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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends March 31st 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Podcast: www.conversationsworthmillions.comAgency: www.syntheticagency.coLinkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/roymurphy/Twitter: www.twitter.com/agencysynthetichttps://www.syntheticagency.co/10-simple-tips-on-bot-strategy-and-design/https://www.syntheticagency.co/oracle-chatbots/ ‘Songs for themeparks’ - 100 tunes for those who love + those who are terrifiedhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6SQ77ZYMDbdHBYPKkQKJ4V?si=XqTPtiTZSICe7Daeb4Mn4w Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Roy Murphy from Synthetic, the chatbot and voice agency. We discuss the opportunity for exciting voice strategies for attractions, and also how attractions can derive maximum value from chatbots. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue. Kelly Molson: Roy, welcome to the Skip The Queue podcast, it's good to have you on today.Roy Murphy: Hello Kelly, looking forward to talking to you on the legendary Skip The Queue podcast. This will be a great conversation.Kelly Molson: You are very kind indeed. Now as you know, you've listened to a few of these episodes and you know that I start off with a few icebreaker questions, which you don't get to prep. Are you ready?Roy Murphy: As ready as I'll ever be. Kelly Molson: Okay. All right, what is the worst job that you've ever had?Roy Murphy: The worst job I've ever had is probably when I was very young on a Pitch and Putt golf course, not because the Pitch and Putt wasn't bad as a summer job, it was pretty cool, I quite enjoyed my job, but it was in a small hut in Wellington Island in Braze in South Dublin in Ireland many years ago, and the problem with the job was that it was in a small hut on the seafront outside a pub, and after the pub, everyone would come into the hut and kick it in and not only take the golf equipment out onto the kind of fairway in front of the promenade, then also do some not very nice things and use it as a toilet.Kelly Molson: Oh no, oh that's horrible.Roy Murphy: So for that reason, that is ... I've got a few other ones, but that's probably my top of the list I think.Kelly Molson: Oh God.Roy Murphy: Let's move on.Kelly Molson: So yeah let's ... shall we? Roy Murphy: Let's move on.Kelly Molson: Sorry.Roy Murphy: Anyway, I told you that, it's awful, isn't it?Kelly Molson: Sounds dreadful. Sorry, I'm just really having a chuckle, I feel bad that I'm laughing at your unfortunate job. Roy Murphy: It's all right.Kelly Molson: Okay.Roy Murphy: My hands are clean now though. My hands are clean now, it's fine. Kelly Molson: Good that, hygiene is very important.Roy Murphy: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Which cartoon character do you wish was real?Roy Murphy: Oh, Tasmanian Devil.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Roy Murphy: Just for the mayhem, I think. I just love ... I loved it as a kid, I'm not sure if it's appropriate now in terms of the name and so on, but just that whole kind of whirling dervish, and let it loose on various politicians.Kelly Molson: Yeah. If you had your own late-night talk show, who would be the first person that you'd invite on as a guest?Roy Murphy: Andrew Ridgeley. Kelly Molson: For what reason?Roy Murphy: I read his biography last year and I found it absolutely fascinating. I love those stories behind the fame, and actually, it came across that he was actually quite talented. You wouldn't have thought that from his public persona, but actually as a songwriter and a musician he gets kind of a bad rep, you know, George Michael, God bless, was so talented and popular, and I actually ... I think the stories behind the stories are sometimes more interesting, so I'd like to have him on and tell his side of the story face-to-face.Kelly Molson: That would be a great guest. I have to say that I was a massive Wham! fan so I would be watching that.Roy Murphy: Shows your age a bit.Kelly Molson: I know, I can't help it. Tell me something that is true that almost nobody agrees with you on, so your unpopular opinion.Roy Murphy: Oh, I've got lots of those. Kelly Molson: Oh, I'm intrigued.Roy Murphy: I like being contrary. So I pose it that winter doesn't exist. I have a theory.Kelly Molson: You need to explain this theory because it feels very wintery at the moment.Roy Murphy: Well, I'm not a flat-earther, but I have a theory. Let me run it past you. Typically there's four seasons in a year, I get that, and my own way of thinking is ... and I'm an optimist and I hate winter, by the way, just to set the groundwork. So summer doesn't end until September in my book, right? Because ultimately you always want an Indian summer, and September's still summer in my book. Autumn is October, November, and part of December because October, November are kind of autumn-ish, and December is a month of Fridays, right? So December isn't winter either. Roy Murphy: On the 21st of December, it's the winter equinox, and it gets lighter one minute per day, so therefore by the time you're into the 21st of December, forget about Christmas, that's always fun, by the time you get to first of January, the days are getting lighter every day by a minute, therefore winter doesn't exist. Discussed.Kelly Molson: I'm going to disagree, but I'm going to do it based ... I know where you're going, I understand where you're going with the equinox, but the winter ... the weather in January is horrendous and you could not associate that with any other month, other than winter. Roy Murphy: Disagree. Kelly Molson: Like it's always miserable, it's always really super cold, it normally snows.Roy Murphy: I see your point, but I'm an absolute optimist and I'm not having it. Winter is a construct, doesn't exist, and we're already into spring, so I'm skipping winter.Kelly Molson: I feel like we all need to do that this year.Roy Murphy: Every year.Kelly Molson: So maybe we should just all agree with you.Roy Murphy: Every year. This year in particular.Kelly Molson: January is my birthday month, which is really tough, nobody ever has any money, everyone's a bit miserable, the weather's rubbish, so maybe we should all just skip January and then I'll have a birthday later on in the summer.Roy Murphy: You'll thank me for it, Kelly, believe me.Kelly Molson: I'm with you. Thank you, Roy, for answering my questions. Roy, I want you to tell us about your agency that you run. So your agency is Synthetic, tell me what you do. Roy Murphy: So I run Synthetic, we are an emerging technology agency with a specialism in conversational AI, so what that means is we create conversations worth millions for our clients using chat, voice, messaging, all those AI-based concepts. I've been running it for about four years, got in quite early into the space, previously we were a mobile agency, but niched down into conversational AI because it's a really growing space, very interesting things happening across all those kind of areas from chat, voice, and messaging and so on.Roy Murphy: The platform is getting bigger, social's getting bigger, and customers and clients both are using these platforms every day, and therefore there's a massive opportunity for niche agencies in that space to help strategy, help to develop, and help to maintain those kinds of platforms and those kinds of activities.Kelly Molson: And what kind of ... like give me an example of something that you've worked on that we can reference. Roy Murphy: Sure, there's a couple of interesting ones, one on the kind of more entertainment side and maybe some more business-related ones. So one of the first ones and a very successful one we did a little while ago was a Robbie Williams virtual personality bot. So that was a fascinating project actually, so we actually got some time with the man himself and went through it with his record company and so on, and that was to promote ... I think about two albums ago, it was about 2016 we started that, that's still going actually, it's one of the longest-running ... certainly messenger chatbots, or successful ones, that's been around.Roy Murphy: So the idea being that you know, it's a virtual personality, he is not obviously there, but when we started it, it was quite early in the kind of chat space and area, there were so many messages coming through saying, "Is this you? Tell me where you are, I'm going to show you something," and it got quite personal actually-Kelly Molson: I can imagine.Roy Murphy: Not [crosstalk 00:07:09] yeah it did, but at one point we had ... I think we broke Facebook inbox it was so popular, and this was, you know, one of those kinds of small budget and small kind of time-spent projects that had a massive footprint.Kelly Molson: So it was a bit like ... as if you were messaging Robbie and you would get responses back from him?Roy Murphy: Yeah, exactly right, yeah. Since then obviously like lots has happened in that space around a kind of virtual assistants, a lot more sort or reality around augmented reality and kind of replicas of people and digital twins and so on, but that was kind of where it started, that was very successful and very popular, and still going actually. So a bit more up-to-date, we work with a number of large technology companies, one in particular, so we are doing a bunch of stuff with them around gamification and chat, so that's using the conversational piece to ... in the SaaS space actually along sort of [inaudible 00:08:01] and CX in that space, where we're doing things like virtual events on chat and we're doing some voice applications as well. Roy Murphy: Customers will come onto the website and using things like web chat to find out more about some of their products and then upselling from there, so chat and conversational AI with an ROI behind it.Kelly Molson: And that's kind of what I want to talk about today. So Roy and I are both members of an agency networking group, so we're both members of Agencynomics, and this is how we met, and I think Roy saw something that I posted about chatbots on LinkedIn, which spurred us to have a conversation about a few things. So some of you listening will have seen me speak at the Visitor Attractions Conference last year, and as part of our talk we were talking about things that could improve the guest's user journey and guest experience online, and one of the things that we suggested was using a chatbot.Kelly Molson: I mean chatbots are great, they can often give people information that they can't find that easily, or you know, if you have a chatbot you're freeing up someone else's time from having to kind of be on that and populating it themselves, and that's how we got talking, and I have to admit, after the talk in the Q&A session, I got a lot of questions about chatbots, and I thought, "Why don't I get Roy on to answer those questions? Because he is an expert in it and I am not." Hence why you're on Roy.Roy Murphy: That's useful.Kelly Molson: So I kind of want to talk about that kind of side of voice activation and voice kind of conversation around attractions, and I know that you have worked a little bit in that sector, and I wondered if you could give us your kind of ... well, your thoughts on them, and then maybe can we talk about how ... like how can attractions derive that kind of maximum value from using chatbots?Roy Murphy: Just to set the scene a little bit, quite important to mention I think, that you know, around the chat and conversational AI space we're still very early into it. I mean from our side it feels like it's been going on forever, we're almost five years into this kind of space, so the questions that we still get are often quite fundamental questions, you know, "Can I give my website, my product, over to an AI? What's going to happen? What if they start making ridiculous claims and comments? Will people be able to use them? Are we lying to people because they're not talking to people? Is there any kind of brand damage that might happen?Roy Murphy: You know we get a lot of these questions still quite a lot from the educational side, and that's, of course, every sector, not just visitor attractions, that's everything from finance to healthcare, wellness, education and so on. So the fundamentals still apply. So the first thing to say is, of course, we're still quite early into it, although we've been doing it for quite a while, so these questions do still apply, and then the second thing we often get as well is, you know, how do you get started? Is it very difficult and complicated and therefore expensive?Roy Murphy: And it really isn't. You know, of course, anything ... as a piece of string, can be ... you can be using very basic bots or very, very complex and integrated with the CRM systems, so in essence, we are early into it, there are lots of use-cases coming in that are ROI focused and kind of based in reality, which is great, but in terms of visitor attractions, you know, the very basics of a museum or an attraction using an FAQ bot is a great place or a great example to start with.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Roy Murphy: So in essence ... and that's very simple to do, so really these are not large projects, and most attractions and most businesses will have most of the information to hand anyway, which is often in their call centre scripts or on the FAQs or the questions being asked on their website, and indeed what's coming in on email, you know, whether it's the kind of ... you know, a more analogue process they have. So in the very basic version, it's not difficult for a site to spin up something on their current site based around their FAQs and then use that kind of data that comes back in to understand what people are asking for, because the beauty of those simple chatbot systems, of course, is that people are asking you actual questions, they're not ... you know you don't have to use eye-tracking software, you don't have to use Hotjar or something like that, you can actually get ... you know, people are actually asking you what they want, you know, what time you're open, will my discount vouchers still apply because of COVID? Roy Murphy: You know, are you COVID safe? You know, things that have really been kind of popular last year.Kelly Molson: In its simplistic form, you are gathering data about what people need to find out about your organization?Roy Murphy: It is ... in essence, it is really like having a conversation with a customer, and that can be automated, of course, so you don't have to have your call-centre staff on board, you don't have to have you, social team, if you're a small business as well with a single site attraction, this can all be automated very simply and very quickly, and that's a great place to start with this whole kind of AI space if you like because then you're going to get a load of data back which will inform you as you what you might do next.Roy Murphy: The classic what we call think like a startup, kill or continue, so if you're getting a whole bunch of questions back and you've already answered, okay, maybe that is what you need to spend your time on, but if people are often ... if your bot or if your site's failing on the certain questions of ... you know, maybe someone's asking a particular question all the time, are you open? How do I get to you? How much is it? How much are ticket costs? You can use that and you'll find that we've got loads of data around how people use conversation versus how they use a website, and they'll spend more time basically on chatbots, and they'll ask more questions, side-by-side apples with apples than they will on the website, we've seen that time and time again. Kelly Molson: So the time that they'll spend talking to a bot will be longer than a browse time?Roy Murphy: Yeah, often. Often there's caveats around that of course, but yeah, in essence, we see that a lot because if you've ... and again, you don't have to brand it particularly excitingly, although keep away from female named assistants, I've got a massive bugbear about that, let's get onto that later, but you know, if you're not ... you know, you don't have to spend huge amounts of time with developing new characters or new kind of personas for your bot, if you've got a friendly open museum visitor attraction park, whatever, just use that. Answer the basic questions, and use those questions to inform what you do next.Roy Murphy: And the other point of that is ... so the other important point is that of course if someone gets stuck or if they've got a major problem, or it's a high priority customer service question you can always hand over to a live agent anyway, so there's loads of nuances around how you would do that and when you would do it, but these things are all very possible and very easy to integrate with whatever you're currently using in terms of your live chat.Kelly Molson: Sounds really cool, doesn't it? Like it sounds like something that everybody should be using.Roy Murphy: I think people are often quite flummoxed by where to start and how easy it can be, because it seems like it's a great thing to do and everyone, of course, jumps in and goes, "Right, can we have a Robbie plus replica ... can we have someone in our ... can they be AR? Can they be this? And can they connect to all our systems?" And absolutely it can, but you don't necessarily have to start there. So you know ... and again, because the prevalence of chat and voice and all these technologies that are happening and your customers are using them, it's not a big jump for them, so really it's something you should be doing, you should be talking to your customers on the channels they're already using.Kelly Molson: And what would you say is the starting point? Because you talked a little bit about things to think about before you get started with this, like what should an organization be thinking about before they commit to something or before they come and speak to you for example?Roy Murphy: It's very simple really. I mean you've got to pick a use-case, so there's a bunch of things you could do, and a bunch of things you should do, but what you absolutely must do is, you know, set your KPI, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to, number one, reduce the amount of hours spent with your social team on answering questions that could be very simply answered by a bot? Are you number two, needing to increase sales by X percent and will this help us to do that? What do we do about? How do we get involved in that? Roy Murphy: So first thing you need to do, understand what it is you're trying to do in terms of the business KPIs, and then the second thing, of course, is that ... you know, leading on from that is describing it which is just a pre-post or after-sales type of scenario, or is it an engagement tool? So are we looking at conversational AI in this instance? Should we be ... are we using it for your website? So that's pre-buy, someone's looking at your information, it's top of the funnel, it's awareness, and that's one thing and that can be driven all the way through to the final ... to kind of booking.Roy Murphy: Or is it on the other side of the coin when someone gets to your park, your attraction, or your museum, whatever it might be, are you interacting more there with a character? Is it more things like treasure hunts? Is it something that's engaging in terms of dwell time? Are you upselling from there? So they're kind of separate things. Either can be started off very simply, but I think you need to ask yourself those simple kind of one-page answers and questions which are, what's the bot trying to do? What's the key audience? And what the success looked like, you know, very simple, basic questions you need to start with first.Kelly Molson: Yeah, one of the questions that came up ... well there was a couple, there was quite a few questions actually at the Visitor Attractions Conference, but one that sticks in my mind was around ... it was around social media, you know, was there a platform of some sort or something that would interact with people's social media, as well as people, being able to ask questions on the website as well? I guess if you're building something bespoke for an organization, you can make it do pretty much whatever you want it to.Roy Murphy: Yeah pretty much. I mean anything with API is integrable, basically. So, in essence, yeah, so whether you want to ingest your Twitter feeds ... or indeed a lot of the chats are actually social themselves, so they don't have to be ... and there's kind of ... there's open and closed systems of course, but you know, for instance, Facebook obviously everyone's aware of, and it would appear from all the things that we see that ... and not forgetting that Facebook own three of the biggest social platforms in the world, you know, not just Facebook, of course, they own Instagram, of course, they own WhatsApp, and who knows what else, and they are moving into a ... it feels like or it seems like an integrated system where you can now message, you can now use chatbots, to an extent, on Instagram. Roy Murphy: Messenger obviously is the platform for bots for Facebook, but again, WhatsApp being more private has had business beta on it, and it hasn't really broken in the Western countries as yet. It's massive in India mind you, WhatsApp. So all these things are all possible and all ... and you can build one system and one platform to interact on those as a single point of view, so yeah, it's all very possible from a social perspective, yeah.Kelly Molson: How about engaging with different demographics? So is there ... you know, in your experience, is there a certain age bracket that will interact more with a chatbot on a site? I guess ... again one of the questions was around kind of our grandparents that are booking a trip with their grandkids, are they going to use this chatbot? Is it going to be helpful for them?Roy Murphy: That is a very, very common question. That's a great question. Before I started in this whole space I had the same question, isn't this just for kids though? But actually, kids aren't using Facebook as you've probably noticed. I've got a 14-and-a-half year old going on 20 daughter, she hasn't touched Facebook in four years, or for that matter, Instagram and WhatsApp. If you're not on TikTok or some of the newer ones you're kind of toast really. So yeah, we've seen ... we've got a ream of data around this and you'll probably be quite surprised from the grandparent question that they're actually very capable and use Facebook, in particular, a lot, because that's how they communicate with their kids and grandkids. Roy Murphy: So we see a huge spread. We thought the same thing actually a couple of years ago, is this route for kids? And would anyone use it? And is it all ... opposite, if it's easy to use, that's a truism across any platform, if it's simple, you use and you're being upfront about what it is and how you use it, it really does cross ... there isn't a demographic we've seen that doesn't use it. So yeah, it's not skewed young in essence, no.Kelly Molson: Is it a case of if it's easy, anybody will use it? Or would an attraction have to put in any kind of work to get people to engage with it? Because I think that was something that people were a bit worried about, is committing to this and then it not being used, and would it need to be ... like would they need to put this huge kind of drive behind encouraging people to use it?Roy Murphy: So again, depending on what the use-case is. So in very simple terms for the kind of top-of-funnel awareness, and there is other ways of doing this, but your classic chatbot scenario is the bottom right circle, you know, on your website, which you select, and I think we're all pretty used to ... there's loads of different ones out there from some of the big names like Drift and Intercom and so on, and some of the other platforms. So that is really a tap of a button to ask questions into a kind of FAQ.Roy Murphy: So that is people are coming to your site anyway, or they're coming to your Facebook page, and that how you interact anyway, or they're Instagram now and possibly WhatsApp and so on, so that's all kind of intrinsically baked in. In terms of on-park or on-site, slightly different scenario. So yeah, I think it's fair to say that you need to surface it. So if you're in the aquarium or whatever it might be, or you know, a London Bridge experience or whatever, front-of-house, there's something there they haven't seen already, I think definitely. Roy Murphy: Parts of your marketing in terms of if you're using an app already and there's a nice part of it which might be chat-related or kind of something you would engage with through the experience, I think yeah, so it really depends. I think the key though is ultimately ... it's telling people about it, yes, but then making it really simple to use, and there's two things you want to do really, you know, you don't want to take away from the experience itself, right? The reason they're there is to see fantastic ocean animals or go on roller coaster rides.Roy Murphy: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that, you know, some train or some ... or at least an awareness from front-of-house staff would be important, if you know ... just to check in with people, "Have you seen X or Y? Have you seen we've got a new dipper," you know, for museum, you know, our new Dippy chat bot, interact with it, you can see ... find treasures, if you do the treasures you get a discount or an offer or something, you know, that kind of stuff is important I think, but again, not taking away from the experience is really important, because you know, let's face it, we, and our kids as well, spend enough time on screens, so it's got to add to the experience, and we're going through the experience of the attraction, and of course not all attractions are end-to-end and kind of, you know, linear, but understanding whether it's just using a QR code or something simple or being tripped by another kind of interactivity, is important, and making those things short and sweet I think is important as well, those interactions.Kelly Molson: This was going to be like my kind of final round-up question to you because what we've focused on quite a bit is what I think is that kind of pre-attraction journey using chatbots, so people are asking questions about you know, are you open? How much is the ticket price? I can't find this thing to be able to book, but actually, there's a lot that can be done in terms of voice strategies for attractions once you're at the attraction as well. Kelly Molson: Like what kind of things could potentially attractions be looking at for that? I guess this is endless, endless opportunities?Roy Murphy: Yeah absolutely. I mean you know, depending on the attraction, like I say, I mentioned the kind of Dippy scenario where ... you know, are we looking through the museum at bones or artifacts or using a voice to give hints around where to find things, more like an interactive treasure hunt scenario, I think is definitely useful. Making it engaging as well, because you know, obviously moving into a post ... hopefully a post-COVID world soon where things are back open again, hopefully sooner rather than later, you're able to touch things, but maybe people don't want to, so I think it's going to be quite important that that kind of touchless experience is probably more part of the experience going forward than it has been.Kelly Molson: Really good point.Roy Murphy: So then that's going to be important. There's tons of things you can do, like you say, create new characters, use some new technology like AR to kind enhance, I've seen some great stuff around museum attractions around selfies, you know, putting yourself into pictures and really engaging and immersing yourself in whatever you're looking around. I mean my own personal favourite which doesn't exist, I'm so disappointed that they stopped doing it, was in Audley End, you know, the national heritage-Kelly Molson: I live right near Audley End-Roy Murphy: Oh okay. Kelly Molson: Yeah, we live in Saffron Walden.Roy Murphy: I love it.Kelly Molson: It's a great place.Roy Murphy: I love Audley End, they used to have a Victorian sing-along at Christmas, I don't know if you ever went to it-Kelly Molson: No, we moved here a couple of years ago so-Roy Murphy: Right, I think they stopped it about three or four years ago, every time I go there I'm so disappointed they don't do it, because you got a chance to go into the house and there were some people dressed up in Victorian ... I thought, "Wow that's what I want, I want a Victorian granddad bot, that's what they're missing," right?Kelly Molson: Yes.Roy Murphy: I honestly do, I might just go and do it anyway because it's a fantastic idea, but that kind of interactive and engagement, these things, these character-driven kind of experiences around AI are again ... they can be quite complex. It's not that difficult to start, but again, it just adds to the kind of fun, doesn't it? And again, the important point I think is, is not just to have that on the park, so there's any kind of brand and merchandise extensions that are possible in terms of licensing et cetera, so if you're ... I know Dippy's a good example, or maybe Audley End's a bad example, but there's certainly plenty of character-driven attractions where you could extend that more and you could have more engagement from people outside of visiting the attraction.Roy Murphy: And again, it could just be that you have a conversation starter and you are able to talk to people and engage, and that might be, "Did you know we're open? Why don't you come along and have a two-for-one offer?" And these are you know, digitally printed tickets, they can go into an existing app they've got, they can go onto social, go onto the bot itself, so lots of opportunities I think, commercially speaking, that aren't really being utilized that well because ... because we're quite early into it, and again, I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say I think that in the visitor attraction kind of space there's huge opportunities because ... for people to steal a march on the competitors to be honest.Roy Murphy: Because not many people are doing it and doing it well, so there's a massive opportunity. The audience is definitely there, we know that, we're going to reopen again soon, and even before reopening it's a brilliant way to engage people and not particularly ... I wouldn't say cost-neutral, but it's not particularly expensive to get these things started if you go in with an MVP think like the startup mindset.Kelly Molson: Yeah, totally agree with that. There is endless possibilities and huge opportunities at the moment. I love what you talked about ... the Audley End example is a really great example actually because it is about ... you know, it's about putting you into that experience, isn't it? It's about ... it's complementary to it, it enhances the experience, it doesn't take away from it