times. Whenever teachers introduce that activity and they say, "No looking at the picture." Inevitably, the students find ways, especially if you're teaching young learners, they're going to find a way to cheat.Ross: Let's talk about some other ways that you can hide that information. One way is simply yet people have got their backs to the board. The most foolproof way is you actually put the information outside the classroom. One student has to run outside the door, look at the thing, and then come back in and describe it.Matt: Depending on what kind of information it is, you can just put it really far away. One student is mobile and can walk straight up to it and come back and give them that information.Ross: Another one I've seen is if you have the students turn round in their chairs, but they don't turn the chair around. If you can imagine that the back of your chair is to your chest, you could stick the hidden information on that back of the chair. The person would really have to lean forward so far [laughs] they would topple over to be able to see the information.Matt: I saw a cool one. This took a little bit of preparation from the teacher.She made these headbands out of paper. They go around and then I got a piece of paper sticking up in front and then she could just tack on different images to that piece of paper sticking up off of their head. Everyone else in the classroom could see what was on their head band, but that student couldn't see what was on his own head band.Ross: I've done this before, as well, where maybe you get a word or something, and you stick it on the students' backs. Then, I have to ask you to give me clues about what one word is, and I have to try and get it.Matt: You can also set up the classroom. You can have your students sitting back‑to‑back. One side can see it. You can keep an eye on the other students on the far side. Make sure they're not turning around and looking back at the information that you're showing to half of the class.Ross: I feel the way it is easiest for students to cheat is if we are just holding two bits of paper. I feel they are right that the temptation is very, very high just to hold a bit of paper at an angle where the other person can see it. There's varying degrees there of how well you want to hide your information depending on the self‑control of the students.   Transcription by CastingWords   

Matt LeMay is a product management consultant and author. He's a co-founder and partner at Sudden Compass, which helps companies reconnect with their customers and helps teams focus on addressing human needs. He's the author of Agile for Everybody and Product Management in Practice. In this conversation, Matt shares with us One Page / One Hour, his pledge to make project collaboration more agile. Listen to the show Download episode 59 Show notes Matt LeMay Sudden Compass One Page / One Hour Tricia Wang The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager Designstaq Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Matt, welcome to the show. Matt: Jorge, thank you so much for having me. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you please introduce yourself? About Matt Matt: Sure! So, my name is Matt LeMay. I'm a partner at a collective consultancy called Sudden Compass. My career has been kind of all over the place. I was a professional musician in my early twenties and a music writer. I worked in marketing for nonprofits. I accidentally became a product manager and made so many mistakes, mistakes that keep giving in the sense that I am still learning and sharing lessons from the many mistakes I made as a product manager. And now I'm mostly helping teams manage the way they work together to solve problems, which is really, I think, the thread that's run through everything I've done from being a musician and working with my band, to being a product manager and working with developers and designers, to being a coach and consultant and working with cross-functional teams that span marketing and sales and everything else. Jorge: Well, that makes me super intrigued. What are the connections between managing the work of creating music and product management? Matt: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's kind of the question that got me into product management in the first place. When I was in a band and kind of informally managing the band, a lot of the work I did was managing specialized skills. You know, our bass player was a really good bass player. I didn't know how to play bass like that, but I knew where we needed to go. When we worked with mastering engineers and mixing engineers, I didn't know how to do that work, but I knew what we needed to deliver. It was a lot of managing complex specialized work to achieve some outcome, which spanned both emotional outcomes, creative outcomes — and though they were hardly in the super exciting range — business outcomes as well. We needed to be able to at least break even when we were going on tour in order to have any plausible defensibility to continue going on tour, which was something we really wanted to do. So, a lot of what I learned was about how to motivate and communicate and coordinate specialized work in the service of creating something that nobody could create on their own. And really that's a lot of what I was able to bring... when I was doing well as a product manager, what I was able to bring to that experience was... you know, I've told people that when I was a musician, convincing four tired people to wake up at six in the morning to drive from Columbus, Ohio to Dayton, Ohio, and play a concert for 10 people and lose money on it, it was a great team motivation challenge. You have to really learn why people are doing what they're doing. What they're excited about, how to get people through difficult times, how to get people excited about the work that they're doing, even when that work isn't really giving them the kind of external validation that I think we all want. So, in a lot of senses, I think software product management is much easier than being a musician. And in other ways, it's more challenging. Jorge: I'm not a musician myself, but I would imagine that musicians also have like their own expression that they want to bring to the project. And somehow balancing the personal needs of the individual with the overall needs of the group must also be a factor, no? Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, It's kind of a joke among mixing engineers. But when you've got a band in a room and they're finishing a record, everybody just wants their own instrument to be louder. And at a certain point, if you make all the instruments louder then everything sounds quieter. If you're not willing to be subtractive, then everything you add actually makes the finished product weaker and less focused and less compelling. Which I think is very true in product development as well. If everybody has their feature that they want to build, if everybody wants to highlight their own individual contributions, you very quickly get to a point where the thing you're building no longer makes any sense. Where if you can't prioritize, if you can't think systematically and then think structurally about how everybody's contributions come together to create something new and meaningful, then you wind up with something which is just a collection of features, or a collection of ideas that really don't coalesce into something interesting or powerful, or that solves a problem. So, I've been on both sides of that one. I've been the person saying, "make my instrument louder in the mix!" I've been the person doing the mix and trying to manage a band full of of people saying, "make my instrument louder in the mix." I think both in music creation and in software product management, you really learn to recognize the power of subtraction. That the most meaningful work you can do is often subtractive work, not additive work. That constraints and subtractions and blank spaces are really what define the work that you're doing more so than features and additions and things that you add in. One Page / One Hour Jorge: That is a perfect segue to the reason why I wanted to talk with you, which is that I saw something that you built called, "One Page / One Hour." And I was hoping you could tell us about that. Matt: Sure. So, One Page / One Hour... I'll give you the kind of brief backstory. In my coaching work, I spend a lot of time talking to product managers who are torn between two things. Between on the one hand, the work that they believe is going to deliver outcomes for their team, their customers, and their business. And on the other hand, the work that they believe is going to bring them recognition and praise as individuals. And these two things are almost always in some degree of tension with each other. Because in a lot of cases, for product managers, the most meaningful work you can do leaves no trace. That leaves no deliverable. There's nothing you can point to and say, "I did this." Instead, your team's success is your success. Your team's work is your work. And for product managers who... many of us tend to be overachievers. Tend to be, you know, people who are very accomplishment and recognition-driven. This creates a real tension. As if you'd make, for example, a beautiful 20 slide deck and present it to company leadership, then you are likely to get praise and recognition. However, all that time and effort you spent on that beautiful 20 slide deck is likely not going up in the product. It's not resulting in any value for your customers. And I've seen product managers who will, for example, pull visual designers off of product design and have them help them design the deck, and walk out of that presentation, feeling validated and accomplished, even though they've just spent tens, if not hundreds of hours on something which doesn't actually deliver any value to the customer and only marginally delivers value to the business. So, in my coaching work, I found myself advising a lot of product managers to start really small, make something that is incomplete and messy, bring it to your team and then work together to co-create from there. I brought this experience to Trisha [Wang] and Sonny Bates, our other partner, and they both kind of smirked at me. And I said, "why are you smirking at me? What's that look?" And they said, "Matt, you are worse about this than anyone we know! You are always showing up — just in our internal meetings -with these beautiful, like 20 page, 'look at this incredible workshop plan I put together!' You are the thirstiest person we have ever worked with in terms of wanting feedback and wanting that validation! And it's funny, but good that you are realizing in your coaching work that that is not the most productive pattern." So, I thought about that for a second, and I said, "you are absolutely right. I need to shift this." Because Trisha is a genius and a powerhouse and I want her to be impressed by the work I'm doing. I want her to be like, "Matt, you're smart. I feel good about working with you." So, I realized that if we wanted to change that behavior, we needed to change the incentives. In other words, we needed to create a situation where if I showed up with something too finished and polished and impressive, I would actually get negative feedback, not positive feedback. So, I wrote up this pledge to my business partners saying I'm willing to forego the sense of individual accomplishment that comes from presenting finished and polished deliverables to my colleagues. I promise that I will spend no more than one page and one hour working on any deliverable — any document — before I bring it to the team. In other words, if I show up with five beautifully formatted pages or a one-page that took me 10 hours to create, I want you to hold me accountable to that. I want you to say, "man, why did you do this? We made a deal. We made a commitment to each other! We all know that if we actually want to deliver value, if we want to do valuable work, we need to collaborate earlier on. You can't go off onto your own and create this big thing, and then just want us to tell you how great it is!" So, I did this and massive credit to Tricia who said, "publish this!" Who said, "put this out there. This is not just for you. This is really gonna make a difference." So, we put together a One Page / One Hour website and we've been putting it out there and it's been just incredible to see folks from so many different organizations, people who I have never spoken to, who so far as I know, have never attended a talk I've given, just find this and share it with each other and take this pledge, which now has over a hundred people from over 75 organizations all over the world committed to spending no more than One Page / One Hour on anything before sharing it with their colleagues. Jorge: That's really awesome. And it's... well, proof that it works: it's how I came to you, right? Matt: I hope so. Jorge: I feel totally identified with the problem as you described it. I too am very thirsty for that kind of adulation that comes from making something beautiful — and perhaps overwrought — if I am hearing correctly, the spirit of it. And you're describing it as a tool to collaborate with your colleagues. I'm wondering, as a consultant, if the boundary for collaboration stops with your team, or if you also extend this to your customers as well? Your clients. Because I'll just say, like, in my case, I feel most compelled to share the beautiful thing when I'm presenting to the customer, right? Matt: You know, it's funny. I used to do a lot of training work in ad agencies. And I would talk to them a lot about how to do paper prototyping in particular, how to do really low fidelity prototyping. And they would all say the same thing, which is, "yeah, this is great, but we could never show this to a client. We can never sketch something on the back of a napkin and show it to a client." They would say, "why isn't this finished? Why isn't this beautiful?" And I kept thinking to myself, I'm also training and coaching a lot of the companies that are your clients... people are pretty capable of understanding if you show them a sketch on the back of a napkin that it's not intended to be something finished and polished. People are actually much more open to seeing unfinished and to participating in the co-creation of unfinished things than I think we think they're going to be. And one thing I've found really helpful about One Page / One Hour is especially since it's one of our calling cards as a consultancy now, it gives us a way to present unfinished, unpolished deliverables to clients that feels purposeful. Where rather than just showing them something and saying, "yeah, here's what we did. Whatever." We're letting them in on this little operational secret of ours. We're saying, "we have this guiding principle called One Page / One Hour, and we're going to agree to this with you. So, you're always going to be in on the ground floor with us. We're never going to bring something to you, which you're going to have to feel even remotely guilty about ripping apart." We did a One Page / One Hour exercise with a client once where they were 75 pages into an organizational transformation plan. And they had brought us on to help them with this plan. And we said, "tell you what, what if we do a One Page / One Hour pass, just synthesizing this down. You put together all ... this big thing. We're going to just spend One Page / One Hour reading your 75-slide deck, distilling it down and reflecting it back to you." And they said, "sure, why not?" So, first of all, it's very hard to read a 75-slide deck in one hour, which already helped them understand that asking everybody in their company to read a 75 slide deck means that you're asking people for a lot of their time. But we did our best to distill this down, and we presented it back to this leadership group. And they got furious. They said, "this is not what we intended at all. We don't want people to take this away. We don't want people to take that away. You captured this idea, which is totally the opposite of what we wanted." And we said, "Great. Hey, if this is the best we can come up within one hour, then there's probably some contradictions in this document you put together. What may have happened is that you have a leadership team, which can't actually agree on some of these things. So, each person just puts 10 slides in there. Those 10 slides are totally in conflict with each other, but because you can always add more, you haven't actually identified that conflict. You've just worked around it." And they said, "huh. You're right. This is really... this is really helpful!" but then something really interesting happened. They started saying, "well, but you know, don't worry. We don't have to throw out the work you did. It's great. We realized...." I said, "I don't care! I literally spent an hour on this. You know, how long I spent on this!" How many times have you done an hour of something? If the takeaway from this one hour is that you need to align as a group and work within constraints to actually resolve these conflicts? Then it's a success, even if we throw it out. So, it's been really helpful, not just to work in this One Page / One Hour way with clients, but to share with them why and how we're doing this. To let them in — into this world of One Page / One Hour, so when they receive an unfinished, unpolished deliverable, there's no chance that they'll think, "why is this unfinished and unpolished?" They understand that they've been inducted into this world of One Page / One Hour and they feel really awesome because they're seeing this work better for them too, and they're like, "wow, I get to participate in this in a different way!" So, there's that meta layer on top of the One Page / One Hour pledge where it's not just the way of working, but it's the conversation and the agreement to the way of working that also clears and creates a different kind of space for collaboration, including with clients and customers. Modes of communication Jorge: Sounds like a little bit of a jiujitsu move, where you take what is potentially a liability and turn it into an asset, right? And it speaks to this shifting of incentives that you spoke of earlier. I'm wondering what that does to the intensity of communications. Because obviously if you're spending less time working on the artifact and sharing it more quickly, that speaks to a higher volume of messaging. And is that an issue? How does that get managed here? Matt: I'm so glad you asked that question because part of the point of One Page / One Hour is to force us out of our comfort zone a little bit. Is to get us having those conversations with other people before we're sure about the path that we're taking. Before we're confident in the deliverable we're creating. And that is emotionally difficult. It forces people into a very challenging mode of communication. And as I coach more teams through this, I'm just appreciating that much more. That in a sense, One Page / One Hour also forces you to level up your communication skills. It forces you to get more comfortable communicating when you don't have control. This has been a big theme in so many of the conversations I've been having with teams in the last couple of weeks is: what does it mean to be willing to give up control? When are we truly willing to give up control? When are we willing to let someone else see something we're working on before we feel confident enough in it that we would do that necessarily of our own accord, if we hadn't made this commitment to each other? I think that's really one of the biggest challenges around this, and one of the reasons why it's so hard to keep up with it is that we do have to be forced into... I think you're right: a more intense form of communication, a more vulnerable form of communication, a form of communication where we don't know what the outcome is going to be going into a conversation nor are we trying to convince or persuade or sell people into an outcome. We are genuinely open to things going in an unexpected direction. And the value of that is pretty clear and straightforward. But the challenge of that is something that I think people often underestimate until they find themselves having to do it themselves. Jorge: One method that I was reminded of when I read about One Page / One Hour is Amazon's 6-page memo idea. And the main similarity there is that it feels like they both impose constraints on the format in which things are going to be. It time boxes the activity, and also constrains the format in which it's going to be presented. As I understand the 6-page memo, the idea there is that it'd be shared prior to meeting so that people have an opportunity to review that. And I'm wondering if there are any communication best practices around One Page / One Hour that would be analogous to that. Matt: That is another great question. It's funny. To me, the big differentiator between the narrative memo per Amazon and One Page / One Hour? Well, two things. Number one: One Page / One Hour includes that explicit time box. You cannot spend more than an hour. The trap I've fallen into with narrative memos as a writer is that I can spend forever writing a page. It's funny, the program I was in in college had a one-page maximum on all papers. It was sort of a critical theory, very like, post-modern studies kind of program. And a lot of people would take it because all the papers were a maximum of one page. So how hard could it be? It turns out it is really hard, especially when you're working with really complex ideas. So, for me personally, if I just have a format constraint, I'll spend way too long trying to make it perfect. So, it's the duality of the format and the time constraint that I've found really helpful for me to not let myself negotiate out of the constraint. The other thing is that One Page doesn't need to be one page of text. One page can be one page that you've sketched out. It can be one drawing with some text around it. You know, I work with people who are very visual. I'm not a very visual person. But One Page / One Hour can be one page of visuals. It can be one slide. You can use visuals within that format to communicate between people who are more words-oriented and people who are more visuals-oriented. As to the question of how to share it, the timing of this is perfect. I've been using this technique a lot, which I'm planning to write up later today called the "Synchronous Sandwich." The synchronous sandwich is how I've been structuring almost every meeting and activity that I do remotely in particular. And a synchronous sandwich is: an asynchronous pre-read, a synchronous meeting, and an asynchronous follow-up. In other words, you send something through as a pre-read, using a lot of these same concepts. So, you time box how long you expect somebody to take to send the pre-read and how long it will take them to read the pre-read. Then you work through the document or do something synchronously together, and then you send through a follow-up or a revised copy of that deliverable or whatever it is afterwards. I've been really lucky because in a lot of my coaching work, I've worked with people who are not afraid to raise questions and challenges. And when I started doing more of this synchronous working through things, some of the people I coached said, "you know, for me personally, I need a little time to think about it before we go into a meeting. I don't like being on the spot. I don't like showing up and you're asking me something I haven't had a chance to think about until we're in the meeting together." So, I found that that synchronous sandwich format gives people who need a little bit of time to process offline, a chance to do so. You're really structuring and using that synchronous time well, and then you have a chance to follow up afterwards. A lot of the day-long whiteboard-y type sessions I used to do in person are now three, one and a half hour synchronous sandwiches. We have a chance to pre-read work together, regroup, pre-read, work together, regroup, and... it works really well with One Page / One Hour-style documents so that we can actually work through the document, edit the document together synchronously, and still have a chance to do some of that preparation and pre-reading asynchronously. Granularity of problems Jorge: That makes a lot of sense, and this sounds like a really good approach. I love this idea of the synchronous sandwich. It sounds like something that can be applied even to other ways of working, you know, beyond the One Page / One Hour. I'm wondering if there are some types of... I don't like using the word "problems?" But some types of issues that you're working around that lend themselves better to the One Page / One Hour approach than others? And I'm wondering specifically about granularity. If there are some... I'll use the word problems, why not? That are small enough to be dealt with in a One Page / One Hour format versus others that are so huge that maybe you need to pull back too far for it to be useful. Matt: It's so it's so funny because that was how I approached this work at first as well. I was thinking of it for more granular issues One Page / One Hour would be a more accessible and more valuable approach. A year into this, I actually feel the exact opposite way. That the bigger and more strategic and more high-level something is, the more important it is that you take this One Page / One Hour approach and involve more people earlier on. I've been finding myself in a lot of coaching conversations with product managers, hearing people say to me, “we've got to put together a strategy for my team. So, I need two weeks to come up with a strategy.” Which is dangerous when you think about it, because if one person goes off for two weeks and crafts this impeccable-seeming team strategy, the team might not feel invested in it. But that person who came up with it is going to feel really invested in it. So, I've been finding for some of these high level, really big picture challenges, One Page / One Hour is actually the best possible approach. I've had some coaching conversations where I'll say to our product manager, "all right, we've got a half hour left on the call. Let's draft our strategy now. Who are we solving for? What problems are we trying to solve? How will we know if we've solved them? Great. Bring that to the team and see what they think!" So, the kind of paradox of One Page / One Hour is that the bigger and more difficult to granular-ize a problem seems? The more transformative a One Page / One Hour approach can be, which has genuinely surprised me. Closing Jorge: That is so exciting to hear that and intriguing. And I also think that it is a good place for us to wrap the conversation. I definitely want to learn more and I'm expecting that folks listening in want to as well. Where can folks follow up with you? Matt: Yeah. So onepageonehour.com is the website. We just worked with the fantastic team at Design Stack to revamp the site. So, we now have some templates and resources, some kind of "One Page / One Hour — Getting Started" if you are somebody who is terrified of a blank page, as many of us are. You can see a list of all the people who've taken the pledge. You can take the pledge yourself and add your name to the website. I am still — manually, I receive an email every time somebody takes the pledge and I go into our website and add their name and go into MailChimp and add their email address, if they've requested so. You can join the mailing list where we communicate with each other and share our own experiences and tips and tricks. So, onepageonehour.com is definitely the place to start. Jorge: Fantastic. Matt, thank you so much for being with us. Matt: Thank you so much. This was such a great conversation. I appreciated the questions very much.

With the mission of helping American heroes find a place to call home, Matt has been leading veterans and military personnel navigate the process of finding the right property as well as teaching them the ropes of real estate investing. Among the many hats he wears, his passion for teaching and shedding light on the real estate industry has enabled him to help more people find homes.   His sole mission: Inform and educate upcoming homeowners to make a confident and clear choice   In today’s episode of the Expert(ish) Podcast, our guest, Matt Huneycutt will talk about how he helps veterans and military first-time home buyers find the right property for their situation or future goals. He will also emphasize how collaboration and providing value to the community are the keys to a successful real estate business.   Mike Huneycutt is a Licensed Real Estate Professional at Whissel Realty Group, San Diego County’s top-ranked team and #128 team in the United States by The Wall Street Journal Zillow and Trulia. Their goal is to help people find the home of their dreams at the price of their dreams.   In This Episode 1:09 - Matt's backstory   7:43 - How Matt got into the real estate business   14:49 - What motivates him to serve veterans and military personnel in the real estate investing   20:37 - How he qualifies people to buy a property   29:08 - What makes real estate investing different from other investment platforms   31:51 - The beauty of real estate investments   46:53 - The reward in providing value to your network   55:20 - The roadmap for a successful real estate business   1:03:09 - The importance of having a collaborative mindset   1:20:01 - Two ways to get into real estate business   Favorite Quote "People think all you know like when's the right time to buy a house. We'll look at your life plan. Does your life plan support being in a home for three to five years and not paying rent to someone else? And it's a great time to buy a house. We have a North star and the North star is to put those military first-time home buyers into the market in the best way possible come hell or high water." - Matt   "What was really awesome is I actually didn't leave anything behind. I mean, I put the uniform away, but I still have everything about the Navy that I always loved, which is all the people. And I still get to do what I love to do with real estate now while still being deeply involved with all my active duty and veteran folks here in San Diego." - Matt   "'I've been in the industry long enough now that I see how some really bad clients create some really bad agents." - Matt   "What's so great about our community is when you spend 10 years building relationships with people and we come from that fraternity or sorority of military people, there's a lot of trust that goes along with that."  - Matt   "I had a reputation of being a pain in the ass with aircraft because quality control was non-negotiable. So I treat my real estate business with that same level of rigidity in a lot of ways. I want everything to work out extremely well." - Matt   "I get super excited at the idea of the wealth that you can generate through real estate. It's reliable. It's trustworthy. The concept and the notion are very elementary. People need places to live. They will pay to keep a roof over their head." - Matt   "Coming from a real estate investment standpoint, you don't need a business degree to feel good about investing in real estate. The mechanisms are very obvious." - Matt   "You can only feel good about doing that when you appreciate that more positivity that you pump into your network and your life and your day is going to naturally reward you in ways that you can't see yet." - Matt   "When you can give people help, when you can give people information, insight, resources, and opportunities that to me is what really unlocks that concept to that information. It really frees it to grow." - Matt   "Not only should we not be keeping things to ourselves, but we should be actively trying as hard as we can to share things with people." - Matt   "Competition is garbage and collaboration is everything." - Matt   "The more you share openly about whatever positive ideas and things you have, you really do attract some great people." - Matt   Engage with Matt Huneycutt Facebook Instagram Email matt@whisselrealty.com   Connect with Expert(ish) Podcast Host JAY JOHNSON   Call (858) 925- 4536 Website LinkedIn Facebook Instagram   Listen to more episodes of the Expert(ish) Podcast iTunes Spotify            

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.