or distract you from what's actually happening there at the same time. Roy Murphy: Yeah, I think that's really important. I was also just thinking about audio as well, and again, this is just simple things, and this isn't necessarily around conversational, but you know, just ahead of us having a chat, just thinking about things like some of the more ride-based attractions, and whether this has been done or not, I'm using ... audio is massive obviously, podcasts are massive, audio content's massive, Alexa and Google and so on are massive, and you know, just simple things like those additional engagements of those ... for instance Spotify or Alexa playlists of ... you know, you're going to Alton Towers in a month's time, you're really excited about it, here's the Terror List list with ride on time and songs from TerrorVision and Screamadelica, why aren't we doing that? This is not difficult to do. Roy Murphy: You know, and you can do corporate audio and AI and conversation to all these things, and there's so many good opportunities I think for this, and I think there's a ... you know, I think the brands that jump on this and attractions that jump on this will ... they'll put themselves in a good spot I think.Kelly Molson: That's such a great idea, what is your attraction's playlist? That's what I want everyone to tweet me, what would be on your attraction's playlist? Roy Murphy: You can't use Screamadelica, I've used that. Try and get an example that's under 30 years old, I tried to think of one earlier, I couldn't. Kelly Molson: Well this one's not under 30 years ... well ... yeah no, it is, but I always think about ... there's the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney and it plays Aerosmith, and it's such a great song, Dude (Looks like a lady), and I just have got such great memories, and every time I hear that song I instantly get transported back to that attraction. It would be really cool wouldn't it, to have like your playlist from your favourite attractions?Roy Murphy: It'd be great, just on a personal note, I'm a heavy ... well my family, we are heavy attraction users, I was talking to my wife earlier and I think we count ... even though we're on COVID, I think we counted up about 30 attractions last year we did.Kelly Molson: Nice.Roy Murphy: And we generally do around 40 plus, and that's everything from you know, the obvious big ones, you know, the Alton Towers and so on, to ... we went to Portsmouth into the Mary Rose and the dockyards we did [inaudible 00:27:53] Tower, we did Woburn Safari, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Museums, and I did one interestingly, like just before Christmas, the Silverstone Experience, don't know if you've done it, which is-Kelly Molson: Oh no, I haven't yet. I should because it's not that far from where we are.Roy Murphy: It was actually really good. You know, I'm not a huge Formula 1 fan, but I know lots of people are, but I took the kids out there and my wife came as well, and you get to drive on the track, and now it's very slow, but they've got little lights on, it's fantastic actually.Kelly Molson: That's cool.Roy Murphy: And there was a Silverstone radio station which you could turn on and they play some tunes, but I thought they were missing a huge trick around interactivity, they should have had a very simple point and click where they are, which you can do very easily now. You're all going very slowly up the grid, why they didn't have sounds popping and people revving their engines like Lewis Hamilton on the grid is beyond me.Kelly Molson: Yeah, really build that atmosphere a bit, yeah.Roy Murphy: Exactly. Roll your phone over the ... traffic lights are, you know, they're red, amber, green, and then show it off and then you could have James [inaudible 00:28:46] it just missed the big trick there, and none of this is difficult, whether you could just point your thing at the stands and you can have the voice of Murray Walker or whatever it is for the F1 fans. These interactivity things, again, are not difficult.Kelly Molson: Well I mean they might be listening Roy, so-Roy Murphy: They should. Call us.Kelly Molson: You could get a call. Call Roy. Roy Murphy: Call us. Call Kelly.Kelly Molson: On that note, if you do want to know a bit more about Roy and what he does at Synthetic, then there's loads of places you can look. So you've got loads of really great articles on your website, syntehticagency.co, now there's a couple of really specific articles that are really useful to this conversation, so you've got 10 simple tips on bot strategy and design, and you've got a case study around Oracle chatbots as well, and there's just some really, really useful information if you want to carry this conversation on, that's the best place to go. Kelly Molson: And actually Roy you've got a podcast as well, haven't you?Roy Murphy: It is called Conversations Worth Millions.Kelly Molson: Love it.Roy Murphy: So in essence, conversationsworthmillions.com is the URL, but if you ... because I'm amazing at SEO as well, if you type in conversations worth millions into Google, every result on the home pace will be my podcast, if it isn't, my OCD's going to go mental.Kelly Molson: Okay, well let's test this, so yeah, if you want to listen to a bit more about this topic, then Conversations Worth Millions is what you type into Google and as Roy said, you should find everything that you need. One last question for you, I always ask all of our guests to recommend a book, and it can be a book that you love, just you love it personally, or it could be a book that's kind of helped shape your career on some way, so have you got a recommendation for us today?Roy Murphy: Can I just make one small comment before I tell you what book it is? My second unpopular opinion is that you can't read too much.Kelly Molson: Okay, yeah.Roy Murphy: I'm a doer, don't ... my final parting shot on that is don't just consume, create. I'll leave it there, however-Kelly Molson: Yeah, no do you know what? I agree, and don't just read self-help books, I think there's a lot of people who consume self-help business book one after the other, go read some fiction as well, and mix it up.Roy Murphy: Speaking of self-help, I've got one for you. Kelly Molson: Good.Roy Murphy: You'll like this. Okay so this one has got ... it's a bit of a mouthful for a name, it's brand new, don't know if you've seen it, so this is the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, have you seen it?Kelly Molson: No, I haven't.Roy Murphy: Okay, so I'll give you a quick pre-see of what it says on the back cover. So it says getting rich is not just about luck, happiness is not just a trait we are born with. So in essence what this is, is Naval is very famous on Twitter, he's a VC and a bit of a lifestyle guru and so on, and a tech guru too, he wrote quite a ... again, famous tweet about a year-and-a-half ago on why getting rich isn't just about money, it was a massive Twitter thread of maybe, I don't know, 15 tweets. Someone took those tweets and turned them into a book, which I thought for a couple of reasons was fantastic.Roy Murphy: First of all, to be able to spin a book out of 15 tweets is really interesting, and actually the lessons in it I think are actually quite powerful, so that's my recommendation. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Kelly Molson: Great. Good. That is a good choice. As ever, if you would like to win a copy of this book, we offer it as a prize, so all you need to do is head over to our Twitter account which is Skip The Queue if you just search for that on Twitter, and then if you retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Roy's books," then you will be put into a prize draw to potentially win it. Kelly Molson: Roy thank you, I've really enjoyed this chat. Thanks for coming on and for sharing your knowledge about this topic. Please, everyone, go and subscribe to Roy's podcast the Conversations Worth Millions. If you are interested in what we've been talking about today, it's a wealth of knowledge there, and I would definitely check out Roy's website too. Thanks for coming on.Roy Murphy: Thanks a lot, Kelly, it's been a pleasure. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us, and remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

You've got a new product ready to launch. What's the best way to come out of the gate strong and see immediate ROI? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Mindful Marketing founder Jordan West shares the details of a gated launch strategy he's used many times to nail new product launches. In addition to his work as an ecommerce marketing agency owner, Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who owns three successful ecommerce businesses (with plans for more in the works!). He isn't just advising other companies on how to market their businesses—he's in the trenches building his own businesses as well.  In this episode, Jordan gets into detail about what he's done to build customer communities, how he stays top of mind with his customer base, and why the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out) is a powerful tool to use in building momentum around new product launches. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit the Mindful Marketing website Get Jordan's launch checklist Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jordan West, who is the founder and CEO of Mindful Marketing. Welcome to the podcast, Jordan. Jordan (00:24): Hey Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. Kathleen (00:29): You are a fellow podcaster, which I love and it's just easier, isn't it? I don't have to tell you, you know, to silence your cell phone and things like that. Amongst many other things. Jordan (00:44): Oh, I would have appreciated you to though because I don't think I did silence it. Kathleen (00:48): Well, you can be forgiven just this one time. No, you're, you're a fellow podcaster. You are a marketing agency owner, which I was for 11 years. I feel like we probably could do about 10 or 20 podcasts together about any array of topics, but we're going to start with what I think is a really great one today, which is a big success that you had. Before we go into that though, can you tell my audience a little bit more about yourself as well as what mindful marketing does? Jordan (01:20): Yeah, totally. I'm the CEO of a marketing agency. I also run three brands as well. My wife and I own and run three brands. So to me, I actually normally get introduced on that side. So it's fun to be introduced in the agency side. I don't wanna just have to slip it in at the end, you know, like I, I love that. That's, that's wonderful. Cause mostly people want founder stories when I, when I come on podcasts. So so I'd love to actually tell you the story though, of sort of how I got into business. So I was 20. Kathleen (01:52): Four businesses! Like we, we might have to talk about like how you cope with the crazy, because that is a lot of work. Jordan (02:00): Yeah. I mean, and we're doing two acquisitions right now, too, so. Kathleen (02:05): Wow. Oh, okay. Yeah. So what's your story? How did you wind up doing all of this? Jordan (02:10): So, okay. So I was 23 years old. I was a paramedic and a painter. So painting houses, being a paramedic, doing the part-time paramedic thing. And I really wanted to learn business. So my family actually had had a business. We had a, a mill and they wouldn't let me come in and learn business there. They're like, no, no, we don't want family involved. I'm like, Oh shoot. Okay. So I looked on Craigslist and I found a Mexican chain restaurant, a taco Del Mar for sale. And I'm like, Oh, okay, this is great. It was for sale for $35,000. All everything included. I'm like, Oh, this is incredible. Okay. I'm a learn business. And this like, what's the worst case scenario. I'm going to lose $35,000, like a big deal. Right. I mean, at 23 years old, actually 35,000 was a big deal. Kathleen (03:00): Chump change when you're just starting out. Jordan (03:02): No, totally. But I thought I'm like, okay, well that, that wouldn't be that bad. Well, the worst case scenario after five years was that we lost about $150,000. So we did not have to lose. I just remember having these lines of credit from every possible place. My father-in-law my dad, like all these places just to keep this thing afloat. We finally sold it for $25,000 at the end of it. And it was a very tough learning experience, but I'll tell you, I wouldn't be here without it. I absolutely would not be here without, I remember before my grandpa died, who was big in business. He said, he said, Jordy, you know, nobody who I respect doesn't in business. Doesn't go bankrupt. At least once I'm like, okay, good. I'll consider that my bankruptcy without actually going bankrupt, waiting those seven years, you know, for my credit to, to, to resolve. So, so that's really, that was the beginning and, and that could have been the end. You know, if I, you know, didn't actually stick to it. And so we had, this is about seven years ago now we had our first child Daphne and she we decided to try cloth diapers. We thought, Oh, this is going to be great. You know, we're going to save a bunch of money. Use cloth diapers, be good on the environment. Yeah. I mean, we were just absolutely great people. Kathleen (04:17): I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it when I had my son. Jordan (04:24): Well we tried for, you know, I mean about three months, but my, my wife was trying to put leggings over top of her and no leggings would fit. And so she was she came from a fashion design background and she's like, Oh, I can whip up a quick pattern, like no problem. So she put them on and she's like, huh, I wonder if anyone else is having these issues. And so she brought these leggings you know, she just bought fabric online, brought these leggings to a market and people loved them. She was already selling jewelry at the time. And so she's like, Oh, I'll just add leggings on. And the leggings started to sell out every single market. And so then we put them on Etsy. This is back in like, I think 2014, we put them on Etsy and they, they would just sell and sell and sell. Jordan (05:01): And we're like, this is incredible. So we started a Shopify store and we started to get men home sellers around where we were. Right. So we'd, we'd actually cut out the patterns at home, in our garage. And we bring them to all of our home sewers and, and and so that was really the growth of our clothing company. And now obviously we, you know, we have manufacturers and all that sort of stuff. We're sort of like mid seven figures with that company and growing very, very rapidly now. And so the baby brand is Little and Lively and then we've got, we're actually, we're doing a huge rebrand right now, but The Kindred Clothing co is the women's line. And we also have a new pajama brand that we're launching called Pretty Laundry. Yeah. Yeah. So those are, those are kind of the fun ones on that with that core business right now. Jordan (05:50): So throughout all of that, my wife and I realized you know, we're not awesome working together day to day. It just didn't work. And the, the one thing that I was really good at was the marketing side I could execute on, on on the paid, especially in, in paid media really, really well. And so, you know, I started doing consulting for people and I'm really like it, I'm not a Saint, but I just couldn't charge people. I just, it was just so hard for me to charge people or even charge like what I was worth to, to them at the time. So, you know, I charged like 500 bucks a month or something to run these paid media campaigns for people. And and I realized one of the lessons that I learned to talk about more was bringing in a business partner, especially a partner who does the things well that I don't do it. Jordan (06:34): So I brought a business partner in and and since then I think that was 2017, 2018 I don't know, time, just, just blurs and you're having fun. Totally. And so since then, now I think we're a team of 15. Now we just keep hiring right now. So so yes, the team has grown. We're not, you know, a massive agency or anything, but but a really, really great team of super efficient. We work mainly with e-commerce brands. Actually, sorry, mainly we only work with e-commerce brands. Can't even imagine if a non e-commerce brand came in. So we work with, with seven and eight figure e-commerce brands, mostly running paid media that we're adding services within that vertical all the time. And then, yeah, and then on the, on the other side, I'm the kind of an acquisition mode buying up kind of one to $2 million brands that hopefully we can scale into eight figures. And it's just, that's, that's my life. Kathleen (07:28): I love this story. And, and when I said in the beginning that we probably could do lots of podcasts on lots of different topics, cause we both owned agencies and things like that. I didn't realize that you owned your agency or you owned your businesses with your wife and I, when I had my agency for 11 years, my business partner was my husband. So we could do podcasts together on those topics. Jordan (07:53): I feel like that's even, that'd be even harder at an agency. There's so many more people issues. Kathleen (07:58): We were like two businesses in one. And much like you and your wife. We had to figure out how to run our business in ways that we did not overlap. So literally our offices were at the polar opposite ends of our office suites that we'd have as little in-person contact, not cause we couldn't stand each other, but because we spend the rest of our time together, right? So like when we were at work we were like, let's be far apart. And then we, we, we, I ran the digital marketing side of our business and then we actually sold promotional products, which is the side of our business that my husband ran. So they were like two businesses in one. Jordan (08:28): Those are two totally different businesses. Kathleen (08:30): Perfect, perfect division of labor for us. But we, I always say whenever anybody asks, that my proudest accomplishment in life is that I owned a business with my husband for 11 years. And I'm still married to him. Jordan (08:42): That is good. That's something you should be very proud of. Kathleen (08:44): I am. So anyway, I, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about today, but I just wanted to mention it because, you know, you don't come across people very often who've had that much experience working with a spouse and we are a small and unique and probably pretty crazy tribe. Jordan (09:00): Yeah, totally, totally. We should probably start like a Facebook group or something, you know, just for support. Kathleen (09:05): So one of the reasons that I was excited to talk with you was that, you know, we first met because of the world of e-commerce because in my day job my company does things that have to do with e-commerce and we started talking about e-commerce marketing and this and that, and you have had some particularly successful campaigns and things that you've run one of which was a big launch that you did that got amazing results and you have a particular strategy around that. And so that's, that's what I love sharing on this podcast is who's getting great results and how are they doing it? So let's back up and, and talk a little bit about what was the launch and what it is that you were trying to do. Jordan (09:49): Totally. So just to be clear, this launch was for our baby and women's brand. So for Little and Lively and Kindred, so it was our fall winter launch. So we generally launch almost all of our products on one day where people can finally purchase. So we do about a two to three week lead up to that with content, letting them know sort of what we're going to be releasing over the years. And we've been around for five years now, we built up a really loyal following that we'll generally when we release something we'll purchase. So so what, what we've done though, is we've really tried to create some hype around this and real hype, right. Real hype and real what's, what's the word I'm looking for? Like feed, you know, fear of missing out yeah, all like all of that around, but without like scarcity, but not false scarcity. Jordan (10:41): Right. We manufacture everything still in Canada. And so that's, that's very difficult to know exactly how much to manufacture, because it does cost a lot more to manufacture here. It's just one of our core values. So we're, it's not something we're going to get away from. So people know that you know, of, of items that are popular, which we have no idea until they buy them. What's going to be the most popular item. Otherwise we just make more of those. We don't know what's going to sell out and what's not going to. So generally during launches, people already know that we're going to sell out. So we've created a VIP community over the last year. So the VIP community consists of a Facebook group and an SMS list. So those are kind of intertwined together. And we call those our VIP our VIP customers. Jordan (11:23): And they know by being on those lists, that they're going to get early access to certain sales like this. So I got this idea years ago and I only implemented it this year. I got this idea from a book by Jonah Berger called Contagious. And he talked about this fashion brand that that was really struggling and they decided to password protect their site. And then they would give the password out only once a week and then they'd sell out every single time. And I thought, you know, why don't we do that? Why don't we try that? And so they just rebranded, they were selling all the same stuff. They were struggling almost going bankrupt. And then they turned it into this massive brand because they created this hype around the brand. Right. And sort of, re-imagined what it looked like. Jordan (12:08): And so we weren't, we were already on our way to, you know, being a hundred percent year over year then sales, but I'm like, how can we, how can we create this kind of hype around this? And so we did that exact thing for 12 hours before the before we released the product. And I remember there's no discounts, no sales anything like that. This is just new product that people were paying full price for. We password protected the site for 12 hours before, so nobody could get on people on the VIP group. You know, there's probably 50 posts that people like, Oh my gosh, I can't wait. I can't wait. And we'd have launches before that were pretty successful, but like maybe 50 grand, which is great. I mean, that's still a great launch, but we had no clue what this, what this type of launch was going to do. Jordan (12:54): And we have replicated it since. And so we so we, you know, password protected the site, gave people right at 10:00 AM Pacific the password. And I looked on Google analytics and immediately I see like 3000 people on the website. Kathleen (13:08): Oh, wow. Jordan (13:09): Oh my gosh. Not like 3,500. And then we just see the sales come in. And it's like, I think in the first hour it was something like a hundred thousand dollars in the first hour of sales. And we're like, Oh my gosh, I can't like, we couldn't even imagine. So for two hours, people had to enter a password to get in. There's some incredible things that happen when when you make people want it like that. Right. First of all, there's the whole FOMO idea, right. Which is like, FOMO is not going away. Everyone has this, this fear of missing out. Jordan (13:43): There's the idea of exclusivity, right? There's also, I think the thing that I love the most is micro-commitments right. They have now made this micro-commitment and they've, they've made I remember somebody told me this term years ago, and I just thought they were such a nerd. I love this term now. It's a Rubicon, right? It's something that you can only go through. Right. You can only go one way through and you do not want to leave. Right. You don't, as soon as you've, you've made it through that you know, through that gate, you don't want to leave that gate. And I think that's the psychology behind it. Right. So, and why the gated launches do so incredibly well. We've replicated it twice since then. And every time it's results that are, that are very similar to that, essentially, we generally just sell out of everything during the gated portion of it, which then just self-perpetuates right. People join the VIP group. People join the SMS list because they know that they want that early access. Kathleen (14:43): So, all right. I have a lot of questions. Let's back up. Jordan (14:47): No I've talked all about this so I'm done. Kathleen (14:49): No, it's great. That's great. There's so to unpack here, so this sounds like a good strategy. When you have something kind of big you want to announce whether that's like a new season of clothing, or it could be a new product you're launching, or, you know, what have you, I can, I can envision lots of uses for it, but it sounds as though you started with building your list of let's call it most ardent brand enthusiasts or your brand loyalists in the VIP group. So you had that before you did this, correct? Jordan (15:22): Yes. Yes. So we've been building that for a good year and we'd been doing launches to them, but we would just tell them early, right. We wouldn't password protect the site. We would just tell them early, or we'd give them like a special discount. Kathleen (15:35): And how did you determine, like, how did you build that list? Was it invitations? Was it marketing of it? How did you get people onto that list? Jordan (15:44): That brings up another great strategy or tactic that we've been using for a while now? So every new purchaser somebody who has never purchased from us before the first time, they actually get a personalized video from one of our staff that by name, thank them. They tell them what they ordered. Like, Hey, hope you enjoy your, you know, leggings in floral. If you want to learn more about the brand, do you want to ask some questions, join our VIP group. So that's where we invite people to the VIP group right there. Kathleen (16:14): I love that you do a personalized video. That is, it's such a simple thing that is so easy to do. And I can't even imagine, it must be like a fraction of a percent of companies think to do something like that. And it has such a big impact. You must get great responses from it. Jordan (16:33): Oh yeah. And it's really hard to actually measure the entire impact of it. Right? Like the, the brand, it's hard to measure what that brand loyalty looks like and the brand sentiment. But it's something we're going to do forever. We're not going to stop doing this. I've told some you know, on our podcast and our agency, I've talked to massive brands about this and they've just started doing it because they realize how incredible it is to, to just start doing it and start letting people know, like, people don't want to buy products anymore. Right. They want to buy from brands. They don't want to just buy some random product. I mean, go to Amazon, if you just want to, I don't know, buy toilet bowl cleaner, but if you want to buy the most incredible toilet bowl, cleaner in the world, that's surrounded by the toilet bowl. People, you know, build a brand. Right. That's, that's really what it's about, and brands have to have people involved in them. And so that's why I think that it works so well. Kathleen (17:26): So do you have somebody who is assigned to be like your community manager? Jordan (17:32): Yeah. So in this case we actually have so for the videos we actually use virtual assistants who we have worked with on the agency side and on the brand side awesome people. I've worked with them for ages. They're essentially just full-time employees for us. They'll just actually do the videos. We tried to get in-house staff to do the videos and they would take like five minutes on each video and be like, I don't look super good. I dunno, like, no, this isn't gonna work. So and then as far as community management, believe it or not, that's something that my wife and I do that is one place where I truly believe that it is worth us doing that on, is managing that community. I've seen communities thrive especially in the digital marketing space. So I don't know why I've talked about this a lot recently. I think it's cause I'm sad about it. But Digital, Digital Marketer like Ryan Deiss and those guys, they had an incredible community for years. I pay a hundred dollars us a month. Literally. I never went on the platform. I don't think I've been on digital marketers platform in like four years, but I was paying a hundred dollars a month just to be a part of that community. And that community is dead. Absolutely dead. Kathleen (18:42): Do they still have their Facebook group? Cause I was a part of that. Jordan (18:45): Yeah. It went from 12,000 people to 3000 and nobody ever posts. The posts are garbage. It's not a great community and I think they've made, you know, they had incredible people in there who went on to - Susie, I forget what her name is. She went on to work for Facebook afterwards in building communities and, and became a real expert in that. And they have just it's dead. And to me, I look at that as a, as a warning of being like, no, that, and so I stopped paying. I'm out. And that was the only reason I was here for all these years. Cause that's when I first started learning digital marketing, I became part of digitalmarketer.com and, and it's awesome. I love those guys. I've done presentations for them and stuff and but I think that they've really missed the mark on that. And so I use that as a warning to me, with our community, making sure that like that, to me, that's the $10,000 an hour stuff is, is being a part of that community. Kathleen (19:44): Oh, I mean, and, and you certainly don't have to sell me on that. I'm a huge believer in building community. I was, I spent two years at a company called IMPACT that has a 5,000 plus member Facebook community that I was involved in growing when I was there. It is such an investment that you're making, like a long-term investment when you build community. It's an asset for your business. Jordan (20:09): It is, it is. And it's interesting. Cause I'm looking at these two acquisitions that I'm making in the outdoor space right now. The reasons why I love them so much as they have massive communities and engaged communities, I'm like, you don't know, they don't know what they have. Right. They don't realize how to leverage those communities afterwards. Right. I think that there's ways that you can leverage your communities. Especially like, I looked through them and they're not doing some of the things that we're doing and I'm like, Oh, I see the value in this, in these communities are like 10,000 person communities, ones on Slack even, which is even bigger in my opinion than a Facebook group. So yeah. Kathleen (20:48): Cause you, you own your platform on Slack. I totally agree with you. Yeah. Oh, this could be again, a whole nother podcast on community building. I love this. So you built your community and I liked that you used the video, the videos that you sent as a way of funneling people in and then what was the SMS component? Jordan (21:10): What we were finding is that people at first didn't have SMS attached. We did not want to do SMS. We're like, you know, people don't want to hear from us via text. Like nobody wants to get that text from a brand, but we realized that people actually weren't seeing the notifications on Facebook, right. Because groups, I mean, groups still, I think, have the biggest reach, right? If you have a big community you're going to get the biggest reach, the biggest bang for your buck, I think within a Facebook group, still with the algorithm, but that, that may go away at some point. So we said, Hey, if you guys want to make sure that you get the benefits of being part of the VIP group, sign up for our SMS list. And so I think that's really been, that's really been the magic ticket of actually getting that direct response within the Facebook group, the rest of the community building, which you know all about. Jordan (21:56): Right. The other portion of that too, on the Facebook group side, sorry, I'm jumping around here on the, on the Facebook group side. It's incredible to get the feedback from customers. So we'll often just ask them before we release something like, Hey, what do you guys think about this? We almost released something at Christmas that like 90% of people and who knows there could have been some groups thinking this, but like 90% of people said, no, we hate this. Like really, like we had like 200 comments on on one of the graphics that people said, no, we do not like this. And so we had to go back to the drawing board and release new graphics. And luckily we hadn't, Kathleen (22:33): When you say graphics, is this like your ad, your ad creative, or because that's a cool idea if you're able to test things like that. Jordan (22:41): Actual graphics on shirts. So one of the things that we do within the the baby clothing company and the women's clothing company is so we produce all the actual garments, but we'll do graphics as well. And and so luckily there wasn't something that we'd invested in. Yes. Was those graphics, but people said no. And then we showed them two more graphics and they're like, yeah, we love those. That's interesting. Yeah. Really good to get that feedback. Just, there's so many different ways that you can leverage those groups. Kathleen (23:12): So you have the, the launch that you're planning and you've got your group that you can message and that is, am I correct? That's on Facebook. Jordan (23:19): Yes. Yeah. Kathleen (23:20): And then, okay. And then you have the SMS list. So how far ahead of time do you start messaging about the launch and what does that cadence look like? Jordan (23:31): It depends. If it's a big launch, we're going to start messaging two to three weeks before. Right. Cause we're in, at that point, I mean with, with apparel, I think that most brands are probably doing something similar to we're doing. That's sales season for us. Right. So we're launching sales throughout that, like just getting rid of all that inventory. We have to carry so much inventory. And that's just part of, that's just part of apparel. So we're, we're, you know, doing sales along with showing people what the new collection is going to look like. Right. so that's about two to three weeks out and we're going to let them know if you want early access, join these groups. Right. So in our emails, we're going to include links to SMS and to the VIP group. So that's it, generally. For, for other launches, it'll be about a week before that we're going to let them know. We also don't want our sales to completely drop off before that. That just makes it a really difficult time for our staff to fulfill orders. We still do in-house fulfillment. So that does take, you know, quite a, quite a good amount of time for them to fulfill orders like that. Kathleen (24:32): And then, so I assume you're regularly messaging folks leading up to it. How often do you hit them on SMS? Well, on SMS and in the group, like how often are you posting about the launch? Because there's, I feel like there's a fine balance, right? Jordan (24:47): It's not a lot. It's not, we're not, we're not, we're not posting every single day about the launch. We'll do like maybe once a week, we're kind of reminding them, Hey, we're going to be doing this launch or we're doing it sort of subtly like showing them like, Hey, here's, you know, one of the things that, one of the new items that we're going to be launching that sort of thing, or we'll just make a monster post that shows them all of the different things or links to the look book. Like when we release a new collection, it's like 500 skews, right. Five between five and 600 skews. So there's a lot of different products that we're launching. So those posts get a ton of reach and a ton of action on them, especially with people clicking links to go over to a look book or whatever that is. Jordan (25:24): So, but we're, we're not banging people over the head that I feel like would start to people would not enjoy that. And then they would stop being a part of our community. And, and also we don't like, we really don't want people to think we're just about revenue, right? We're not just about selling things to people. We genuinely want people to be happy. Like we have at all of our brands and we will continue with the, with the new brands will have return policies where we're paying for everything back and forth. We just want people to be happy because if they're not, and we, we at the, on the customer service side as well, we have this idea that even the customer's not always right, but we're always going to say yes. So we just don't say no, because it, it costs us so much more. They think that they're right, right. It doesn't, it doesn't really matter whether they're right or not. Like recently somebody, you know actually this is probably a good year ago now they sent us a picture of a ketchup stain and they said, yeah, I can't get this ketchup stain out. I want to return it right now. Just keep it, we'll send you a new one. Kathleen (26:24): Oh wow. That's like, I feel like that's almost like the LL Bean return policy of the days of, of before where like, it was like a lifetime thing. Jordan (26:33): And that's exactly, that's where we got the idea from right. Was from, from them. And I don't care how much it costs and if people take advantage of it, because the brand equity that we get from that is, we're so much more the, the, the not accepting those returns, that's just small thinking, right. That's this years thinking that's not 10 years from now and building a big brand thing. Kathleen (26:57): Right now. I really want to check out your store because it sounds so awesome. So talk me through the results. It sounds like you've done this a couple of times. Talk me through the results you get when you do this kind of a strategy. Jordan (27:12): Yeah, totally. So we just had another one. I think the last one we did was in November, December, this was actually after black Friday. So December generally is our worst month of the year at this company. And we're like, okay, we've got to figure out how we can get better December sales. So we're like, ah, okay, let's launch of our bigger promos. It's like three leggings. We call them Kindred surprise cause Kindred is our company. And so it's this three legging bundle. They don't know what they're going to get in it. And people love this promo. We only do it twice a year. And so we launched that one and I think in the first we actually just sold out. So it didn't. So we did about 150 K in the first day. And then we just sold out. Jordan (27:55): It was an awesome promo, really helped our December out in incredible ways. And it just kind of kept the ball rolling for all of December. Kathleen (28:04): And then, is there anything you do kind of after you run the launch to follow up on it? Or is it just really like then onto the next one? Jordan (28:14): The great thing about a VIP group as well on Facebook in particular is that people do the promoting for you, right? What will happen? And we didn't promote this at all. People just started doing this. They started screenshotting their cart afterwards and being like, Oh my gosh, look at all this stuff I got. So there'll be like 40 posts of people talking about the different things that they got with a ton of comments on each one of them showing what, what they got, which then you know, incentivizes other people especially with, with the whole FOMO idea, being like, Oh my gosh, they got all this stuff. That's incredible. And it's, it's user generated content that we're not even promoting. Right. It's just going, like every post in our VIP group will generally reach like 3000 people. So like we're getting like 10 to 20 posts a day in a regular time that reach 3000 people that's like, and that's user generated content that has nothing to do with us. We don't promote that. Nothing. Kathleen (29:12): So how large, can I ask how large the VIP group is? Jordan (29:15): I think it's only 10,000 people. Kathleen (29:17): That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Jordan (29:20): I think so. Considering we've only been growing it for about a year and a half. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, I think it's a great community and our SMS list is about the same size too, not massive. Like these aren't huge lists that we're talking about, but I think that those customers, right, when you create loyal customers and we've been talking about this for years and actually Digital Marketer, speaking of, did an incredible job, Ryan Deiss of walking through what the customer journey looks like, right. Everyone thinks the customer journey stops at purchasing. It's goes so beyond that, right. To, to the place where like, you know, the eighth step of the customer journey is they are your brand advocate, right. When somebody posts a complaint on the VIP group, it gets flagged immediately, immediately somebody flags. And those are our advocates, right. That are like, Hey, I understand you've got an issue. They flag it. And they say, talk to customer service about this. We don't have to do any of that for us. We've got this 8,000 or eight to 10,000 person army. That's doing our promoting for us. Right. So we've actually been on, on the paid ad side. We've actually had to spend less or the money that we're putting into paid ads. We're trying to build our community and our lists even more. Kathleen (30:25): No, I think doesn't Ryan Deiss refer to it as the Value Journey Canvas? I've seen that model before. It's really great. So cool. So you, do you also help other like online retailers to do launches? Is that part of what, how you advise them? Jordan (30:45): It's actually part of our, at our, at our agency, it's part of the strategy portion, right? One thing that we discovered really early on, and I don't know how many B2B people are in this, but like one thing we, we really realized is that results mattered maybe like a quarter to people. Right. Whereas results are kind of like the baseline when you're working with an agency, right. You have to have results, but strategy and relationships are so important to maintaining clients long term. And so for us, we really try and break up what we charge right. Based on strategy and then also an execution. And I think that that's really important and I'm sure, you know, from, from being in the agency world but that's really important that people know, like, look, you're getting strategy along with us. And that's really part of the longterm strategy that we have with clients is like, Hey, you're not going to run a gated launch tomorrow. Not unless you've been doing all the things I've been saying, but let's get you to the point where you can run a gated launch. Kathleen (31:47): Yeah. And I remember from my days as an agency owner, you're, you're spot on that. Like even if you have an amazing call it overarching marketing strategy, you still need to introduce new, littler strategies, like every quarter every month, what have you done to keep people excited, to keep the momentum feeling as though there's momentum? Yeah, there always has to be something new. Jordan (32:10): We've actually, we've actually built out a whole, we use monday.com as our project management tool. Very similar to ClickUp if people out there, you know, wondering about that. So on Monday I've actually built out a strategy board that every, because I don't, I can't manage accounts. Right. Impossible. But I've, I've kind of given over that strategy to our account managers. So we have, I think it's something like 65 paid ads, strategies with loom videos of each, every single strategy so that clients can actually see. So it's a shared board that the clients and our ad account managers see so that they can then you know, on the ad account management side, it's awesome. Because sometimes you'll be like, just bang your head against the wall. Like, Hey, what am I doing? Like, am I just running dynamic product ads? Or like what, like, you know, what's working right now and now they can go and be like, Oh, okay. So Facebook, you know, a level one strategy is this. And then the clients can also see it. And it future paces clients. I mean, our churn is so low at this agency because of I think it's the future pacing along with relationships. Kathleen (33:16): Oh, that's great. And because agency, life can be very brutal if it's not going well. Jordan (33:22): Yeah. I mean, you can have, yeah, yeah. It can be, yeah. It can be terrible. I really prefer the product side to be honest. Yeah. Kathleen (33:31): Yeah. I can see why. Well, that's awesome. I love that strategy. I love that you built a community in order to facilitate it. Anything, any kind of like last words of advice, things you wish you knew when you got started that you would say to somebody, if they were thinking about doing this now themselves. Yeah. Jordan (33:51): I mean, on the gated launch side, I just say start a community right now. Right? Like as soon as you can start a community, give tons and tons of value. Especially at the beginning, like we were asking questions every single day, right. People want to give their input, especially in our space you know, moms who are struggling and, and you know, maybe first-time moms just ask questions, be involved, really be just think of your business. You're human to human, right. You're not direct to consumer. That is not what you are. You are a human selling to another human at a craft show at wherever. Just think of it like that. Kathleen (34:27): Yeah. I love that advice. All right. Well, we have to shift gears now because before we wrap up, there's always two questions. I ask all of my guests and I want to make sure I get your answers. The first one is, of course this podcast is all around inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really like setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Jordan (34:51): That's a good question. That's a good question. Did you prep me with this one? I feel like you did prep me for this. Kathleen (35:00): That's all right. There's lots of people that I prep and they read it and then they still don't have a good answer. So you are not alone. Jordan (35:06): You know what? I actually, it's interesting. Cause I told my sales team about to follow these people recently because I think they're doing an incredible job inbound and that's Interview Secrets. They are, I forget what their names are. The owner Margie is one of them. They have a huge podcast, like gets you onto podcast agency. And they run just the most incredible inbound strategy that I've seen because I really believe that in the, in the business to business space it's all about podcasts. These days, podcasts and YouTube shows, right? Like we've grown our agency just doing that. And so those guys that interview secrets go get into their Facebook group, they have an awesome community and they just give value all the time. Kathleen (35:55): I will definitely have to check that out because I'm clearly drinking the podcast Kool-Aid and, and you mentioned that you have a podcast. So quickly, what is the name of your podcast? Jordan (36:04): Yes. So ours is called Secrets to Scaling Your E-commerce Brand. Kathleen (36:07): I love it. So if you're an e-commerce or you're, or you're e-commerce curious, just check it out. Second question that I always ask everybody is, you know, marketers are constantly saying to me that one of their biggest pain points is that trying to keep up with all the changes in the world of digital marketing, particularly things like paid ads where you really specialized, it's like drinking from a fire hose because it changes so quickly. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up to date? Jordan (36:34): Ooh, good question for I'm going to answer that. First of all, that, that if you focus on offer and creative, thing, don't change. They really don't. IOS 14 - big deal. You still have to have good offer and good creative you're targeting. Like for me, targeting is number five, right? It's the least important. It's the thing everyone wants to talk about. And the thing that matters the least because if you don't have any of the other stuff, it just doesn't matter. Right. so as far as where I get my advice, honestly our account managers are the ones who are doing, they're having calls every single week with their Facebook reps. That's, that's really where we're getting the most on the Facebook side. And after that, I'm just looking at my peers, like Ezra Firestone is a great example. He's got great content out there. Digital Marketer is still awesome for the content that they're putting out just in a little, but like I said, they're in a bit of a funk right now. Those would be my, my two places that I would kind of point towards. Kathleen (37:40): Nice. I'll definitely have to check out Ezra Firestone. I know the guys at Digital Marketer and they definitely have lots of great content. So that's also a very good one. So if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about the stuff that you've been talking about, or they have a question, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Jordan (38:00): Totally. So we actually have a checklist that we run every sales launch that we're giving away for free. So it's mindfulmarketing.co/sales-launch-checklist. I know it's a long URL, but man, we get like 20 or 30 downloads a day. So people must actually, it must get in their brains. Kathleen (38:20): That's right. And I will put the link in the show notes. So that will make it really easy. Jordan (38:25): Yeah, totally. And I love to connect on LinkedIn. So most of the conversations that I have start on LinkedIn and end in us chatting. So actually they own, and generally they end other places, but the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Kathleen (38:40): Oh, this is awesome. Jordan, thank you so much for sharing all of your tips with me and my listeners. If you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave this podcast a review so that other folks can find us as well. And of course, if you know someone else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Jordan. Jordan (39:08): Thanks so much for having me. Really nice to be on here.

Greetings Gunn Runner It's time to take a look back at the past year, to decide what worked and what didn't. What is useful and what isn't? Before we get to all that, we're gonna do a review of December. It's all on Celtfather Monthly, show #273 0:14 - PODCASTS December is always the toughest month for podcasting for me. That's because in addition to the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, I have the Celtic Christmas Podcast and I have to create the Best Celtic Music of the Year episode. I can't do that until all of the votes in the Celtic Top 20 are in. So December is a little bit different. There was only one regular episode of the podcast this year. That came out on the first Thursday of the month. The second episode was a Patron Request show. that was a good and long show. This year's Christmas episode highlighted Celtic women playing Christmas music. It was a two hour special, thanks to a Patreon milestone we hit. Fantastic show whether you enjoy Christmas music or not. Meanwhile, I finished up the final two episodes of the Celtic Christmas Podcast. It was a pretty good year, though a bit labor intensive. Again, that's in large part to all of the other podcasts and work I need to do. I'm probably gonna cut back on shows. But we shall see. I'm gonna set some new milestones next year to see if I do more or less episodes. If you love the podcast, look for those in October. I did enjoy releasing the Hang the Holly episodes of the Celtic Christmas Podcast. Stay tuned. I will publicly release them to the feed in the months to come. Planning for the Pub Songs Podcast is getting better. It's amazing how much easier things become when you create a solid plan and plan ahead. There's still a little uncertainty. But I find myself already planning the January episodes. I even recorded one of those already. So I know what's coming. If I can keep that up and fine tune it, this may become favorite podcast. What I don't know yet is what listeners think. The show gets a really good number of downloads. But is it something that gets people excited? Something that makes you want to share it? I'm reading another book on Bing Crosby. He ran the Kraft Music Hall for over a decade. That was one of the most-popular radio programs of the 30s and 40s. I often liken podcasting to the early days of radio. So I'm looking for ideas. While I can offer music that I feel like you will enjoy, I don't have the comedic skills of Bing. Certainly not as a solo podcaster and I don't have the easy ability to add co-host. Hm. I don't know. Maybe I could work out something with Andrew. Honestly, I'd love the Brobdingnagian Bards Podcast to become something more. I just haven't figured out how. And sadly, Andrew and I had trouble the past couple o'months recording a podcast at all. 6:27 - VIDEOS Coffee with The Celtfather came to a wonderful conclusion. We had a bunch of viewers watching the final episode of the season. Season 8 returns on Thursday, January 7 at noon eastern. I'll have to let you know about Celtfather Live. I'm cataloging this BEFORE that show. So I'm not sure about the success. I'll let you know next month. But you can also catch the next Celtfather Live on January 21. All Heroic Gunn Runners will get access to that show. The video single release plan is working great. I have enough videos to release them weekly. I put out "Slainte Mhaith Christmas", "Let's Have a Celtic Christmas", "Kilty Pleasure", and "Hero of Christmas". 8:06 - IN THE STUDIO Oh, the studio. I did not spend much time recording, at least at the beginning of the month. I did write a new tune that I'm gonna try and record, maybe add a guest musician to as well. In fact, it might turn into a hobbit tune with Sam Gillogly. We shall see... I did decide to finish "Wherever I May Roam" though. That song just needed completion. It sounds great. Is it everything I dream it should be? I don't know. But I'm not sure where to go with it. Or how to revamp. The Browncoat Christmas EP I released with Mikey Mason is getting more play than some singles. But it doesn't look to be added to a bunch of Firefly or Christmas playlists. It's just getting light play as of recording this. 9:32 - MERCH I have some new merch packages that I will probably launch in January. If you're into some discounted CDs, keep an eye open. And if you're subscribe to my mailing list, you get a discount code to save 15%. - CELTIC TRAVEL Hooray for a vaccine! I know it's still rolling out. And I will happily get the vaccine as soon as it is available to me. May be I can finally back to planning the Celtic Invasion of Scotland. Sign up at CelticInvasion.com if you want to be one of the first on the list. 9:53 - WEBSITES I updated lyrics for the Irish Song Lyrics website, including: “Rosin the Bow” “The Smial or the Tree” “Hero of Christmas” "Kilkelly, Ireland" "Johnny Jump Up" "Rocky Road to Dublin" 10:06 - SHOWS PLANNED FOR JANUARY THURS: Coffee with The Celtfather, YouTube (Season 7) @ 12:00 PM EST Season 8 will start on January 7. JAN 15: Tucker Brewing Company in Tucker, GA @ 4:30 - 7:30 PM ET JAN 21: Celtfather Live on YouTube @ 8:00 - 9 PM EDT. Tickets $8. JAN 23: Ironshield Brewing in Lawrenceville, GA @  7:00 – 10:00 PM. 10:52 - STATS Mailing list subscribers = 1191 is down from 1194 Celtic Music Magazine = 4027 is up from 4021 YouTube Subscribers = 4907 is up 16 from 4891 Facebook Likes = 3755 is up from 3752 Instagram = 1858 is up from 1856 Spotify followers: 1684 is up from 1670 # Number of listens on Spotify: 7838 is up from 3265 Latest Spotify Single Stats: "Hobbit Hornpipe" released Aug 26: 373 is down from 447 "October Waltz" released Oct 14: 13 is down from 103 "Tough Times" released Oct 21: 69 is down from 163 "The Hero of Christmas" released on Nov 17: 1454 is up from 148 "Firefly Jingle Bells" on Dec 1: 81 "Grandma Got Devoured by Reavers" on Dec 1: 69 "12 Days of Firefly Christmas" on Dec 1: 93 Most-popular songs on Spotify: "Christmas in the Shire" (3K), "Slainte Mhaith Christmas" (2.9K), "Frosty the Irish Snowman" (2.6K), The Widow and the Devil (1.5K), Hero of Christmas (1.5K) Most-popular songs on Amazon Music: "Doctor of Gallifrey" (377), "Hero of Canton" (303), "The Widow and the Devil" (117), "Christmas in Scotland" (97) "Jedi Drinking Song Prequel" (77) Fun Christmas Songs for Kids & Families = 1927 is up from 1762 Last year's playlists from this time last year: Top Irish & Celtic Music: 547 is up from 426 Sci F'Irish Music: 12 Nagians Only: 21 Celtfather Experience: 30 Hobbit Drinking Songs: 4 Firefly Drinking Songs: 122 is up from 101 Christmas Drinking Songs: 36 is up from 29 Joyful Celtic Christmas Music: 89  is up from 83 Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers: 59 Jedi Drinking Songs: 32 14:30 - PATREON Patreon Subscribers: 155 is down from 158 Patreon Monthly Income: $1202 is down from $1221 Thanks as always for supporting my music. Streaming music gives you a quick and easy way to sample all of my music. Digital sales keep my business running. Tips and CD sales allow me to tour. Kickstarter funds physical products like CDs, shirts and other merch. And Patreon funds my songwriting! Join the Gunn Runners Club on Patreon to support my songwriting. You will step behind-the-scenes with new music, bonus podcasts, videos, and live concerts. 15:18 - GOALS FOR 2021 I'm gonna break down last year's successes and then share plans for 2021. Promote one "Hit" song every month. (in videos, podcasts, blogs, on social, mp3 giveaway, in emails). Pick 12 songs. Give away original recording of hit song. Once a month. Mingulay Boat Song. Wild Mountain Thyme. Promote one Coffee event per month FOR NEWBIES. The show AFTER Celtfather Live Encourage and seek a cover of an original song once a month. Take photos for promo purposes. Build up Instagram. Thank you for supporting Sci F'Irish music at Celtfather.com! #CFMonthly