June 15, 2020 The group celebrates their victory and enjoys their last moments in Lab Sallidas..... Noteable Quotes: “I need cows! Cows are a necessity!” Calree “I will enable you but I will not take the blame.” – Maia “We're totally leaving tomorrow!” “Is it hot in here?”-“Oh no, that's just me, I'm super attractive?” – Calree Feat. Guard “Iolanda wasn't feeling very spiritual, but I'm sure she was holy.” -Robin “Why do devils have to be so difficult? Gods you just pray to them!” –“And then they give you nothing-” “No! They answer!” – Iolanda Feat. ZxZk “Don't eat my chicken! He's my bestfriend!” Calree “That's 4 nat 1's” Matt “I just dropped a lot of margarine in my notebook-” “-It's in the margins too!” -Robin feat. Matt “You get me a donut, I will eat 7/8 of this donut and send you a picture of the remaining 1/8 and you tell me whether or not it clearly looks like a donut.”

Sometimes an opportunity comes along that’s too good to pass up. For Matt Hulett, that happened when a friend approached him about a job at Rosetta Stone. The famous language-learning company was stuck in the analog world and they wanted Matt to be the guy to bring them into the digital future. It was no small feat, but Rosetta Stone has made progress on the digital transformation and Ecommerce journey, including introducing a subscription model and overhauling its tech stack and app. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matt discusses the challenges of transforming a world-famous brand, including how he chose a free-trial subscription model over going freemium, what it was like to achieve buy-in from investors, and the future of Ecommerce and why he thinks social selling still hasn’t reached its full potential.   3 Takeaways: Even the most well-known brands need to earn their stripes when entering a new space. When a previously offline product starts playing in the digital world, it has to prove to customers that their investment in this new space is worth it AR and VR are tools that Ecommerce platforms will be exploring more in the coming years. If you can provide a more immersive experience, you differentiate yourself from the competition and create more value to your customers Stay true to the brand and don’t try to compete on business models that don’t fit For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host. Today, we're going on a digital transformation journey. Matt, how's it going? Matt: Oh, really good. A little cooped up here like we all are, but I'm hanging in there. How are you doing? Stephanie: I'm doing well. Yeah, same hot, very hot. It's 92 here and the places in Silicon Valley usually don't have air conditioning so just a little sweaty in the studio. Stephanie: So I must admit, I have not checked in on Rosetta Stone in a while and when I started browsing through you guys' website, I was like, "Whoa, you all have come a long way from CD-ROMs and everything that I was used to when I was growing up and thought of Rosetta Stone." So I'd love to hear a little bit about what brought you to Rosetta Stone and your background before you joined. Matt: Yeah. It's interesting, just before I dive in, it's rare to join a company where everyone knows your brand and your product like just about everyone in the United States does Rosetta Stone. Matt: And so actually, it's an interesting story because there's not many ed tech companies that are a public companies, you could count them on your hand and the company has been a public company for over 10 years. Matt: It's been around for 27 years and it's a really interesting backstory on how the company was founded and so some of that came into play with what got me attracted to the business. Matt: So a friend of mine who's a recruiter talked to me about this opportunity and I typically do restarts, pivots as they are [crosstalk] for startups. Matt: And even the startups that I join are typically pivots. So there's kind of this pivot transformation story that typically is a draw for me for whatever weird reason why I attracted to these things and when he said, "Oh, it's Rosetta Stone." Matt: I was like, "Oh, the CD-ROM company, the yellow box." I was like, "Yeah, but they're trying to be digital." I'm like, "They're not digital yet?" Matt: And so the draw for me was typically, I take on jobs and assignments that are very difficult where I have to either completely change the strategy or get new financing on a new idea. Matt: There's generally something really, really wrong and Rosetta Stone was so intriguing to me on the surface for the intellectual reasons why they brand the product, people love it. Matt: It's not one of those iconic brands that people are afraid of. It's not like saying, "Matt, do you want to restart Myspace? I was like, "Oh my God, it's Rosetta Stone, of course." Stephanie: That's your next project. Myspace. Matt: Yeah. Stephanie: Just bring it back. Matt: Making it great again. Too soon. But what personally drew me, that's kind of the intellectual business level, what personally drew me into the company was and is the fact that I'm dyslexic, and a third of the revenue for Rosetta Stone is actually one of the fastest growing. Matt: We sell software into K-12 schools primarily in United States that help kids learn how to read, better learn how to read which is a problem. I've seen my own youngest son struggle with his dyslexia as well. Matt: And so on a personal level, it's very emotional when you can kind of tie that emotional tie to a company to its mission and vision. It's really intriguing. So it's been one of the best career decisions I've ever made. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. Were there any universal truth that you discovered as you are kind of pivoting from different companies and trying out different roles and turning them around? Was there anything like yeah, universal truths that you saw while doing that? Matt: Well, that's a great question. Yeah, a couple things. One is it's so crazy to me, when I step into a company how basically from week one, maybe day one, no one really understands how the business works, like truly understands it. Matt: The key insight, what makes the business special, what can you do to apply capital or a time or attention to improve your strategy or your outcomes? It's just so, it's so weird when you go to a business that's operating, and maybe these are the only businesses I look at where it's not quite tight inside around the strategy and what makes the kind of the economic engine run. I think that's the biggest one that I see off the top of my head. Stephanie: Yeah, that's interesting. I can definitely see a lot of companies struggling there especially as they grow bigger and they have many business units and everyone's kind of chasing a different path, I can see people losing sight of what's important and what's actually driving this business like you're talking about and making it profitable or maybe it's not, but it's the lost leader, something that we still need. So yeah, that's really interesting. Stephanie: So when you joined Rosetta Stone, it hadn't been digital. I mean, only a few years, right? I think it stopped, maybe it didn't stop doing CDs, but it went online. Wasn't it in 2013? Matt: Yeah, I would say it was like half digital. What that means is we were selling one of the most expensive products in the App Store at the time and we didn't really have the concept of really effective sales funnels, a well thought out pricing and packaging strategy based on the type of customers that we're going after. Matt: We didn't have a lot of mobile native features and capability. So I would say it was kind of a port of the CD product in the mobile environment and that was kind of the approach. Matt: And also the approach was really not to focus on the consumer business. So not only did we make this kind of business model and digital transformation move, but also when I came into the business, the big focus was for the language side of the business was to focus on enterprise customers. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt: I thought that was actually the wrong move because enterprise is difficult, it's a smaller market, yet consumers where everyone knows Rosetta Stone, everyone likes the product. They actually remember the CD products in many cases and want to use them again, but they want to use them on your phone. Matt: So I thought, "Well heck, everyone knows who I am from a brand awareness perspective, I'll have an easier time deploying less capital against the consumer space and enterprise space." So there was not only just a business model shift, but also a strategy shift. Stephanie: Did you end up sticking with that business model shift to focus on enterprises or did you kind of make it a mix of 50/50? Matt: Oh, good question. So it is about 50/50 today, although consumers now are growing fast. I mean, we're a public company so I can only speak to our public company numbers, but in Q4 of last year, we grew the consumer business about 20% year over year and this is from a business step was growing at single digit. Matt: And then our last reporting earnings quarter, we grew the consumer business around 40% year to year and the enterprise business has struggled more primarily because of the C-19 impacts this year because obviously, we're in a never before seen macro economic headwind, but generally, it's the right decision to make and I view the enterprise business as more of an extension of what we want to do for all adult learners versus creating as a separate entity. Matt: That's a long answer to say consumer turned out to be the right move. It was not clear when I joined the company that even joining Rosetta Stone was a smart move. Matt: I had a lot of folks that I know, acquaintances more so than friends say, "Good luck. There's a lot of error in this company." And I just think it's just a really exciting problem and it's a ... Sorry to keep going because I've had maybe 80 cups of coffee today and just, I don't know. Stephanie: No, keep it up. Matt: It's like the two big verticals that are the most expensive that increased their prices to consumers over the last 50 years are healthcare and education and they have the lowest penetration of digital, and like, "Well, those are hard problems to solve. Why wouldn't you want to be involved?" So anyways, I think it's really fun. Stephanie: Yeah, that's fascinating. So when you came in, what were expectations for your role? What did people want you to do? Did you have a 90-day plan? How did that look? Matt: Oh yeah, if anyone thinks these are scripted questions, these are not scripted questions. These are very good questions. So during the interview process and I'm sure you've had this experience before, when you meet with somebody in a company, you're like, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this job." Stephanie: Yup. Matt: And I had one of those experiences with Rosetta Stone. I knew I wanted this job and so I came into maybe the first or second interview with a 90-day plan before I even started, this is the first or second interview. Matt: And the 90-day plan did change slightly because then I knew a little something, but I've done enough of these transformation projects, these pivots where I knew there's these basic building blocks in a format, I have a toolbox of things that I do that really didn't change. Matt: The inevitable strategy didn't know before I started, I didn't know the team members, were they the right fit or not, I didn't know any of that, but the basic building blocks I definitely put together. Stephanie: Got it. So what was on your roadmap, did you have to think about how to re-platform to support your commerce journey and shifting into enterprise and then consumer? What was on that plan that you laid out? Matt: Yeah, and I kind of learned some of this years ago when I was ... Sometimes I think my best work, I can't speak for you or anybody else, but my best work is when I'm completely ignorant of the challenges in front of me and so when I was younger, I worked for ... Well, actually, we sold our company to Macromedia and they had a division called Shockwave. Matt: And Macromedia at that point was not bought by Adobe, and this is Web 1.0 bubble, so I'm dating myself which is not legal in Washington State and these jokes have all jail time. Stephanie: [crosstalk] get us in trouble. Matt: I know. And so we step back through that experience and I learned a lot from the Macromedia Adobe kind of M&A folks about how to approach a problem. And that plus some other work experience over time really got me to the point of thinking through things from I call it the insight, the math in the heart. Matt: And no one framed it that way to me, but that's kind of how I framed it and so when I think about the insight, I think about the addressable market, the position that we are in the marketplace, so supplier's demand competitors. Matt: Then I think about what value we're driving to consumers, what value are you driving to your suppliers if you have them. And then what are the decisions you're going to make based on the strategy that you're laying out for the best outcome? Matt: So you want to grow market share, you want to grow revenue share. Do you not have enough capital? Do you actually need to raise capital and buy companies in order to get size and scale that's the outcome? Matt: So it's kind of a process that I've done over time and I want you to figure all that out, and it takes a while, maybe 90 days, maybe a little bit more, then it's really like how do you put a process together and dashboard is a little trite, but how do you actually run the business so you understand what things are working, the unit economics, what key layers of the business are you looking at, and then figure out an organization to support that and then you find the right team. Matt: And it sounds kind of exhaustive in terms of an answer, but I think too many people come in situations and they say, "Okay, I started this job, I got to restart it. What's my team look like?" Matt: And it's always I think the tail wagging the proverbial pivot dog and I typically, you can find startup people that are good at startups and sometimes, you find startup people that are good at later stage. Matt: You can find every dynamic possible, but until you do the work on, "I need this type of person for this type of growth stage, it's the right person the right time." Matt: If you don't do the work upfront, then you end up having a team that isn't the right team for the outcome that you want. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I've heard ... I forgot who said that startup advice where a lot of startups especially around here, are looking to hire that VIP level person, you have to pay a bunch of money to and someone was making the point of like, "Well, will they help you right now where you're at?" Stephanie: And it's okay to kind of grow out of people, but it's not okay to hire someone who's way above that actually can't get their hands dirty and do the work of what needs to be done right now. Matt: That's right. There's lots of people that have different approaches. I actually like to be pretty data driven in terms of how I think about people so I use like employee satisfaction studies and I use different personality profile tests. Matt: Obviously, you're not trying to like ... Hopefully, no one is like applying an AI filter looking at my reactions on this live video, but you can go overboard with data, but I do feel like you need to get the right alchemy talent for your team. Matt: And I've made mistakes where you have that senior person that doesn't want to get their hands dirty when you're like, "Look, I'm in build mode, I'm painting the fence, and I'm the CEO and I'm painting the fence and then I'm talking to the neighbors and driving Uber ..." Matt: The alchemy of that is hard to do, but that's a long winded answer to say there's there's a process and I think it's figuring out what's special about your company, how do you improve it, how do you run it? How did the inputs become the outputs and then what team is required for that? Stephanie: Yeah, very cool. So with the company having to shift as they did to go online and create mobile experiences, what kind of challenges did you see come up when you guys were going through that shift? Matt: Yeah, so there's multiple. So I always think about kind of the four constituents in most businesses, its investors, its customers, it's your internal employees and society. Matt: Not in that order. The order depends on lots of different things and so when I kind of checked down all those boxes, I think the big one, the first one I pick is investors because you're having to explain a model where the CD is purchased up front, it's very expensive versus you don't get all the revenue upfront, you amateurize that revenue and recognize it over 12, 24 whatever terms of the span of the subscription. Matt: So it's a change in terms of how you're reporting revenue, explain it in a consistent way, explaining the new metrics of subscription is challenged one I think from an investor perspective explaining why we have a language business, the Lexia business that I mentioned that focused on literacy is a 20 to 25% growth business, it's growing pretty nicely and language was declining. Matt: So then explaining to investors why do you still have this business and why are you changing the direction from enterprise to consumer, I think for employees. Matt: I always like to think through the employee piece, get the employee piece right, you can do anything and so getting the employees reason to believe, I was the first president to actually run the language business. Matt: It had multiple owners of the P&L and I was the first person probably since the CEO, we had one CEO that that started Rosetta Stone and took it public 20 plus years ago. Matt: I was the first single leader to ... I also tried creating a reason to believe a compelling vision, mission and culture and then when I think through kind of the customer piece, it wasn't as hard to be honest because there was so much brand equity that was good brand equity that doing little bit of things in a way that was kind of planful and data driven actually generated a lot of great outpouring of support. Matt: So the customer side of what we were doing wasn't as difficult as I would have thought and we also had an enterprise business that had already integrated things like digital tutoring with the software and demanding Fortune 500 companies. Matt: So there was some DNA in the company where we knew, "Boy, you can earn every interaction with every interaction." So that was that piece and then later, I started building more hooks into society as part of that and so I kind of view it as a self-fulfilling positive effect of you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers, the investors get great outcomes, and society benefits and you keep kind of turning this crank and you start getting much more reflective about it. Matt: And it does have, it does pay off. It takes I think, in general, I think people brag about how fast they can turn around companies. I don't know why people brag about that. Matt: I don't know, my experience is two years and taking a business from bad to like growing, at least, believing in itself is very hard and so I look at those four factors and I think the society piece is one that's super important that a lot of companies pay lip service to and there's a lot of discussion especially in Silicon Valley about some large companies that are controversial there. Matt: But I'll give you a for instance why if you can tie together the vision, mission, culture values to society, how that's self-reinforcing, we had a obviously horrible global pandemic that we're still pulling ourselves out of and everyone's kind of living through this experience at the same time. Matt: And we basically took just two days to decide that we're going to give away our software for free for three months for students. And we run a current business and selling software to enterprises and adults and we said, "You know what? We know that parents are actually going through hell because there's kind of a make your own adventure right now and schooling." Matt: [crosstalk] and I can feel it myself and we are like, "Oh my God, this is so stressful and the anxiety I heard from our own employees about it was overwhelming and I'm asking them to work harder." Matt: And so we said, "You know what? We're going to give away three months subscription and we're going to just do it and you just have to ... The parents have to put their email address in the school and that's it." Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's awesome. Matt: And we're not a free ... We're a paid subscription product. We're not, there are other competitors that have a freemium model and as you know, changing models or mixed models generally don't have a long history of working and we said, "You know what? We're just going to do it." Matt: And so the team decided to do it, I just said, "Yeah, let's do something." They said, "Here's exactly what we're going to do." And it was live, and then the amount of positive benefits, we got that from pure impressions. Matt: It actually helped our adult business to ... Adult language learning business. That's just one quick example of when those things all start working together. Matt: It's transparent, it's engaged and it's consistent. It becomes kind of operating leverage as well. So it's fun. It's fun to see how that work. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. It's definitely a good reminder of do good things and good things will come back to you. Did you have any struggles with maybe like surges and people logging in and trying to get on the platform that maybe you hadn't experienced in the past? Because it was maybe a bit more predictable since it wasn't free? Matt: That's a really good question. Not on the system, the system's basis, but certainly from a support basis because we had a lot of, we outsource most of our customer support, and we debated for a while whether we we're going to continue phone support, we still do and I still debate that one, but a lot of our service providers were in outside United States and they all of a sudden had to work from home and then some facilities shut down and so we are just constantly playing whack-a-mole with our support organizations. Matt: And then also, I would say to our frontline heroes were our tutors and we employ a lot of highly educated tutors that have degrees in language learning and they all work from home primarily, they're part-time employees. Matt: And they turn out to be like our heroes because they took some support calls in addition to one-on-one digital tutoring. And so there was unique ways in which we had to adapt with the demand, but I would say more on the demand side regarding the support elements and we definitely saw a surge do the work from home trend as well, but that didn't impact kind of service levels and general software. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And I could see it being a bit tricky to develop and maintain a platform that has so many different layers to the business. I'm thinking about the enterprises who are going on there and buying seats for employees, and I'm thinking about the school is going on there for students, and then the individual consumer like me who's maybe like, "Hey, I'm going to Italy and I want to learn Italian." Stephanie: I don't know, but like it seems like it would be pretty tricky creating a platform that does all of that. How do you think about creating that so everyone gets a good experience and also being able to monitor and measure it in a successful way? Matt: Yeah, I've never seen the complexity Rosetta Stone before at the smallest scale, but what I mean by that is we have three businesses and we're a small cap public company. So that's unusual and the business was run on the language side ... Well, let me step back. Matt: So the literacy business is a business that was acquired seven, eight years ago and that's a 30-year-old company that was acquired, it's called Lexia and it works as a distinct operating unit from my business and is run by an awesome gentleman. Matt: And I use that word loosely and if he's listening, sorry Nick, he's a great guy and so passionate and his team is so good and it's ... I've never seen before a product that's built with like academic research combined with awesome data product engineering that gets results. Matt: It's just, I've never seen anything like it and they had the time to build this product over these many years, it was always digital first and so they're run separately. Matt: My language business was run on two different tech stacks. Actually, it was like five and when I started, I was like, "Well, wait a minute, why is this product that looks the same running off this underlying architecture? Why don't we move everything to react?" Matt: As I kind of went through this morass of tech stacks, it was a lot of M&A that generate a lot of complexity and a lot of tech debt. And so I would say majority of our innovation was not innovation, it was just keeping these old tech stacks up. Matt: So from an R&D perspective, in addition to all the other complexities we just talked about in this interview, I was trying to grow the consumer business, trying to change the business model, swapping out new team members for more growth orientation and doing a huge tech migration. Matt: And the complexity around that is mind boggling. We finished that late last year like de-flashing like old weird services, moving to a services architecture. All that stuff we end up doing and inevitably, the goal is to have one learner experience, just like you use Google, Google Mail for your enterprise, or personal. Matt: There were some admin privileges and other things that are associated in the back end, but in general, the product kind of looks and feels the same and that's, the inevitable goal which we're very close to execute on. Stephanie: Got it. Were there any pitfalls that you experienced when going through all those different pieces to the business or anything where you're like, "When we implemented this, or we move to this type of tech stack, this is when we saw a lot of improvements with conversions or anything around the consumer or enterprise business." Matt: Yeah, just on conversions, yeah, one thing on that is interesting is the amount of improvement we saw just with like putting different team members with specific goals and this is going to sound kind of crazy because everyone is going to like, "Yeah, he's talking about agile." Matt: Just getting very specific about areas in the funnel to improve and how to adjust the trial experience at certain times, and experiencing and showing customers different things at different times. Matt: That had like a crazy amount of upside for us. And I would say less architecturally that we see an improvement other than we had just less stuff that wasn't moving the innovation forward, but just these small things have big impacts and get and I must say like if any one of my team members is listening to this and say, "You haven't solved all that yet is." Matt: It's very difficult to take a business that is so complex, and then all sudden kind of say, "Look, we're going to reduce all the complexity, networks are innovating again." I think there's still a challenge of like, faster, smaller teams, we use a safe framework which is kind of scrum like. Matt: I don't think we figured all that out yet, but it's way different than when I came in and felt very waterfally to me. We're going to issue a press release, what this release is going to look like in one year and we're going to work back from that, I'm like, "Yeah, that's very Amazon." Stephanie: Yeah, yup. Matt: I'm like, "Well, how do you even know this is the right thing if you don't have any customer?" So there was there's a whole evolution of trying things, validating them, making sure that you're deploying enough capital against that makes sure it gets a fair shake, but not too much where you're, you're in over your head and we've had some public black eyes on some of our tests, and I don't care. Matt: We were trying some things internationally with tutoring, it didn't work out, it didn't have the capital honestly to support some of it and I kind of feel like those are good experiences to understand whether you're going to invest more in something or not. Matt: And so I think the fact that we can start doing those things now because we simplified the platform or if possible. Yeah, I think it's hard to say no to things and yes to things. And some of that discipline is easier when you're a startup because you just don't have people to outsource to. Stephanie: Yup. There's always an excuse. Nope, no one else can help us with that. Can't do it. Matt: Yeah. There's never like I'm a product manager by training and I've used every product manager tool under the sun and now I've kind of just resulted in my using Google Sheets again and what I'm trying to triage like epics and themes and stories, and I still like to play around with those types of planning elements, I just always look at all these people in these points available. I'm like, "You guys have no idea the luxury we have." Stephanie: I'm sure they like hearing that. Matt: Yeah, there's nothing more pure than a startup and it's like five people, five engineers and like a product manager that codes and the seat goes, doing UI, UX and it's ... Stephanie: Yeah, that's really fun. So you mentioned earlier a free trial which I actually went on Rosetta's website and I ended up going through the entire trial of learning Spanish. How did you all think about creating that free trial and actually convincing people to do it? Stephanie: Because a lot of times, I think I would see something like that and I'd be like, "Oh, that's too much time and I don't want to start that process right now." Stephanie: And I eagerly jumped in and started doing the lesson plan because it was engaging and fun, and it kind of felt like the real world with the person walking around and you're stopping and talking to them. How did you think about creating that? So it actually converted users into paying customers? Matt: Oh, thanks for saying that. Yeah, I think we have a long ways to go. I think in terms of what we could be doing is we're just, I just feel like we're sprinting to the start line because of the late start, but I think the core piece is for most companies and they think about like what business do you want to be in a lot of people will default to like whatever their venture capitalists said they should do from their other companies they manage or whether they read on TechCrunch or whatever, or listen to on this program is I think you have to be very specific once you figure it out the approach to the product that you're going after. Matt: Are you going to be freemium? Are you going to be paid trial? Or are you going to be for lack of a better term I call it force-trial or upfront trial and there's elements of this that change, there's kind of nuances. Because that's more of a nuanced discussion is the freemium players in the language space for instance would be Duolingo. Matt: How do you get the most amount of MAUs, Monthly Active Users and get enough of them to convert? Or the Spotify example, and you're using basically cap ex as cap, you're using your R&D to drive user and usage and that's kind of Slack-like. Matt: Slack is slightly different obviously. Then the paid trial is, "Well, I have enough of something that's good that I want a lot of people to use it, but I want the conversion to be pretty good." Matt: And so for the first one with freemium, you have to say, "Okay, it's going to be so fun and compelling and I'm going to actually invest in growth that isn't there yet because I think I have scale effects —I can crowd out everyone else." Matt: The second one is I actually have a pretty good product, I need enough people to use it and then feel like I use it enough to want to use more of it. And that's what I decided to do and I'll explain why. Matt: And then on the upfront paid thing is typical like for low ACV, Annual Contract Value SaaS companies you'd see, please just call my ... Just call us and we'll walk you through it with one of my sales reps. Matt: And we'll do a guided tour through the demo or whatever and the decision why we did the second one was it was a good decision and is people knew enough about what the Rosetta Stone brand was like that we knew people would want to try it and that for people that remember what it was like, they definitely would want to use it again and we felt like the pinch was more compelling if we gave everyone a little taste of that. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt: We could have said, "Please pay up front." And we're the gold standard and giddy up, but we felt like we needed to earn our stripes a little bit into proving to people that we weren't just like a port of a CD product. Matt: And so that's why we decided to do that and we've played along different roads before. We've never done full freemium and I would argue at this point in the market, we would not be better served to do that because Duolingo has done a really good job of growing their monthly active users and have built some advantages there and we're not trying to play that game. Matt: I'm trying to play the game of being a really good, effective language learning product and I'm trying to set the tone in the trial experience that when you're using the product, it's not going to be like a game. Matt: It's not going to be like Clash of Clans. I guess Clash of Clans is a bad example, or the jewel or like Candy Crush I guess is what I was thinking of. Matt: Every day, I collect coins and I'm collecting coins to benefit my gameplay. It's kind of how I think about Duolingo a little bit and it's ... I think they're masterful of what they do, but I think they're designed to do something different than what I'm trying to do. Matt: And if you're serious about learning a language, and you stick to what I'm doing and you do a couple tutor sessions that we offer, you're going to get there. Matt: And so the business model and what we're trying to do in terms of posture, not market share, but revenue share really drove kind of the philosophy on the trial experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it definitely, it felt more serious especially where you could speak in the language and it would tell you I guess if the tonality was right, and if you were saying it correctly, and it would keep kind of advising you on it, once I saw it had that feature, that to me was when I was like, "Whoa, this is really serious, and I better be ready to learn this language because it's not like a game, it's not just saying random words." Stephanie: You're actually kind of conversating and having to hear yourself which I think is really important. That seems like a big first step to getting people to try it. Matt: It's an interesting observation because we are very oral first in our pedagogy. We want people to engage with the product and speaking is actually just in general a really good way to learn and then the key outcome of speaking well is not sounding stupid. Matt: And so if you're trying to learn a language, you want to sound somewhat authentic. So for Rosetta Stone, I would say, for anyone that really wants to learn a language, we'll get you there, but if you're just kind of trying to build like, it's like counting your calories kind of. Matt: If you wanted to do something like that, then I would say, pick a freemium product over ours and yeah, it's not like super intense scary, but it's like, "Yeah, you better do your lessons before you do your group tutoring session." Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's, I mean, that's great to incentivize people like you're paying for this, you might as well get the best out of it. Is there, so one thing I was thinking when I was interacting with the free trial was, "Wow, this would be really cool if there was like a virtual world where you could be walking around and talking to other students who are learning." Stephanie: Are you all thinking about any technologies like that to implement or is there anything on your radar where you're like, "We're moving in this direction or planning on trying this tech out or this digital platform out?" Matt: Yeah, we've played with VR in the past. I've been kind of like bearish every time someone says, "Let's go into VR." I'm like, "This is [crosstalk 00:39:27]." Stephanie: It's a hot word for a while. VR everything, it doesn't matter to the problem. Matt: Yeah, I know and I have a lot of friends. One really good friend of ours, she has a pretty successful, his definition of success and I think it is honestly successful VR games company, but like I have a lot of other friends that went into VR that gaming or especially verticals that just had a hell of a time just because there's not enough handsets that are available. Matt: Well, we have dabbled in in terms of immersive experience. I think what you're saying is is there a way to since we're immersive, use technology to make it even more immersive and what I really want to do is enable more AR in our experience. Matt: And we have like a little feature called seek and speak where you can ... It's like an almost a sample app where you can use your phone, we use ARKit to do a treasure hunt for things around your house like fruits, objects around your house and incorporate that in your speech practice. Matt: And I always thought that was like a really cool thing for us to expand into and if we ever get the Apple visor, some AR HoloLens or whatever, it'd be cool to start interacting with your world around you, not just with translation, but also to see if you can actually interact with folks that are kind of ambient around that experience. Matt: I personally and maybe this we're going too deep here, but I always thought it'd be cool if like I can visit another country and just decide how much of the spoken language am I going to generate myself, how much am I going to have my device do it because I'm not going to spend the time. Matt: And then how can I phone a friend? How could I have my tutor or my guide integrated experience where I'm going to sound really authentic if I do this or here's an experience that I could do here. Matt: I think the goal for language learning inevitably is different based on where you are in the world, but if you're from the United States or one of ... Maybe some European countries like the UK, it's kind of like this is a cool way to get engaged with a culture. Matt: If you're not in those countries, learning English primarily is a necessity and so I think some of these AR ideas that you just mentioned would be really good and speaking more frequently to other folks that are even not native speakers, but just trying to generate language is a very good way to teach. Matt: We have a product coming out called Rosetta Stone English this summer, literally like a couple months and it is a version of Rosetta Stone for EL kids or English Learners K through six. Matt: And this product is an oral first product and this blew me away. The stat if you're trying to teach a kid English primarily from lots of different countries is written communication. Matt: It's like 20% spoken and so our product is like 70, 80% spoken because this ... And so it's just really interesting. What could you do that's more immersive using AR or VR? Matt: I think there's, I'm with you. I think there's a lot of cool things you could do and I think you could enhance the travel experience quite a bit. I think you could enhance the young learner experience quite a bit. I think there's so many cool things you could do. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree and there seems like a lot of opportunities there. So what kind of disruptions do you see coming to the world of ecommerce and online learning? Matt: Yeah, it's a weird market and it's weird because like depending on what we're talking about in terms of overall commerce, it's like a $6 trillion education market, 6 trillion. Matt: Consumer is probably the largest out of that and then obviously, there's higher ed, there's middle school, high school, there's elementary, and then there's adult education and then where it's coming from, is the consumer paying, is the government paying. Matt: And so take all this aside, less than 10% is digital right now and I think there's going to be this massive realization and awakening because of the C-19 pandemic of everything that I do has to be digital. Matt: And it's not that we're replacing teachers, it's how do we integrate digital curriculum and conductivity between the teacher and the student, how do I build a data layer that personalized that experience. Matt: I think that can happen between, language learning, it can happen in lots of different curriculum like reading and writing. And not having a digital enabled kind of curriculum I think is going to be like if you don't have a solution for that, if you're an education system, if you're a college, if you're whatever, and if you don't offer these types of products in the future, you're going to go the way the dodo bird. Matt: I think higher education has a wake up call. J.Crew, I like J.Crew, they're in bankruptcy now. Hertz, I used Hertz. They're in bankruptcy now and I think there's this massive pull forward right now that's happening because the product that we've been using in education hasn't changed in like 40, 50 years. Stephanie: Yup. Matt: It's the same problem. If I time warp myself from 50 years ago into most classrooms, it would look the same. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I've always kind of thought that a disruption was definitely coming around higher education, but this seems to have moved everything forward by many years and especially around K through 12 where that felt like it would be much harder to change. Stephanie: For colleges, it's like, "Okay, now it's changing pretty quickly with all the boot camps coming out and company's not really always requiring degrees, at least in this area." Stephanie: But K through 12 felt hard to change and it feels like this is going to be an interesting forcing function now that like you said, a lot of kids are home and parents are figuring out how to be a part of their education more in the online learning process. Stephanie: It just seems like there's going to be a lot of opportunities that come up because of this. Matt: Yeah, I agree. And I also think that now I'm sounding like the tech utilitarian, but I would say that ed tech and I'm not from the ed tech space, but I am in it now. Matt: I would say that the ed tech providers that ... We're now entering the third wave I guess is how I think about it. The second wave which is typical of most other businesses that you and I have seen before, like ecommerce or sales ops tools, now you can talk about those and go, "Remember Omniture and it was badass?" Matt: Yes, it's now part of Adobe Cloud Matt is when you talk about these generational shifts in how we think about things, I think a lot of the ed tech players, people who are selling software to schools or directly to the parents or kids or whomever, they've definitely oversold or oversold the efficacy of some of those products. Matt: And when I talk about digital transformation, I'm not talking about the ability to do things self serve, and have the teacher look at some flat experience. Matt: Right now and this is not against teachers. Teachers, they're like little mini MacGyvers to me. I mean, they're like doing amazing things streaming together curriculum on the fly. Stephanie: Yeah, both my sister and my mom are teachers and I do not know how they're doing it and how they had to pivot so quickly to being in the classroom and my sister is actually a ESL, English as a Second Language teacher. Yeah. Matt: Oh my gosh, okay. Stephanie: Yup, because I have a twin sister and she always tells me about the difficulties that she's experiencing right now trying to bring her students online and develop curriculums online and a lot of them don't have internet access and it's just very interesting seeing how they kind of develop workarounds to make it work for their students. Matt: Yeah, my criticism of education isn't the teacher clearly, a lot of it is kind of the cost basis in the bureaucracy and when I talk about ed tech, it's like I think it comes down to and this is not a Matt Hulett Rosetta Stone specific thing is educating a group of young individuals or even old individuals, it doesn't matter the same way at the same time makes zero sense. Matt: And so building in the ability for the student to do some things themselves, having a data layer so that a teacher understands the areas in which that student is struggling, and so that the instruction becomes very personalized. Matt: It is generally what I'm talking about and it's right now, I think we have a billion and a half young kids around the world that don't have access to computers. Matt: And if they do have access to computers, they're scanning in their Math homework and sending it to a teacher. Well, who knows if I struggle for five minutes on this problem versus long division versus multiplication? The teacher doesn't know. Matt: And so I think the ed tech software that I'm more in favor of what I'm speaking about is how do you build curriculum-based, efficacy-based software, not unlike what your mom and your sister think about because they have degrees and know how to actually educate someone, they're not software [inaudible 00:49:10]. Matt: And if they're wanting to provide very explicit instruction, my guess is they're really swamped. They've got other things they need to do, they're probably paying for materials that are [crosstalk 00:49:22]. Stephanie: Yup. Matt: And so I think about all these stresses and we're asking them to provide excellent education, it's just, it's too much. And so I really feel like this third wave of technology, and I think it's going to happen is it's going to integrate this we call AI and HI, how do you integrate the best of what software can do and integrate that into the lesson planning of the teacher versus let's try to create AI for the sake of AI and disintermediate teachers which I think is ridiculous is and that's what I'm talking about. Matt: Because I see a lot of tech companies playing the game of ed tech versus education companies that are actually trying to be technology companies. Matt: I think the latter will be the software and the providers that will end up actually being the most successful and the most adopted, but obviously, I'm passionate about this because I've seen this with our Lexia software. Matt: And we have like 16 plus academic studies that show that the software works and I'm like, "How is this possible that two-thirds of kids still today by the time they're a third grade or reading below their grade level that continues through eighth grade?" Matt: Two-thirds are reading below level. How is this possible? And I'm not here to tell my own software. I'm just like, "Why is this possible?" Well, it turns out we don't train teachers to teach kids how to read. Matt: There's an approach to it, and we don't do real time assessments of kids struggling, the teachers swamped, they don't know what's going on. Matt: Anyways, I could talk about this for hours, but I do think there's this world where at some point, the $6 trillion business of educating all these kids and adults and young adults will be digitized. Matt: And I think that will be an interesting space. Ed tech is that one space where most VCs wouldn't want to touch. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I know. It's a hard ... I mean, health care and education. It's a hard space. So yeah, I completely agree. I know we're running into time and I want to make sure we can jump into the lightning round. Matt: Okay. Stephanie: Is there any other high level thoughts that you want to share before we jump into that? Matt: Nope. I think I hit the verbose button when I answered that question, but I didn't realize you have some familiar background on education which got me going so I [crosstalk] Stephanie: Yeah, no, yeah. Matt: I will be [crosstalk] lightning round. Stephanie: Yeah, we need a whole other podcasts where we can just talk education stuff and I can have my family be the call-ins and they can give us a little advice and ideas. Stephanie: All right, so the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud is where I ask a few questions and you have one minute or less Matt to answer. Are you ready? Matt: I'm ready. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your reading list? Matt: Words that matter. I don't know the author. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next on your podcast list? Matt: This podcast of course. Stephanie: Hey, good. That's the right answer. Matt: And then Masters of Scale. There's a new podcast actually with one of my competitors from Duolingo. Stephanie: Oh-oh. Very cool. Yeah, that's a good one. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Matt: God, it is embarrassing. Do I have to say it? Stephanie: Yes you do. Matt: Too Hot to Handle. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. I can't believe you're watching that. I'm judging a little bit, but I've also seen a few episodes. So if you were to choose a company right now to turn around, not Rosetta Stone, some brand new company, not a brand new one, but maybe one that's in the industry right now where you're like, "I could jump in and help." What company would you choose? Matt: That's a great question. WeWork. Stephanie: Woo, that would be an interesting one to try and turn around. Matt: Yeah. Stephanie: All right, next one. What app are you using on your phone right now that's most helpful? Matt: I listen to a lot of podcast, I love Overcast. I don't know if anyone ever mentions that. I just love it because I listen to things 2x. Stephanie: Yup, yeah, I know. I agree. I like that app as well. What language are you or your family working on right now to learn? Matt: Well, it's funny. I'm kind of barely competent in Spanish. My 16-year-old is actually I would say pretty intermediate level Spanish and my 10-year-old is oddly learning Japanese. Stephanie: Oh, go. Go him. A boy, right? Yeah, that's great. All right and our last, a little bit more difficult question. What's up next for ecommerce professionals? Matt: Oh boy, ecommerce professionals. I think to me it's a lot of the same topics in ecommerce have been discussed for so many years and I think that the interesting one is how do we actually make social commerce really good. Matt: And I think I spend a lot of time just, I'm not serious with it, but playing with like, TikTok and Twitch, and I think there's some elements to the social selling piece that I think are super interesting that no one's really figured out and I buy actually a lot of products off Instagram, and it's still too much friction and it's not quite working right for me. Matt: So I think there's some ... How do you integrate ecomm and then TikTok in a way that's native to that audience? I think there's some things there. Stephanie: Oh, that's a good answer. Well, Matt, this has been yeah, such a fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and Rosetta Stone? Matt: Rosettastone.com for the company and I'm matt_hulett on Twitter and it was a pleasure to talk to you today. Stephanie: All right, thanks so much. Matt: Thank you.  