On today's episode of Quiet Light, Dan Ashburn joins us to discuss negotiating terms with your suppliers. Dan is the co-founder of Titan Network, the Mastermind for Amazon sellers, the China Magic, the immersive Mastermind discussed in another episode. Tune in to pick up some awesome tips about how to save cash and boost the overall value of your business. Topics:  How he came up with this concept. Why face-to-face interaction is important. Forecasting sales, inventory requirements, and pay-out per unit. Using market data to help with forecasting. The formula/numbers Dan uses. Making sure your offer is win-win. Timing your requests. Having perseverance when it comes to your requests. Traveling to China. Transcription: Mark:       Shortly after you buy a business, you're obviously looking for any opportunities to increase your return on investment. Sometimes that's through growth, sometimes that's through different ways of cutting expenses. But oftentimes looking at your suppliers and the terms that you have with your suppliers can be an easy way to free up free cash flow or get better terms or be able to even get different rates. But how do you go about actually negotiating those terms? How do you approach the suppliers, especially when the relationship is new? If you're on the sell side, the same sort of questions applies; how do you approach suppliers in a way where you can increase your return on investment by negotiating better terms? Joe, I know you talked to someone about this and have some good tips here. Joe:          Yeah, Dan Ashburn from Titan Network. You know what? Just in the podcast, I'll just tell you right now, Dan goes through a step by step process to basically walk people through what to do, how to do it and get better terms with your supplier. And the ultimate result, whether you've got a straight-up e-commerce business, a Shopify store, or an Amazon business, or whatever it might be, even retailers that are out there importing from overseas. I hear it over and over again that when you make the right connection in the right way with your supplier, you can get better terms. The end result is more cash flow. More cash flow means you've got the ability to buy more inventory as you try to keep up with growth, which is often a good problem to have. But Dan talks about it quite a bit in there. And the piece that is forgotten and not all that talked about is people are always trying to drive top-line revenue. But if you can negotiate better terms with your supplier and then get a better reduction in the cost of goods sold, it's going to boost your overall value as well. Joe:          Hey, folks, Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage, and today, I've got Dan Ashburn on the line with me. Dan is the co-founder of Titan Network and I think China Magic as well amongst another a number of other pretty fancy titles and credits to your LinkedIn profile here that I'm looking at, Dan, but that's as far as I get with fancy introductions so why don't you tell the folks that are listening about yourself and about your background and what you do? Dan:         Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Joe. So, yeah, I'm the co-founder of Titan Network Mastermind for Amazon Sellers, co-founder, and co-organizer of China Magic, which is a trip where we take 100 people twice a year to source products over in China. We've taken over 500 people now and the co-creator more recently of Amazing Selling Machine. And then my team and I are responsible for delivering eight figures in sales on Amazon per year through my brand management agency. Joe:          That's an awful lot. How do you do all that and not lose all your hair? You got a nice head of hair there. So this is a prod for people to go to the YouTube channel as well. Dan:         Yeah, for sure. So I have a good team around me. I've got a good management team. I've got an executive assistant who makes me look really good. And then, yeah, I just got good people around me so it's pretty cool. Joe:          Okay. There are not a whole lot of Amazon sellers that we have on the podcast and that I deal with on a regular basis; I've been doing this for eight years that have a beautiful British accent. So tell me about that aspect of it. You've got; I don't know how many you said in terms of Amazon sellers, 1,600 that you work with or something like that. How many are typically US-based versus Europe based? Dan:         Yeah, it's a great question. I'd still say the majority of the market is in the US. I'd probably say it's a 70/30 split right now. However, Europe is growing and it's growing fast as markets like Germany, etcetera pick up. And if you combine the combined sales volume of Europe to the US, then it's a good opportunity. And Europe is definitely picking up. A lot of the Europeans are obviously using US as their main channel as the US seller are then coming out over into the European market to diversify. Joe:          Okay. So a quick side note before we get into the meat of this discussion is that Amazon has just made it a whole lot easier to transfer a European seller account. So that's real positive news. It doesn't necessarily have to be a stock sale anymore. It can be an asset sale and it's easy to transfer so positive stuff there. But today we're talking about a little bit of your China Magic experience and your China experience in general and negotiating terms with your suppliers to improve cash flow and to improve your bottom line and boost valuations, which is a breath of fresh air because you can't; you wrote that line when we talked about it because most people don't think about valuations when they're working with suppliers and things of that nature but you do. Dan:         Yes. So you've had Scott Dietz on a number of times now. Scott was very much a mentor of mine over the last few years and something Scott really instilled in me is what's good for selling your business is good for building and running your business. So installing that, combined with the challenges that I come across so many sellers have; there's one thing in this business that stops growth and that's cash flow, its cash on hand. We all know there are only three ways really to grow the business, sell more of the same products, sell additional products, or sell the same products in new marketplaces are really only the three ways. All three of those ways take cash and they take cash flow. So we very quickly; my team and I launched this, my team and I really set our minds over the last couple of years to how do we solve this problem for the accounts that we're involved in, the brands that we have stakes in, and the people that we're working with across Titan Network, China Magic, etcetera to really solve this problem. And that's where this working with a supplier to fund that growth, that whole concept really came from. And I'm really proud to say that the last year or so, the last 18 months, we've been getting some pretty impressive results where suppliers are letting us go north percent down, 10% on shipment, 90% two or three months thereafter so it's really positive. Joe:          One of the things I hear often is, yeah, I just got back from a trip from China. I was able to do this. I'm getting better terms here. I reduced my cost of goods sold here. I ate way too much and drank way too much and I feel like I'm a member of their family now. Is that what everybody has to do? Do they have to get on a plane and go to China to meet the manufacturer and supplier or is it just something that helps but there are other ways to do it? Dan:         Look, there are other ways; there are always other ways to do it. You can get this done over a Skype call or a Zoom chat like we're having now but if you're serious about growing the business and you want to go in and get the times that you want, then every time in every case, physically being there in China in the room, staring the person in the face, building a real relationship with that person gets the better result every time. And where we've had a good result virtually, it's always been as a result of following up physically with someone. So we've already been earlier in the year or we may be met them at the last Canton Fair but there's always been that physical interaction. And I think what people underestimate about China is the business culture out there is relationship-driven. It's all about building that relationship. It's all about going and having that male drink and some of the alcohol stuff that they put in front of you to really build up that relationship. And there's so many benefits to that relationship much further beyond payment terms and cost of goods sold even down to stuff like it's coming up to Chinese New Year that productions run is full. And because you have that relationship, they bump you to the front of the production line, which keeps you in stock. Joe:          So let's get to specifics for the audience then. For people that are; and talk to them as if maybe they're your clients, they may be somebody that just bought an Amazon business from Quiet Light Brokerage or they're somebody that listens and is getting expert advice from folks like you. What are the first few steps that somebody should take? And I know this is general information for general people, specific would be if you were talking to one. What do you advise somebody to do? Dan:         Okay, cool. So first off, we need to understand what terms do we need to achieve and what are we aiming for? What's our goal? So the first steps or so of executing this process before you got to China or before you attempt to do this virtually is we need to put together a sales forecast. We need to understand what am I expecting to sell over the next 12 months and include uplift for Q4 based on historical dates or if you're selling seasonal products, make sure you're including all of that uptick and then break down what you plan to order. So once you forecasted those sales, understand what inventory requirements you have and what your current order rate would look like with your supplier over the course of that year. Then figure out with that information what is the payout per unit on your sales? So you need to calculate the Amazon payout per unit after all fees and marketing costs. So within our brands, we work to operating 10% advertising contribution or true A-costs whatever you want to call it. And we factor all of that in and we figure out after storage fees and etcetera, what is our P&L per unit? Joe:          Did you say 10% advertising; is that what that was? Dan:         Yeah. So as a PPC contribution, margin, or a true A-cost; whatever you want to call it. Once we're out of the launch phase and we're in some maintenance we factor in a 10% margin for advertising. Joe:          It's great, we do key financial metrics anytime we list a business for sale and typically see the ad cost somewhere in that 8 to 12, 8 to 15% range so 10% is a good number. Before you go on too far, so you've talked about doing a sales forecast and of course, that leads into inventory need forecast. The question often comes up, what's the best software if there is such software for inventory management and sales forecasts? Do you use some or do you create it with Excel spreadsheets? Dan:         So we keep it simple. We do all of this in Google Sheets. We have adopted a new inventory management system and I'm pretty impressed with it if you wanted to talk about that. But we do all of this in a basic Google Sheet template. And if you want, Joe, I can have that template sent out to your subscribers. But yeah, we just use a Google template, we use a Google sheet and we just manually plotting in numbers, manually forecasting out. It's nothing fancy. If we want to work with someone at more advanced than we'll offset pull in an accountant or a bookkeeper; someone that's more savvy with the numbers. But we're just using historical data to forecast the future 12 months. Joe:          And you're pulling that data from Amazon or from QuickBooks; where are you pulling it from? Dan:         Yeah. Typically, depending on the account that we're working with or depending on whether it's an in-house brand or a joint venture type relationship, we will take the initial data from Amazon. So we'll take your initial sales data. And then if we can sanitize that data with actual validated bookkeeping records, then obviously we will do that. But for the sake of this exercise, it doesn't need to be 100% accurate. This is a forecast and everyone knows; I think what everyone gets is they get that analysis paralysis on forecasts. Because I think what if I don't meet the forecast or how do I know what it's going to sell? You've got to take the best guess and if you haven't got 12 months of trailing data, go use tools like Keeper to look at your number one like for like competitors trailing 12 months of data. Just use data in the market to be able to inform your own self forecast. Joe:          So doing a cash flow forecast or I'm sorry sales forecast leads into what your inventory needs are. You're doing that in Google Sheets and what's next from there? Dan:         So before we can move onto the next stage, we then have to figure out what our payout per unit is, because these three pieces of data, the sales forecast, and the inventory need forecast as you call it, and then the payout per unit factoring in a rough 10% advertising contribution. That gives us all the information that we need to be able to produce an accurate cash flow forecast. So what sellers I find out doing most that aren't taking on external cash or external funding, they're kind of running on this system of hope. They kind of think or hope they'll have the cash in the bank for the next inventory order, but they're not really forecasting enough ahead to say, will I have enough cash on hand to be able to fund my next inventory order to meet demand of growth and not run out our stock at the same time? But without those three data points, without knowing how many you're going to sell, what inventory you need to meet that demand, and what your cash payout per unit is, you can't put together a cash flow forecast. So once you've got those three data points, we then put together our cash flow forecast. So to give you sort of a demonstration of this, we base it on our current term. So let's say typical terms, 30% deposit, and 70% before shipping. That's pretty much most the market. Joe:          Pretty standard. Dan:         Yeah. So we will forecast our cash flow based on those terms for the products that we want to negotiate. So you might have one product with a supplier or you might have 10 but you just do it for the group of products that you're talking about with the supplier. So we'll have the sales forecast at the top of that cash flow forecast. Then we'll have a payout forecast which is based on sales. It's just that payout per unit multiplied by the number of units we expect to sell in that month. That gives us our total cash pile for that given month. We then factor in some fixed costs. So things like employees, software, training, salaries, costs that we know we're always going to have. And then we might factor in some ad-hoc costs like travel conferences, going to China Magic twice a year. God, I'm plugging that. So we factor in those hard costs and then that gives us a forecast month by month, January through December. If we go for the annual calendar year of what our cash on hand looks like. Then we just have to plugin based on what we know we have to order what cash output; what cash outlay do we need to factor in based on 30/70 payment terms. That then gives us an accurate view of where we're going to have a deficit on cash, where we're going to be up on cash, and what that looks like for the next twelve months. Does that make sense? Joe:          It does. You sound like a grown-up here, running a business with real numbers and doing some analysis. Dan:         I'm trying to. Joe:          Congratulations. And that's what you teach the folks at Titan Network as well. You're going through this with them Dan:         Yeah. Joe:          And do you produce video walkthroughs on how to do this with examples? Dan:         Yeah. So we've got like the whole step by step. Within Titan, we have something called masterclasses and we've got an entire master class on supply payment negotiation with all the templates, negotiation, soft scripts, ways of approaching; I'll give you some secret sauce in a minute but even like a presentation that we use to present this information to the supplier, all of that is all inside of Titan. And our Titan members; I mean, the results that we're getting, someone got a 50 grand credit line off the back of this. Joe:          Wow. Dan:         I can't count how many now; it's got to be 20, 30 members in the last few months alone that are getting terms, even just improved terms like 20% down because the raw material costs are quite high, but then they're not paying 40% until 30 days after shipping and the remaining 40% until 60 days after shipping, which means they've been selling the product likely for 30 days before that balance is due, which just opens up so much opportunity because you can afford to sell more product cause you can order more inventory. You can afford to expand into new markets because you can afford more inventories. Or you can afford to launch new products. And for anyone that's doing some serious money in this business, they know launching products is the fastest way to grow it. So, yeah, I mean, the results are quite stellar and we're doing some good things in time for sure. Joe:          It's all good stuff. Everybody listening certainly needs to do it if they're not doing it now. So once you've got all this information, the forecast and estimates and things of that nature what do you do with it? Dan:         So once we've created that cash flow forecast based on our current terms, so 30/70 we then produce a second forecast and we play around with those terms. So the example of I'm looking as a reference in front of me here is 20% deposit, 35% 60 days after shipping, 45% 90 days after shipping. And this is actually a live case study on one of the ASINs that we run. So we will adjust the cash flow to the new terms to then demonstrate what that does for our cash flow. And at this point, this is all internal. This is all internal reporting, preparation to support and enable the negotiation. So I know here, just look, I'll read us some numbers because obviously, I can't cast the screen. On our 30/70 our cash on hand column across the bottom January was in this example 5,000, February is 3,000, March goes into a 2,000 deficit, April goes into a 4,000 deficit because we've paid out that 30% deposit on this inventory order. Joe:          Can you just with those numbers do you have a ballpark total revenue figure as well? I'm just curious. Dan:         Yeah, we do. So down here we've got a total payout figure in this example because we haven't got the retail cost in here. We just track basically what cash flow we receive from Amazon so it's on the end of the column. But if it scales up; this was an example of a new product launch achieving 300 in the first month to a thousand units in the 12 months; very, very conservative forecast. Joe:          Okay, so what happens when you flip this to the new terms that you're trying to achieve? Dan:         So interestingly, the cash outcome; so at this point, we're not forecasting what additional inventory we can get so the cash outcome at the end is the same. So December, for instance, in the 30/70 on this example, the cash outcome for December, cash on hand sorry is 79,000. It started at 4,000. In the after states 20/35/45 again it's 79,000 at the end of the year in terms of cash on hand. But the difference is I don't have a single deficit in my 12-month run because I've been able to achieve better payment terms. So that's sort of step one of this process, cash flow forecasting existing terms and saying where your deficits are and then making sure that you can negotiate payment terms that mean you never run out of cash. You never need to go into any credit line, credit cards, any sort of equity or debt financing, because you're always going to have positive cash on hand to fund the growth of your business. Joe:          So what do you have to say to those people that are listening saying, okay, I got this, I'm just going to ask for these better terms and they don't do this work and they don't do a presentation the way that you want, what it is their supply going to say? Dan:         It's funny, actually, because one of the things we normally go to; this is a typical role play and if I ever talk about this on a stage and you lied and or anything like that, this is how it typically goes. You send an email that goes, hey, I need some better terms. Can I pay you the balance after shipping? The supplier email backs no. You sit there drinking FML like, what am I going to do? Yeah, most people just go give me better terms, a supplier goes no. And if you think about it, these factories; these suppliers, how many brands are asking them daily? How many of their customers because they're supplying hundreds if not thousands of customers. Joe:          Yeah. Dan:         I'm just saying give me better terms. I hope you sat there as a factory owner going well what's in it for me? Joe:          Right. Dan:         You have to answer that question of what's in it for me. It's got to be a win-win relationship. Joe:          Let's get to it then. The next stage is I mean, obviously, you're seeing so no deficits, which is great. The entrepreneur is sleeping better at night. They've got a little more cash for themselves, but also cash to probably buy more inventories which is what's in it for the vendor, right? Dan:         Absolutely. So with everything we do, we have to approach these relationships as a win-win deal. Having been to China more than a dozen times now, I've taken over 500 people. I have been involved in a number of these negotiations at lower levels and much higher levels. It is all about the relationship. It's all about the win-win. And you have to present what's in it for them. Why should they risk that workflow, their cash flow? Because I sense you're asking them to fund your business. Why should they risk that inaudible[00:20:16.2]. So the outcome for everyone has to be a benefit. So the way we do that is there's a five-step process to presenting a win-win. And this is what we break down into a presentation and we've got templates for etcetera. So Step 1 is the opportunity and the conversation that you're trying to get across is there's a big opportunity to make more sales. That's kind of the message you're trying to get across. And the reason it's better to do this in person as well is you can take; if you've got like a logistics manager or sourcing agent on the ground. All of our Titan members benefit from Titan sourcing, so we provide this to them on the fly. But yeah, if you've got that on the ground, you can then have that person translate but also be like an internal ambassador for this process. So step 1, the opportunity. There's a big opportunity to make more sales. Step 2, the challenge. The challenge is I can't order enough inventories to fund and meet the demand of my growth because of cash flow. And that's the challenge that you need to communicate. You can't fund your growth because of cash flow, and that's limiting your ability to grow because your sale is outgrowing your cash impact. I lose sales and as a result, the supplier, the factory that you're dealing with is going to get smaller orders. The solution is better terms so we can order more inventories. The whole objective here is better payment terms, more cash on hand, and allowing you to order more inventory just to grow faster; to compound that growth faster, the benefit, larger orders for the supplier, more sales for us. So that's kind of the five-step story that your supplier, your factory really needs to understand from this process. I'll read… Joe:          Read them off. Yeah, you were just going to do it. Yeah, read them off real quick one more time. Dan:         Opportunity, challenge, impact, solution, benefits. So they really need to understand each one of those points and then we're going to break down exactly how we do that. Joe:          Okay. So look, I haven't been to China before and I want to ask you about that a little bit, but I know that there are benefits for the manufacturer because you're going to be placing more orders. What's their recourse if you don't pay on those notes or is the risk so low because you've been there, you've met with them, didn't rush on building a relationship. Dan:         So you're not going to get this sort of payment terms on your first order. We have, however, had a number of success stories on their first order, even just slight movements like 20/80 on the payment terms or a slight reduction in COGS because we're guaranteeing more orders. We are getting some traction on first orders. This is more for sellers who are probably more your audience, Joe, who are sort of gearing towards exit. I've got an established relationship inaudible[00:22:54.8] the second to third order is kind of the sweet spot that you can start bringing this up. And if you bring it on early in the relationship, every time you place a bigger order, you can revisit these terms, you can revisit the relationship. So for the factory, yes, of course, there is risk involved, but they're weighing up the relationship with you and there are other insurances and stuff that you can bring up without getting too technical. You kept their eyes on ways of ensuring the order and stuff which can give a lot more confidence to the supplier but we don't do that most of the time. It's just purely based on the relationship and your order history. Joe:          Okay, so any more steps after the 5 that you talked about there? Dan:         Yeah there is. So that's the story we've got to present but when it comes to actually presenting that you've got to back that story with data. So they have to believe you and they need to see the numbers for themselves to tick that logical box. You've ticked the emotional box, you've got the relationship. They believed your story. Now you've got to present the data to back your story. So the six-step process to presenting the win-win, one is the growth potential, two is a product by product sales forecast. So that forecast to we produced in the beginning, we're just going to take the sales aspects of it and present that in a nice presentation. We're going to then present the order values to meet that demand and we're going to show them the before and after. We don't get into showing them the internal cash flow or the profit or anything like that. We just show them on the current payment terms this is what we can afford to order, on the new payment terms this is what we can afford to order. And what they're going to say is an order of say, 5,000, 10,000 units but with the new payment terms, I might be able to order 20,000, 25,000 units. So they're going to see a drastic change in the volume of units that you're able to order if they just work with you on the payment terms. Now, once we've done that, there's two other points. We always present what out of stock means. So most factories and suppliers don't really understand what it means when you're out stuck financially from a sales perspective. Sure they're being hammered; you're sort of getting on email, you're getting on Skype, you're doing you thing saying well I need this order, can you push it? Can you put it to the front of your production line and you're sort of pressuring them. But because you're pressuring them so much they're not really thinking about the impact on sales. So you can show the cost of being out of stock from a point of re-launching, lost sales velocity, lost growth. So maybe you've lost a couple of places in rank which has actually brought your growth percentage down, the momentum of growth. And for them, they're not going to be getting as frequent orders because that volume is down, meaning you're not placing as bigger orders. So you can still present the loss to them as well, which is a nice sort of stick to underpin the whole thing. And then finally you go right to solve this problem; this challenge, to order more from you and to recover was it, defend against that potential loss of being out of stock. These are the payment terms I need. And you just present the data to back the story. And it's quite easy, there's a whole template towards it in terms of how we do that. You can use screenshots out of your Amazon seller central accounts to back the data; you can use Keeper screenshots within the presentation as well as just sort of showing screenshots of that spreadsheet you really want to be showing the analytical graphs to back that data because it really gives that visual representation. Joe:          I'm sorry so let's just put in the; so for every 10 people that go through this process and try to renegotiate terms to go through the full process, they do it right. They do the projections. They do everything that you've talked about so far, which I think is eleven steps after they're doing the sales forecast, do 9 out of 10 of them get better terms or 10 out of 10 or 2 out of 10; what are the odds? Just put it into a realistic perspective for the audience. Dan:         So if you are already working with the supplier, you're already in communication. You're not just… Joe:          Yeah, let's assume that somebody has been placing two, three, four, five orders. A lot of people if they hadn't done this, they'd been placing the order for two or three years. Dan:         Yeah, so that person I would be as confident to say that eight in 10 people. I am yet to come across a relationship of that stature that's established with good communication where you won't end up better off. Now, you might not get the terms that you want straight out the gate, but I guarantee if they value your business, which they should do by that point you've got a relationship, you will end up off in a better place. So 90 to 100% of people will end up better off. 80% of people will execute to a point where it impacts customer for sure. Joe:          And this includes a trip to China because you're presenting it in person? Dan:         Yeah, this is like optimum. You've gone to China. Think about how many requests these factories and suppliers get from brands in the west as they say it asking. And then think about the percentage of people that actually get on a flight, fly to China, sit in the office, drink sake and do all that good stuff. That is going to be like 98 and 2%. So who are they going to prioritize? They're going to prioritize those showing real commitment. Business is about commitment. Business is about doing what you said you would do. And I think that's all this is. It's as simple as that. Joe:          Yeah, the 80% of people that have established brands can certainly get better terms with these vendors. Are you seeing; obviously they're ordering more and with higher volume orders comes lower cost of goods sold. How do you negotiate a lower cost of goods sold? Is it strictly volume based or do you make that part of this overall presentation that you're looking for terms and lower COGS at certain levels? Dan:         Yes. So what we do is we hold that conversation. So in any negotiation, you need the person you're negotiating with to say yes a few times. You need to get them to agree and we need to chip away at the yeses. So what we do is we hold that COGS conversation right until the end. So once we've gone through showing the growth potential, the product by product sales forecasts, showing the order values to meet the demand before and after if they give us these terms, the impacts of being out of stock, and then say this is the payment terms we want and always start higher, by the way. Always start higher than you actually need because there will always be a piece of negotiation. They will turn around and say, yes, hopefully. That's the goal. That's our amount in agreement. It might not be what you want, but they might say, well, on this one, we'll give you this and if you meet the demand, then on the next one we'll give you this. We might be a bit of an up curve. We then turn around and just say so now I'm placing a bigger order, I get a better price, right? And you'll find about half the time they'll smile and laugh at you and say, yes, the other half the time they'll say, let's talk about that in the next order. But yeah, you have to put a bit tongue-in-cheek in whether you have to build the relationship, play on the relationship. Joe:          Is this done over dinner or is it done over a desk; how do you see it most often done? Dan:         Typically, it would be done; in most cases, it's going to be over some sort of food environment, some suppliers and factories would like to get the business done and then go for dinner. Most likes to get the relationship piece in first. They want to sort of learn about you, your family. They want to give you some food, take you to lunch. And then during that process, we'll then bring it down to the conversation. Now, it's important to say it won't always happen there and then in the room. A lot of the time you'll present this, you'll throw in that thing at the end that says, so now I'm placing a bigger order do I get a better price and be a bit cheeky with it. And a lot of the time they're going to turn around and say well, look, we need to run our raw material costs. We need to look our production workflow. We need to speak to our internal production manager. We'll get back to you within a few days. So depending on how long you're in China, it could be back when you were in America or back in Europe. You'll jump on Skype and they'll go, okay, cool we've run the numbers. It makes sense. Yes, we can do that. So it kind of happens like a bit of a fluid conversation during the social aspects. Sometimes you'll sit in an office and just get it done. But most of the time it would be over some sort of lunch or something like that. Joe:          I got you. Okay, any other steps that you want to review? Dan:         No, we're good. So really just remember, it's a win-win. Do your internal prep; what they say is the success is in the preparation, success in the planning. Do your planning, and then make sure you're presenting it in a way that presents it as a win to them. And yes, you can achieve this virtually over the internet, but you're going to have 100% better results. And if it's okay, Joe, I've got some examples here, actually. Joe:          Yeah. Dan:         So Case Study 1, 30% deposit, 70% before shipping, after 0% deposit, 100% percent 60 days after shipping. Joe:          That's a beautiful outcome. I can't imagine anybody would be upset about that. Dan:         No, it's cool. That was actually inaudible[00:31:13.0] and my business partner and Sarah, who's head of Titan Sourcing that negotiated that one. The next one was 30% deposit, 70% before shipping after we got a 30% deposit because the raw material costs were quite high on this product, which you have to still work with them on, and then it was 20% percent before shipping. So we pay sort of 50% and then we got 50% percent 30 days after arrival at Amazon FBA, which meant we had 30 days of sales before having to pay the remaining 50%. Case Study 30% deposit, 70% on the approved inspection report. That was a bit of a quality assurance thing there. After we got a 20% deposit, 35% 60 days after shipping, 45% 90 days after shipping so that was a nice one. And then finally, the fourth one and I've got some bonus tips at the end if you want them, Joe, 20% deposit, 80% before shipping. That was the terms we had so it was a bit nicer on the frontend. After we got a 10% deposit, 40% on landing in the USA, and 50% 60 days after landing. Joe:          Wow. Dan:         And these are typical; I can stand there and say now these are just four cases that we've done we've got a whole Titan network full of members that are doing the same. Joe:          Yeah. No, I want to hear about the bonus tips. Also want to hear briefly about China Magic and maybe we can have Athena on to talk about it. Just let me ask; go ahead into the bonus tips and then then I want to talk briefly about China Magic. Dan:         Yeah, sure. Because there's loads of benefits above and beyond obviously COGS and terms. Joe:          Yeah. Dan:         Okay, so tips to success face to face always will produce a better result. They often pay for the trip and that's what you got. Think if you're looking at a cost offset, you'll often get to pay for the trip in the renegotiation. Always ask for more than you need; really important. You probably won't shake hands there and then as I said. Make sure if you come to see the boss, you don't want to be waiting on a middle person or a middle man so they then you have to go and sort of do the translation. You want to be in front doing the deal with the boss. Before you go into that environment, before you even head out to China, if you've got a representative from that factory or you've got a sourcing agent that handles that relationship for you, then get them onside. So run through the presentation with them first so that when they're in the room, they've already done the thinking, they're already standing there, and they can get the buy-in of the boss in the room. Consider consolidating your orders to one supplier. It gives you more buying power. And one thing we're a big fan of in Titan and in China Magic is leveraging an outside adviser. Because then you can play the whole good cop bad cop. If you want to maintain a good relationship you can bring in someone that's like an external advisor to crack the weight a little bit and you can call them your finance person. You can call them whatever you want to. That allows you to do that. And remember, every relationship and supplier cash flow is different so you have to really; don't just tell them what you want, understand what they need, and bring the two together. And this is counter-intuitive but it's often being willing to pay more to achieve the terms especially in the beginning. So one thing you can do is if they're not budging, you can afford to give them a dollar bum pull over here now on a product to get them to nudge on the payment terms which is still going to give you more cash on hand and then come back to renegotiating the COGS once you're up at the higher volume because you've been off to some of the growth. Joe:          I like it. Dan:         And also take gifts as well; take presents. It works. It depends; there are controversial views on this. So Kian Golzari for instance who is a sort of an expert on China Magic everything; he's doing sourcing and product development. Kian loves; he's from Scotland, he's from Edinburgh, he loves taking some Scotch whiskey with him. Other people take chocolate. There's the whole red envelope with some cash in it for the children but that one's a bit more controversial. But yeah, just my advice would be take something that's important; not important but personal to you, and then that creates a talking point and it creates more of a relationship and a bond. Joe:          Okay, that sounds great. I think one of the most important things I see people that are running great businesses and eventually sell them, they're great businesses, do great for buyers. They really have been to China and they always wind up with either better terms or better COGS. It sounds like a scary place to me, though. I've never been so is China a scary place? Dan:         It really isn't. So when I first got involved in the early days with China Magic I went out there as a guest speaker and then ended up becoming a co-organizer with Athena. I thought the same but when you land; if you think like Guangzhou where the Canton Fair is. That's where we go. It's the biggest product sourcing Fair in the world. I think they start setting up 5 million products on display during the Canton Fair. They're used to receiving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of westerners through that fair over the course of 12 months. The airlines are efficient. The flights are cheap. I mean from the US, the flights are $500 on a good day it's $400. Joe:          Wow. Dan:         Yes. I mean, it's really cheap. That's for obviously economy. I got a first-class ticket; I mean first-class pod for two grand. Joe:          Wow. Dan:         So yeah I mean it's cheap. We head out there and we're picked up by a nice comfortable bus and we stay in the Four Seasons Hotel which was rated Forbes Best Business Hotel in the world 2019; the one where we go. So they look after us. We've got five staff service and food, good internet. We then head over to the fair. This isn't a market; there are other markets like Ebru and stuff which are a bit more like rack markets, Canton Fair is a professional establishment. All of the suppliers there are paying serious money to have a booth at this fair. So if they don't speak English themselves, they'll employ English speaking representatives. So you can have a really good conversation there. Sometimes you have to work with a bit of culture and there are definitely cultural barriers that you have to learn, like receiving a business card with two hands and showing that respect. It goes much further and Ken covers all this in China Magic. We go into depth like we spend some of that four hours just going into how to have a conversation with a supplier so that they know you are educated. But yeah I mean, to cut a long story short, it really isn't. Like I walk around in my shorts and my t-shirt, I go down and they've got little smoothie bars now I'm on the streets by the hotel. It's quite a pleasant place. Joe:          Fantastic. How do people learn more about Titan Network and then China Magic and again I think we ought to probably have somebody on for China Magic and what that event is all about because it's; I don't know, it's the next step. I don't know if I would want to go on my own and I assume that you would not recommend that. You go with a group that does this on a regular basis. So tell us about how more people learn about Titan Network and in particular this cash flow management renegotiation, all of the different steps that you've talked about. Dan:         Yeah, sure. So if you want to know more about Titan Network, we're an invite-only membership organization for Amazon sellers. We're going from strength to strength. And the thing about Titan Network is it's created by sellers for sellers. So it's not about any one person's success. It's not like a guru led thing. You can learn it at TitanNetwork.com. That's where you go and learn about Titan Network. And if you feel like you want to find your tribe and your family, then take a look there and you can apply for Titan Network. If you want to learn more about China Magic go to ChinaMagicTrip.com. It's got the full trip details on it. I'm going to give you access to a little special link. If you go to ChinaMagicTrip.com/masterclass we go into a bit more depth on these payment terms upon negotiation stuff. And it's got off-screen shares. You can actually see some of the slides. And that's all out there free of charge so you can go and take a look at that. Yeah, I'd love to do a follow up about China Magic. I'll bring Kian on, I'll bring Athena on and go into the depths of like not just payment terms and cash flow, but how do you build these relationships and how do you find these factories that you're not going to find in Ali Baba, how do you improve the quality, how do you differentiate products in 2020; yeah, we could talk about a lot. Joe:          Well, I think it's a great service to the people that are Amazon sellers or even just not Amazon sellers, other people that sell-off of Amazon need better terms as well. Dan:         Yeah. We're seeing Shopify sellers. We're seeing a lot of these influencers on Instagram that are realizing they've got an audience. If they apply a physical product to that audience, they're going to make money. We're seeing all these guys come along now because it doesn't matter whether you're selling on Amazon or Shopify, physical products are physical products. And to your point about going alone, there are seasoned travelers out there that will have no issue in visiting China themselves. But for me, it's about return on my time, a return on investment on my time so if I can go with 75 like-minded sellers at a similar point the journey led by multiple seven and eight-figure sellers, get shown 30 years' worth of sourcing experience across Marcy, Kian, myself and the team in a couple of days; so condense that learning period, get the COGS on payment terms on it and every single evening mastermind for four hours a night on every single area of the business, that to me is a bigger return on my time than just going over to China myself. So that's kind of my view on it. Joe:          Yeah, if I was in the e-commerce world myself, I'd be in. I'd want to bring my son though so he enjoys the world travel. Maybe in another life, I'm out of the e-commerce business myself. I'm an entrepreneur at Quiet Light Brokerage only. So listen Dan, I appreciate all the time you spent here. I think its great advice and I know from experience that people that exit their business for the maximum value end up doing a lot of the things you've talked about so thank you. I appreciate it. Dan:         Yeah, no there's just a final closing point now. We should tie this back to valuation. So you'd go how does this make my business worth more? Well, I think I'll just spin-off three raises in my head to maybe cut this in. One is it's going to make you more attractive as you've got solid foundation relationships with your supply chain and you're not relying on Alibaba or some sourcing agent. Buyers want to know you've got the full foundation. Two if you've got more margin, you've got more profit, more profit, bigger valuation. And three, if you've got better cash flow and more cash flow on hand, you can compound that freight faster which means you achieve your valuation faster. So that's how they tie it back to valuation. Joe:          And again, I say it and I'll stop saying because Mark keeps correcting me there's no fifth pillar. All of the things that you're talking about make you a better business person; somebody that others will trust because you're instilling confidence in them that will bring you better value as well. People if they trust you they're willing to pay more for your business. So Dan, great stuff, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Dan:         I appreciate it, Joe. Thanks for the time. Resources: Titan Network China Magic Masterclass China Magic Trip Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com  

Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We discussed Iran, The Broadcom chipset in cable modems that makes them vulnerable to attack, How Amazon is changing it's delivery model and most importantly if you use Firefox, the Patch that is available. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Transcript: Craig We are going to have to be prepared for and expect this as it is not just an aberration, nor was the SARS concern or is any outbreak, right. Craig Peterson  Good morning, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. I don't know about you, but I'm concerned about the coronavirus. So let's get into it. I discussed it with Jack Heath this morning. Here we go. Jack Heath The coronavirus is traveling worldwide, and I'm going to ask our next guest just about it on the technology side of things. If technology can help speed up, for example, a vaccine for this coronavirus. Still, it's interesting that this has affected our financial markets so much. Is it due to the global implications on the spread of it or just a reaction to all the news reports recently? We haven't had spent a quiet period with the whole Iranian situation, whether it was a Qasem Soleimani twos weeks ago or all the impeachment stuff or that coronavirus is responsible for market impacts or could it be the markets are jittery after the announcement that a Massachusetts company is working among many on a possible vaccine. Here is Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy, and who has a show on Saturday on these iHeart news-talk stations. Craig, in this fast-moving era, coming out of China, the source but also as it spreads and mutates, I guess a few thousand people may have been affected by this virus. The question is, can technology help curb it? Craig Peterson Good morning. It is a very, very big problem they've got in China right now. Of course, one of the significant issues we've had over the years with China when it comes to these diseases is that they've been so tight-lipped about it. So there is a doctor who is working up in Toronto, and he did some fantastic stuff. He founded this company called Blue Dot and previously involved with the SARS outbreak. Now, you might remember that back in 2003, it was an epidemic, and it spread from China and, ultimately, all around the world. Yeah, it was a huge deal. And these types of flu can, of course, cripple hospitals. China is building a hospital right now. Another one. In fact, during the SARS epidemic, they constructed a 1000 bed hospital in six days total to help handle those people. So he was working as an epidemiologist during the SARS whole outbreak. He wanted a better way to figure out what was going on. And he did. That's what blue.is he got about $10 million worth of funding when he first launched a few years ago. And he and blue dot were able to predict on December 31, and they told their customers who are all major countries. So December 31, he said everybody, hey, we see the spread. Now what they do, Jack and it is rather interesting. There's they're looking at things like global airline ticketing data to help calculate the spread based on travel by residents. It monitors newspapers in 65 different languages. And it's using a form of artificial intelligence to figure it out. So he was able to correctly predicted the virus would jump from Juan to Bangkok to Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo. And he got it 100%. Right. So that's one piece of technology that's an amazing blue dot. And then just for the regular stuff, if you're interested in watching what's happening with the usual slews, you can go ahead online and go to google.com or google.org slash Flu Trends. And Google's tracking it as well. But Google's paying a little more attention to some of the social media and some of the other things that are going on, but they've got the public Data Explorer, you'll find there and many other things. And we're using that we're also using some of these devices. Is that we wear the monitor our heart rates, but also can monitor our body temperature. They're also using the collected data at airports, watching people thermally for diseases, we've been doing that for quite a while. There's a lot of technology involved. Well, back up to December 31, he said his data showed -- hey, we've got an outbreak, it's going to spread. The US Centers for Disease Control warned us on January six, but they'd already gotten notification from Blue Dot, and the World Health Organization was January 9. So basically, right now, we had about a one week jump on everything else knowing what was going to be happening. Jack It's interesting because you mentioned the SARS epidemic, and I'm not sure if that, you know, it's a good thing if these things don't pan out. Justin did allude earlier with the traditional strains that are not the current strain right now of flu that is out there. Now is the height of the flu season. Due to the potency of this virus and the lack of a valid vaccine, this could get dangerous. We must be prepared for and expect that this is not just an aberration, nor was a SARS concern or nor is any outbreak. Craig Yeah, you're right. It is something that could kill a lot of people. You might remember the Spanish flu back in 1918. And that killed millions of people worldwide. And that's all it takes. So getting this little bit of early warning, knowing where it might be coming from in a country like China, of course, they just shut down all travel for the rest of us a little bit more complicated but knowing it's out there, being able to take the next step. There's also new technology when you talk about the shots for like the flu that we get. Right now. Its kind of against most of our seasonal flu, do come from Asia, and it seems to have to do with the handling of everything over there, poultry, pork products, etc. Were there live at the markets Not just mentioned just the sheer population. I mean, you know, you gotta look at how many people are in China. Jack Jack You make fun of me for being a vegetarian see, they're still going to make you sick Justin on the universal flu shot and showing a lot of promise, and it's already entered into the trial. So you know, who knows what we'll be talking about next year during flu season, Craig Peterson. Craig   Hey, as always, I try and give you some tips and things to do the obvious stuff. Well, according to the officials right now would have slowed down or even stopped entirely the spread of this virus. and that is to wash your hands and don't touch your face with your hand, especially during flu season. You know, make sure if you have a cough, you cough into your elbow. Hopefully, you've got a long sleeve shirt on, and that'll help stop the spread. So basic. Things will help a whole lot. You don't need high tech for any of that stuff. All right, take care, guys. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow, Karen and I and the rest of the team. we're busy, busy getting everything ready for you guys. So we'll let you know when that's all set. 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 Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Tandem's Control-IQ system was approved by the US FDA in mid-December. In this episode, Stacey talks to Molly McElwey Malloy, Tandem's clinical outcomes manager with behavioral sciences. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Control-IQ technology is an advanced hybrid closed-loop system that uses an algorithm to automatically adjust insulin in response to predicted glucose levels to help increase time in the American Diabetes Association-recommended target range (70-180 mg/dL).* Check out Tandem's YouTube channel, featuring new videos about Control IQ Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! This is our last episode of 2019! Stay tuned for new sponsors, new segments and new weekly mini-episodes. Sign up for our newsletter here To use Control-IQ, you must have the Tandem t:slim x2 insulin pump and you must have the Dexcom G6 CGM. The Control IQ software is as simple as a download from your computer to the pump.. it does not require a purchase of new hardware.. no new pump needed. You do need to have a prescription from you doctor. If you are an in-warranty customer the Control IQ update s free. All software updates released through 2020 are free to in-warranty t:slim X2 users. It doesn’t matter when you choose to download the update. The no-cost is determined by our release date, not your download date. ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android   Episode transcription (Note: this is a rough transcription of the show. Please excuse spelling/grammar/punctuation errors) (Time codes listed refer to times within the interview, which starts 5:30 into the episode) Transcript: This episode of Diabetes Connections is brought to you by the World's Worst Diabetes Mom. Real life stories of parenting a child with Type One Diabetes, available now as eBook paperback and audio book, Learn more at diabetes dash connections.com Welcome to our last episode of 2019 and it's a big one all about Control IQ the new hybrid closed loop system from Tandem recently approved by the FDA. I'm talking with Molly McElwee Malloy from Tandem. And I'm going to try to keep this intro short. I know you all just want the information. But I do have a few housekeeping and other things to get to. You can always skip ahead if you wish, I will not be insulted. But first while my regular podcast listeners insulted first when things like this happen when there is a Big news in the community. We get a lot of new listeners. So I want to go through some basics first. Hi, I'm your host, I'm Stacey Simms. My son was diagnosed 13 years ago, right before he turned two. He is now freshman in high school. He is 15. And boy, time has really flown. My husband lives with type two diabetes, I don't have diabetes. I have a background in broadcasting, local radio and TV news. And that is how you get the podcast. We are four and a half years into this podcast. We have more than 260 episodes. So I would encourage you to head on over to diabetes dash connections. com If you're brand new, scroll through. There's a very robust search feature. So if you want to type in Tandem and see what we've done over the years leading up to this release, or any other topic pertinent to diabetes, you can go ahead and do that it's very easy to search through. It's very easy to search through, and everything you'd want to know about the podcast, including how to subscribe for free on whatever app you want to use. Joining the Facebook group all about me, it's all there on the website. Okay, let's talk about Control IQ. What is it? Control IQ technology is an advanced hybrid closed loop system. It is the software within the pump. It uses an algorithm to automatically adjust insulin in response to predicted glucose levels. So we're going to talk about that to help increase time in range. Time in range and the recommended target range is 70 to 180. And yes for the International listeners we have quite a few. This is a USA centric episode Control IQ is rolling out in the US. We will be staying up to date on when it is available in the rest of the world where Tandem is already in your marketplace. But this is a USA centric episode so when you hear us talking about numbers, that's the system that we're using. For Control IQ you must have the Tandem t slim x2 insulin pump and you must have the Dexcom G6 CGM. The Control IQ software is as simple as a download from your computer to the pump. It does not require a purchase of new hardware, no new pump is needed. You do need to have a prescription from your doctor and you will hear more about that if you are an warranty customer, the Control IQ update will be free. All software updates released through the end of 2020 are free to in warranty t slim X to users. It doesn't matter when you choose to download the update. The no cost is determined by Tandems release date, not your download date as we're right at the beginning of 2020. That probably doesn't matter to most of you listening but I think it's important to point out. Control IQ is FDA approved for those 14 and up. It is not a replacement for diabetes management. And it is not a cure. It is not a cure. There is so much information about this online already from Tandem. I will be linking up a lot of stuff on the episode web page. They have YouTube videos. There's so many features that we don't even get to in this interview. I mean, the tubing fill, you can now set that to vibrate so it doesn't beep when you fill the tubing and change the cartridge which I know Benny just so excited about but in this interview, we really just scratched the surface. So please know I will be doing follow ups and there's a lot of supplemental information on the website. Quick note about Molly McElwee Malloy, who I'm talking to from Tandem, she was diagnosed 22 years ago this week as a young adult. And as you will hear, being in an artificial pancreas trial, changed her life. It changed her career path, everything. And she is one of many, many people who has been with this project for a very long time. We do spend the first four minutes of this interview on that subject on who Molly is and getting to this point. And if you're dying to get Control IQ info, again, go ahead and skip ahead. But I think her story is an important part of all of this and I think it sets up all the information very well. One more thing. There will be a full transcription available for this interview. A lot of you have been asking for that. That's a new feature I'm making available for the podcast in 2020. So stay tuned on that for every episode, but this transcript will be right on that episode web page. The best way to read it go to diabetes dash connections. com scroll down and click on this interview to open it up. All right here is my interview with Tandems, Molly McElwee Malloy, Stacey Simms 0:01 Molly, thank you so much for joining me. I can only imagine how busy you are and how full your inbox is. Molly McElwee Malloy 0:08 It's a really exciting time. For sure. Absolutely. No doubt. Stacey Simms 0:15 Well, congratulations. We're very excited. I mean, personally and professionally. I can't wait to talk to you about this. So let's just jump right in. I do have to ask you though, for people who may not be familiar, tell me a little bit about your background because Boy, you have been with this project. Really, I want to say almost since day one, tell me about your involvement with what has led to Control IQ for Tandem. Molly McElwee Malloy 0:39 So I'm, I'm sort of what you would call like the obsessed fan who went rogue. So I, I was in an artificial pancreas prior in 2006. And full disclosure, because no surprise to anybody who knows me but I have a bit of OCD. And for me, that was manifesting is testing my blood sugar 30 times a day. Wow. And yeah, it was really out of Control. Or as most, you know, endocrinologist say, I was a perfect patient with zero Mental Health Quality, but life like it definitely was impacting my quality of life. But I participated in one of these trials. And it was, you know four IVs and somebody at your bedside for 32 hours and the whole nine yards, but for me, it was life changing that for a period of time, I could relax for the first time and just let somebody else take Control. And everything was fine. And I sort of just realized that deep breath at that time was exactly what I needed. And I and I was like, Well, I'm going to do whatever it takes to work on this project. So you know, at the time, I was a professional musician, which makes getting into science.. Stacey Simms 2:05 Be vert interesting, Molly McElwee Malloy 2:06 Just a super, super easy transition (laughs). As logical obviously, as you've spent your life, being a musician that makes sense to just go into science. So I went back to school for nursing and continued to participate in trials through nursing school. And then when I graduated they hired me on at the Center for diabetes technology at the University of Virginia, which is where all of this magic was taking place. And I have not looked back. So they hired me in 2010 have been acquainted with the algorithms since 2006 as a patient, and here we are, it's almost 2020 it's 2019. And it's finally getting to market so I've done that and I worked with a startup called Type Zero technologies, which commercialized The algorithm licensed it the Tandem diabetes care. And then I jumped over to Tandem to pursue commercializing the algorithm. So, a little bit of like a dog with a bone, go and fill it out. But it was sort of my glimpse at sanity. Like, this is what sanity, this is what my life could look like with diabetes. If something was managing it in the background, I was really only worried about the big things. And I saw that and I was like, that is exactly what I will do. That's what I'm gonna be doing. I will do this all the time until it gets there. And it is. It's been a very long journey. very rewarding journey. Very difficult journey, but to be here today, wearing the device is magical. Stacey Simms 3:54 Okay, I'm gonna stop you there. I could talk to you for a long time about the process. But as you listen, I know you want to get to Control IQ. So I will just say, I've talked to Molly a couple of times before and I will link up the other episodes because the background on this, as you mentioned, type zero, you know how Tandem came to have that software, the development of all this, it's really important. And it's really interesting to listen to. So I will link those episodes up. But let's talk about Control IQ, so many questions. What are the what are the first steps? What's going on right now. Molly McElwee Malloy 4:27 So because of this all happening right around holidays, what we're doing with him doing kind of behind the scenes and, you know, as we speak up through the beginning, or first two weeks of January is we're educating the whole you know, diabetes educator and endo workforce, getting everybody up to date, getting everybody ready, making sure we're on the same page. So that when you go to your endocrinologist and say I want this you know that customer, they are well informed of what's going on. So all of that's been going on in the scenes like, you know, just earlier today I was on the phone with 10 different doctors trying to make sure that we all understood everything. So we're, we're educating as fast and as seriously as we can. We have an excellent online training program. So you as a customer, if you are current X2 user base, like you are just x to the end user will get an email, and I believe it's the first the second week of January way of January 13. That week, you'll get an email saying, hey, go ahead and login, update your information, make