With frustration at an all-time high and professionalism at an all-time low, our friend the Buyer has “had it” with the Seller and quite frankly their lack of knowledge. At present our Buyer is rightfully concerned that the latest misstep from our loose-lipped Seller will threaten not only the entire operation of the businesses but very well may threaten this deal. After so much solid leg work has been done by our team, our guys will have to reach up their sleeves for a good plan, potential solution and hopefully a little luck.  But the old adage keeps popping up that nothing is guaranteed in business. Hate to say it but “they let it slip”.… Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Alright, this is our fifth episode of Behind the Buy where we are covering a transaction from beginning to end with our client buyer, My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I'm Matt Staub. NASIR: I think this was interesting because our buyer was jarred on this one. To this point, the ups and downs were pretty -- I should say palatable by our client but this one, you could tell even on this phone call, she was a little annoyed. MATT: Yeah and some of the previous calls, there's been some minor things that have come up and maybe a little bit more than minor. She's been relatively fine, but she was definitely concerned about this one and rightfully so, a possible thing that could just kind of blow up everything. I would say this is the most material issue we've come across even more so than the whole lease situation. NASIR: Righ. Without giving anything away because we're gonna play the call here in a minute, I should set up the premise. We've signed the LOI, we're in this due diligence period and we're exchanging documents. We're still basically finishing up and drafting the asset purchase agreement, which is by the way one of her vocab words again. We use that term asset purchase agreement, APA, that's the actual agreement, the purchase agreement that we're utilizing and it differentiates between just a regular equity purchase or agreement where we're actually buying the equity in the business, in this case, an asset purchase for buying the assets. In this process of buying the business, we represent the buyer and the buyer wants to make sure that the business continues as normal. Once the business is purchased, we want to continue with the success that it's had in the past. So anything that disrupts that is a risk to the transaction. From the sellers perspective, they don't want to risk any kind of disruption in business, and from the buyers perspective, once they buy the business, they don't want it all of a sudden to fall apart. I guess that's the kind of cue up of the call is something happens on this call that risks that from happening. MATT: You're exactly right, from looking at both sides of the coin, the seller doesn't want anything to happen because it could blow up the whole deal, there's contingencies in place and if those aren't met, the buyer might back out and then on the buyers side of things, if they go through with the transaction -- There's always going to be issues to deal with at the beginning once the transaction is finalized, but they don't want anything major that's going to disrupt the entire operations and possibly things from the get-go. NASIR: Right and so hopefully, we come up with a solution here. This is a short call, so let's have it. I think we just have one or two more vocab words to go over and we'll play it. The first is UCC lien. I feel like we've covered that before but just in case, again when there is some kind of lender involved or some third-party financing and someone wants to make sure that their collateral is protected, they could actually file a lien with the respective state and that's called a UCC lien. UCC meaning Uniform Commercial Code. You don't need to know too much about that other than it's if you have a UCC lien on the business and you're buying a business,