sure everything correct when you get the prescription will, you know will we talk to your doctor and will help you if you're an existing customer with we have that information kind of fully loaded, ready to go. You could also log into the portal, the customer portal and you know, go ahead and start that process. I'm interested, I want this and talk to your doctor. That's all that's one place. It is super easy scripts with your doctor that gets loaded. It's an automatic process. Once we have that, if you've already got that, like a blanket prescription from your providers practice is already going with us and we're trying to initiate that next two weeks. That's already there, we will automatically check on the background and then it will, you know, provide us with going ahead and giving you the green light to issue the next email which will be your training is ready. And then you will do the online training. And it will give you the ability to learn all about Control IQ. It's very interactive, you can't hit play and walk off. I know people do this on other training like I know we have webinars and we push play and we walk off we do the dishes when we come back. You cannot do that with this. It actually won’t advance to the next part until you've done x, y, z that is asked you to do. We've designed that for a reason so that you actually come away with the knowledge you need to operate the the algorithm and integrated into your life. So then you will answer a couple of questions and take a quiz. And you will have had to pay attention to get this information correct. And if you don't, you can go back and re learn until you do answer the questions correctly. Once you do pass the quiz and the module, you will then get the download code which is specific to your serial number of your pump. So I know there's been some questions, people sharing about work arounds, can you share it? The answer is no, no. You can't share it. It is your learning and your code is specific to your serial number. So all of that lines up perfectly to allow you to download the software update. And that will be, you know, everything will walk, walk through all the steps and pretty obvious, but for those who think that this some idea that someone will get a code and then we could post it on the internet somewhere and share it like, sorry Debbie Downer you're gonna have to get this on your own. Like, we work smarter than that and the FDA is smarter than that, and they're not gonna allow one code to rule them all. Yeah, so everybody's gonna have to do this upon their own and because it requires a prescription you have to go through all this stuff. Stacey Simms 8:37 When you mentioned training healthcare providers, and this might be a really dumb question, Molly, so forgive me, but is do they go through a more in depth training? It just seems like a couple of weeks to try to get all of these endocrinologists and CDs on board is a tall task. Do they all have to be trained before they can write the prescriptions and then what is their training like Molly McElwee Malloy 8:59 this have to be trained before they can write the prescriptions we want them to be trained before, obviously, we'd like them to have knowledge before they write the prescription, but they don't, they need the training to be able to treat patients, right. And I want them to be we want them all to be informed before they write the prescription to know if this is a good choice for the patient. But you could always write the prescription and then the person doesn't do the update. Right. So there's, you know, there's, there's always a couple ways to be kept it at the end if they don't intend to write the prescription. But writing the prescription with knowledge is always excellent. And we want to be aware, it's really, you know, an hour and a half two hours of their time. It's not a whole day thing. I know with other systems, there's been some feedback about like the links of training being really long and and we took all that into consideration. You know, we got the beautiful gift of not having to go first. Right? So we got to see what happens with the market with feedback before we did it. And we implemented a training and the good news with Control IQ is, it's not difficult. You do have to understand some concepts and some differences. Right, but it's not hard. Stacey Simms 10:27 I guess my concern was that people would be calling their health care providers and saying, Are you trained? Are you trained? Did you do this yet? Because you could see that happening. Molly McElwee Malloy 10:35 Yeah, and the good news is that we're getting them trained. So and it's on there's an online module they can take to do this. Like it doesn't have to be me on the phone with somebody train them, although we are doing that for them for larger offices that need, you know, to have that interaction, but there is an online module that they can take to get trained. So we do have a provider but site that has been launched. We've been very patient centric and very patient forward and our website and our outreach, and we are adding new dimension to both Tandem and our website, and how we are looking at our business. So, you know, to be honest, when you do this business, there's, there's at least three customers you're looking at, right? There's a patient, there's the provider, and there's the payer, and all those things need to be addressed. And we've been very patient centric. And now we are and we are continuing that we're just expanding to be very have people that are actually focused on providers. And so there is a portion of our website now dedicated to health care providers, and their education and resources specific to them. So that is launched that is up and running, and it's actually a very elegant website a host of resources for healthcare provider. Stacey Simms 12:10 Alright, so let's get to the moment at hand - Control IQ. How does it work? Talk to me a little bit about you know, the pump settings or what do we have to do you? What is the? What is the basis of Control iQ? Molly McElwee Malloy 12:24 Yeah, so this is the beautiful thing and I love all things that are based in science reality and truth, right? Like, I don't like we and Tandem doesn’t like this either, but we don't like you know, don't let trick and we don't like you not be able to see what's going on. So the beautiful thing about Control like you would like about all of Tandem technology is that it stays in the science and the foundation that you know in love, which are pump settings that you already understand. So the traditional rules that healthcare providers have used and I can provide you a link to article that’s helpful on you know 15 and 1800 you know, rules that they've always used and you know, implement duration action that is built in on the foundation of many many many decades of science. So, the all of that I can provide you some links and educate people about that what does that mean but your traditional insulin to carb ratio, sensitivity factors and basal rates all still apply. We use that the Control IQ technology uses your pump foundations and your foundations order the basal rate into the carb ratio, correction factor to operate from right so those are specific to you, they always have them they always should be. And that is where we you know, we start the game of Control IQ technology. So Using those settings, Control IQ technology, what we making adjustments from your baseline parameter, so your baseline parameters are exceptionally informative of how Control it technology will work. Stacey Simms 14:12 So we've been using a pump, let's say, you know, our personal case for 12 and a half years, we're pretty good at the settings. You know, we're going to talk about insulin on board because that's an interesting change. But we have our ratios and our, you know, our sensitivity factor. People like us, you know, a lot of people who are used to changing things on their own, you're basically saying we're not gonna have to learn to use the pump that we know so well. Molly McElwee Malloy 14:38 Correct. Right. So all the settings that you know and love are great. And you will move forward with those right? Okay, people coming from other systems, like maybe different pump or multiple daily injections, things like that. You're going to want to establish some really good baseline settings and make sure that those are accurate. So you particularly, if you're coming, I could say you're coming from a competitor's product like that, that has automated insulin delivery, you want to make sure that those settings are good to go. Because the previous, you know, previous other things that you may have used, only altered on board and carb ratio, right. So if you're only pulling two levers, the other things may not be totally, you know, set in stone and based and in the reality that you need. So, moving forward, you will need to make sure that the patient has, you know, your patient which would be your son or myself, that user has the pump parameters and settings that are based in in what you would want to use. So somebody is moving from a different product. We just want to do a double check and there's going to be in the healthcare profession. We'll have a little checklist to go through and we'll ask them, you know, you're coming from a different product, please look at the baseline settings and make sure that they are perfect for the patient. In your situation, you're just going to be moving from you know, base like you to Control like you. And those settings will apply. I will say a note for your super super savvy listeners who have used Basal IQ. And something we've noticed just in real world data as we've looked at people who data people have up to their basal rate to allow for, you know, like you to go to be like suspend, resume, suspend, resume and kind of hug that line at 80. A lot of people have done that. And I want to talk to that community real quick and say, Look, I know what you did with Basal IQ with riding those basal rates high to hug that line at 80. I saw that we saw that. You did that. We know why you did that. Just look at them. One more time before Control IQ because Control IQ is going to be adding, right? It can add insulin. So just before you go on your merry way with Control IQ like you double check your baseline settings, are they where you want them to be before you go right knowing that a system can add insulin to it. Stacey Simms 17:20 Okay, so you mentioned a lot of people, a lot of my listeners like to ride that 80. Molly McElwee Malloy 17:27 Let's talk about people, man, a lot of people love that they want like, they want that super, super tight Control and I get it. I totally get it. But you got particular, you know, space of listeners needs to be open to the idea that we're now going to be adding insulin right? So if you've kind of made these aggressive pump settings with Basal IQ and now you're going to be just on your merry way. We don't want you to experience hypoglycemia, right? That, you know, we don't want to put anybody into hypoglycemia land. My personal least favorite experience of, of diabetes? Well, let's, let's not do that. Stacey Simms 18:10 Right. But the question then is, what are the targets? I thought Control IQ wasn't really going to let you ride that 80. Can you talk a little bit about I mean, obviously, nothing's perfect hypoglycemia can happen hyperglycemia can happen, but what is it aiming for? Molly McElwee Malloy 18:29 If your listeners can pull up the little chart, the patient pamphlets that I that I gave you, there's one of them that has a really good visual of what that looks like. And just so that we can go from soup to nuts, the person who has now downloaded Control IQ technology, all you have to do is turn it on. It’s either on or off. Just to preface all of this before we get into target and all of that. There's no kick out with Control IQ technology. Control IQ technology works, so long as we have CGM. And I will say that as long as we have a continuous stream of CGM, or we will continue processing that data. But if there are 20 minutes or more of missing data from that CGM and those who are very savvy with Dexcom know that you can kind of get internet readings occasionally. I'm not talking about reading, you've got a loss of CGM for more than 20 minutes, we're going to revert to your pump settings. And so we can get that until we can get that information back up and running. But if we miss a value or two when we come back, and we've got that information, we're running full steam ahead We're good to go. If we have any data point in that 20 minutes that pops up, you're still in. It are still in the game. They're still playing. But there's no kick out. Right? Stacey Simms 20:14 So as you mentioned that, just to be clear, there's no auto mode or manual mode to kick out of. So if you lose the CGM signal for that period of time, as you said, What did you say 20 minutes. Molly McElwee Malloy 20:26 It has to be greater than 20 minutes Stacey Simms 20:28 if you lose CGM signal for 20 minutes, it just goes back to regular Tandem pump, all the settings are in it. When the signal comes back, it automatically starts Control IQ, you don't have to do anything else. Molly McElwee Malloy 20:40 Correct. You could sleep through the whole process, right? You do you right. Like if we lose it, we'll we'll get it back as soon as possible. We're going to alert you that there’s no CGM available, right? Right. We're gonna alert you that this happening. But if you're sleeping or you're doing something else and you are not paying attention to it, we’re going to keep running with the ball in that process without having to like all these bells and whistles, and there's no modes, right? Control IQ is on or you can turn Control IQ off. There's no mode. Stacey Simms 21:16 Alright, so let's talk targets. Molly McElwee Malloy 21:19 Yes. So there are several targets, the one you will call the main target is the number 112.5 which in the pump, it's going to default to 110. Why because you don't have 112 point fie as an option. 112.5 for those who are interested is a weighted average between 80-120 with the least amount of hypoglycemic outcome. So if you're a statistician or mathematician and you love numbers you can a bunch of scenarios of hypoglycemia and when it will likely going to happen in all these different situations which is what did happen to come up with this number you would come up that 112.5 had the least amount of hypoglycemic outcomes in the greatest amount of time in range and you know successful euglycemia. Yeah, so 12.5 it is. And it will show up as 110 in the settings 110 will be the target. In the settings that you set up for Control IQ it is non-negotiable. We have different ranges for things that we're using throughout the way the system progresses, but as far as looks on the settings on the pump, is going to show up as 110. Now when you enter the system, as long as you're in euglycemia land, like as long as you're in range and predicting range, which would be predicting 70 to 180, we’ll use your pump, right your pump study should be adequate. But the minute your predicted to be outside of the range. And this is where this graphic is really helpful. If you’re predicted to be 70, right, less than 70, we're going to start decreasing basal insulin. It's predicted when you start going below 112.5 right. And then when you get to 70, we're going to stop basal delivery. And this is during this time, right? So the during regular Controller to you, if you are predicted to be less than 70, you start going down less than 112.5 we're going to decrease basal, and we'll eventually halt basal. Now if you're above 112 point five and you're heading up, and you're predicted to be above 160, we're going to increase that insulin delivery and increase that in the background until you hit a prediction of 180 and that's not you hitting 180. That's the prediction heading 180. If the prediction hits 180 then we can give an automatic correction bolus once an hour during waking time and I'll go over more about what that means in a minute. But predictions to be above 180 one at if there was, you know, not been another bolus in the last hour, we can give one at that point to try to keep blood sugar more in range. So the range 70-180 again, 112.5 is euglycemia. Going below that, you know, we start decreasing if you're predicting below the lower than 70 we're going to, you know, stop basal insulin delivery, you’re predicted to be above 160, we're going to be increasing basal insulin delivery of your predicted to be above 180. We're going to deliver an automatic correction bolus once an hour during the waking time. And by that I mean when you're not using exercise or sleep. There's three activities in Control IQ and they are Control IQ or what I call wake time. There's sleep and there's exercise. And those three things have three different targets. Because if you think about it, those three activities have very different applications for your blood glucose. So, waking time 70 to 180. That's sort of where we aim for all things during the day to accommodate for blood glucose fluctuations with meals and stress and schedules and everything like that. Sleep is something you program. So you can have just like you would program a basal rate. So if your basal rate normally changed from three to 4pm, every day… the sleep is, you can program that right. So mine is programmed for 10pm to 6am. So from 10pm to 6am I'm sleeping and it will automatically go into sleep, it will automatically come out of sleep. I don't have to do anything. And during sleep, we're going to target 112.5 to 120 which is a much tighter range, but we're not giving automatic correction boluses during sleep, Stacey Simms 26:02 can you tell me a little bit about the thinking there? It seems obvious. But is it just because a person is sleeping and can’t adjust the pump? I'm trying to figure out the logic? Molly McElwee Malloy 26:14 The logic of not having the autocorrection? So the logic around not having the autocorrection overnight is about being super conservative with the FDA and their comfort level . But also, the algorithm really drives a really tight range during that time because there's not a lot of interference, right? You think about sleep it's like for blood glucose is the easiest time to manage diabetes, right? because nothing's happening. Although you are asleep, so technically difficult because the operator is asleep, right but as far as what's happening with diabetes, sleep should be a pretty steady state. So if we can automate going into and out of and having a really timeframes for that period of time, then we can kind of optimize time in range by, you know, six hours a day being really tightly Controlled, or however long the sleep activity is. And we noticed in the in the clinical trial, those people who had a sleep schedule and not everybody did, and you do not have to set one. But those people who had a sleep schedule had significantly more time in range. So that's just something to notice. No, you don't have to set one right? Could you have automatic corrections going all night long and being awake, I'm sure you could do that. If that that's how your diabetes works. Great. My diabetes, your diabetes, somebody else's diabetes, they're all going to be different, right? We all have different versions of how we metabolize things and how we sleep and how we process and our activity and you know, sometimes, you know, the sky's blue and sometimes it's not and it just depends. That's life with diabetes, some things will work with some people, somethings won’t. We did have in the clinical trial have some people we refer to as Sleeping Beauties who had sleep going 24 hours a day and and that would put you at the you know, like the 112.5 to 120 all the time, no automatic corrections but you would get basal increases and basal decreases to try to keep you in that range. And for some people, that's great. You know, that's where you want to live, that's fine. You will not get the automatic correction, you will need to give that correction when you need it. It's not going to be enough to accommodate that. But hey, if you're sleeping beauty and that works for you, that's fine. Then there is exercise. Exercises is a button you press. You go into options you press exercise – start. I'm exercising now and then I will leave it on exercise and when I want to stop I will go in and I will stop exercise. And while I'm exercising will be a little Running Man on the side of the screen to show me that I am exercising. And that will tighten the reins to 140 to 160. To help prevent hypoglycemia, it also engages what we call the brakes or the prevention of hypoglycemia by 10x. So if you think of a car rolling down a hill, and if you think of getting your brakes tightened 10 X, the minute you start going downhill, you're going to stop, right? It's going to be like that, stop, it's gonna be really, really grippy. And that's the way it works doing exercise. We anticipate hypoglycemia. Now you can still get an automatic correction bolus, and you can still get an increase in basal during exercise because there are people who will go high during exercise. With the pediatric sports particularly, you notice a big difference between game day and practice day. Like game day there's a lot of adrenaline there's usually a lot higher blood sugars and practices it’s low blood sugars. So You know, this is why that's still going on in the background, starting in an hour before starting at the time of exercise, leaving it on an hour after all of that's going to vary depending upon the person and the activity and you're going to have to play with that and see what works for you. You know different strokes for different folks. And some people won’t need to put on the exercise right they'll be fine where they are. It just depends on what you're doing your body, your diabetes, what's going on. And as to when you start it and when you stop it or if you use it. Likewise, you know you could put exercise on 24 hours a day if you wanted to, if you needed to ride a little bit higher or you know were feeling very cautious about something you know, and you want it to be, driving all day or something you know, like I just want to be a little bit higher today Stacey Simms 30:53 Your kids first sleep over Molly McElwee Malloy 30:55 your kids first sleep over and you want that automatic bolus, they're going to snack. And, you know, if you think about it, like if I think about my kids there, they are active 24 hours a day until they crash, right? So if they're super, super active, and I'm getting, I'm getting frequent lows from that activity, I might put them in exercise all day, right? So depending on what's going on with that patient that time and what works for you, they'll be different. They'll be different reasons why different activities are better for some people than other people and when you want to use them, but they're all available to you to use as you want to because we all deserve choice, and we all should have Control over what happens with our diabetes. Stacey Simms 31:43 It's really interesting. Okay, I'm trying to get through the list because I have I have 14 questions for everything you answer. So I know we'll talk again, but I do want to ask you about insulin on board and I will set this up by saying in the last few months, I've been reading up a lot on this in anticipation of what we're going to talk about here, because Benny's insulin on board, which is as you listen, you may not realize there's a setting in the pump, all pumps, where you try to figure out how long the insulin that you're giving is lasting, and this is with MDI as well, but the pump does it automatically - you have to tell it and then it keeps track. So we have always said Benny's at three hours. And then when he hit puberty, we kind of tightened it up. And I've learned that it really didn't matter what we said, or what we thought that everybody's insulin on board, studies show, is about five hours. And so that's what's in Control IQ? Molly McElwee Malloy 32:40 Yeah, it's at five hours. So if you look at some data, and again, I can provide you with links to some published data on that, the data says it's between four and a half and six hours. So let's split the difference and call it five hours. So we're using five hours for several reasons. One it’s established data we can rely, on you can hang your hat on it. Also, it's a static number, right? So if you are, if you are trying to aim for targets with a multitude of patients, a multitude of patients and you're trying to automate an algorithm, you cannot then vary IOB without causing some pretty crazy ripples, right? So it's going to work for some people, some people not, we want something that works for most people, right? Like, I understand that Control IQ is an amazing solution for a lot of people. And if some people are like, I'm so much better when I do it myself. Do it yourself. That's fine, right? Like that's why we have choice. But in order to design a system for the masses, you're going to have to go with the large majority of scientific evidence, right, which again, shows insulin on board somewhere between four and a half and six hours. So going with five hours and keeping that static when you're aiming for different ranges, and you're allowing people to do different basal rates and carb ratios and sensitivity factors, you will have to lock something in and we've locked IOB. And that gives you some really good results, obviously, but and for skeptics, I will say this, you know, try it. Try it and see what you think. Because it may not be as different as you think. Stacey Simms 34:27 well, I’ve been shocked to find out that the entire looping community, and the do it yourself folks, all of those systems are based on five hours, pretty much. Molly McElwee Malloy 34:37 Right, right. And you do have to assume some, you have to make some assumptions, right when you're writing an algorithm that's going to modulate insulin for the masses. And one of the assumptions is how long does this thing last? If you change that, all the other math has to change. And that makes it a very unstable algorithm. A very unstable system. And then it’s not for the masses, right? So that is why it's locked in and there's a lot of scientific evidence. And the DIY community has embraced us too, you know, at that five hour time frame. Stacey Simms 35:13 In terms of the rollout Molly, I remember when we got Benny's pump about a year before Basal IQ was available. And as I was looking back, it was a pretty seamless process for us. In that I remember it was FDA approved. We got the email, we got the prescription from our doctor then Tandem said here's your code, and we downloaded it and the whole process took from FDA approval to on Benny’s pump, with no special treatment, was 35 days. I'm not going to hold you to that. I'm not asking you to keep to schedule, but I am going to ask and I think 35 days was pretty great. Is there anything that you all learned from the Basal IQ roll out that people who went through that can expect to experience differently this time around or did it work pretty smoothly? Molly McElwee Malloy 36:00 Yeah, so I mean, you always learn, right? You always learn, and we're always learning and Tandem is excellent at collecting data and then understanding, you know, and learning from it. So one of the things that we did, we did learn there is that we needed a more robust patient portal. And so we've done that we've built a more robust portal, and we've built a lot of automation in the background. So doing things like if you entered, you know, I'm going to update this and your physician had a blanket statement on board. And, you know, we could automatically line those two things up. It doesn't have to be a separate step it just automatically Yes. Okay, you're good. We have this checked in our records checking. We have this and this is on file, and we can do all of it. So there wasn't a lot of automation that there is now and there were maybe a couple extra steps involved in getting people either approved or making sure we had all the documents and we've streamlined all that. So it should be a very seamless process. The update itself could take eight minutes, but it shouldn't take much longer. You know, it's the eight minutes from, you know, whatever you're on now the Control IQ, and then you know, and then just reschedule it and doing the online training right before that, that's, you know, a little bit of chunk of time, but I think 35 days is pretty good. So we got approval this past Friday 13th. And we plan to roll out those emails to existing customers a week of the 13th. So it might be coming at close, but I think you can probably you could probably figure on the 35 days. Stacey Simms 37:43 (laughs) I'll give you some grace for the holidays. I mean, the last approval was August, so we only had to worry about back to school. I'm not too worried about 35 on the dot. I did want to ask you a couple of questions from the Facebook group, the diabetes connections Facebook group, you've answered a lot of them, but I had a really good question from Tim who was asking about in the clinical trial, he said, You know, people were able to familiarize themselves with the pump in the system about two to eight weeks, I guess. So he said, what took place during that period? And how much interaction with healthcare professionals was required? So I guess the question really is, how much do I need to interact with my healthcare professional? How much do I need to ramp up and learn before Control IQ will work well for me, we've mentioned you know, there are variables. Molly McElwee Malloy 38:29 So I think, and I think looking at that run-in phase, that was what it was called that two to eight weeks is that when you were taking people from multiple daily injections, introducing them to CGM technology, introducing them to pump technology and getting pump settings straight. So that was the longer run in period for people who were completely naive to both CGM and pump technology. And they could they could be allowed up to eight weeks, I don't think most of them completed their run-in phase much faster than that. And most people have people that already had pump or CGM or some knowledge of one or the other could go but at a much faster speed. So it was just getting them up and running and comfortable with the technology and the physician or whoever was overseeing at that site felt comfortable that, yes, this person is ready to proceed to the next step and go ahead and use an automated system. So that just allowed for all walks of life to come in and to do this trial. And that's really what that was about as far is, you know, how many connections how many touch points with an HCP. You know, I can't speak specifically to each situation. But typically, in a run-in phase when you're getting people up and running that have never used technology before, you might check in with them every couple of days and then do a download at the end of the week and then check those settings. So And I would suggest at a later time you having one of those sites, the principal investigators on to talk about the studies it’s fascinating. And they could really get into the weeds of these details, because I think Tim had a really good question about that. As far as the average person though, getting up and rolling, the big thing with Control IQ technology, is you have to have good pump settings. Right. So that may be a couple of touch points you maybe have to have with your HCP if you've never had a pump before, right? Or you're and you're just waiting for the first time. Or if you've had pretty poor settings, and maybe pretty poor Control along and you've never really sat and been like, Huh, I wonder if these are right, or your HCPs never sat down with you into like, let's take another look at this. That that may take you a visit or two but if your pump things are pretty good, you should be fine to go And then you can check in with your doctor. At your comfort level, right, like there's no recommendation. As long as you feel like you're doing well, then great. There is a mobile app that will roll out with this. It's embedded into the technology update for Control IQ that will give people access to this mobile app, which will be available on Android and iOS. But this will allow for automatic uploads to the cloud. So the data will be going seamlessly to the cloud. You could also then see it on your phone. You cannot yet bolus from that phone or dismiss alerts or alarms. But you can see what is happening from that phone. And it will, it's a ways to send data to the portal so that your data is always updated. And so you know, your healthcare provider can check in and say how you doing and I see this is happening or I see that's happening and you can all beon the same page without actually, we go into the office or upload your pump or any of that stuff. Yeah, I believe it that process. Stacey Simms 42:08 That was going to be my next question. But my understanding is that the phone app is going to be just for healthcare providers as it's rolled out, and then consumers can use it down the road. Is that not correct? Molly McElwee Malloy 42:19 No. So there are two parts to this. So the app will be on the patient's phone, right. That's how the data gets the cloud. So the space is going to have visibility to their data. The data going to the cloud goes to the HCP portal, right. So that's the healthcare professional portal, the portal that we offer up to professionals so they can manage all their patients in one place. Right. So they log in, they can see data as long as you have Wi Fi available Wi Fi is both publicly and people having it at home or you can choose to use cellular data. You can send your data for the cloud every five minutes. Stacey Simms 43:04 I just want to be clear. So when I get my Control IQ, let's say, let's say I get Control IQ by the end of January, when I get Control IQ on Benny's pump, he will be able to look at his cell phone, not do anything with it, but he will be able to view his pump data in real time on his cell phone. Molly McElwee Malloy Yes. Stacey Simms Yeah, that is amazing. Okay, so I know that many people who are newer might think, well, that's not so amazing. But I mean, after 13 years, you know, we had these dumb pumps and no CGM to have Benny be able to look at his phone and say oh is was my battery charged. Do I need insulin? You know, even the simplest things. And then the idea is down the line. And maybe you can give us a peek into the future. As you said, You can't bolus from it, but possibly someday, soon. Molly McElwee Malloy 43:50 Oh, we are working on integrating the ability to do a mobile bolus. Yes. Stacey Simms 43:58 All right. I'll leave that there for now because I know Talk to you another hour about it. But then my last question on the phone is, what about remote data from the pump? Can a parent caregiver, you know, friend spouse, once the Tandem information is on the user's phone, can it be shared. Molly McElwee Malloy 44:15 So we are working on a remote monitoring feature. But at this time, it will just be available on the patient's phone, and it will be a way to get the data to the cloud. Now you could log in to see connect and look and see what's going on with Benny at school. If he's if he's got Wi Fi going. It's not really meant to be a remote monitoring system is approved for that. But you know, Stacey Simms 44:44 (laughs) I’m just thinking of all the parents I know All I care about is is it charged and is there insulin in it, but I know a lot of people really want to see, you know, everything but that's really interesting. Molly McElwee Malloy 44:52 It could be that you know, and then some people know how to like do the mirroring on their phone to another device and you know, there's going to be people will figure that out. And we will eventually have a formal system for that. And again, nothing is intended to be remote monitoring or you know, per share type viewing. It’s supposed to be a, you know, a secondary viewing device of seeing the data. But you know that data is going somewhere and you can log into that place. So, you do with that with whatever you want to, but you'll be able to see that data if he's got Wi Fi going. Stacey Simms 45:32 All right. before we let you go. I have to ask you, we started this whole conversation about you talking about, you know, finally relaxing when you use an automated system in 2006. So here we are. 13 years later, Molly McElwee Malloy 45:50 I know. Stacey Simms 45:53 You've been using Control IQ I shouldn't make that assumption, but have you been using Control IQ? Molly McElwee Malloy 45:58 I do have Control IQ Okay, Stacey Simms 46:00 and I'm asking you this I know I may be limited in what you can say and I understand that. Are you as relaxed and feeling more in Control of your diabetes as you had hoped? Back in 2006? Molly McElwee Malloy 46:15 You know and.. sorry, it makes me little choked up. I am in a place I never knew existed, right? This is a place that I dreamed about. I'm not worried about what's happening with my blood sugar. I'm not worried. We had my daughter's third birthday this past weekend, and I didn't worry about, was my bolus enough for the cupcake because like it had my back, right? Like, I was like, if it's, you know, this more than this, whatever, it's got me if it’s less than this, it’s got me like, I didn't worry the whole day and I stayed in range the whole day and Got to enjoy my daughter's birthday without worrying about my diabetes. So that was pretty awesome. And that's where I want to live, right? Like I have other things to do. Everybody has other things to do than to try to be their own pancreas and their own organ. So let's relieve that burden and then you just interact with it with meals with exercise, you know, when you need to. It's much more of a relief than I imagined because in 2006, I was hooked to laptop. Stacey Simms 47:35 Oh my gosh. That’s right! Molly McElwee Malloy 47:37 Yeah, I was hooked to laptops with four IVs in my arms. And I was willing to do that. And I would have walked around like that. So this is some space age invention that never entered my mind that this could have happened but it is beautiful, very eloquently done. I have to hat tip to the engineers at Tandem, who took you know, years and years and years and years of research to work, you know, work done in neat tidy ways, right? And then put it into a system and made it this eloquent and this beautiful. Where I don't have to think about the 50 things I would have thought about before, you know, is my laptop plugged in and my plugs into the right USB port, my, you know, the things you've got to think about if you are plugged into bigger machine. Sure, like, I don't want to think about any of that. And, and during research, you know, seeing in all the different iterations. You know, we still had even we have a cell phone, we still had the fanny pack, right? Because you had to keep the receiver and the phone near each other and all this other stuff going on and the pump. And now I'm just walking around with a CGM and a pump on and it's doing it and I don't have to worry about any additional things to keep up at it's pretty great, it's pretty awesome. This is a place that I never dreamed, I never even dreamed of. And I'm just so happy to be here. Stacey Simms 49:10 Molly, thank you so much for joining me for spending so much time talking about this. It's been remarkable to just for the few years that I've followed along in your journey, it's been wonderful to watch. So thank you so much. And I cannot wait to get this for my son! Molly McElwee Malloy 49:29 that I can't wait to see what you say. Because, you know, we're like to 2.0 we’ll make 3.0 We'll see what's going on. So your feedback, everybody's feedback is so valuable. Stacey Simms 49:40 I would have liked to have ended on that emotional note that you have there. But we do have to say, for for many people who have been in this community for a long time, who are emailing you and me saying, Why can't I get the target under 100? Why cant I do this? I want this feature. I want that feature. It's not that they're that people are greedy. It's just that you know, you know we all we all want this so badly. It's a great reminder that this is the first step. This is this is the beginning of the automation. So, you know, I want it all too, but I get it. And I just think it's fantastic. So yeah, this is this is the first one with Tandem. Let's see what happens to the future. So gosh, it's so exciting. Molly McElwee Malloy 50:21 It really is. And I could say to people who want to customize everything, want to do everything good. Look, the future is coming. And it's coming faster than we then we could have dreamed up and I realized we waited a long time. Trust me, me of all people. I know how long we have waited. But this is a really solid system that we get to build upon. It’s going to be a phenomenal ride. Like I would invite them to try it. See if you can relax a little and see if it brings you any kind of peace of mind. And then we'll work on getting the targets exactly where you want them. Stacey Simms So much more information on the website please check it out. And I know many of you have unanswered questions you know you really want to do a super deep dive you want more we will dig into the research as Molly mentioned, I promise we will do mentioned I promise we will be doing follow ups on this as a tandem family. You know, we'll have Benny fool around with it. let you know what he thinks I'm hoping to get him to do a review. As soon as we get control IQ, which, you know, we're not jumping the line, we're there with all of you. So hopefully by the end of the month, beginning of February, I'm really hoping that we'll have control IQ on his pump. And, you know, that brings me to just a quick personal note on Ben, he was diagnosed 13 years ago, in December. So December of 2006, is when we heard those words, you know, your child has type one diabetes. And I remember a few bits of information from that day, we were not told, thankfully, we were never told, oh, the cure is five years away we were we were never told that and I had been a medical reporter for many years, and I'd covered type one diabetes. And I'd actually covered failed products like the gluco-watch and things like that. So I had my my knowledge around me and I knew there was going to be no cure in the next five years. So we didn't have that. But our endocrinologist did tell us that the artificial pancreas was in the works. And he said three to five years. And we would probably have that. And I have been hopeful, you know, cautiously optimistic, I didn't hang my hat on that. And I knew we'd have to learn to live well with diabetes without an artificial pancreas. But when I think now to 2006, knowing that that is when Molly, within that trial, and other people that I've been so lucky to meet and talk to, since people like Tom Brobson, so many people at JDRF, who were involved in the early early artificial pancreas project, , it kind of boggles my mind to think that I could go back to Stacey in 2006 in that hospital room and say, Look, it's not going to be here as soon as you hope. But your son's going to be fine. And you're going to get to talk to these people that right now are testing it out. I mean, to me, it's just wild. And more importantly than than me still me getting to talk to all these people much more importantly, is that the people with type one as you listen my son get to use it. I'm so excited for control IQ. I'm so excited for anything that takes any bit of burden away from people with diabetes. I'm not looking for the world's lowest A1C? I really know that I am looking for a healthy A1C  that lets my son lives a life he wants without diabetes being a pain in the ass without his mother texting him 400 times a day did you bolus Did you check? Right all that nagging stuff? I don't want him thinking about it 24 seven. When you talk to people who loop when you talk to people who've used open APS, right, these do it yourself systems. Their first response to you isn't, look at my fantastic A1C, although they're usually very good. It's, well, I get more sleep. Wow, I think about diabetes less. Wow, I worry about my kid less. And that, to me is what it's all about all of these decisions. I’m getting emotional thinking about it. All of the decisions that everybody who has diabetes, forget the parents that the people with diabetes have to make and that burden that is on you. I hope systems like this. Just relieve it a little bit. It's a good first step. It's not the end there is a long way to go. But that's what I am hopeful for. Okay. But that's what I am hopeful for. And I know that I'll hear from you. You wonderful do it yourselfers who will be figuring out ways to you know, hack the sleep mode and change the exercise mode and figure This stuff out. So we will move forward with lots more information in the weeks and months to come. You know, I don't have a way to wrap this up with a big bow. I don't have a way to end this year by, you know, saying something incredibly motivational and giving you a boost into the new year. But I do have to say that it's so exciting to end 2019 with the approval that frankly, I've been waiting for all year, and I know many of you have as well. And seeing that as another step forward. And looking forward to 2020 and what may come. Our next full episode will air on January 7, but later this week, I'm going to be releasing a new minisode I'll be doing more of these in the new year just really short episodes where I share some thoughts or some advice. love to know what you think about all that. Big thanks as always to my editor John Bukenas from audio editing solutions. Thank you so much for listening. wishing everybody a happy and healthy New Year. I'm Stacey Simms and I'll see you back here in 2020. (disclaimer) At times I mentioned tandem diabetes care. However, I am not compensated by tandem for my actions. And tandem does not support or control this content. I have created the content and it is based on my personal experiences and observations. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

If you’re feeling lousy about the state of politics in America, now might be the time to surround yourself with some Brits. As they surely must ask about us: What in the world is going on over there? The UK is now more than three years into Brexit, the unexpected, unplanned and so far unfinished move to pull out of the European Union. The latest delayed exit was delayed again when Boris Johnson – UK’s permanently disheveled Prime Minister – couldn’t, as we like to say, get the bloody ball over the goal line. Ok, we don’t say the “bloody” part. Instead, Boris called for and got new elections. So December 12, UK voters will decide whether to elect a new leader, or not, and through that choice, whether to leave the EU or not. In other words, Britain’s future is as clear to see as a plate that holds a double helping of bangers and mash. So what, in fact, is going on over there? How did they get into this Brexit mess – and will they ever get out? Few better – or funnier or more thoughtful – to help explain than Fintan O’Toole, the award-winning writer and columnist for the Irish Times, Guardian, and New York Review of Books. His own new book is “The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism.” O’Toole is Irish borne and loves England – both important facts as you read and listen to him analyze the English psychology around self-pity, colonization, and that terrible EU oppression that, we’re told, led to Brexit. In fact, among the surprising insights from O’Toole – at least to this American – is O’Toole’s argument that the Brexit push has less to do with the European Union than it does with England itself. For show notes & my newsletter, go to chrisriback.com.

Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! November is (somehow) just around the corner and for a lot of people in the writing community it’s that magical time of year: NaNoWriMo!  In this episode, we talk about all aspects of this highly anticipated month.  What is NaNoWriMo?  How and when did it start?  What do you have to do to participate and what should you have when you are finished?  Rekka and Kaelyn take a deep dive into what to expect during NaNoWriMo, plus offer some important Thanksgiving-while-writing tips. We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. We Make Books is a podcast for writer and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and tell us if you are planning to participate in NaNoWriMo so we can cheer you on! We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast       Kaelyn: 00:03   Hey everyone, welcome back. Another episode of the, we make books podcast to show about writing, publishing and everything in between. I'm Kaelyn Considine and I am the Acquisitions Editor for Parvus Press. Rekka: 00:12   And I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore. Kaelyn: 00:21   And today is a learning episode for me. We're talking about NaNoWriMo today or national novel writing month. And this is a little embarrassing for me to admit, but I did not actually know a whole lot about this. I knew it was a thing that happened. I knew it was a massive community event. There's, you know, November my Twitter feed is just covered in hashtag NaNoWriMo and I knew what the, the goal was. I know what was kind of going on here, but outside of that, I really did not know too much about the ins and outs. So, um, Rekka has some expertise in this - Rekka: 00:51   I am a municipal liaison for my NaNoWriMo region, um, which if you don't even know what that means, we'll go into a little bit in episode. And, uh, so yeah, I, I, you know, I pitched to Kaelyn like, Hey, last episode of October, people are going to be looking forward to NaNoWriMo, but there are also people who have no idea what it is and they're seeing everyone in a flurry talking about it right now. Kaelyn: 01:17   And then I raised my hand and said, yes, I'm one of those people. Rekka: 01:19   Yes, exactly. So yeah, we, um, we decided, we covered this, uh, this will be like an evergreen episode unless something major changes with the NaNoWriMo program. But, um, yeah, it happened. Kaelyn: 01:31   You never know. Rekka: 01:31   It could happen. So this will probably be our one NaNoWriMo episode, um, unless we decide to come back in maybe in, uh, December of another year and saying, okay, now what do you do with your NaNoWriMo project? We'll talk about that more in this episode, but yeah, this is a definition, uh, pros and cons. Uh, then what do you do kind of conversation. And, um, hopefully if you are excited about NaNoWriMo, you will just enjoy hearing somebody else talking about it. And if you don't even know what NaNoWriMo is, then I'm, hopefully you'll learn. And maybe, you know, by planning your own project. Kaelyn: 02:06   So by the end of the episode, you'll know, so, um, everyone take a listen, uh, hope you as always, hopefully educational and informative. Rekka: 02:12   Don't tell them it's educational, thy'll stop listening. Kaelyn: 02:17   That's a good point. Yeah. No, no, nothing, nothing of value in terms of - Rekka: 02:21   Fun and games, frivolity and skullduggery throughout the entire episode. Kaelyn: 02:26   Exactly. So I'm take a listen. We, uh, hope you enjoy Speaker 3:       02:39   [inaudible] Kaelyn: 02:50   NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo. [inaudible] so we're talking about, yeah. Rekka: 02:55   Do you want to start? Yeah, give us the whole background. Kaelyn: 03:00   Oh, I no, because I'm, I, uh, don't know too much about this. I know kind of the, the basics of it. I know what the goal is. I know, you know, it's a big sort of writing community event. Um, but even just from some of the things you've been telling me now, I had no idea it was so extensively organized. Rekka: 03:19   It's a whole thing. Kaelyn: 03:19   Um, there's this whole underground going on and - Rekka: 03:23   It's not that underground. Kaelyn: 03:24   No, it's not. It's not. And it's funny because you know, obviously like this time of year, Twitter blows up with all of this stuff and like I, you know, very aware that it's happening. I've just never really looked into it that much. I just know that I get the product of it typically. Rekka: 03:42   Okay, well we'll get to that. So NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and unlike national talk like a pirate day, this is not just like, Oh ha ha how cute for a lot of people this is like their big holiday season. Kaelyn: 03:57   Yeah. This is, I didn't like, again, I knew this was a very serious thing that people took very seriously. I did not realize the organization and planning that goes into this. Rekka: 04:08   Right. So to give it a little bit of background, it was begun by a few friends who lived in California and they decided that they would, um, just try writing a novel in a month. That was kind of the, the concept that kicked it all off. And so it started with 21 people in San Francisco Bay area in 1999. And then, um, Kaelyn: 04:37   Oh, so this is the 20th anniversary of this. Rekka: 04:40   Oh yeah, it is, isn't it? Kaelyn: 04:41   How appropriate that this is Episode 20. Rekka: 04:44   Oh. Kaelyn: 04:44   We did that on purpose. Absolutely. Rekka: 04:46   Okay. Did you feel that? I think I just felt like the universe tear a little. Um, so yeah. Yeah, I guess it's, it's the 20th anniversary of the very start of it. Um, it didn't go national until the following year when they put up a website for it. So in 2000 they um, they not only put up a website, but they moved it to November. So the first year was a July. Kaelyn: 05:12   Okay. Rekka: 05:13   So, um, they were in California. They don't even notice the difference between July and November. Kaelyn: 05:17   Well, certainly not in, in San Francisco. Rekka: 05:19   San Francisco. Yeah. So I'm a nice balmy, probably 72 degrees throughout the year and um, they didn't even notice, but they moved it to November because they figured for most people who are, at least in the Northern hemisphere, they will be looking for a way to avoid like gloomy, rainy, shorter days and stuff like that. Kaelyn: 05:41   November's a brutal month, November and February. Rekka: 05:42   The funny thing is they, they chose it on a month where typically people have at least a week of travel or holiday planning to deal with. Kaelyn: 05:54   Yeah, I was wondering about that actually. Rekka: 05:58   So I find that, well, one my family doesn't travel for Thanksgiving. Um, so I find that it's not really an interruption for me. If anything, there's usually a couple extra days off work during that week. And so I can take advantage of that. Um, people who have family come into town probably have a harder time of it because their life is disrupted, but for whatever reason, they felt that November the month of gloom amd Turkey would be Turkey for those of us who celebrate Thanksgiving in the U S they've felt it would be the, uh, the proper month to choose. So the second year they had 140 participants. Kaelyn: 06:41   Okay. Rekka: 06:42   So not bad growth from 21. Kaelyn: 06:44   No it's pretty good. Rekka: 06:45   But, um, yeah, by a few years ago they had about half a million people. So it's been growing. And then of course by word of mouth, as everyone gets excited and talks about it, they um, they draw more people in. I think it's probably the best organic marketing campaign that anyone could have. Um, ironically it's a 5013- C nonprofit organization, but they do help, um, kids in schools get interested in writing through their young writers program. Kaelyn: 07:18   Yeah. Rekka: 07:18   The NaNoWriMo itself is free to participate in, they collect donations, so if you donate to them through their website, your avatar on that site has a halo slung over one corner. So in theory, anyone with internet access can participate in the community. I've heard of plenty of people who do NaNoWriMo without ever logging onto the website as well. Kaelyn: 07:41   Yeah. Because it's not, well, and we'll get into this a little bit, but it's something that can just be done entirely independently. You just declare, I am doing NaNoWriMo and then you do NaNoWriMo. Rekka: 07:53   And then you sit down and you figure out how you're going to do it. You figure out how you're going to do your word count. I mean, I know people who handwrite in a notebook, their 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo, which makes my wrist scream in agony at the thought. But for some people still have limber carpal tunnel ligaments then. Kaelyn: 08:09   Well, yeah, because they're writing everything. They're not typing. Yeah. We haven't destroyed all of their - Rekka: 08:16   Well, yeah. And mousing. You can participate through the website, you can choose not to. Um, but one of the advantages that I love about NaNoWriMo and why I think it's so successful is that, you know, so many people online who are participating. So people who are good friends of yours in person may show up and write with you in person at write-ins, uh, at libraries, cafes, you know, wherever people take over to sit and write for a while. And then, um, you know, you might have friends that you've never met but are also participating in NaNoWriMo online that you can, uh, do community challenges through the NaNoWriMo or through Twitter or Facebook, Slack groups, discord, you know, whatever. And then, um, you have people that you meet by doing NaNoWriMo. So it's community reinforcing, but also community building. And I think that's the power of NaNoWriMo is one, just the general excitement that you are not alone in attempting this feat. Rekka: 09:20   And the support I think is probably incredibly important. The other half is that it's community building as well. So you meet people who have similar passions to you. You know, writing, you meet other people who write in your genre. You might even meet people who beta read your novel for you when, when your draft is done and help you refine it and move it toward completion. So it's a great resource to motivate yourself, but it also can be a great resource for finishing your manuscript once your draft is done. So NaNoWriMo started, as I said, with one month that moved to November. And then what about the rest of the year? Or for people in other hemispheres who, um, you know, their dreary month is, you know, July or April, you know, so there is also camp NaNoWriMo, which of course belies the fact that it's four people in another year by making it sound like a summer event. Rekka: 10:18   But, um, essentially, you know, this is a very, um, Northern hemisphere Western hemisphere centric event and it probably always will be. Um, it's been better about recognizing that people are all over the world. They've got regions all over the world, but it's, it's definitely still got a us centric mindset. And um, so in April when you used to have script frenzy, you know, have the first Camp NaNoWriMo, so this is 30 days, um, in which you set your own goal. It's, it's a much more casual NaNoWriMo project. In theory, in November you were writing at least 50,000 words, but for camp NaNoWriMo, you can go as low as 10,000. Kaelyn: 11:00   Okay. Rekka: 11:00   So if you just wanted to write some poetry or short stories and you wanted to do it at a slower pace, you could say, I'm going to write a, you know, a 3,500 word short story every week for April. Kaelyn: 11:15   That's still a pretty steep undertaking. Rekka: 11:16   That's still a pretty decent undertaking, um, and that would land you with something. I'm doing the math in my head poorly, like 17,000 words or something like that. At the end of the month. Kaelyn: 11:26   14. Rekka: 11:26   Yeah. See I told you before that I went to art school and I'm a writer so that I can avoid these number things. Kaelyn: 11:32   Yeah. Yeah. Rekka: 11:33   Um, so you a can set your own goal. You go to the website, it's definitely not as active, like there's little cute stuff on the website throughout the month, but it's, the community is a lot quieter on social media where you might have experienced tons of sprints on Twitter and a word Wars, whatever you'd like to call them. Um, and then you know, your friends on Facebook are talking about how they're doing their, um, talking in your discord, chat room server, whatever the term is about the progress they're doing and you're all rooting for each other. Rekka: 12:12   Camp NaNoWriMo in April for 30 days and in July for 31 days is a lot more low key. So you pretty much on your own, I've found you might have a friend or two that are doing it. And I've seen a lot of people release themselves from the deadline pretty early in the month. Kaelyn: 12:30   It's not as organized and community driven from what I've seen as NaNoWriMo. Rekka: 12:37   Yeah. I mean all the functions are there on the website so that you can track it. But, um, I'm very curious to see how this goes because their new website that they just rolled out allows you to track projects throughout the year so you can go in and set a goal. And they started to do this on the last version after, I think last year. But you can start tracking goals throughout the year and you can set them, you can add your word counts to them, you can set deadlines and it will show you, you know, how you're progressing towards your deadline throughout the calendar year. Rekka: 13:09   So I wonder if camp NaNoWriMo is actually going to fade as a result of that or maybe be combined into one other, I mean, this is me just speculating. Kaelyn: 13:17   Yeah. Rekka: 13:18   I mean by keeping, you know, keep your eyes peeled because I think there will probably be some changes to the, the events throughout the year. But as of this moment, you have three NaNoWriMo events, two camps and one big national. You