In this inaugural podcast, Regie Routman, author of Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity for All Learners, shares her thoughts on what we need to focus on right now during these difficult times. We talk about poetry, about addressing the unique needs of everyone, and how we can embrace “Good is good enough.” Important Links (available on original site only):TranscriptPurchase Regie’s latest bookRegie’s poetry videos: Nurturing Writers in Uncertain TimesRegie’s writing project: A Notebook for YouTranscriptMatt: Thanks Regie for joining me today and this conversation about what's essential right now in education.Regie: Thank you for inviting me, I’m delighted to be here.Matt: This is Regie Routman, author of many texts on literacy and leadership most notably, most recently Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity for All Learners. This was a book that we did on the blog as a book study two years ago, and this is the inaugural podcast episode and I couldn't think of a better person to have here then Regie. Regie: Very kind, thank you.Matt: Just a little bit of background: I came into the elementary principal position in 2011. That school was a high poverty school that had already embraced Regie's work. The teachers had said, “You really need to come to the Literacy and Leadership Institute in Madison”. I resisted at first, saying that I have the schedule to get ready and I've got to get the budget square away first and I didn't buy in right away. Once I saw it in action and the teachers were the leaders in the professional development, I just said, “Wow”, this is real, kids are going to be engaged by this, it just makes sense. I went the next year and that's when I met you. So we've been colleagues, friends...I consider you a mentor and I'm very grateful to be able to talk to you today.Regie: Thank you Matt. I think we are equals, we’re educators, we're learning from each other. It has been a joy to watch you change, to watch your beliefs shift over the years in what you find essential now (and this is true for all of us) is not necessarily what we saw as essential years ago.Matt: That's very true. Now, what’s essential now is the big question related to your book Literacy Essentials and we want to take time for that: what you would tell someone in education what we need to focus on right now with everything going on with the pandemic. You have a cool project out now with Gail Boushey on poetry and nurturing writers in uncertain times. When I first saw this come out, Nurturing Writers in Uncertain Times, I thought, “Regie is going to choose poetry,” and you did! Why did you choose poetry?Regie: (laughter) It’s such a good question and really an easy question for me. These times are so different and full of so much fear and trauma for so many people. I was plagued, it kept me up at night, “What can I do to make things easier for families and students and teachers?” The equity issue pulled at my heart as it always does. I’m in Seattle and the public schools are giving out food and books for the neediest schools. I was concerned about kids that didn’t have computers, access to the same literacy advantages as other kids, so I came up with the idea of donating notebooks to these same sites. You can find that at regieroutman.org along with my writing project with Gail Boushey. The idea was to get students pencil and paper, it’s still good technology and to get kids writing about things that matter to them during this time. In all the years that I’ve been teaching, I have found poetry to be the great equalizer. For kids that are struggling, that are having great difficulty with following the rules, they take to poetry like a duck to water. I am talking about starting in kindergarten. The other thing I love about it is, one of the biggest shifts and hardest shifts for people to make in education and the kind of work kids are being asked to do, this is not a time to worry about following the rules, to worry about, “Is their spelling correct? Are they using capital letters?” This is a time to celebrate, and I say that word meaningfully, to celebrate what kids can do and have them soar. Poetry does that. They don't have to write a lot, they don’t have to follow the rules, and it’s very enjoyable. What we’ve done in this video series is to take you through how you might do that at home, as a parent, a teacher, a family member, and everyone is successful, it’s comforting. It’s joyful. It’s freeing.Matt: I found myself engaged while watching, especially when you were writing the poem, “Dandelions”. You said “lowly weed in the world,” and I wrote that down. I wanted to tell you that it was such a cool line that you said, and then you incorporated those ideas with weed and flowers. You mention nurturing and not following the rules, and I think that can cause anxiety for any writer when trying to following the rules when you just want to get words down on paper. Poetry seems to allow for that, gives them an entry point into writing.Regie: And also because poems tend to be shorter, instead of, say, an essay. It can be just a few words. In the video series, I demonstrate my writing process. You can see me do it on the screen, the thinking and the revising, and what’s going on. Writing is hard, and the satisfaction you feel from writing is great. Kids get that. I also love it because you start with the whole. I see that shift that all teachers and leaders have to make for teaching and learning to become joyful and meaningful for all students. You start with a whole poem, a whole idea, I tell the story first, and everyone is successful, even kindergarten kids who may only know a couple of letters and sounds. So I love that. It’s so critical right now.Matt: You base that on something your noticing - dandelions - which gives every kid, that everyone can notice something. You picked out something as simple as dandelions, but you make it into this rich text. Regie: I was very careful. I wanted it to be a neutral topic. “What are you noticing today, or now, that you didn’t notice before?” and to model something positive. I’m noticing the natural world a lot more. We are inside, looking outside, and I am really looking at something as I take a short walk. This is what I call choice within structure. I’m modeling a poem about dandelions (which I’ve never noticed until now), and the message to kids and parents is, “What are you noticing?” They can take that same process and they choose the topic. What’s very important right now is something Larry Ferlazzo says on a wonderful video he’s done through Education Week, to just throw out the regular curriculum and to ask your kids what they are interested in. What do they want to learn and start there. Don’t worry about the skills in isolation. I think some of the things we need to be concerned about now are kindness, being kind to ourselves, to our kids and families we are working with, and making whatever we are doing with them relevant. Easy - this is not the time for complex projects. I think putting people first. In Literacy Essentials, in the engagement section, that is where we need to start. I have four parts there: developing trusting relationships, accelerating learners, creating a thriving learning environment, and teaching with purpose and authenticity. This is where we can start, with this home-school connection and what parents are doing with their kids at home. You’ve got to set up a culture in your home, in our virtual classrooms now that allow for that kind of trust and celebration and purpose. A lot of that is offering choices and being a really good listener. What is it that they need? Keeping close relationships with the kids and their families. It’s hard.  Matt: You mentioned the home-school connection. I am meeting with staff in weekly meetings; we’re making them optional. They are noticing that kids are not as engaged as much right now and I think people are feeling some sense of, getting worn out and not noticing what's going well. So I think that's just really an important point of involving the families and how to create that structure together and noticing what's going well. Regie: That’s really hard to do. I was noticing in a New York Times article recently on the front page that parents are having a very hard time teaching their kids at home. They didn’t know that teaching was so hard.Matt: For any family that has thought about homeschooling, they are getting a real experience right now. Although I feel for the families trying to juggle jobs and homes, or parents who are unemployed. They are dealing with unique stressors right now.Regie: This is a hard time for parents. I don't know if your teachers are doing this, or for that matter even for you to do, it would be great to just start each day or each lesson with a read-aloud. Even if you're teaching high school, to pick a book that allows you to talk about it and to jump off and write something about it to just start off with something relaxing. Kind of a beginning to the learning day. One of the books that I like is Be Kind. It is a picture book by Pat Zietlow Miller about kindness. It would take less than 5 minutes to read it and then I might ask the kids to reflect on what's a kind act that someone did for you or that you did for someone else. Let’s talk about that. Let’s write about that. If there's a way for you to do some demonstration writing in front of the kids, do that because that's really helpful too, the kind of modeling that you're expecting. Matt: What you did in the videos is such a cool example, I shared that with my staff yesterday, where you pulled up your whiteboard and you had a picture in picture. You were talking as you were writing, at the same time, and they can see the process of writing. You could see poetry kind of in action, the development of it. I think that's a simple shift that I think teachers could do in keeping things manageable enough for kids and for themselves. Regie: I think what's really important there is that there wasn't a lot of planning for me. I talked about the fact that writing is a recursive process that it's not linear. So when I was done with that, I was really done because I was revising it as I went along. I was re-reading it, I was rethinking, I was talking out loud, and I think it's important for kids to see our thinking. That thinking aloud and seeing our struggle that we go through, that it's not perfect, and that that's okay. Matt; Yeah, listening to kids, like you were saying, and having a conversation about what they're noticing and with kindness and even doing some shared demonstration. My wife, she teaches special education, and she was dictating a letter to a friend they haven’t seen in awhile since we've gone to remote learning. Doing it in front of him and putting up the whiteboard, there’s a lot of options that I think your video, as well as the conferring conversation with Gail, it was just a cool example that anyone can do tomorrow, today. Regie: I think so and that's really why I love poetry and I think it’s really a great way to start a lesson. In fact, I thought it was quite interesting that, in the New York Times which I read every day because I am from New York, the national desk now, when all the reporters get together and talk about what they are going to write about, they start by reading aloud a poem every day. And so I thought that’s just wonderful to read that poem, to get people in the mood, and relaxation, and the beauty of words, settling down, to soothe your soul before you have to do this hard work. I think that's such a great way to start a lesson. So the read aloud could be a poem and it could be a poem that you’ve written together, perhaps as a class. That’s easier in some places than others. I also like poetry writing because if you just have paper and pencil at home, you can do that, you can put together a poetry anthology by stapling papers together. It could be a writing record, it doesn’t have to be poems, a writing record of what you did during these uncertain and difficult times. I think the hardest thing is to keep the celebration and joy part of whatever it is you’re doing - as a principal, as leaders, as teachers, as kids, and how do you do that and bridge that digital divide. That is why I like poetry. The other thing I would say is I think this is hard to do but I would include in my lessons every once in a while, “Let's talk about gratitude, we’re all struggling, we’re tired of being indoors, but what are we grateful for?” Maybe writing a letter to somebody telling them how much you care about them. Or even, if you can do this, especially where not all the kids have computers or a hotspot, actually writing a letter to each of your students. At the elementary level, I think that's doable and enclosing a stamp and having them right back to you. I think that whole connection, we need to keep our kids and family socially and emotionally whole, which is so difficult to do and to put that before any mandated curriculum. Matt: I couldn’t agree more. That leads to what’s essential right now for educators. You’ve mentioned celebration and stopping and being grateful. I’ve tried to do that with team meetings, starting with what’s going well, or checking in. One teacher yesterday shared that a fox family had taken up residence on their property. She was sharing pictures and it brings in those positive experiences and what’s going well right now. You mentioned parent involvement. What else is essential right now for us in education? Regie: I think that those are the most essential things, that we do right now. Our social and emotional well-being, the strong connections with families and listening to where people are kind of at. Making sure that the curriculum allows some choice, asking kids what do you want to learn about right now and being adaptable. Not worrying so much about tests. I just read recently, which I thought was great, a professor at Stanford University who was, up until the last minute, was going to give a final to his students, decided it was just too much. Everybody was in an emotional state including him. So instead of a final, he had each of his students submit a photo of something from the natural world and that was the final. They were gorgeous, of sunsets and a bird or maybe just the way the light hit a tree, and they posted all of those photos for all students in the class to see and that was, I thought, just terrific. Anything we can do to help people feel successful. Sometimes it feels like the world is ending. We are going to come out of this eventually, but we want to help families and kids come out of this as whole as possible. And then finally Matt, and this might be a good place to end: Years ago when I was teaching and I would go into a school and the teachers were always, you know how we are, we have high expectations, that's great, but I never heard a teacher say “You don't have to do anymore. It’s fine as it is.” But it’s always, “Improve, improve, improve”. When I left one of the residencies, I had a teacher give me (I have it on my wall) this huge necklace that was handmade with paper. It says on it, “Good is good enough.” That was the message they took away which I was thrilled about. We are all trying to do the best we can. We need to slow down, breathe, find moments of joy, do the best we can, and accept that our families and student are doing the best they can. Good is good enough. So, I wish everybody peaceful days during these very hard times. Thank you Matt for this opportunity to talk with you. I appreciate our friendship and collegiality so much.Matt: “Good is good enough.” I am going to write that on the cover of my journal.Regie: I am going to send you a photo of that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com

Regular guest Matt Courtois returns to discuss teaching groups of young learners online. We focus on some of the advantages of online teaching – what is it possible to do online, that isn’t possible to do offline? How to get students to genuinely and meaningfully communicate with each other online? And why tech problems and glitches might actually be the best part of online language lessons.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest, returning once again, is Matt Courtois.Matt Courtois: Hey, it's good be back.Ross: It's good to have you back. Matt, you and I used to work together in the same company. A large part of what you were doing was training teachers to teach online lessons of groups of students.Obviously, lots of teachers now all over the world are teaching groups of students online, so pretty cool to get your ideas and experience of doing that.Matt: Also, where I'm working now, we're doing the same thing that I think a lot of people are going through, and then we're transitioning our face‑to‑face classes to online.Ross: In your experience of doing this, both now and in the past, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for teachers?Matt: One thing that every teacher...Actually, it was my first instinct as well, whenever I move to an online company, was thinking about, what do we do in a "real" classroom? Basically, figure out, right now, let's do that online, which is all good.It limits you because there are things that you can do online that you can't do in your regular classroom. First of all, teaching online is a real classroom. Secondly, there's a lot of advantages that teaching online has that you wouldn't even know how to do in a real classroom.Ross: I'm imagining here like a Venn diagram. It's like, what teachers tend to do online is just the stuff that overlaps often with teaching offline.Matt: One of the challenges that I still struggle with in training teachers online is trying to consider how can you get students to interact more. You've run Skype meetings, I've run Skype meetings, or zoom meetings, or whatever platform you're using.It ends up being a lecture. You don't get the participation you would in a normal training. It's just the nature of the way those platforms work. You can't get 10 people talking at the same time when working on a project.Ross: You can't do that thing of turnaround to speak to your partner now and discuss this if it's 10 people all sharing the same online space. What do you think are some ways that teachers can get students to interact with each other online in those group classes?Matt: I think the nicest way that a lot of platforms use, the most logical way to get all your students interacting at the same time is if you have six students, break them up into three different breakout rooms. They can talk for five minutes. Then you gather back together at the end, and you can debrief what they came up with in those five minutes in their breakout rooms.Ross: I can imagine there being a lot of trepidation from teachers in using them. It really is like a complete blind spot. If you're setting up group work in a class, you can kind of hear what everyone's doing at the same time, but as soon as they're in different, literally different rooms, it's absolutely impossible to hear what's going on.I guess maybe some tips for teachers in setting those up would be to be really clear about what you expect students to be able to come back at the end of the five minutes and be able to do or present and be super specific in the instructions.Matt: That goes with something I recommend telling teachers during class. Tell your students, go and get something from your house. You're talking about food, like tell students go to your refrigerator and find some food that you can present or show off.Again, you do have to consider, if you don't set a time limit, you might have some students that are gone for 15, 20 minutes. Because going on the refrigerator can be a point of distraction with some people.[laughter]Ross: Yeah, that's such a good point. I feel that's the other side of that Venn diagram. It's something that's possible to do online but not offline, is get real stuff from your house and from the students' houses, and bring them together and show them and compare them.Matt: Some obvious sets of stuff that everyone has in their house. You've got your furniture, different rooms. I had a teacher who's doing a demo with me. I was the fake student. She was doing the different rooms in the house. She basically would say, instead of take your computer to the bathroom or the bedroom ‑‑ it's too difficult; it's an invasion, almost.Instead, what she said, "Go to your bathroom and find a toothbrush. Bring your toothbrush back here and then go to your bedroom and find your pillow." It's vocabulary within the room. You can practice some of that.Different rooms, food, family members, presumably you're in your house with your family. For little children, especially, you can say, bring your parents here and introduced them to the class.Ross: You could do some cool translation activities with that as well. Like, get grandma, and you ask the question in English, the other student has to translate it into grandma's first language, then you do that back the way.Matt: Another huge way ‑‑ this is probably the best way you can get all your students talking in the same time with that breakout rooms ‑‑ is have them do the role play with their parents.It's great for parents too, because I think a lot of parents want to see that their children are learning and there's evidence of them being able to produce language in English, and they are interested. They are wanting to participate in their student's learning.Ross: They'll participate regardless. If the teacher just lets them be passive, you're really rolling the dice there in terms of what participation you're going to get. We've seen just about everything, from just shouting out the answers to telling the students that they're stupid for getting it wrong, to giving the wrong answers.If you're able to set roles for what you actually want the parents to do, then you can involve them in a way that you know is going to be productive.Another big difference for teaching kids online compared to offline, I think that's a potential advantage, is the classroom management language is really different for online to offline.If you think about just any decent coursebook, the first chapter is usually going to be things like what's your name, because you need to know your students' names, and things like stand up, sit down, pencil, eraser, pen, boom, blah, blah, blah, because students need to know and need to be able to use that language in order to actually participate in the class.I feel that most coursebooks will not have the language that you need to participate in an online class, which is all these other things. It's [inaudible 7:00] not stand up and sit down. It's like click, circle.Matt: It's an interesting thing, with teaching Lexus. I remember, a few years ago I went to a talk, and somebody was saying what are the first words that you teach to students? You teach the highest frequency words first because those are the ones that students use most.Ross: Again, it's so context specific, isn't it? I guess if you were teaching a group of students from different countries and different backgrounds, you would want your coursebook at the beginning to have things like, where did you come from?If you're teaching a group of students that are all in their home country from the same time, that language is not meaningful at all. It's even not meaningful, like if the students already know each other's names because they're in the same primary school class and have been for three years. That's not useful language.One of the things for teaching online is you really have to start assessing like, why do we teach some of the things that we teach?Matt: Along with that, here's the flip side of it that's positive is that a lot of my teachers, in the beginning of a lot of classes, they want to do something that students notice.They always ask students, "How's the weather today?" Something I point out is you and I sitting here in the same room would never ever ask that question because you're fully aware and I'm fully aware of how the weather is today, and we know that each other knows.It's not a real interaction. There's no exchange of ideas happening. It's purely a fake interaction that we create for the classroom.Whereas, all of a sudden, online, you do have some people being in different places. When I'm on the phone with you, if you're in Shanghai and I'm in Shenzhen, let's say, we would say, "How's the weather today?" I think online, now that becomes a genuine interaction. We can actually do it and have some different language appear as well.Ross: Even very simple things, like very, very low level students, like, "What colors can you see?" It's a sort of thing you'd maybe do in the classroom with real beginners. When everyone's in their own living rooms, all of a sudden, that's a genuine question. What colors can you see? Because I can't see your living room.I can just see wall behind you. You can see all these different things. All this communication that before used to be fake, or these questions, at least, that used to be display questions are now referential questions. Real communication is happening.Matt: I remember a story from our old company where one lesson, the teacher was asking students questions like that. They were looking at this PowerPoint together, and he said, "What's on this page?" The kid would say, "This is on the page, this, this, this." He just named all the items. "All right, next slide, what's on this page?" "This is on it. This is on."It's all this fake interaction because the teacher knows what's on those pages. Then all of a sudden, there was a technical difficulty. They started looking at two different pages.All of a sudden, the teacher said, "Can you tell me which page you're on? What are you seeing?" The student starts describing the page, and he's like, "Oh, so you got three pages ahead of me." You realize, it was by mistake, by a glitch in the system.Finally, we had a real interaction when they were looking at different things and trying to communicate and solve the problem together, so they could end up on the same page together. For the first time in their lesson, they're having a meaningful exchange.Ross: The teacher has a reason to actually listen to the student's answer as well. The communication is happening both ways.Matt: How many times am I going to ask you like, "What do you see?" He'd tell me, and I'd say, "Good job." That's not a real interaction. It's only for the classroom.Ross: That's a fascinating example, doesn't it? It was like, sometimes online, when things go wrong, it can be a positive thing. I've definitely seen this as well in terms of the audio quality, and then the teacher and students are not being able to hear each other.It doesn't mean you get more sort of negotiation and meaning of like, "What was that? What do you mean? Can you explain? Is there another word for that? How do you spell it?"Again, I'm not asking how do you spell it because I'm checking your spelling. It's because I'm genuinely trying to understand.Matt: Trying to understand. I remember something you used to complain about. In another previous, previous job, there's a lot of times to get that gap between students, to get that meaningful exchange in a real classroom.To get one student looking at something the other student doesn't, you end up blindfolding the student. You end up blindfolding student B, so student A can describe what to do. How many times have you been blindfolded in real life? No, don't answer that. I don't want to know.[laughter]Matt: You can understand why teachers are doing that, why they're putting the blindfold on their students ‑‑ so they can create that gap and that need for real communication, but it's just so inauthentic. Whereas online, you do have some people with camera problems and some people that don't. You can really use those to make your lessons better.Ross: Absolutely. I feel so much of this, it's really just taking the same principles as you're teaching off...I think there's so much of what is bad teaching offline. Teachers holding up flashcards and getting students to name them. That's also bad teaching online.Matt: It's a bit more obvious online as bad teaching. A teacher, when they have those flashcard activities, they can have 10 activities where they get the students up and running around.In essence, all they're doing is getting students to memorize these words on the flashcard. It is a very interactive thing where students are moving around. It can feel pretty fun.Online, if you're doing just that list of words or looking at the picture and treating it like that focus on the six vocabulary items again, and again, and again, you can't really fall back on that fun flashcard activity.Ross: Something you hit on there is the importance of doing something to get the students to move.I think half an hour, if you're six years old, to sit in the one place, that's a big ask. Trying to do those activities of whatever it is, like miming something or finding something in the room and bringing it back. Just doing something to get the students to just move away from this sitting, staring at the screen is a bit of a must.Matt: One rule I make for teachers is get your students up and moving in every class.Ross: That's obviously really easy to do offline, but I think that's something that requires a lot more thought online. Or, maybe it's not necessarily easier offline. It's just everyone has been doing it for longer.People have developed all these strategies for getting students to switch seats or look at something outside the class or do a rolling dictation. If it's online, you need to think of a new way, a new reason for the students to stand up and do something.Matt: I said in the beginning that this is something that all teachers around the world are doing, this transition from offline to online. I'm excited about it. In my profession and education, it is a pretty conservative thing.It hasn't evolved that much since I've taught. We're at a time now, right now, that we are doing something very different, and everybody's doing it. I'm excited to see what comes out of this.Ross: Good. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Matt, thanks for joining us.Matt: A pleasure, as always.Ross: All right. We'll see you again next time, everyone. Goodbye.Matt: See you.

Connect with ClearDATA on the Azure Marketplace: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/cleardatanetworksinc-4386736.cleardata_comply_self_service?tab=Overview Matt Ferrari is the CTO of ClearDATA, a company that serves the mission-critical system needs and regulatory requirements of healthcare organizations. As part of this discussion, we shared how their partnership with Microsoft, their use of Azure, and the Azure Marketplace has empowered them to scale and grow their business. Connect with Matt: Web: https://www.cleardata.com/ Twitter: @cleardatacloud LinkedIn: ClearDATA Networks Microsoft partnership opportunities for healthcare partners: HealthcareIndExp@microsoft.com Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [00:36] When it comes to digital transformation, healthcare has typically been slow to adopt Cloud-based technology, due to the many industry regulations around data privacy. What are some of the challenges that healthcare companies encounter when trying to innovate on the Cloud? [01:42] Three key changes that happen inside the public cloud in a healthcare environment are: (1) Regulatory Changes (2) Application Changes (3) New features & capabilities inside the cloud [02:44] The biggest challenge for healthcare organizations when migrating to the cloud is how do we embrace all these public cloud technologies without having these capabilities in-house? [03:17] A lot of the capabilities that the public cloud brings now, will accelerate the way healthcare organizations leverage their own in-house talents. [03:53] ClearDATA recently launched a new offering called ClearDATA Comply. What is it, and how does it support healthcare innovation? [06:42] How would a healthcare provider use your solution with Azure? [08:31] How can customers find out more about the ClearDATA Comply solution, and procure it through the Azure Marketplace? Matt: You can access it via this link: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/cleardatanetworksinc-4386736.cleardata_comply_self_service?tab=Overview. [09:01] How has partnering with Microsoft helped ClearDATA scale and grow your business? [10:58] How can people find out more about Microsoft partnership opportunities for healthcare partners? Matt: For more information, you can send an email to HealthcareIndExp@microsoft.com. [11:21] How do people connect with you? Matt: You can visit our website at https://www.cleardata.com/. You can also follow us on Twitter at @cleardatacloud. [11:37] Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you’d like to share with the audience? [11:37] The public cloud plays a key role in healthcare. #AskTheCEO with Matt Ferrari

Matt Till is a lecturer of Christian Ministry and Communications at Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL, lead pastor of Restoration Church in the Chicago suburbs, and a regular contributor to Ephesiology, an online community and podcast dedicated to the study of the early Christian movement. Today, Matt shares with us the story of finding Christ at Promise Keepers with his dad, learning that working in ministry isn't all it's made out to be, and responding to his calling to plant a church. Matt also shares how he learned that vocation can be lived out in any line of work anywhere. His story reminds us that God always has a plan even when we think we're directing the steps. Listen to Matt's story now!  Stories Matt shared: Growing up in a Methodist home in Chicagoland Hearing the Holy Spirit for the first time at Promise Keepers in 1996 and receiving Christ with his dad Being baby Christians with his whole family Building community in college and how that shaped him Studying broadcast communication Working in Chicago television Moving to a megachurch in the area to use his gifts How his disillusionment caused him to grow The vacation where God asked him to plant a church Going to seminary to become a pastor How God sparked conversations about church planting Planting a church in the middle of megachurches falling The unexpected response to his vulnerability Great quotes from Matt: You can be doing something of value for the Kingdom of God even outside the church. God is a God on mission. We've been more consumed with getting people to believe the right things; that's just tribalism at its best. Or its worst. Resources we mentioned: Ephesiology's the State of the Church in America episode Ephesiology: The Study of a Movement Matthew's website Connect with Matt on Twitter Related episodes: Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. The post Matt Till and Living on Mission appeared first on Eric Nevins.

Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt and Marty (who was sitting in for Ken.) We had a good discussion about election technology and what different states are doing to assure that they are secure.  We also talked about the FBI and Homeland Security about Passwords and Passphrases and security.  Here we go These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable. Would they even know that hacking occurred? If they did, it would be much after the fact. Craig So well, this morning, I was talking on WGAN in their affiliates about some of the voting technology, you know, Super Tuesday is coming up. I compared some of the election technology in different states. What's good. What's bad. We talked about the new FBI press release that came out, that is I hope going to have a significant impact on security. It is fascinating stuff. So here we go. Craig By the way, I talked a little bit about our tutorials and coming up. Yeah, man, You won't believe the work that went into these all for you. It is part of my give back. I am not trying to sell you, upsell you, or anything else with these. Anyways, here we go with this morning on Ken and Matt more. Joe things technology.t tech guru Craig Peterson is on right now on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. Matt Alright, we're back ladies gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and also Matt. There is no Ken today. There is a Marty Groman he is over there. He is still wearing the Mardi Gras beads. Marty I am, Yeah, the party's just wearing off now. How many Mardi Gras jokes Do you get to do? Is it a party for me? Matt You know, I should have a whole roster of them. Marty But you don't work out times in the early 90s. Back in the good old days. The real Mardi Gras. Yeah, way down there. The crew of Baucus indeed. Matt Well, I don't know if Craig Peterson's ever been to Mardi Gras, but he joins us now to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, How are you this week? Craig Hey, I'm doing well. Yeah, there's a lot of party stuff. A Marty McFly, Cartoon Network has one of their top shows right now as Marty character in it to see. So yeah, he's getting around. Marty Everyone's getting on the bandwagon. Matt I don't know how to segue. So we're going to go ahead and just move into the attack already. Well, we do have an election coming up. Craig Peterson. Of course, in South Carolina, we've already seen a few primaries as well. And they've all gone smoothly with no trouble as we all know. There is an evolving question, though, that every time we have an election, we sort of debate and talk about and ask ourselves a very similar question? How can we make sure that these things are on the up and up? How do we make sure that our voting is secure? How do we make sure that it is all done correctly, and that nobody hacking and changing votes and manipulating things? On a more fundamental level? How do we protect our elections in technology? Craig Yeah, real big question a big problem. There are a few states have and, in fact, quite a few now that are using these election machines that we've grown to know and love, where we have a piece of paper effectively. And you fill in those little ovals there using the pencil or felt tip pen, right. You guys are familiar with those, right? Because you voted, right. Yeah. Those are right now, anyway, the best type of technology used for voting. There are other states and go all the way on the other side, and use these touchscreen voting machines that are running Windows XP. Now Windows XP hasn't been supported for many, many, many years, and they are connecting them to networks. When you vote, you just you touch the screen saying you're voting for so and so but some of these machines, they've got configured steal tickets. So you say, I'm voting Republican, or I'm voting Democrat. Or maybe you have Libertarian in that in a state right. People have repeatedly complained that the machines are improperly registering their votes. They'll say I'm voting for President Trump but somehow was recorded for Bernie Sanders. Right? That's, that's kind of the nightmare scenario. We don't want to see this Fall. If you vote and your votes not counted or correctly counted. When these things hit the news, and there is no audit trail like in some of these states, all you have is this computer that identifies that you voted for Bernie Sanders, even though you meant to vote for Donald J. Trump. They hit the news, all of a sudden everyone's all worried that somehow maybe my vote didn't count. Maybe there's cheating going on. Both of these could be true when using some of these types of technology. So there is a $10 million contract that has been awarded, it was awarded last year to come up with a secure voting machine. It looks like it's going to be more of a secure method of voting. There are so many ways that voting can be hacked. I just mentioned the machines themselves. If they are connected to a network ever, there is a potential for hacking. Optical Scanning machines used in New Hampshire are never connected to networks. They're loaded up, they put a little, basically a thumb drive into them, and they dump what the load is all about. But ultimately, there are multiple places that it could be hacked and could be hacked at the Secretary of State's office, where they're compiling all the votes from all of these machines throughout the state. It could be hacked again at the Secretary of State's office but on the website, where they post results, and where the federal government goes to get the results from the Secretaries of State. There's nothing fancy about how the votes are collected nationally. So your question going right back to it, Matt, have Can we trust the election? How can we trust the vote? Right now, I'd say here in Maine we are in pretty good shape. In the majority of states are in pretty good shape. There was a lot of money. I can't remember the numbers, exact number but a lot of money that was set aside and given to states to upgrade their voting machines. The temptation is always as we talked to with Ken here about this a couple of weeks ago. Should we buy the Betamax right or buy the newest, greatest latest, and coolest technology? We see right now from the FBI and Homeland Security reports, generally speaking at this point, it doesn't look like there will be a lot of problems this year. There was disclosed some significant issues in few states in the 2016 election with problems with hacking attempt, explicitly directed at the Secretaries of States in several different countries. Those Secretaries of State have been informed about it, those of them that come out recently. Ultimately, I guess we won't know how good it is until sometime after the fact. That part of it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, is that the average time to figure out a hack occurred is your business is around six months. If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable, would even know that they've been hacked. If they did, it wouldn't be much after the fact. So just let's stick with the old fashioned way for now, because it's the best way, the brand new way, by the way, that $10 million award. It looks like they are leaning towards a paper solution as well. So it's an electronic voting machine. And you touch the screen so that you vote for people you want. It spits out a piece of paper with your votes on it, you then take that piece of paper with your votes on it, and you give it to ever to whoever is, is running that little local election, they run it through a scanning machine. That is not much different from what we're doing today. And that's, that's a suggestion as to what the most secure type of voting will be. Marty Craig, it's, it's Marty. So yeah, it fills in the Oval for you then. But let me ask you if I may change topics on you a little bit. These trackers kind of drive me bonkers, right. When I when I visit, you know, the onion dot com or something the banner ads seem like they take forever to load. I added the DuckDuckGo extension to Google Chrome, and it cut that right off. I mean, what is your take was was that a good idea? A bad or bad idea? Craig Well, we've just had over 500 extensions removed from the Chrome extensions store, store, even though they're free, right, you have to pay for them. And as a general rule, I advise against using those extensions. In about two weeks, Marty, I'm going to have some training that I'm going to be releasing that's free. I'm not trying to upsell you or trying to sell you anything about some of these extensions that are going to keep your information safe. Now DuckDuckGo is well known as one of the best guys out there when it comes to blocking your tracking. Some of the others that I'm going to be covering in training include Ghostery, and you should be using HTTPS anywhere, which does something a little bit different. pundants amazing. You block origin and others. I'm going to go through those a couple of hours worth of training that I'll be releasing here in a couple of weeks, but Marty, I think you're right, use DuckDuckGo for your search engine. And there are more and more these extensions that are trying to keep your privacy. And I haven't looked at goes. But as a rule, those guys have been great and make sites load faster. Over to you. Marty That's what it does. Craig Ultimately, you know, all of these different extensions that I just mentioned in there, we're going to be doing this training on all of them will make it load faster. And you take a site like forbes.com that just has a crazy number of trackers on it. And the ads that you mentioned, like the ads, loading, and taking time, it makes Forbes go from about it took four minutes for me the other day to completely load everything on Forbes homepage. It was that bad. Then when I turned on these blocker extensions, it went from four minutes down to five seconds. So they're not only tracking us, but they're making our lives miserable. Trying defined to stuff we're looking for on the page. Right, Marty kids are there cluttered with all this junk too, right? Marty Yeah, it's awful. I frankly, I don't miss it. But it does make it all a little bit cleaner. But back over to Matt, I think you had a question. Sure. Matt I got one more quick one for you before we let you go, Craig. The password that I am going to be required to change in like, I think, a couple of days here at the radio station is among the 8000 different passwords that I have to change all the time. And there are no new recommendations. I understand it from the FBI that we are using passphrases instead of complex passwords. So like instead of d3, 724 dashes, but you know, period, whatever, some crazy combination of letters, whatever we should be using passphrases Why don't you explain that a little bit. Craig Yeah, well, get this quick. I'm going to go into this more on my show on Saturday at 1 pm So you can tune in there. And it's a two-hour show, and we go into quite a bit of depth on some of these things. But I'm glad you brought it up because this is one of the essential pieces of advice in the security world in the last five years. About five years ago, a study came out saying that rather than those types of complicated passwords that you just mentioned is not practical based on today's technology. Here's the bottom line recommendation from the FBI and from the research that's been out there, use a string for random words together, and just put a dash in between each of the terms, or space, whatever you'd like. A passphrase is something that might make sense to you, something that might not make sense at all, but something you can remember, and that's the essential part. Now, if your business, like for instance, Matt, your business might require some more company passwords, you might want to share this article with them. So you still might have to have those crazy ones or numbers, letters, uppercase, lowercase, special symbols, etc. But in reality, those are not the best passwords nowadays, make sure it's at least 15 characters long. Throw a few non-related words. For instance, making America great again would be a lousy password. Marty I thought I was going to use I can't drive 65. So there you go. That's probably not one to use now that you mentioned on the air Marty, that's true. Craig Yeah. But those types of passwords are the best. Matt All right, well, Craig Peterson He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening. Excuse me in the world of technology. Craig one more time promo for the show, when is it? What time where can you listen to it? What are you going to be talking about? Give me that one more time before you go and then, and then we'll say thanks. Craig Okay. I'm not the automaton that Marty is when you ask that question. The show this Saturday, every Saturday from one till three, I talked about the latest in technology with an emphasis on security. We're going to be talking about some of the cloud services that businesses are using thinking that somehow they're safer, right? But how to make it safer. We'll talk a little bit more about the passwords. Ransomware is on the rise right now. Apple Macintoshes. It turns out there's more malware out there and get a few more things as well. But this weekend shows Saturday at one we're kind of focusing on cloud software. Matt All right, his name is Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Today was no exception to that, Craig, thank you very much. And we will talk to you again next week, sir. Craig Gentlemen, take care. Bye-Bye. All right. Appreciate it, Craig. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Riding Shotgun With Charlie #069 Klint Macro & Matthew Mallory Meet The Pressers    One of my passengers said I needed to get Klint in the car. After some messaging, we decided that I’d be on Meet The Pressers and they would be on RSWC.  Since we were all heading to SHOT Show 2020, this is where we filmed this show. The Meet The Pressers gents were kind enough to let me use their rental car for the show!   Klint Macro is a recording engineer as well as a firearm instructor. When Klint was recording musicians in LA, he was friends with an armorer which led to helping others in using a firearm.  That led to becoming a firearm instructor. After some NRA instructor training, Klint discovered that he was going to be able to teach as a civilian since he thought only military and police were the only people who could be instructors.    He shares a story about a woman who told him that after he taught her to use a firearm safely, she would never be victimized again. That had a profound effect on him and his instruction. Klint expanded his knowledge base with the USCCA “instructor in a box” and added much more defensive methold and tactics to his classes. All the instructing  and students he had led to him starting the Trigger Pressers Union.  We knew it was time to change seats when the RangeTech Shot Timer from ConcealedCarry.com went off!   We did a ‘Chinese Fire Drill” at the coffee shop drive thru and Matt took the passenger seat for his part of the show.     Matthew Mallory is a former military and peace officer in two towns in upstate New York.  Matt starts off by doing a special announcement that Meet The Pressers is going to have a merch website where you can buy their gear!     Matt is also an instructor for his company, Public Safety & Education (PS&Ed). He teaches rifle, pistol, shotgun, mace/pepper spray, defensive tactics. And does inservice for police officers in the area. He shares a grenade story during basic training!  Yikes! He started teaching civilians thru hunter education and teaching the Boy Scouts. Teaching the state permit course led to becoming a Utah instructor and a number of other certifications, including some USCCA certifications. He also did an article about George Zimmerman, which we talked about.  Here’s the link to that story. https://www.ammoland.com/2019/07/seven-year-later-george-zimmerman-speaks-someone-he-trusts/?fbclid=IwAR0T1noSgJv3jn6EakPXOaPrP4nNPdIH-4fQD6uuhwrOGMypmmqtd5NrnTY#axzz6DSqzm88R Klint and Matt decided that they would join forces and start Meet The Pressers.  Their logo is half PS&Ed and Trigger Pressers Union. They did say that if you voice text “Meet The Pressers” it comes out as “Meat Depressors”. The two of them with their experience instructing and recording and all the other things brings them a lot of great success with their Meet The Pressers show.   Favorite quotes   Klint: “I believe that God puts doors in front of you sometimes and gives you a little kick” Klint: “Remember you’re part of something bigger than yourself and make us all proud”. Matt: “You can do everything for the right reason, do nothing illegal, and still be prosecuted or persecuted by a jury of public opinion based on the decisions that you make.” Matt: “Think of 3 people in your life, that you care about, and they care about you. If you died like that, they’re going to be totally financially, emotionally, gone because you’re gone.  You owe it to them not to be in that fight.”   You can find their links to their shows and outlets below.  Meet The Pressers Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MeetThePressers/ Meet The Pressers YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/meetthepressers Meet The Pressers Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MeetThePressers/ Public Safety & Education Website https://psanded.com/ Concealed Carry’s Website & RangeTechShot Time https://www.concealedcarry.com/claim-your-free-rangetech-bluetooth-shot-timer/ Trigger Pressers Union http://triggerpressersunion.com/index.html National Train A Teacher Day http://nationaltrainateacherday.com/index.html Meet The Pressers on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/MeetThePressers Please support the Riding Shotgun With Charlie sponsors and supporters.    Asfaleia Designs https://asfaleiadesigns.com/   Keyhole Holsters  Veteran Owned, American Made http://www.keyholeholsters.com/   Dennis McCurdy Author, Speaker, Firewalker http://www.find-away.com/ Or listen on:   iTunes/Apple podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/riding-shotgun-with-charlie/id1275691565   Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4EEPud0XzYz4wo0MYmA9uB   iHeartRadio https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-riding-shotgun-with-charli-30654270/   Self Defense Radio Network http://sdrn.us/

Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt. We talked about StarTrek and then we got into Tech and what is going on with our Cable Modems.  Then we discussed the big vulnerability with Firefox and why you must update it NOW! Also Smishing. So here we go with Ken and Matt. Microsoft is out with some Critical updates that must be applied.    These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: One of the most significant vulnerabilities in Windows ever was disposed at noon yesterday by the NSA. Craig Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. I had a great little chat this morning with Ken and Matt about some of the things that are affecting us right now security-wise, including your cable modem, it is probably vulnerable. I gave some tips on what to do as I always try to do. We had a little bit of fun teasing each other about William Shatner. So here we go. Ken All right, we're back at 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and Matt. Happy Wednesday to you and Wednesdays at 738 means Craig Peterson joins us now, Craig. Craig Peterson Hey, good morning. Why would you guys insult my favorite over actor this morning? Matt Vince Vaughn Ken Are you referring to are you must be referring to Shattner Craig Yeah, I call him Bill. Yeah. Matt I'm sorry, but I believe the mystic name took us here because I have, for one, complimented his acting in the Wrath of Khan. I did not, yes I did in Star Trek Five. Although I mean, I liked Return Home. That's the fourth one with a little nuclear Wessels. Craig I don't know if you guys know it, but in upstate New York, a guy who is an Elvis impersonator, I forget his name. He bought all of these old Desi-Lu sets, and he rebuilt all the original sets from Star Trek, the whole thing. They examined the footage to see what they looked like, as some of the sets were destroyed or lost. But the entire thing is there, and I went on a tour. I've been there twice. They have these guided tours of the sets, and they talk about things, but it is the entire set. They reuse Kirk's tricorders for this, that and the other thing. There is cork running up and down the hallways. Now when I look at that original series, I tend to notice things like they run some of the footage backward, and that is because the entire enterprise, you know, where he's running between decks and up and down is maybe 50-75 feet long. There's one core door. And so you'll see, the names on some of the doorways are backward because they reversed it to make it look like he was running in a circle around the deck. Ken That is a great deal of detail that you're paying attention to Craig. Craig It is Yeah. I did notice that I watched Star Trek six a little while ago, and they used the warp core from Star Trek The Next Generation. Matt Anyway. While this is quite interesting, you are here to talk about tech topics, not Star Trek topics. So well kind of Craig So well kind of a lot of techs. I mean, let's face it Star Trek introduced a lot of tech issues. For example, the Motorola flip phone, right Matt from Motorola. Exactly right. Directly inspired. Yes. Dave. That's how we got came from going to the moon. So let's talk about technology, shall we? Many people use Firefox today. Now be worried about using Firefox? Craig You know, we've got a few major government warnings out right now. The biggest one is Microsoft Windows. Huge, huge, huge, one of the most significant vulnerabilities in Windows ever was disclosed at noon yesterday by the NSA. And so trick number one, although there's no evidence it's being used in the wild right now. What Microsoft There is a specific type of encryption that you can use in Windows. If you present Windows as an application saying, here's a file encrypted for me or decrypted for me, there is no validation at all of the key involved, it is a huge security problem. Now, why not something massive here, the difference between the Trump administration and prior administrations, and that is that previously, the NSA would find out about this and use it against people. They would use it against foreign governments, etc., who are using Windows and they'd say, Isn't this great? We have a way into computers, or we have a way to break encryption or to do whatever we want to make significant differences. Now, the NSA is telling us about some of these substantial security vulnerabilities. So tip one this morning patch Windows early and often patch it right now. Number two, we've also got the government warning. And this is Homeland Security about Firefox. Firefox is one of my favorite browsers. It is one of these privacy browsers made by Mozilla. It's very, very good, mainly if you are a Facebook user, because it has some special lockdown features and when it comes to Facebook. Still, Firefox also has critical security warning out, so make sure that gets updated with Firefox. All you have to do is exit Firefox started up again. And it will go ahead and patch itself all automatically but a vast and critical security warning for Firefox. Matt All right, we're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us for our tech update on what's happening in tech around the world. Now, Craig, I must admit, I've never heard of the word smishing. Could you educate me a little bit about it? Exactly what are some examples of this that people should understand? I guess as they continue to run around paranoid about all things in the world coming to get them. Craig It's like Australia, right? Everything's trying to kill you. Exactly. The Outback. Exactly. So here's what submission is you you've known what fishing is P-H-I-S-h-I-N-G where bad guys are trying to trick you into doing something. Some of the earliest examples of phishing is the Nigerian scams, where a poor Nigerian prince needed your help? Well, they have continued to evolve. And smishing is fishing on mobile devices when we're talking about texting messages. SMS messages, that's where it gets the name smishing. Right now, we're seeing an increase in messages being sent that looked like they are from a bank. In particular, right now, the US Bank is the biggest at a smishing message. I don't even know I should have looked this up if there is a bank called US Bank, but they're they come through is urgent messages. They pretend they are your bank or Amex or Visa or MasterCard. And they have a link that you can, and you can click on. So, for example, American Express dash message.com, which is not a legitimate domain. What will happen is once you get reported, and you can report almost anything to their email addresses. It is typically abuse at American Express, for instance, or abuse at the bank name. You can notify them once reported and the banks, etc. Find out about them. These sites like American Express dash message dot com get shut down. But be very careful nowadays, you unless the text is coming from me, click on mine, right. But unless a text is from someone you really know and trust, be careful, because they are sending out the text messages and you want to pry this is from your bank. And we're going to see a lot of this more and more. The new head of the FCC has been working very closely with the various telephone companies to try and put an end to this. However, because of the design of the systems, and that is without security in mind, it's going to take a while before they're ever going to be able to stop all of this. was speaking to Craig Pixar Ken We are speaking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us every Wednesday, 738. You can also catch him on WGAN on Saturday at 1 pm. What is this thing about cable modems and the attacks on them? I would think not true. One would be right. I would think so. Matt You would, right because of those cable modems? Craig Yeah, that's what I was. Yeah, it's a cable company, you might have the phone company depending on where you live providing your internet. And what's been happening historically, initially, we had cable modems, and we just hooked the cable modem up directly to a little switcher or a hub in our house right and used the internet from there. And then they got fancier, and the cable modem started having built into them little firewalls. They did this actually for the benefit of the cable companies because we're we are still running out of internet addresses. So they did a little trick called Nadeem gets kind of complicated, but right now, there are over 200 million affected modems over in Europe alone. There are estimated to be at least that many here in the United States. Here's the big problem. If you're using these cable modem firewalls in your homes, a lot of them are not up to date. Some of the ones that you bought yourself and those supplied by cable companies with names like Sagemcom, Netgear, Technicolor, and Compal models shipping to broadband subscribers, those are just some of the infected ones. We've got to be careful with all our equipment, just like we mentioned this morning, right already, we've got the NSA warning us about Windows and Firefox. It has issues our cable modems do too. So if you own your end device there, make sure it stays patched up. It's up to date. Don't buy the $80 router firewalls, and you have to spend at least 200 nowadays, to get a router firewall cable modem for your home. That is going to auto-update. However, we have pay attention to this as they are gaining direct access to our security cameras, our computers, all of our Internet of Things devices, in our homes, in our small businesses. So my general advice is to go and buy a suitable cable modem yourself put it in. And when I say I didn't have a modem, my main one that is has a built-in firewall and is going to update it shelf automatically for at least a few years. So that means get them from some of the more prominent manufacturers that are out there. And if you're interested, you can just email me at Craig Peterson calm. I'll send you a little list of the current ones out there that I've been recommending people just drop an email to me at Craig Peterson calm. Be glad to let you know. Matt All right, ladies, gentlemen, that is Craig Peterson. He's our tech guru. He joins us at this time every single Wednesday, and this Wednesday is, of course. I appreciate it as always, Craig, and we'll talk again next week. Craig Gentlemen, take care. Bye. Thanks a lot. All right. Craig 12:05 Hey everybody, I'm going to be sending out an email because I am working on a fantastic course right now. I would love your input. I want to make sure I cover everything. It is going to be the definitive course, and I am sure of it when it comes to protecting your computers. So keep an eye out for the email that's going to bet coming. If you're an office manager, if you're someone who has the responsibility of securing computers in a small company, this is for you. So keep an eye out. I'm more excited about this than anything I've done before. I've done these DIY or Do It Yourself cybersecurity courses before and several other courses. However, this is the course of courses when it comes to securing your computer but also administering your computers. I'm going to get some bonuses because I'm working on it thinking, you know, what else can I do that's going to help them understand the depth of maybe how far they need to go. There's a couple of times where I was doing this saying, and you know what they need to understand this too. So putting all of that in, this is going to be amazing. But I do want to make sure I'm covering everything you guys want to have included. So I don't hear I'm rambling on, but keep an eye on your email, because I'm going to be sending something out probably early next week about this as we're finishing up these modules, and then we'll use your input to polish it up. So thanks again, everybody, and we'll be back this weekend. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! My guest today is Matt Baker. He’s the VP of Corporate Strategy and International Expansion at FreshBooks, which makes accounting, bookkeeping and invoicing software to help service providers get paid faster and save time on tedious administrative tasks. Matt’s also super passionate about helping entrepreneurs mitigate the risks associated with going from side hustle to self employed. I’m super pumped to have him on the show - even though we both graduated from colleges that have a huge football rivalry (Go Buckeyes!) - to share some of his insights with you because he’s in the unique position at Freshbooks to have access to a lot of data about challenges faced by people who are self-employed, and what prevents people who really, really want to quit their day jobs and have the freedom, flexibility and financial independence that comes with working for yourself from making the leap. Today we’re talking about: What’s stopping the 20 million Americans who say they want to be self-employed but aren’t taking the leap. A low-risk way to start your business so that you don’t have to jump without a safety net. How to figure out if you are charging too little, and what to do instead. The difference between value-based billing and time-based billing, and which one Matt advises side hustlers use. Matt’s best advice for you if you want to make the jump to self-employed. Matt’s best advice for how you can create a sustainable, long-term business. My favorite quotes from Matt: “You don’t want to price on surviving, you want to price on thriving.” “You have to know how to go out and find your own clients.” Resources mentioned in this episode: Freshbooks All-In-One Small Business Invoicing and Accounting Solution Ep. 228: How to Price Your Products & Services with Paul Klein of Pricing is Positioning Breaking the Time Barrier E-book Connect with Matt: Freshbooks Website LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bakermatthew/ Bio: Matt Baker is a money strategist and business coach who’s passionate about helping entrepreneurs solve their most challenging problems. As VP of Corporate Strategy and International Expansion at FreshBooks, Matt is helping millions of self-employed pro’s grow their businesses and get paid faster. As a reformed management consultant and ex-Google strategist, Matt loves asking the tough questions that lead to tipping points in business. When he’s not helping businesses grow, you’ll find him teaching a Change Management course at UC Berkeley or giving back via his seat as a board member at the Next Step Learning Center, an adult literacy program based in Oakland.

ALPS Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte sits down with Matt Sims, co-founder of Standpoint Decision Support Inc. to discuss risk assessment and some new technology that is helping lawyers maximize billable hours, save time, and reduce risks to their practice. Transcript:   MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE: Good morning. It is a beautiful day here in Big Sky Country. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager with ALPS and welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Today I am very pleased to have as my guest Matt Sims, and Matt is a co-founder with a company called Stand Point Decisions. MARK:                And Matt and I met not too long ago up in Vancouver, at an ABA conference. And we just got to talking about risk management. And Matt has a really gone in a very, very interesting direction. So today we're going to be talking about risk management, Stand Point and a few other things. Before we jump into this, Matt, can I have you take a few minutes and just fill our listeners in, in terms of your background? MATT SIMS:          Yeah, certainly. Well, thanks. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast today, Mark. Really appreciate it. And yeah, so Stand Point and where did we come from? We've been ... there's two of us, Steve Wilson, Dr. Steve Wilson and myself, and we've been working together for just over 10 years. And Stand Point is sort of a coming together of two worlds. MATT: One is Steve's world of quantitative data analysis, and he's got a Ph.D. in quantitative data analysis, and approached me one day about 10 years ago and said, "Hey, I'm seeing some other applications for the work that I do." And he wanted to get together with somebody who had some of the business side and the marketing and communication side of things. MATT: And so we teamed up and our very first customer was the Law Society of BC here in British Columbia where we're based. And we knew nothing about the area of law or regulation, but this was our first contract. And lo and behold, 10 years later, it seems that we found ourselves a bit of a niche. Because we've only ever worked with those in the legal profession, and primarily legal regulators up to this point. So, kind of an accident that we fell into this space. But that's how we are. And 10 years later we're still at it. MARK:  Fascinating, fascinating. And what are the backgrounds ... You've shared a little bit about Steve, what's your background here? MATT: Yeah, my background has primarily been in technology. So I've worked for a number of large technology firms, everything from network services to hardware. And then over the last 10 years, I got into the software development space, and my focus has primarily been on management operations, and then definitely in the sales and marketing aspects of it as well. MARK:  Okay. All right. And can we talk a little bit about, what are the problems that Stand Point really is trying to solve? I think both historically and where we're at 10 years down the road now. MATT: Yeah. Yeah. So 10 years ago, the problems we got into starting to solve, were really not much different than the problems many of these same organizations have today. Which is, we've got a bunch of data on hand. We have some strategic decisions or policy decisions to make, and we need to somehow inform these decisions with the data that we have. And sometimes that's a bit of a daunting task, especially in today's world when there's just so much data. MATT: You know, you've got spreadsheets, you've got experts in the room who have inputs on things. And so, basically, we were trying to pull together all of these various sources of data and people and help them solve problems. And some of the earlier problems were trying to understand complaint data. That was the big one. So regulators are usually the receiver of complaints from the public. MATT: And if there's an issue with a lawyer, and they wanted to try and understand, what are the root causes of these complaints, and is there a way to, using analytics, to get ahead of them a little bit? And proactively get out there and try and deliver resources that can help to bring those complaints down. MATT: So yeah, the early days we're looking at complaint data. We've looked at program data to see if certain courses or programs are being effective in what they hope they might do. And then of late, we've been getting into self-assessments. And so, trying to understand how lawyers are self-assessing themselves against a model of professionalism. MARK:  Yeah. And that's where you and I really got into some interesting conversations. And so, how does the platform ... How have you moved past Stand Point and gotten into this consulting piece, the lawyer self-evaluation? Can you describe where we're going with that? MATT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the first five or six years, we were just primarily doing one-off consulting projects, doing data analysis on those. And then at one point we thought, "You know, we've got a lot of experience here. We really now understand that the typical types of datasets that regulators and legal organizations are using. And we understand a lot of the problems they're trying to solve with that data. MATT: So what happens if we put that onto a platform and try to automate some of the analysis and the reporting so that we could deliver solutions faster to our customers, and also solutions that were more scalable?" Because when you're a consultant, you're only as good as you can run, as fast as you can run. But when you embed some of that knowledge into a platform, now you can scale it up. MATT: And so that's how we transitioned from just pure consulting and professional services into more of a platform. And then our very first customer on that platform was the Colorado Supreme Court, which was rolling out a voluntary self-assessment program to the lawyers of the state of Colorado. And so that's where we got our start about three years ago now with the platform itself. MARK:  And if this is Avvy Pro that we're talking about, or that's the next step? MATT: That's right. No, Avvy Pro is the name of the platform, yeah. MARK:  Okay. And you know, when I think about ... Matt, for many years as you're aware, I've done a lot of personal consulting if you will, going in and visiting law firms all over the country. And doing what we would call risk visits, and have been in literally well over 1200 firms now over the years. MARK:  But we got to a point ... You see, this is a very expensive service. It really is. To do it one firm at a time sending somebody out in terms of the travel, it just, it doesn't scale up very well. And what I like about what you're doing is, you're taking this much, much further, and can take the risk management processes that I've been doing over the years, and bring it to the masses. MARK:  That said, there are all kinds of products in the marketplace. In terms of even just Cloud-based case management systems, in and of them of themselves, they can be from an insurance perspective, a very effective risk management tool. What is the value of Avvy Pro, how do you see this defining yourself? What's the niche here that you're going after? MATT: Yeah, no, that's a good question. And you know, I think it's squarely in the same camp that you've been working on for all these years, Mark, which is risk reduction. MARK:  Okay. MATT: And we've looked at multiple the types of value that the program provides. So one of the things the platform can provide for a lawyer is a fast way to determine what CPD, at first, they want to look at for the year. So doing a self-assessment results in a report that actually gives you your areas of priority, and it can even start to serve up some of the CLE resources that you might want to get into. MATT: So we see it as a time saver for lawyers. And we know that lawyers are very focused on saving time because they need to maximize the billable hours. And so the time savings is one thing, but at the end of it all, it always seems to come back to risk. Right? And how can we reduce risk to a practice, whether that's for a firm or for an individual attorney? MATT: And so at the end of the day, that's what we're delivering to lawyers and firms out there is a reduction in risk. And it's quantifiable, in the sense that there was the study out of New South Wales from the University of Melbourne, where they looked at a group of lawyers who took a professional self-assessment. And they studied this group of lawyers over a period of time, and they found that those lawyers had a 60% less chance of receiving a complaint than the lawyers in the group who hadn't taken the self-assessment. And so this has become the genesis of a lot of these PMBR activities from some of the regulators across the country and has really shown the light on the fact that you can reduce risks to your practice and into your firm immediately just by doing a self-assessment. MATT: And the interesting thing, Mark, is that it's not necessarily got to do with the scores you give yourself. In other words, whether you score high or low on your self-assessment, it doesn't really matter. It's just the process of going through that, which increases self-awareness and changes behavior. And the numbers show that you have a much less likely a chance of having a complaint if you've done one of these self-assessments. So, that's really the core value of what we're trying to do. MARK:  Well, that's really interesting. What I'm thinking about as you share this, is sort of how cybersecurity education is evolving. And as you're well aware, I'm sure, the weak link in cybersecurity is the users in any law firm, any business, just due to social engineering. And there are some similar studies there that if you educate, appropriate behaviors or more responsible behaviors occur early on in the process. But it drops off over time. MARK:  So I guess, sort of thinking about that, if I become a user of Avvy Pro, do I have the ability to, I don't know, keep this fresh in front of me? Is this kind of like a one-off, once and done thing, or is it something I can come back to over time, share with others in my firm? See where I'm going in terms of ... What's the model? I'm just trying to understand the model. MATT: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And so yeah, even though there is a one-off benefit to taking a self-assessment, you're absolutely right that there is a tail off of that benefit over time. And so the idea is that you revisit this, right? And the whole idea of self-assessing too is so that you can establish a benchmark for yourself. And ultimately, what you want to be able to do is move that mark forward, right? You want to have a continuous improvement cycle happening year over year as a professional. MATT: Because the self-assessment I took five years ago shouldn't be where I am today as a professional. I mean, we always want to continue to improve. And so the idea would be to revisit your self-assessment every six months, every year. MATT: What the right interval is, we're not exactly sure. But we do know that coming back to it and reassessing is definitely a way of refreshing on this. And then, what happens is you reset some of your benchmarks and your scores, and then the CLE resources that the platform provides change up based on what your priorities are this year. Because they might be different from last year, right? MATT: So yeah, continuous improvement is something that definitely needs to be looked at. And we actually did a study with a regulator on one of their programs. They had a small firm course that they put out, and they just didn't know if it was helping. And so we analyze some of the data on the lawyers who had taken that course, and it was similar to the self-assessment. MATT: Whereas they had seen an immediate value, but we had a five year study period and the tail off was very evident in the numbers. That the benefit of that program had reduced over those five years. So the whole message is, yeah, you've got to keep at it. You can't just stop. It's not like exercising, right? You don't go to the gym once or twice and then you're done. You've got to keep going back. MARK:  Again, just to be clear for our listeners, you've talked about going in, doing a self-assessment, getting a score, and awareness can make a real difference. I assume that there's more to this than just sort of scoring yourself. That if I do get a low score, perhaps in, I don't know, client intake or calendaring or something like this, and I assume these are the types of procedures that you're looking at. Are there resources? MARK:  I mean, what's the ultimate benefit to me if I become a client and get in, and go through this evaluation? What do I get for the effort? MATT: Right. And so yeah, you've nailed something there, interesting. Because one of the things we observed over the years is that there is no shortage of information available to lawyers out there. I mean there's websites and PDFs and courses, and there are so many resources available. What we saw was, typically the problem is that people don't know where to start. So they think they might need help in communications, for example, or calendaring or client intake like you said. But trying to go through and weed through and find the right resources is sometimes a bit of and challenge, and a time-consuming effort. MARK:  Yes, I can relate to this. MATT: Yeah, so what we are trying to do is make that jump between that gap between my self-assessment and the resources that are available to me out there. And so what we've done is, again, we take that self-assessment and let's say you score yourself low on calendaring. The platform takes that low score on calendaring and then matches that, algorithmically, to the available resources in the platform library. MATT: And so the resources in the library are tagged according to their content. And so, your self-assessment will pull up a bunch of calendaring resources. Maybe it's a YouTube video, maybe it's a course, maybe it's a quick blog post from somebody on calendaring. But it will serve you the resources that are most applicable to the needs you've identified, which we think really starts to, again, save time for lawyers so that they're not out there Google searching their way around, trying to find things. MARK:  Right. And in my mind, this is what really differentiates you from a lot of other types of platforms and systems, procedures, products available for lawyers to help in their practice. This goes in a completely different direction. I really like the idea. Again, this is risk management for the masses in terms of really scaling it up, so that any lawyer can ... Or I assume from an administrator or whoever wants access to this within a law firm can sign up. Very, very good. MARK:  What's the future? Where do you see this going, short term and long term? MATT: Well, short term we're just trying to get the platform exposed to as many jurisdictions as possible. So we've got some good conversations happening out there right now with a bunch of areas. Typically, we have delivered the platform through a legal organization as opposed to direct to lawyers. And so it's been delivered by a regulator or a bar association. Or potentially an insurer like yourself. MATT: And then yeah, future, we've got lots of other ideas around the platform and how we can improve efficiency. And again, basically, reduce risk and save time for lawyers. One of the things we've been looking at, which we're really kind of curious about, is whether we can improve the CLE accreditation process, and collecting credits and submitting them to your regulator. Because as you know, lawyers need to need to have their number of credits every year. And it's different for every jurisdiction. MATT: And there's this ... If you look at the way the credits go, the regulator has the bag of credits, and they assign or permit certain service providers or education providers to give those credits out to lawyers who have come in and taken their courses. Right? MARK:  Right. MATT: And then the lawyers take those credits and then what do they do? They give them right back to the regulator at some point and say, "I got my 10 credits for the year, I got my 20 credits for the year." MATT: Well, I was looking at that and I thought, "This is like a currency system, right?" It's basically a currency that comes from the regulator to the CLE provider, and then to the lawyer and then back to the regulator, and the regulator being the central bank. And so I've got some background in the blockchain space, and I looked at this and I thought, this is a solution, or the blockchain is a solution to taking that manual process of affidavits and sending PDFs, and yes, I was in that course on this date. And digitizing it with a token, a digital token. And so, one of the things we want to be able to do is say, okay, if you come into Avvy Pro, you do your self-assessment, you consume some resources which are CLE accredited. Let's make that real easy for you to get that credit from your regulator. And so that's their future vision, is to try and take this thing and then add on functionality. MARK:  Yeah, I am loving this. Because over the years, trying to keep the manual sending stuff in and the states, if they're different, it's just a headache. But that's solving a good problem. I like that. Matt, it's really ... I so enjoy visiting with you and learning about all that's going on here. If any of our folks in the listening audience would like any additional information about Stand Point or Avvy Pro, is there a way they might be able to contact you? MATT: Yeah, certainly. So, individual lawyers who are curious about the platform and would like to try and take the self-assessment themselves can go to avvy.pro. And so that's A-V-V-Y dot pro, and they can jump in there and try it out, and have a look at what it delivers. And standpointdecisions.com is the professional service's website. And that would be for organizations, firms, bars, and regulators who'd be interested in finding out more about the work that we've done in the past. MARK:  Yes. Yeah. And I assume you are interested, if a state wanted to look at doing something like this, similar to the colorized supreme court model that you share, I assume that that's something you guys are still looking at as well. This isn't all about moving into just the individual lawyer space. Am I correct about that? MATT: Absolutely. Yeah. No, absolutely. It all usually starts with the jurisdiction itself. And then they deliver access to the platform to their lawyers. MARK:  Got It. Very good. Well, thank you. I appreciate your taking the time to visit. It's always a pleasure. And to all of you listening, I hope you found something of value today and if you have any thoughts about folks you'd like to hear from in the future or a topic you'd like to hear discussed, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can reach me at mbass@alpsnet.com again, mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening folks. Have a good one. Bye-bye.      

An interview with Alison Gianotto / Snipe, creator of Snipe IT Snipe.net Snipe-IT @snipeyhead Editing sponsored by Larajobs Transcription sponsored by GoTranscript.com [music] Matt: All right, cool. All right. Welcome back to the latest episode of Laravel Podcast. It's been a little bit of a break for those of you who tune in to every new episode, but I've got another great interview here. As with every single one, I'm interested and excited to introduce someone to you. Some of you have heard of before, a lot of you might not know that she actually works in Laravel. Either way, it's going to be great. This is Snipe. Although in my head, you have been Snipeyhead because I feel that's been your Twitter name for a while. Real name, Alison Gianotto, but I'm probably just going to end up calling you Snipe for rest of this call. Before I go in asking you questions, the first thing I want to do is just I always ask somebody, if you meet somebody in the grocery store who you know isn't technical at all, and they ask you, "What do you do?" What's the first way you answer that question? Snipe: I say I work with computers. Matt: Right, and then if they say, "My cousin works with computers and whatever." Where do you go from there? Snipe: Well, it depends on their answer. If they say, "Do you fix computers?" I'm like, "Not exactly." If they say, "Really? What type of computer work do you do?" I say, "Well, I'm a programmer." They're like, "So you make games?" "Well, not exactly." If they say something like, "Mobile apps or web? What languages?" Then I'm like, "Okay, now I can actually have a conversation." I don't do it to be disrespectful to the person asking. It's just confusing to them, and so I like to keep it bite-sized enough that no one gets confused. Matt: If you talk to a grandma in a store who doesn't have much exposure with computers, and you say, "Well, I work in InfoSec with blah-blah-blah." Then she's going to go, "Huh?" I totally hear you. If somebody does ask and they say, "You know what? I actually work in Rails," or, "I know what a framework is." How do you answer someone when they are more technical? Let's say, somebody-- You understand that this person is going to get all the names that you drop. Where do you go from there? How do you tell someone about what you do? Snipe: I actually usually say that I run a software company. I say, "I run a small software company that basically works on open source software." Usually, they look at me like, "How do you--" Matt: How do you make money? Snipe: Literally makes no sense. [laughter] Matt: Which is where we're going to go. Let's actually go there. Snipe-IT, it's a company that has an open source product. I'm guessing that you make your money by paid support plans and hosting plans. Right? Then you also have the whole thing available for free in open source? Snipe: That's correct. Yes. Matt: Could you give us a little pitch for anybody who doesn't know what Snipe-IT is, and what it does, and who it's for? Snipe: I'm so bad at this. I'm the worst salesperson ever. Matt: Well, I'm helping you grow. [laughter] Matt: Thirty seconds or less. Snipe: If you have any kind of a company and you buy assets like laptops, or desktops, or monitors, you need to keep track of them and you know who has what, what software is installed on what. Then usually I'm like, "I've got this nailed. I've got this nailed." Then I end up saying, "It's not a very sexy project, but people need it." [chuckles] Matt: Right, right, right. You have to justify yourself in your sales. Snipe: I know it. I really do. I'm really the worst at it. People get really excited. We're going to DEF CON this year like we usually do. I'm actually bringing my whole crew. Matt: Cool. Snipe: Because I really want them to be able to experience the way people react when they realize that we are Snipe-IT because they just get so excited. I've had people run across the conference floor to give me a hug that I've never met. Matt: Wow. Snipe: It's really cool. There was another time I was talking to, I think, YTCracker on the conference floor. He introduces me to one of his friends. He's like, "Yes, she's got a IT asset management software." He's like, "Really? I just heard about one of those. That was really great." I know exactly where this is going. I'm watching him look at his phone. He's like, "Yes, I just heard about it. It's really amazing. I think through your competition." I'm just sitting there smirking and I'm like, "Okay." Totally, I know exactly where this is going, but I let him spend five minutes looking it up on his phone. He's like, "It's called Snipe It?" I just look at him like, "Hi, I'm Snipe." [laughter] Snipe: It was actually wonderful. Matt: It's one of the benefits not just of having the company, but actually naming it after yourself. You're like, "No. I'm actually the Snipe. That's me." Snipe: I'm excited to bring my crew out to DEF CON this year so they can really get to experience that first hand. Because like anything else in open source and in company support in general, a lot of times, you only hear the negative stuff. You hear about when something is broken or when something doesn't work exactly the way they want it to work. To actually get just random people coming up-- I'm getting us swag. I'm getting us t-shirts printed out. I'm super excited. Matt: I love it. There's nothing like having the opportunity to see the people who love what you're doing to really motivate you to go back and do it again. I hear that, for sure. Snipe: Definitely. Open source can be really tough with that because for the most part, the only thing that you're hearing is, "It doesn't work," or, "Why doesn't it do it do this thing?" Or people telling you how they think your software should work. To just get basically unbridled love, it really recharges me. It makes me want to work on a project even harder. Matt: Plus, the phrase unbridled love is just fantastic. [laughter] Matt: It should be in our lexicon more often. Snipe: I agree. Matt: It's asset management software. I'm imagining I've got a 500-person company, and every single person gets issued a laptop within certain specs. After it's a certain amount of time old, then it gets replaced. We're going to make sure they have the latest build of whatever, Windows and the latest security patches, and that kind of stuff. It's at the point where you don't have-- My company has, I think, 17 people right now. There is just a spreadsheet somewhere. This is when you get to the point where a spreadsheet is really missing people. People aren't getting their upgrades. People don't have security updates. My guess was the reason there was InfoSec involved in this at DEF CON is because security updates is a big piece of why that's the case. Did I assume right? Could you tell us a little bit more about how InfoSec and security are related to what you're doing here? Snipe: You're kind of right. We don't currently have a network agent, so we don't have anything that listens on the wire. We do have a JSON REST API, though. Basically, we're now working with folks like Jira, Atlassian, and we're going to be working with a JaMP API to try and basically make that stuff easier. I feel like its out of scope for us to try and build another networking agent, but we have an API. If we can just build those bridges, then it just makes it a little bit easier. Ultimately, in terms of security, the real reason why I think people in InfoSec appreciate this tool, especially given the fact that we don't have-- And some people in InfoSec actually like the fact that we don't have a monitoring agent because that actually becomes a separate problem in and of itself. Let me give you a backstory on why I created this in the first place. Matt: Please do. Snipe: Maybe that'll help explain a little bit more. I was the CTO of an ad agency in New York City. We had grown from-- I think I was employee number 12, and we were now at 60 something people. We were using a Google Sheet shared between three IT people, some of which were not necessarily the most diligent- [laughter] Matt: Sure. Snipe: -about keeping things up to date. Basically, when you've got a single point of truth that is no longer a single point of truth, it becomes a bit of a hellish nightmare. Additionally, if you're repurposing-- Because it's an ad agency, so you have a lot of turnover. You don't have any history on any particular asset if this asset is actually bad. If the hard drive on this is actually just bad and should be replaced. If this is bad hardware, then we should consider just unsetting it, and getting a brand new box, whatever. We had to move offices. We were moving our main office and also our data center. Of course, when you're trying to move a 60-person company, and servers, and everything else, the very first thing that you have to do is to know what you have. That was an enlightening experience. It basically turned out that we had about $10,000 worth of hardware that we just didn't know where it was anymore. Matt: Wow. Snipe: People got fired. This is basically before I was a CTO and before I had set up the exiting process. People had been fired or had quit and just taken their laptops with them. That's got company data on it. That was a huge, huge issue for us. I was like, "Okay, we need something that we can integrate into our exit strategy or exit process to make sure that we're reclaiming back all of the data that--" Because some of those stuff is client data. It's actually really sensitive from a corporate perspective. Also, sometimes it's customer data. It was really important to have a way to handle that a bit better. That's it. The asset part is the most important part of that software. We do have support for licenses where the cloud offering portion of that is not as fully developed. We're going to be building in a services section soon. That will describe, for example, if you had Snipe-IT as a vendor, where would we fit in this ecosystem for our customers? We don't actually have a good answer for that. We're going to be building out a services section that lets you know how much money you're paying every month, how many seats you have. Matt: That's great. That would cover not just global stuff, but also individual subscriptions like Adobe and PHP-- Snipe: Sure, sure. Matt: Cool. That's awesome. Snipe: Licenses are really hard. They're hard because you can have-- One of our customers actually has a hundred thousand licenses. Matt: Oh, my Lord. Snipe: Because you've got this notion of a software license and then a bunch of different seats. There are some licenses that have one seat, and only one seat they only ever will. Then there are ones that have tens of thousands. For example, Microsoft Suite. If you have a large company, you're going to have a lot of those licenses. One of the things I care really deeply about in Snipe-IT, and I think one of the reasons why we've been successful in this really saturated marketplace, because it is a really saturated marketplace, is that I care a lot about the users' experience. I know, for example, that our licenses section, the UI on that, the UX on that is not as optimized as it could be. That will be the next thing that we're really tackling is because it is a popular section. It's one that because of the nature of the variability of licenses, makes that a really tricky UX problem to solve. That's one of the things that I love about this work is getting to solve those kinds of problems. Matt: You're just starting to make me interested in this which means you're doing your job of the sales pitch. You said you got something you're super comfortable with. Snipe: [laughs] Matt: I always struggle-- Somebody made a joke and they said something like, "It's a drinking game for how many times Matt says 'I could talk about this for hours' during a podcast." Snipe: I did see that, yes. Matt: We're there already. [laughter] Matt: I want to step back from Snipe-IT just a little bit. Snipe It, I want to call it Snipe It now that you said that. Snipe: Please don't call it that. [laughs] Matt: I won't, I promise. Think a little bit about what got you to here, and what got you to the point where you're a name and an online persona. I saw you had some interactions with @SwiftOnSecurity the other day. Everyone got all excited seeing the two of you interacting. What was the story? I want to eventually go back to when you got into computers in the first place. First, what was the story of the process of you going from just any other person on the Internet, on Twitter, on GitHub, or whatever to being a persona that is relatively well-known across multiple communities? Snipe: I can't really answer that for you because I don't really understand it myself. Other than lots of poop jokes-- Matt: It's the best. Snipe: Yes. [chuckles] I think, probably, I've been on Twitter for a while. Also, I was on IRC for a long time. I think I'm still an op in the ##php channel on Freenode, although I don't visit there as often as I used to. I was really involved in that as I was learning PHP, and as I was helping other people learn PHP. I don't know. I've always been a mouthy broad, and I think that's probably worked because whether you like me or not, you remember me. [laughs] Matt: Yes, for sure. Snipe: I'm doing my very best to not swear on your podcast, by the way. I've caught myself at least five times that I'm like, "No, no, no." [laughs] Matt: If it happens, it happens but I appreciate it. Snipe: I'm doing my very best. I'm at a conference-- Matt: Broad was a good one, yes. All right, exactly. Snipe: Yes, I know. Yes, exactly. I was like, "B-b-b-broad." Matt: [laughs] Snipe: Which is an offensive term in and of itself, but it's still- Matt: We toned it down a little. Snipe: -better than the alternative, I think. [laughter] Matt: I love it. Snipe: I'm trying my best here, Matt. Matt: I appreciate it very much. Was it in the world of PHP? First of all, I heard longevity. I've been here for a while. That's always a big win. Poop jokes, that's also obviously big win. Give the people what they want. Snipe: I don't know if I can say dick jokes on your podcast. Matt: Well, you did. There we are. Snipe: Dick jokes are definitely big part of my repertoire. [laughs] Matt: Yes, I know. Being an interesting person, having been around for a while, but was it in PHP, and teaching PHP, and being around in the PHP world for a while, was that the main space where you came to prominence versus InfoSec, versus being open source business owner? Was it primarily in being a PHP personality where you came to at least your original knownness? Snipe: I think probably. Probably, yes. When I grab onto something, I don't let go of it. I've been doing some Perl work. I've probably started with Perl, but that was back in the days when I ran Linux as a desktop on purpose. [laughs] Matt: Oh, my goodness. Snipe: I was writing some Perl stuff. Heard about this this crazy thing called PHP which looked way easier and was way more readable, and ended up writing some-- Now, terribly insecure. I know this now, because it's like 2000, 2001, something like that. Which is for going back a ways. I had just started to put out stupid scripts like e-card scripts and things like that, because they served the need that I needed to have filled. This is a well-known secret, but I worked Renaissance Fairs for a very long time. I was guild member number four of the International Wenches Guild. Matt: What? Snipe: Yes. That's not even the most interesting thing I can tell you. Anyway, I was running their website Wench.org which now looks terrible because Facebook took over that community. I used to have interactive like sending roses to each other. Because in the Renaissance Fair community, different rose colors have different meaning. It's basically like an online greeting card thing with these built-in rose color meanings. You could pick different colors of roses and send them to people that you liked, or people you didn't like, or whatever. Having this playground of a huge community of people who-- Basically, I would post to the forums. I'd say, "I'm thinking about building this. What do you guys think?" By the time they actually answered me, I had already built it anyway. I was just like, "This looks really interesting. I want to see if I can do this." Matt: To do it, yes. Snipe: Yes, exactly. It was really, really cool to have access to, basically, a beta-testing community that was super excited about anything that I put out. It definitely stoked the fires for me, stretching and doing things that I may not have done if I didn't have a reason to do it before. Matt: Well, I love how much passion plays a part there. Not this ill-defined like, "I'm passionate about programming. That means I spend all my free time doing it," but more like-- I've noticed that a lot of people who are a little bit older had PHP-- Actually, just developers in general which is quite a few people I've had on the show. Snipe: Are you calling me old? Matt: Me too. I'm in the group too. Snipe: Are you calling me old? Oh my God. That's it. This interview is over. [laughter] Matt: You're going to burn the place down. I think those of us who started back when becoming a programmer wasn't necessarily going to make you big and rich. There's a little bit of that idea today. Go do a six-month boot camp, and then you're going to be rich or something. I think when a lot of us started-- I'm putting myself in that bucket, in the '90s and the '80s. When we started, it was because it was something that allowed us to do things we couldn't do otherwise. I don't know your whole back story, so I want to hear it, but a lot of the people I've noticed, "I was in the dancing community. I was in the video game community. I was in the Renaissance whatever Fair community." Snipe: I used to work on Wall Street. That was what I was doing before I got into computers. [laughs] Matt: Okay. Well, before I talk anymore, we need to talk about this. Tell me the story. Tell me about Wall Street, and then tell me when did you actually first get into computers? Snipe: I left high school. I was living with my sister in a tent in Montana for about nine months. Then it got too cold, our toothpaste started to freeze during the day. We were like, "F this business." We went down to Colorado because we'd met some friends at Colorado School of Mines. Stayed there for a little bit. Came back to New Jersey, and was like, "Well, I don't want to go to college. I also don't have any money for college." [laughs] There's that. I ended up waitressing for a little bit. Was waitressing, wearing my indoor soccer shoes, because I was a soccer player for 13 years. The coach from Caine College came in to eat at my restaurant. He looks at me with disdain and he goes, "You actually play soccer with those, or are they just for fashion?" Matt: Oh, my goodness. Snipe: I'm like, "Bitch, I was All-State. What are you talking about?" [laughter] Snipe: He's like, "Do you want to go to college?" I'm like, "I guess." He invited me to go to Caine College where I studied education of the hearing impaired for exactly one semester. [laughter] Snipe: I was like, "Holy crap. This is so boring. I can't do this." Not the education of the hearing impaired part. Matt: Just college. Snipe: Yes, it just wasn't my jam. I was like, "I want to move to New York." I moved to New York City. I pick up a paper, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm super not qualified to do any of these things." Basically, I was a leatherworker at a Renaissance Fair. I'd done makeup work for the adult film industry. I'm like, "Um." Of course, the easiest way to Wall Street is sales. I had the most grueling interview I've ever had in my life, because I didn't know anything about real sales compared to retail. I remember sweating so hard. I'd just dyed my hair back to a normal color. You could still see a little bit of green in it, and I'm wearing my sister's fancy, fancy suit. I have no idea what I'm actually going to be doing there. It is literally out of Glengarry Glen Ross, high-pressure sales that they're expecting from me. I'm like, "I'm 17, 18 years old. I have no idea what I'm doing." I managed to pull it out. At the very last minute, I got the job. Matt: Nice. Snipe: Was working at a place that did forex futures. Then they went out of business because the principals moved back to Argentina with all of our clients' money. That spent a little bit of time in the attorney general's office, making it really clear that we had nothing to do with it. Matt: At least it was there and not jail. Snipe: That's absolutely true. It's not that uncommon that the main traders are the ones that actually have the access to the real money. Then we started working at a stock shop. I realized I was working until six, seven o'clock at night, busting my ass all for lines in a ledger. I was actually pretty good at that job, but I also caught myself using those creepy, sleazy sales techniques on my friends and my family. When you catch yourself saying, "Well, let me ask you this." You're like, "Ah, ah." Matt: "I hate myself. Oh, my God, what am I doing?" Snipe: I know. I just realized that I hated myself, and that I didn't want to do it anymore. I quit my job. I had a boyfriend at that time that had a computer. That's pretty much it. I had done some basic programming, literally BASIC programming in high school. Matt: Like QBasic? Snipe: Yes. BASIC in high school. In fact, funny story, when I wrote my first book-- I almost didn't graduate high school because my parents were getting divorced, and I just checked out. I was good in all my classes, I just checked out. I had to pass a computer programming class in order to graduate. My teacher, who was the track coach as well, Coach Terrell, he knew me from soccer. He calls me into his office. He's like, "Alison, I've got to tell you. You just weren't here, and you know that if you don't show up, I penalize you for that. Did really well on all your tests, but attendance is not optional in this class. I just don't think I can pass you." I'm like, "I'm not going to graduate then." He's like, "All right. Well, the thing is that when you're here, you do really good work. I'm going to let you go this time, but you've really got to get your shit together." Matt: Wow. Snipe: When I published my first programming book, I sent him a copy. [laughter] Matt: That's awesome. Snipe: I wrote on the inside, "Dear Coach Terrell, thanks for having faith in me." [laughs] Matt: That's amazing, and you know he has that sitting on the shelf where everyone can see it. Snipe: Yes, yes, yes. Matt: That's really cool. Snipe: That was really nice of him. [laughs] My life would have had a slightly different outcome if I'd had to take some more time, and get a GED, and everything else just because I didn't show up to my programming class. Matt: Wow. Snipe: Anyway, I left Wall Street because I had a soul, apparently. Matt: Turns out. Snipe: It turns out, "Surprise." I totally still have one. [laughter] Matt: It's funny because you're telling me this whole story, and what I'm seeing in front of my face in Skype is your avatar. For anyone who's never seen this avatar, it's got a star around one eye, smirky, slanty eyes, looking down where you're like, "I'm going to get you." It's funny hearing you tell this story, and just the dissonance is so strong of seeing that, hearing your voice, and then hearing you talk about being on Wall Street. Obviously, I'm looking back. Hindsight is 20/20, but seeing this story turned out the way it has so far does not surprise me, looking at the picture of you that I'm looking at right now. Snipe: Mohawk people have souls too. Matt: It turns out, yes. Snipe: I got that mohawk as a fundraiser for EFF. Matt: Really? Snipe: I raised like $1,500 for EFF a bunch of years ago. Matt: You just liked it and kept it? Snipe: Yes. Once I had it, I was like, "Wait a minute. This completely fits me. Why did I not have this my entire life?" Matt: That's awesome. Snipe: Yes, there was a good reason behind it. Matt: Honestly, what I meant is actually the inverse which is that I associate having the soul-- When you imagine a soulless, crushing New York City job where you hate what you're doing, you don't usually associate it with the sense of owning who I am and myself that is associated with the picture I'm looking at right in front of me. Your boyfriend at that time had a computer, you actually had a little bit of history because you'd studied at least some coding. You said primarily and BASIC in high school. Where did you go from there? Was that when you were doing the Renaissance Fairs, and you started building that? Or was there a step before that? Snipe: No. Remember, this is back when the Web-- I'm 42. Matt: I wasn't making any assumptions about what the Web was like at that point. Snipe: I think there might have been one HTML book that was about to come out. That's where we were. If you wanted to do anything on the Web, you basically figured out how to right-click- Matt: View source them. Snipe: -and view source, and you just poked at things until they did what you wanted. There was no other way around that. I realized that I really liked it because it let me say what I wanted to say, it let me make things look-- For what we had back then, we didn't have JavaScript, or CSS, or any of that stuff. Matt: Right. Use that cover tag. Snipe: Yes, exactly. It was enormously powerful to be able to have things to say, and put them out there, and other people could see it. Then I just started to freelance doing that. I was also doing some graphic design for one of those-- It's like the real estate magazines, like Autotrader type of things but for cars. I used to do photo correction for them using CorelDraw, I think it was. Matt: Oh, my gosh, that's a throwback. Snipe: Yes. I'm an old, old woman. [laughter] Matt: I've used CorelDraw in my day, but it's been a long time. Snipe: Our hard drives would fill up every single day, and so we'd have to figure out what had already gone to press that we can delete it off. Basically, Photoshopping, to use Photoshop as a verb inappropriately, garbage cans and other stuff out of people's black and white, crappy photos. Because he was nice enough to give me a job. I offered and I said, "You know, I can make you a website." He's like, "Yes, the Internet's a fad." I was like, "I'm just trying to build up my portfolio, dude, for you for free." He's like, "Yes, yes, yes, it's not going to stick." I'm like, "Okay." [laughs] Matt: All right, buddy. Snipe: That's where it started. Then I think I moved to Virginia for a short amount of time, and then Georgia. Got a job at a computer telephony company where I was running their website, and also designing trade show materials like booths and stuff, which, by the way, I had no idea how to do. No one was more surprised than I was when they took pictures of the trade show and the booth actually looked amazing. Matt: That should look good. Snipe: I was like, "Look, yes." Matt: "Hey, look at that." [laughter] Snipe: That's very, very lucky. There was definitely a lot of fake it until you make it. Also, I've never designed a trade show booth, but trade show booths do get designed by someone, and at least a handful of those people have never done it before. Matt: Right. I'm relatively intelligent person, I understand the general shape of things. Snipe: Yes. Get me some dimensions, I'm sure I could make this work. Matt: What is the DPI thing again? [chuckles] Snipe: Yes, exactly. That was exciting and fun. Then I moved back to New York to teach web design and graphic design at an extension of Long Island University. Matt: Cool. Snipe: Yes, it was actually very, very cool. The school was owned by these two teeny-tiny Israeli ladies. They were absolutely fabulous. It was kind of a crash course in Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish culture. It was in Flatbush, so basically, 90% of my students were Hasidic or Orthodox. I think I broke every rule ever. The two owners of the school would just look at me and laugh. They wouldn't offer me any guidance. They just liked watching. Matt: Well, it would be awkward. Yes. Snipe: Exactly. I'm like, "Why would you do that to me?" [laughter] Snipe: They're just laughing. I could hear them laughing from upstairs- Matt: That's hilarious. Snipe: -when they knew I was putting my foot in another cultural mess. That was really, really fun. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about teaching. I even got to have a deaf student one time, which was great, except I didn't know-- I used to know or still know American sign language, but when I learned, there weren't any computer-related signs. It was actually a weird barrier that I hadn't thought about. We're like, "Okay, I can sign as I'm talking," but then I'm like, "Wait, do I have to spell all this stuff out every single time? I have no idea." That was cool. Then I started just doing HTML for a company called Cybergirl, which is not a porn site. I always have to clarify that. Not that there's anything wrong with porn, but it was not, in fact, a porn site. It was an online women's community. Matt: Cool. Snipe: They weren't really super profitable in the community itself, so they had a separate part that did websites for clients. I was put on to work mostly with their clients. They had stuff written in ASP, ColdFusion. Because the people who had designed it weren't there anymore, I basically had to learn all of these languages. Also, we only had a part time sysadmin, so when we'd hire someone new, I'm like, "I guess I'm creating email accounts for people now." I became a stand-in for a lot of different roles. Got to play with a lot of different languages, some of which I liked vastly better than others. ColdFusion? Really? [laughs] Matt: ASP wasn't that bad. There was worse things than classic ASP. Snipe: Yes, there are. That is a thing that could be said. That is an opinion one might have. [laughter] Matt: Trying to keep a positive spin on it. Snipe: I would say that all of these languages, the ones that are still around, have come a very long way since then, including PHP. Matt: Yes, yes. .NET is not a classic ASP. PHP 5, whatever. PHP 7 is no PHP 3, for sure. Snipe: Certainly. Matt: Were you using PHP at that point already, then? Was that one your-- Snipe: Yes. That was one I was-- Because I'd already done some Perl stuff, and it just wasn't that hard. One of our clients had a website, I think it was The Bone Marrow Foundation, had their website in PHP. That forced me to do a bit more legwork on it. That was the beginnings, the very beginnings. Matt: At that point, we're probably talking about single-page PHP files for each page. At the top, you've got a common.inc that you're doing your database connections. Then below that, it's just a template, right? Okay. Snipe: Functions.inc and usually some sort of PHTML. [laughs] Matt: God, PHTML, yes. Okay, all right. Snipe: I told you, I am an old, old lady. Matt: Honestly, we worked on a site that still used PHTML and things like four or five years ago. I was like, "I didn't even know that PHP parser is still allowed for this." Apparently, some of these things still stick around. Snipe: Whatever you set as your acceptable file formats, it'll parse. Matt: Yes, you can make it happen. Snipe: I can have a .dot site file extension if I wanted to. Matt: I like that idea now. Jeez. When was the transition? What were the steps between there and ending up where you are now? Are we still many steps behind, or did you get out on your own pretty quickly after that? Snipe: I was doing some contract work. Thanks to a friend that I'd met through IRC. I was doing some contract work for a company out in San Diego. They were an ad agency. This is the beginning of the days when marketing companies were trying to own digital, and they were trying to build up their digital departments. They moved me out there because they're like, "You're amazing, so come on out here and build up our team." I did. I built up their team. We had some really cool clients. We had San Diego Zoo, San Diego Padres, California Avocado Commission. At that time, I didn't like avocados. I was giving away free avocados that I did not like. Matt: [chuckles] Oh, no. That's so good. Snipe: I hate myself now for knowing how many avocados I could have had. [laughs] I got to build lots of custom web apps, all the database-y stuff. That was really fun. I left there, started my own web design company for lack of a better term, where I was basically using PHP, but also pretending like I knew how to design anything at all. Sorry, hang on. Incoming call. Building my own custom applications for people. None of it is really that fancy, but whatever. That was fun. Then I broke my foot. This is before the ACA, and so I had no insurance. Thousands of dollars and a spiral fracture later, I'm like, "Maybe I should get a real job." [laughter] Snipe: I started to work for the San Diego Blood Bank, which was a great gig. It's probably my favorite job. The pay wasn't that great, but my coworkers were great. Your hours were your hours. There was no overtime. If you had to work overtime, you got paid double time and a half, something like that. It was insane. Matt: Especially compared to the ad agency world, which is basically the exact opposite. Snipe: Yes. Yes. There's no amount of blood you can show to prove that you're loyal to that particular market. I ended up moving back to New York and ended up working for the Village Voice for a little while. Matt: Really? That's cool. Snipe: Yes, that was cool. Unfortunately, they had already been bought out by Newtimes, and so they were not the Village Voice that I grew up with, the one that warmed the liberal cockles of my heart. It was actually a crap place to work, to be honest. People were getting fired all the time. There was this one guy, he used to hang out in the archives room with an X-Acto blade and a piece of paper and would just cut at the piece of paper. He was actually scary. Everyone was afraid of him, because that's office shooter kind of crazy. Matt: Exactly, exactly. Snipe: I left there, finally, and worked for another ad agency. That's the one that I was working at when I finally started to work with Snipe-IT. Finally started to make Snipe-IT. For a while, while I was in California, the nice thing about running your own gig back then, because it was like a one-man shop, so I didn't have people that I had to worry about. I got a chance to work with tigers for about a year. It was just exhausting. That was around the time when I was writing my book, too. Working with tigers, commuting four hours a day, coming home stinking like raw chicken and tiger pee. Then working on my book, and then whatever I can possibly eke out for customers. It was pretty chaotic and definitely exhausting, but they were good times. Matt: I don't want to preach too far on this, but I feel like the more of our story that takes us around different aspects of life and different experiences, the more we bring to the thing we're in right now. That's one of the reasons I keep pushing on people having histories before they came to tech or diverse histories in tech. It's not to say that someone who just graduated from college and instantly got a job as a developer is therefore now incomplete, but I think that a lot of what makes a lot of people interesting is what they bring outside. That's true for anybody, right? What makes you different from the people around you makes you different, and makes you interesting, and it makes you have a perspective to be able to bring that the people around you don't. It sounds like you have quite a few of those, at least as you enter into the communities that I'm asking you from the perspective of whether PHP, or Laravel, or anything like that. I don't know where I'm going with that, but anyway. Snipe: [laughs] Matt: That's very interesting to hear. Snipe: I always say I sound really interesting on paper. I'm not really that interesting to talk to, but when you actually look at all the crap I've done, it's like, "Wow. That's kind of a lot." Matt: Right. That is a lot going on. Snipe: It's all weird. Weird stuff. Matt: If I remember right, the book that you wrote was a Wrox PHP book, right? Snipe: Yes, yes. You can still get it on Amazon, but it costs more to ship. Matt: Really? I got to-- Snipe: Actually, I'm not sure. It may just be eBay. The last time I checked, it was selling for $2.95 and costs like $80 to ship. [laughs] Matt: Professional PHP4 Web Development Solutions. Snipe: Yes. Matt: I don't see a Mohawk. I don't know which one's you. Snipe: No, no. Matt: [laughs] Snipe: Yes, I know. Gosh, it's a mystery of the ages, isn't it? [laughs] Matt: All right. Yes. $22.99. Wow. What was your experience like writing a book? Would you do it again? Snipe: Possibly, but I would need a bit more written assurances up front about how-- This is a co-authored book. Basically, we were not given communication information with each other. We were writing these chapters completely independently and it sucked. I offered to set up a bulletin board just so we could-- For some reason, they didn't want us talking to each other or something. I don't know, but I was like, "Because I don't know where this chapter is going to fall, I want to make sure that I'm not rehashing a thing that's already been discussed, or touching on something that needs more information." They never facilitated that. They actually pushed back against it. It was really frustrating. You're literally writing chapters in a vacuum that then have to be cohesive when you string them all together. I would need to know if it was going to be a co-authorship. I would need to know that this will truly be collaborative. Because the way it looks on the cover, it looks like we're all hanging out. No, I don't think I've ever spoken to those people ever. [laughs] Matt: Wow. Jeez. Snipe: It's really weird. It's really weird. I did not like that. I thought that was really just not a way to give the best experience to the reader. If I was going to collaborate, I would have to make sure that there was something like that. I've toyed with writing a couple of books over the last few years. It is also a bit of a time suck. Matt: Yes, it is. My perception, what I've told people in the past is that people often ask me, "Should I write a book with a traditional publisher like you did?" Because mine was with O'Reilly. "Or should I self-publish like a lot of the people in our community have?" My general perception has been, if you want to make money, self-publish. Snipe: Definitely. Matt: If you want reach that's outside of your current ability, then consider a traditional publisher. You've got quite a bit of reach and I wonder whether it's-- Snipe: This is like 2003, though. Matt: I don't mean for them, but I mean now. If you're going at it now. It seems like there'll probably be less of a reason for you to do a traditional publisher at this point. Snipe: I don't know, though. I still kind of O'Reilly. Matt: You still like it? Snipe: Being a published O'Reilly author, I still toy with that, honestly. Matt: I tell people I got a degree in secondary English education, basically. This O'Reilly book is my proof that I'm actually a real programmer. Snipe: [laughs] You know what? Honestly, that was really important to me back then. Snipe: Me too, really. Matt: I don't know where things would have gone, I don't know if I would have-- I probably would have stuck with it because I really, really liked it. I think that gave me a bit of confidence that I really needed. Proof, again, because I didn't graduate college. I nearly didn't graduate high school because of the programming class. [laughs] It was a way for me to say not just to the rest of the world, but to myself, like, "Hey, I actually know what I'm talking about." Matt: You can't underappreciate just how significant that is. I love that you said it. It's not just to everybody else, it's to you, too. Snipe: More than anyone else, to myself, honestly. I don't care what you guys think. [laughs] Matt: I spent several thousand hours writing a book with a major publisher so that I can overcome impostor syndrome. It's totally worth it. [laughter] Snipe: I still have it. That's a thing, I have it. Matt: I still have it, but maybe a little less. Snipe: At least if someone actually pushes the impostor syndrome too far, I'll be like, "I wrote a book. What have you done?" Matt: Exactly. Snipe: Meanwhile, I go off and rock in the corner as if, "Oh, my God. I don't deserve to be here. I don't deserve to be here." Matt: Exactly. It certainly doesn't make it go away, but maybe it's a tool in our arsenal to battle it. Snipe: That's a very good way to describe it. Matt: I like it. Snipe: I would need that to be a bit more of a tighter process. Matt: Well, if you decide to write with O'Reilly, I know some people. Just give me a call. Snipe: [laughs] I also know some people in O'Reilly. Matt: I was just going to say I'm pretty sure you don't need me for any of that kind of stuff. I just had to say it to try and seem like I actually matter, so this works. Snipe: Of course, you matter. Matt: I matter. Snipe: I got up early for you, Matt. I got up early for you. Matt: That's true. Snipe: You don't have any idea. Matt: That's true, this is quite early your time. I appreciate it. Snipe: [laughs] Matt: I'm trying to not talk forever. I'm trying to move us on even though I'm just my usual caveats, everyone take a drink. You eventually started Snipe-IT. I think we skipped a couple of things. We were talking about you becoming the CTO of the ad agency and being in a place where you needed to manage that kind of stuff. You started Snipe-IT. You now have a remote team. Could you tell me a little about the makeup of your team, and what it's like running a remote team, and the pros and cons you've experienced, and anything else that you would want to share about what that experience is like for you? Snipe: Well, I'm really lucky, first of all, because although our team is remote, we're all also local. We can actually see each other, we'll go out and have beers when we hit a major milestone. We'll go out and have some champagne and celebrate that we do get to see each other's faces. Also, we were friends first, so that helps. It's totally, totally different. If you're looking for advice on how to run a real remote team, that I can't help you with. I can't tell you how to manage your friends through Slack, though. [laughs] Matt: Basically, you and a bunch of friends live like an hour driving distance to each other or whatever and choose to work from home? Snipe: More like seven minutes. [laughs] Matt: Jeez. Snipe: Yes, yes. Matt: Okay, so this is really just like, "We just don't feel like going to an office," kind of vibe. Snipe: It's pants, it's pants. I'm not putting on pants. I've worked too hard in my career to have to put on pants anymore. There is a reason this isn't a video call, Matt. Seriously. [laughter] Matt: I wish that this was one of the podcasts-- Snipe: I think I just made Matt blush, by the way. Matt: I wish this was one of the podcasts where they name each episode, because that would have been the name right there for this episode. I might have to, just for this one, just give it a name just for that. Okay. I hear you. I get it. Snipe: The thing is I hadn't actually planned on hiring when I did. The reality is I should have, because I was really buckling under the helpdesk. That customer support load was a lot. It was causing me a great deal of anxiety. Looking back at it now, it was really untenable. Of course, I think that I'm 10 feet tall and bulletproof, so I'm like, "I got this. I got this." Meanwhile, it's four o'clock in the morning and I can't even see straight anymore. I ended up having to hire someone for a personal reason. She's actually worked out great. She's an absolute rock star on the helpdesk. She's never worked a helpdesk before, and she owns it. It's actually really, really great. Once I'd hired her, I think-- The onboarding takes a little bit. Especially, literally never worked a helpdesk before, so it's not just onboarding with my company, it's like onboarding the entire concept. As soon as she got her footing, she just completely handled it. It was really great. The next hire was a developer/sysadmin that I've known for a while. He is just fantastic. He's actually the harder one because he, I think, requires a little bit more structure, and a little bit more face time. I need to be better. I do. I need to be better about working with that because in my head, I'm still managing this the way that I want to be managed. I forget that that's actually not my job anymore. Matt: People are different. Snipe: Yes, people are different. Also, not everybody wants what I want. Frankly, it doesn't matter what I want. Ultimately, that's no longer a luxury that I have, caring more about how I want things to go for myself. That priority has shifted, and so I'm having to painfully learn [chuckles] that lesson. Not painfully. I love my entire team. They're absolutely amazing. I'm super, super grateful for them every day that goes by. Every time one of them takes vacation, we all hold on to our desks. We're like, "Okay, we can get through this, we can get through this." It's a learning curve, certainly. I've run my own small business, I've run dev teams. This is a different thing though, because the reason why I wanted to make this a company instead of just running this as a side project is because I've worked for tons of shitty companies. I want to build the company that I wish I'd worked for. Matt: I'm so sorry for doing this, but I was doing that thing where you're hearing somebody talking and waiting for your chance to talk. I literally was about to say Dan and I, when we started Tighten, the first thing we said was, "We want to build the company we want to work for." You just said and I'm like, "Exactly." That introduces the problem you're talking about, which is you just assume everybody wants the same things you want. It also means nobody else gets to force you to put people through things that you wouldn't want to be put through. It's an incredible freedom if you can make it profitable. Snipe: Yes. Absolutely. Getting to institute stuff that I think is really worker-friendly. We all make our own hours. We have office hours so that when Victoria's handling the helpdesk, she's got access to the text that she needs during a certain amount of time. In general, she's got a kid. We have to have that flexibility, so that she-- Honestly, she just lets us know that she's going to pick up her kid. It's like, "Okay, cool. See you back in half an hour or whatever." Vacation, she had not had a real vacation in probably 10 or 15 years. Last year, we were like, "You are taking vacation." She kept checking into Slack. I'm like, "Girl, I will actually revoke your credentials." Matt: [laughs] Exactly. Snipe: Do not play with me. Matt: I love it. Snipe: This year, I've decided that there's two weeks basically mandatory vacation, and we're going to put $3,000 towards each person's vacation funds- Matt: That's cool. Snipe: -so that they can actually go and do something awesome, and relaxing, and not stress about money while they're there, and just get to go and actually enjoy things, and come back refreshed and ready to work. It's pretty cool being able to come up with stuff like this and really like, "What would I have needed?" Because when I was working at the ad agencies especially, I would accrue my PTO. Honestly, that's why Snipe-IT existed. It was because I had two and a half weeks, three weeks of PTO that was not going to roll over. They made me take vacation in November. They wouldn't let me do it in December. They made me do it in November, and I was like, "Yes, three weeks of just relaxing, playing video games." That didn't work. I accidentally the product. [laughs] Now, I accidentally the business. Matt: That's awesome. One of the things I often talk about as an entrepreneur, as a business owner is something that I think people are scared of talking about, which is power. Because being a business owner means you get to hire, you get to figure out how money is spent, you get to figure out what pressures are and are not put in the people you work with. I call that power, but I think power doesn't have to be a scary word because, really, what matters is what you do with the power. When we hear power as a negative thing, it is usually because the people on power are benefiting themselves. I think that something is really beautiful, and wonderful, and we need more of in the world is when we can see power as a positive thing, because people get power and then use it for the benefit of other people. I just want to applaud and affirm what you're doing, because you just described that. It's like, "I got power, and the first thing I did was work to make other people's lives better understanding what the situation that they were in was." I love hearing that. I'm really glad that we got to talk about this today. Snipe: Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to coming up with more stuff like that. Matt: I love it. Snipe: It's super important to me. Our customers are incredibly important to us, obviously, but my staff is as important. You can't have one without the other either direction. Matt: In the end, they're just both people who you work with. The hope is that you're able to make both groups of people really have lives that are better because they had a chance to interact with you. Snipe: Yes, absolutely. Matt: Okay. We are almost out of time. I asked people at Tighten if they had any questions for you. They gave me a million, and I haven't gotten any of them. They're all going to be mad at me, so I'm trying to look at the one that I could pull up that won't turn into a 30-minute long conversation. Snipe: I'm Italian. There is literally nothing you can talk to me about that won't turn into a 30-minute conversation. [laughs] Matt: All right. I'll literally go with the question that has the least words in it and see if that gets us anywhere. Coffee or tea? Snipe: Red Bull. Matt: There you go. See how short that was? All right. Snipe: This podcast is sponsored by Red Bull. [laughter] Matt: It's so funny that it's been the thing at Tighten for the longest time, where those of us who started the company and the first hires were primarily coffee people. There's one tea holdout, but over time, the tea contingent has grown. Just within the last nine months, we hired two people who are Red Bull addicts. All of a sudden, we're shopping for the company on-site and they're like, "Orange Red Bull, no sugar, energy, blah, blah, blah." I'm like, I have a course in Red Bull flavors. Anyway, I still think it's pretty gross, but I did try some of them. Snipe: It's disgusting. No, it is utterly vile. It is really, really gross. [laughter] Matt: I don't get it. Please pitch me on why I would drink red Bull instead of coffee then. Snipe: No. If you don't drink Red Bull, then there will be more for me. First of all, I'm not going to pitch that. Matt: World's dwindling storage of Red Bull. Snipe: Obviously, we buy our stores out of local Red Bull, it's ridiculous. We have a main store, and then we have a failover store. Listen, you don't drink it because it tastes good. It tastes like dog ass, but it wakes you up. It keeps you awake. It feels the same role that coffee does, and frankly, I don't think that coffee tastes that good. Matt: Okay. Fair enough. Snipe: I can ask the same question to you. Matt: Right. For you, it's a combination. You don't like the flavor of either, but one of them you can buy in bulk and throw in the fridge? Snipe: Yes, yes. Matt: Got it. I get that. I love the flavor of coffee, but I'm like a geek. I have all the equipment, and all that kind of stuff. Snipe: Of course, you do. [laughter] Matt: Am I predictable? I am predictable. Okay. Snipe: I will neither confirm nor deny. My lawyer has advised me. [laughs] Matt: Not to make a statement on this particular-- I have one more and I'm praying that I can make it short, but I probably won't. You are a member of the Laravel community. You use Laravel. You share things every once in a while, but for someone who is such a big name, who's a member of the Laravel community, much of your popularity is not within the Laravel community. You're not popular because you're speaking at Laracon, you're not creating Laravel packages that all the people are consuming. It's this interesting thing where you're a very well-known person who uses Laravel and is a member of the Laravel community but is not necessarily gaining all that fame within Laravel space. It's an interesting overlap. As someone who does have exposure to lots of the tech communities, you're in the InfoSec world, you've been in PHP for a while, but you're also solidly Laravel. Do you have any perspectives on either, maybe the differences between InfoSec and PHP, differences between InfoSec and Laravel, and/or is there anything that you would say to the Laravel community, or things you'd either applaud or hope to see grow? Is there anything you just want to say about the way Laravel compares, or connects, or overlaps, or whatever with the rest of the world that you're in? Snipe It's always an ongoing joke in the InfoSec community. PHP developers are pretty much the easiest punching bag in the InfoSec community. Matt: And everywhere else. Snipe: In fact, I think just yesterday, I submitted an eye-rolling gift in relation to someone at InfoSec, bagging on PHP developers. I get it. When the language first came out, it was really easy to learn. You didn't need to have any knowledge of programming, or discipline, or best practices. There were no best practices for quite some time in PHP. I totally get that. The thing is that that's not really the world that we live in anymore. It's actually hard to write a PHP application without using a framework these days. Because the frameworks are so much better and it's so much faster, that for me, I'm pretty sure I could still write a PHP application without a framework, but why the hell would? If I ever have to write another gddmn login auth routine, I'll kill myself. I will actually kill myself. Comparing InfoSec to PHP or Laravel is like comparing apples to orangutans. They're entirely different animals and there is a little bit of overlap, but typically not. In general, PHP has a bad reputation in InfoSec. In fact, I will tell you a very brief story about how I got into InfoSec. This one's always a fun one. I used to run a nonprofit organization when I moved to California the first time. It was basically like Megan's Law for animal abusers. Criminal animal abuse. I would pull in data, break it down statistically based on a couple of different pointers like domestic violence connection, blah blah blah blah blah, and basically run statistics on that stuff. This was going back a very, very long time when nobody really knew or gave a crap at all about AppSec. At one point, my website got hacked. The organization's website got hacked. I am literally on my way to speak at a conference in Florida, an animal welfare conference. I'm checking in. I'm like, "Hi, I'm Alison Gionatto. I'm a speaker." She goes, "You're petabuse.com. That's great. I'm so sorry to hear about what happened." I'm like, "I've been on a plane for a couple of hours." I'm like, "Wait, what?" [chuckles] I run to my hotel room, and somebody has defaced the website with an animated GIF, and a song playing in the background which was basically a clip from Meetspin, and they linked to Meatspin. If any of your listeners don't know what Meatspin is- Matt: I don't. Snipe: -please do not Google that. You can google it, but have safe search on. Matt: Is it like Goatse kind of stuff? Snipe: Yes. "You spin me right round, baby, right round" playing in the background on autoloop. To this day, when I hear that song, I shiver a little bit. Matt: Trigger, yes. Snipe: Exactly. I ended up actually talking to this guy who thought that we were a much bigger organization than we were. He was trying to extort money, of course. I was like, "Dude, you have you have no idea. We get like $800 in donations every month. You are barking up the wrong tree." He's like, "I thought you were bigger. I'm sorry, but it is what it is." I toyed with him long enough to figure out what he had done. The thing is, this is on a Cobalt RaQ server. First of all, we're going back. Second of all, those are not exactly going for their security, but it was what I could afford. Honestly, it's what I could afford. I figured it out, I locked him out. I did leave him one final kind of F you text. [laughter] Snipe: Just so that he knew. That was how I got into this in the first place was basically a horrific, horrific internet meme and the defacement of my organization's website. Again, this is 2004, 2005. Application security became really important to me, and that's why I'm here. [chuckles] That's why I go to DEF CON. That's why I speak about application security and security in general. To get back to your original question, there isn't really an overlap. There is this disdainful relationship, for the most part, coming from both directions because InfoSec people don't typically treat programmers in general very well, but especially not PHP developers. PHP developers are tired of getting shit on, and so they don't necessarily treat-- It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling-- Matt: Impostor, yes. Exactly. Snipe: Honestly, it's all just a bunch of dumbass egos and it's stupid. If we would just talk to each other a little bit more, we'd probably be a little better off. Matt: Come on, somebody. You'll be surprised to hear that I could talk about InfoSec and PHP for an hour, but we're out of time. I don't know if I'm going to have you back sometime or I don't know what, but this's been amazing. I really appreciate you spending some time with me. Before we cut off for the day and I cry because of all the topics I'm not going to cover, is there anything you wanted to talk about? Anything you want to plug, anything you want to cover, anything you want to say to the people that we haven't got to cover today? Snipe: Nothing that really comes to mind. I am still really passionate about AppSec. If you're using a framework and you're not utilizing all of the security stuff that's built in already, specifically Laravel is really good with that. I've had write some Middleware to add some additional CSP headers and things like that. If you're already paying the price, the overhead of using a framework, then freaking use it. Actually use all of the bits that are good, not just the bits that you don't feel like writing. Laravel makes it really hard to avoid the CSRF tokens. You'll actually have to go out of your way to disable those. I like that about Laravel. I like that it's opinionated. I like that it doesn't want you to screw this up. That said, any developer left to their own devices sufficiently motivated will still screw it up. Matt: Will screw something up, yes. Snipe: Yes, Exactly. Frameworks like Laravel, I think once that are headed in the right direction, so your default login already uses bcrypt to hash the password. You would, again, have to go out of your way to write something that would store something in cleartext or MD5. I think it's a step in the right direction. Use your frameworks, learn what their built-in security functionality is, and use them. Matt: Use it. [laughs] Snipe: One of the packages I'm actually writing for Laravel right now is an XSS package which will basically walk through your schema, and will try and inject rows of XSS stuff in there so that when you reload the app and if you got to any kind of functional testing or acceptance testing setup, you'll be able to see very quickly what you've forgotten to escape. Matt: I love it. Snipe: For a normal Laravel app, that's actually hard to do because the double braces will escape everything. For example, if you're using data from an API, maybe you're not cleaning it as well or whatever. That's one of the packages that I actually am working on. Matt: That's great. Also, if you're using JavaScript, it's really common for people to not escape it, and so that all of a sudden, they forget to clean it. Snipe: Exactly. I wanted one quick way to basically just check and see how boned I was. That'll be fun. Matt: Yes. Does it have a name yet that we can watch for or would you just link it once you have it? Snipe: Well, the only name-- You know how the mocking data packages called Faker? You can imagine what I'm considering calling this that I probably won't call it? [laughs] Matt: Probably won't, but now we can all remember it that way? Yes. Snipe: No promises. Absolutely no promises is all I'm saying. [laughs] Matt: Assuming it's safe for work, I will link the name in the show notes later. If not, you could just go-- [crosstalk] [laughter] Snipe: Again, no promises. Matt: I like it. Okay. You all have taken enough drinks, so I won't say my usual ending for you to drink too. Snipe, Alison, thank you so much. Thank you for the ways you have spoken up for a lot of things that really matter both in this call and our community as a whole. Thank you for hopefully helping me but also our entire community get better going forward, but also the things you brought to us in the past in terms of application security. I don't know why I didn't say this earlier, but Mr. Rogers is maybe one of my top heroes of all time. That was what was going through my mind when you were talking about running your company. Thank you for being that force both for running companies that way and taking care of people, and then, of course, by proxy for just the people who you're working with. The more people that are out there doing that, I think the better it is for all of us. This has been ridiculously fun. If anyone wants to follow you on Twitter, what's your Twitter handle and what are other things they should check out? That URL for Snipe-IT? I will put all of these in the show notes, but I just wanted you to get a chance to say them all at the end. Snipe: My Twitter handle is @snipeyhead, because @snipe was taken. I'm still pissed at that guy. [laughter] Snipe: The URL for Snipe-IT is snipeitapp.com. Not very creative. All of our issues are on GitHub. Your pool of requests are welcome. [laughter] Snipe: As always. Matt: Nice. Snipe: It is free. If it helps you solve some of your problems at your organization, we would love for you to try it out. If you'd like to give us money, that's awesome too. Ultimately, the more people who are using it, the better. Matt: Nice. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time. Everyone, check out the show notes as always. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks with a special episode. I'll tell you more what it is when that one happens. See you. Snipe: [chuckles] Thank you so much, Matt.

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-