know, um, everyone has a project that they've been keeping in their back pocket for this. Some people start to plan and outline ahead of it so that they're ready to go. People are telling their friends and family, they do not exist in November, um, that they will, uh, you know, come downstairs for the Turkey dinner at 2:00 PM on, on Thanksgiving day and then they will go back to upstairs to the room. Kaelyn: 13:55   I retreat to my cave or my attic. Rekka: 13:57   And so, um, so yeah, so November really if you want to participate and feel the full blast of the furnace, that is the NaNoWriMo experience. Um, I definitely recommend participating in November and find a local writing group because, uh, showing up in person really does make a difference for your productivity. I used to not go to the events because like I said, I'd have to drive an hour or more to get to the event. The event was two or three hours, I think it was two. And then, um, I would drive an hour or more to get home and I was like, well, in those six hours I could be writing more words, except I wouldn't because life would get in the way. So, um, so it really does help to just go and it's also, there is nothing that compares with the feeling of writing in a room where everyone is writing and, um, there's just like this buzz of everybody focused on the same task, that really is incredible. Rekka: 14:47   Um, I'm sure it's the, the theory behind the open working space, a bullpen environment. Kaelyn: 14:55   Oh not that. Rekka: 14:55   But let's, let's not, don't get me wrong, I'm not encouraging that. But um, if everyone is silently writing, then yes, maybe that works. Um, one thing I will mention is that for people who have to write in nontraditional ways for health reasons or, or other productivity reasons, um, it's not going to be a friendly environment. If you are a dictation writer, you know, and it's not going to be a friendly environment. Um, if you need, you know, audio output from your computer as you work, um, or you know, that sort of thing. Um, hopefully all your writings, I know I always try to make them as accessible as possible. Um, I've stopped going to cafes where you had to go up a little staircase to a really cute little loft because it means that people who have, you know, um, crutches or wheelchairs can't attend and stuff. So, um, hopefully all the municipal liaisons around your area take the same efforts to make sure that everyone can come. Kaelyn: 15:51   What typically is the goal at the end of NaNoWriMo when you have done all of this, what quote unquote should you walk away with? Rekka: 16:00   Uh, so the thought is that you can write a book in a month. I mean, a novel in a month. That's national novel writing, not national, write a bunch month. It's national novel writing month. So the goal is to complete a novel in a month, start to finish. In theory, you would not have a draft that you've already begun. Um, and in theory you would write the end on November 30th. Kaelyn: 16:27   Okay. Rekka: 16:28   The metric they use is word count. So the goal of the month to quote unquote, when NaNoWriMo, um, you would have 50,000 words at the end of the month, the goal of 50,000 words is attainable, if you write 1,667 words per day. Kaelyn: 16:50   Okay. Rekka: 16:50   So that will get you to 50,000 in 30 days. So there is a pace that's set by that and there are bar charts and um, estimators that will tell you like at this pace you'll finish on kind of thing. Kaelyn: 17:08   Yeah. Rekka: 17:09   You can sort of see how you're doing, see if you're falling behind, all that kind of stuff. And the number that they came up with is based on literary, uh, great American literary novels, Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, so on and so forth. Um, so if you've ever been handed one of those books in a classroom or picked it up in the library and read it for summer reading, because that's typically where all these novels exist in your life, is in some sort of educational format. Um, you know that these are not the same size as the trade paperbacks you pick up at the store. Kaelyn: 17:44   Yes. Rekka: 17:45   And I think that's an important thing to note is that if you follow the letter of the, you know, goal for NaNoWriMo, you are probably not going to end up with what most people would consider a full size book. Kaelyn: 17:59   You are going to end up 10,000 words short of what my publishing company accepts for novels. Rekka: 18:06   For genre fiction. Kaelyn: 18:08   Yes. So yeah, so 50,000 words is 10,000 words shy of the 60,000 minimum. That a lot, not just Parvus of us but a lot of publishing - Rekka: 18:16   That's pretty standard. Rekka: 18:17   Um, yeah, it's about 200 pages provided that the story is done. When you have your 50,000 words, you are going to have to trunk it or expand it if you want to submit it. Kaelyn: 18:31   With something like NaNoWriMo, um, one of the things I would imagine can be very stressful for people participating in it is, is a lot of pressure and it's, some people don't write well under a deadline, right? Rekka: 18:47   Some people Excel at it. And I think those are the people who tend to love NaNoWriMo and love what it can do for their productivity. Kaelyn: 18:54   Some people, I would imagine this would be an incredibly stressful. Rekka: 18:58   Oh yeah. Kaelyn: 18:58   Thing for them that is not necessarily going to produce the best possible version of what they want to write. Rekka: 19:05   1,667 words a day takes discipline, but it also takes rearranging your schedule. Kaelyn: 19:12   Yes. Rekka: 19:12   For some people, um, it's not just, Oh, I will sit down and write those words with this copious amount of free time I have. Kaelyn: 19:19   There's unseen hours that go into this, of thinking about what you're going to write. A lot of people don't just sit down and magically have these words pour out of them. Rekka: 19:28   So if you don't have the time in your life to think about what you're going to write in your next writing session, chances are part of your writing session is going to be given over to switching from your, like Bruce Wayne mode into your Batman mode. Kaelyn: 19:40   Mmmhmm. Rekka: 19:41   And so that's not necessarily going to be something that you can maintain after November. So that's another criticism I've heard is like, people wear themselves out to get these 50,000 words and then that's it. And they write once a year for 30 days in extreme dash and then they don't write for the rest of the year, which is not a fantastic way to strengthen your skills as a writer. Like writing every day is not something that everyone can do 100%. It's exhausting and just like working out the rest of the process. Kaelyn: 20:21   Your time, your schedule. Rekka: 20:21   You need to take a break so you can come back fresh and um, and write, well if you write every day, every day, every day, and that's all your spare time, then you become a husk of human being in a way. And you know, you're writing probably suffers because you don't have any inspiration in your life. You just have output and you need time for input as well. Kaelyn: 20:41   Right. Rekka: 20:43   So writing under extreme deadline means that you don't have time to take that rest between, um, you know, writing sessions if you need to. Uh, it does mean that you have an expectation of finishing something and maybe that kind of drains the joy out of just being present in the moment of the words you're writing. Now, if you are focused on your word count and say you start off great, like day one, day two, maybe you hit your quotas, no problem. Maybe you're ahead of them. And then day three, you know, you have dinner with family so you're not even home when you would normally be writing. And then day four you're like, okay, well I've just got to make up double quota and I, it wasn't so bad this first two days, so I'll just make up. Rekka: 21:28   And then day four, something else happens. And then day five, maybe it's a Monday and you're back at work and you were hoping that you might, might be able to hit your regular quota only now you've got like a couple of days on top of that so you can start to really pile up and add to the anxiety of things. Honestly, the best time I ever had writing for NaNoWriMo was, um, when I was 100% ahead of my quota every day. And it's just not a situation that happens for 100% of the people and there's no way to control it, really. The reason that I was ahead, that particular NaNoWriMo was because I was the, became that year the municipal liaison for my NaNoWriMo region because now that it's so big, they break it up into regions and then they have local people who lead in person write-ins wrangle the people in that area, encourage them, send out messages to them to, you know, inspire them, remind them of events and all this. Rekka: 22:27   So when I was municipal liaison for the first year, it was also the first year that I attended every single writing and I was encouraging people online and I really thought that your was going to actually make it harder for me to hit my goals because I thought that I'm writing the newsletters to the people and I'm driving to the write ins was going to take away from the time I would otherwise be writing. But instead what it did was like, give me a motivated, like, like super powered focus. And so when I got there, I was leading writing sprints, which are timed sessions, kind of like Pomodoro method except you know, it can be a little bit of friendly competition. You just write, you know, fingers ablaze or whatever keyboard, whatever your method of writing is. Um, you just do that for whatever the time are set for you. Rekka: 23:24   Usually 20 to 30 minutes seems to be pretty comfortable for people. And then like, you know, when you get to the end of your right and sometimes you have like spare change minutes, so you'd do like five minutes or 15 minutes or whatever you can fit in. And then at the end everybody calls out, you know, how many words they wrote. And um, you know, that Pomodoro technique for some people works really, really well. And then you also get built in breaks to like stretch your fingers, get up as opposed to staring at the keyboard and saying, I'm writing for three hours, which is a lot. Kaelyn: 23:55   It is, well doing anything for three hours, is uh. Rekka: 23:58   Yeah, it's tough. I mean there's a reason that, you know, school classes in high school were like, what, 40 minutes for a class because that was about all you, the teacher was going to get out of you before you needed to get up and walk around to your next class, go to lockers. Kaelyn: 24:11   Actually in high school we had block scheduling. So our classes were an hour and 40 minutes each and it was brutal. So yeah, I mean even doing something for like two hours nonstop without a break that can, that's very mentally fatiguing. Rekka: 24:27   Yes, yes. So that's the, the idea is that the um, you know, the write-ins give you not just the community but also like some structure and it really worked for me and I live in a very strange, narrow is North, South, you know, column of a region where it's, you can't just drive directly across one corner to the other because of Connecticut roads. You know, you have to take a highway in the wrong direction for a while and, and make the next one and, and, and make a 90 degree turn. And I really thought that all this commuting was going to cut into my writing time. But what I found was that having set scheduled writing time was really, really helpful and kept me motivated. And then when I did have 10 or 20 minutes throughout the rest of the day, even if I wasn't at a write in, I was already in the mode of writing for this because I was thinking about it daily as opposed to just on the weekends. Rekka: 25:20   So that's another warning is don't save all your quota and just do it on the weekends because that's a lot of words to make up for. That's a lot of pressure and it's a lot of pressure. And then if your weekend goes a little bit awry, like mine always do, you know- Kaelyn: 25:31   The candle thing goes wonky, that'll do ya. Rekka: 25:33   You end up out running errands for three hours in the middle of the day when you were supposed to be writing. So, um, that's tough. But for some people it's um, also tough to just get that time away from their family. Kaelyn: 25:47   How polished is what you're writing during this going to be, because my, I'm kind of looking at this thinking like, alright, you've written 50,000 words. These are probably not the best 50,000 words you're ever going to write. They're going to probably need some revisions, some work, some addition. Rekka: 26:05   That's kind of where I think a lot of folks split on their opinion of NaNoWriMo. Some folks love NaNoWriMo because it helps them get the words on the page. Some folks hate, loath, detestsNaNoWriMo because of the words that end up on the page and the quality thereof. Kaelyn: 26:30   Well, yeah, and that probably has a lot to do with just how you work. Is it a matter of, it doesn't have to be pretty, I just need to get it done Rekka: 26:38   Right. Kaelyn: 26:38   Because this is how I'm going to make myself get it done. New Speaker:  26:41   Yes. So when NaNoWriMo on the word count, because the idea is to prove to you that you can write that many words if you sit down everyday and do it, um, or if you budget out how you're going to do it through the month. Um, if you hit 1,667 words per day and you get to the 50,000, at the end of the month, the quality is entirely dependent on you. It's probably safe to say that the average NaNoWriMo 50,000 word draft is uh, one probably not done. You know, that person probably didn't get to the end of the story. Um, some of this is pacing yourself in terms of like how much to write proceed and how much to write per chapter. A lot of people do a discovery writing, so they just kind of sit down and they might have a character in mind or general plot arc, but they don't have a, a, an outline or a writing plan. Kaelyn: 27:42   So in this case then what their goal is is I have a character, I have an idea of a story. Let me see where this goes. I'm going to sit down and write about 1700 words a day and see how this. Rekka: 27:56   See how this ends up, right. Maybe freewriting is a, is a good term. I mean, most creative drafting is probably free writing once you get into it. It's just a matter of like, do you have a goal in mind to like, am I writing a scene where the character has to get to the bus stop? Because if they don't make this bus, they're not going to see their mother before she passes. Sorry everyone, that was pretty downer, but you know those kinds of tense moments or is this like my character works at a coffee shop and so I'm going to describe her day and you know, and all of those things are valid for your first draft. I suspect that the reason that those people who do not care for NaNoWriMo, I don't even know what to suspect. I can confirm that the reason that people don't like NaNoWriMo when they feel that way and when they feel strongly about it is because in December there are half a million people who have some form of a first draft of something that they now want to share. Kaelyn: 29:02   Yep. Rekka: 29:03   Some of these people choose to go ahead and self publish it right there. Okay, I do not recommend this. Kaelyn: 29:09   No. I would say go back and listen to all of our submissions, September episodes where we talk about is this ready to show to other people? Rekka: 29:18   Not only do people sometimes self-publish these books Kaelyn: 29:22   So wait, real quick, people actually sit down, write the 50,000 words through this, then take that in its exact form. Rekka: 29:31   Yup. Kaelyn: 29:32   And self-publish it. Rekka: 29:35   Yup. I think people are starting to get a little bit better about that now. Um, but it was definitely, and a NaNoWriMo has some sponsors and some of them are the companies through which you can self publish. I think create space before Amazon eight create space. Um, used to have a link on the winner's page, like com upload your draft, which is fine if you want to see it and hold it and read it and go over it again. But please don't list it for sale at this point. Kaelyn: 30:03   Well, who, um who is participating in NaNoWriMo? Because I kind of always understood it to be people very active in writing communities and um, I would think people who are very active in writing communities would know that this first thing that you've done is not ready to be seen by anyone. Rekka: 30:26   Right. So that is part of it. Um, yeah, we have, we have writers who are writers the rest of the year who participate in NaNoWriMo just because they know all their friends are working on it and you hear a lot, even through the rest of the year, like, Oh, I'm saving that for November, you know, like that's a, that's a novel I want to start in November, so I want to finish this other stuff first. Kaelyn: 30:49   Yeah. Rekka: 30:50   So that definitely is true. There are definitely people who are professionally or amateur and I don't mean amateur in the sense of not very good, but I mean amateur in the sense of does it for the love of it. Kaelyn: 31:01   Yeah. The actual literal definition of amateur. Rekka: 31:05   There are people who know what it is to write a book and they know what a book looks like when it's ready to be seen by other people. And they know about the process of editing and revising. There are also people who hear about NaNoWriMo on Facebook or whatever and they think, Oh, that's cute. I've always wanted to write a book. And it's, I think, and I do not mean to disparage any group of people, Kaelyn: 31:28   No, of course not. Rekka: 31:28   But I think it's that group of the, I've always wanted to write a book, people, um - Kaelyn: 31:34   Who are kind of coming into this without exposure to, well, pretty much anything that this podcast is about. The writing and publishing. Yeah. Rekka: 31:42   Right. So they may be enthusiastic readers, um, of any genre. Um, people participate in NaNoWriMo for any genre as well. Um, some people write poetry, some people write blog posts for their website and just use the word count, you know, to measure how they're doing. Um, if you wanna call that a work of, you know, collected articles, you can, you know, NaNoWriMo has gotten a little bit fuzzy. And I don't mean this in a negative way, but they have, they really started originally where you're writing a novel and it's fiction and it may or may not have, You know, speculative elements or fantasy, but generally it is a plot that you come up with, with characters that you come up with. Now there are people who write biographies and, and whatever. And the, the genres that you could choose from the dropdown menu on their website when you're setting up your project to track, um, has gotten a lot longer than it needs to be. Rekka: 32:47   It used to be like five or six things. Um, now, you know, screenplay is one of them where, you know, that's a very different kind of writing experience from writing a novel. And also it used to be separated out into its own event called script frenzy, which they no longer have. They've just absorbed scripts and other comic books and, and that sort of thing into their main events. Um, and they hold three a year. Kaelyn: 33:12   Okay. Rekka: 33:13   Um, so not only are there people who are self publishing these books, um, just releasing them into the wild and sticking - Kaelyn: 33:21   Go books! Be free! Rekka: 33:23   But no, not free. People are charging for their NaNoWriMo draft one. So I think that contributes to the very negative opinions some people have of the um, the community event because they see a plethora of unedited, unrevised unproofed un-beta, you know, Kaelyn: 33:46   Checked, anything. Rekka: 33:46   Um, just, it doesn't necessarily even have a illustration on the cover. It might just have the title, the title. Um, if you've ever seen like the, um, covers where there's like a couple of blocks of, of colors and then the, uh, um, the, the title across it in times new Roman or whatever. Um, so there are, there are usually a flood of those and people who work very hard to try and lift the, the, uh, reputation of self-publishing by putting in the effort are often very frustrated by this wave public - Kaelyn: 34:26   Well that's understandable, you know you never want to see, you know especially something that's a community that's trying to establish and build its reputation more. And then you get this, a flurry of people coming in and going, See I did the same thing you did and you're going, no, you didn't. Rekka: 34:39   Yeah. And I think maybe that's one of the criticisms or the lead, the root of the criticism is somebody who participates in NaNoWriMo throws mud against a wall in terms of the words that they put on the page. They hit the quota and then they say, I've written a book too. Kaelyn: 34:57   Yeah. Rekka: 34:57   When you know that's the tip of the iceberg. That's the, that's the outside impression of what it takes to write a book. It's the revisions and the editing and you know, going through the process of producing the book that is the unseen 90% of the iceberg. And you know - Kaelyn: 35:18   You know, because it's, you know, and as you said, not to disparage anyone in what they're doing, but someone who does NaNoWriMo writes the 50,000 words and says, okay, I'm done, is not doing the same thing as someone who says, okay, I've done NaNoWriMo. I've written a 50,000 words. I'm just getting started. Rekka: 35:34   Yeah. And so check that off. That's step one. Kaelyn: 35:38   Yeah. Rekka: 35:39   I've got almost a full manuscript that I will then reread on my own, try to improve as best I can, involve some beta readers at the very least a really clean it up and maybe query to an agent, start the, the entire process that is years in the making, not 30 days. So, um, you know, to that point, I think NaNoWriMo caught on a national novel writing month. The organization caught on that this was a negative aspect in a lot of people's minds about the event. So almost immediately after you finished NaNoWriMo, you are invited to participate in what they call the Now What Months. Kaelyn: 36:24   Great. Rekka: 36:24   And no, but it's a good thing. Kaelyn: 36:26   It's a very good thing. Rekka: 36:27   And there are plenty of editors and writers out there who have courses and guides for editing what you've written in your NaNoWriMo month and they're out there. They're free on people's blogs. Some people have, um, paid content and webinars and all this kind of stuff. Like people realize that there's a need for, for guidance of a new writer and what to do with these words that they've written. How to know if they're good, how to know if they can be salvaged or if they need to be tossed and just, you know, considered acute experiment or something like that. Um, so the now what months are they begin advertising them in December, but they don't really kick off until the new year, which is a good thing because it gives people to take the space to rest from the, um, madcap dash that they just participated in. Kaelyn: 37:20   Well and also, December in a chaotic month for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. Rekka: 37:24   And your family is already mad at you for skipping out on Thanksgiving. Kaelyn: 37:26   You already went and sat and wrote in the middle of Thanksgiving. Rekka: 37:29   So, or you know, ignored your, your aunt and uncle who you only see this time of year to write this thing. So December, December is your month off, which is a good thing, I think in the process of writing a book. It's good to step away from it after you've finished the draft so you can come back to it with fresh eyes and then begin the process of editing and revising it. But that's not NaNoWriMo itself. It's just what you should do with your book when you're done with NaNoWriMo, whether you realize it or not. So if you create this drivel of a draft and it's 50,000 words that you should probably set on fire, why, why do people do NaNoWriMo is the question that usually comes up next like, okay, so you don't want to publish what you did. Why do it? Kaelyn: 38:15   Well, I mean I would just, you know, from my having never participated in this side of things, think of that it is getting you to sit down and just do the thing. Rekka: 38:28   And I think that's the intent is just to prove to people that you can write a thing. Kaelyn: 38:32   It's to prove to yourself even. Rekka: 38:33   Yes. I'm sorry. Like for people use to prove to themselves that they can write a thing. Kaelyn: 38:38   Um, there is, you know, we, we talked about earlier, there is this mentality of like if everyone is doing it, it's a motivating factor. It helps you kind of stay on track, stay involved, feel like you're not drifting alone out there doing this. And it's um, it's a big community building event as well. Rekka: 39:04   Yeah. As we listed like you can meet people, you can hang out with people you don't normally get to see, at least not this much and you can um, just participate in this. Um, you know that same thing I was talking about earlier with everyone focusing in one room, everyone focusing on the internet is also pretty thrilling. Kaelyn: 39:22   But you even, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head earlier. You called it like if this is like a holiday, people plan for this, they say like, I have a project that I'm saving for November and I think having a specific time where I'm going to do this at this time, one gives you a deadline to prepare for. Rekka: 39:42   Right. Kaelyn: 39:42   And I don't mean the deadline at the end of the month, I mean the deadline or the beginning of the month where it's like, okay, I kind of need to have this stuff figured out before I dive into this. I need to have plans setups so that I can dive into this. I need to have a schedule in place. And I think even just having that motivating factor is very important for getting started. Rekka: 40:06   You know, I talk about being a municipal liason on and having write-ins throughout the month, but we start earlier than that. Um, we have a, it, it hasn't even happened yet. So, um, you know, if you're listening to this on the 22nd, you're going, Oh, I've never heard of this, or I have heard of this, but I've never dared to enter. But I think this year's, I really wish I could, but it's October 22nd. It's too late. I've got to wait until next year. Kaelyn: 40:28   It's not too late. Rekka: 40:29   It's absolutely not too late. Um, if you don't mind a bit of discovery writing in your drafting process, you can just start on November 1st with, uh, you know, what if question and let everything unfold from there. Um, if you like an outline, it's still not too late as long as you can set aside like a day or two and maybe not even consecutively. Um, that's just my recommendation to write an outline, a quick outline. It doesn't have to be a fully fledged, you know, Rekka-style outline, which is what 500 words. Kaelyn: 41:05   Those are notorious. Rekka: 41:06   Um, so the, um, you know, you, if you can set aside a day to come up with your story plot and then set aside a day, a few days later to revisit it and see how it sounds, if you have any more ideas cause you've been thinking about it for a couple of days. So, um, what we do in my writing, uh, community, my local writing community is, uh, this one hour plot workshop and we're holding it on the 27th. So, you know, the 22nd is not too late to start this. Kaelyn: 41:35   No, definitely not. Rekka: 41:38   Yeah. There's, there's really no time that it's too late to start writing. Even if you come in halfway through a NaNoWriMo event, um, you may not hit the word count without, you know, breaking your brain over it. But, um, you know, creating this habit or participating is never a bad idea. No. But yeah, so we create this, um, or we have this one hour, a plot workshop, which is actually like two or three hours for the setup and chatting about it and answering questions and doing things, following, you know, a person who's leading you through this. But it is based on a book called The Busy Writer's one hour plot that's by Marge McAllister, which is an ebook that you can still find on Amazon. Um, and you know, you just go through and you, you start with the character, you start with one or however many you have and it just basically asks you like, okay, what do they want, what are their obstacles? Rekka: 42:31   Um, and what are three obstacles that they have to go through throughout the plot, you know, assuming a four X structure. And, um, and then at the end of going through that little plot program, you've got a loose, but you've structured, yeah, you've got a structure of a story that you can start writing. So, you know, at 25,000 words through your 50,000, you should be at that second obstacle. You know, things that you can sort of use to pace yourself at the very least and discovery, right, all the rest. Um, they welcome plot plotters as well as pantsers NaNoWriMo. Um, and there's even a book by, um, one of the founders of national novel writing month called no plot, no problem. So you can, you can definitely get started with just the barest idea of the story and um, and succeed from there. And you know, assuming that success is a 50,000 word draft and again, that you will take and develop further. Kaelyn: 43:30   So on my end, um, Parvus typically opens for submissions in the beginning of the year and - Rekka: 43:39   Which may be a mistake. Kaelyn: 43:41   Well, you know, the thing is that we, we usually open for submissions twice a year and we always get a lot more in the beginning of the year because everyone has just finished NaNoWriMo and not every one takes off December. Some people go straight into revising and editing. Rekka: 43:59   Um, and we love those people who revise and edit rather than just wait until January to dump it on your doors. Kaelyn: 44:03   Yes, yes. But, so we talked about this. Now what, here's the thing, your 50,000 word, NaNoWriMo writing project, that's not a book that's not ready to get submitted or sent in as we talked about, you know, that's 10,000 words shy of what a lot of places want for a minimum. Rekka: 44:25   A minimum, yeah. Kaelyn: 44:26   Right off the bat. So is this ready to show to anyone? Here's the thing, probably not. Um - Rekka: 44:33   Be very proud of it. Kaelyn: 44:34   Yeah! Rekka: 44:34   Like, don't, don't think that you should be ashamed of what you've just accomplished and - Kaelyn: 44:38   You absolutely should be proud of it. This is a, this is a feat. You have accomplished a feat. Rekka: 44:44   And you've proven to yourself that you can do this. Hopefully you haven't overtaxed yourself to the point where you feel like you need to collapse until next November to write again. Um, because you know, and that's just one of the criticisms that you get and they get some pretty nasty heated conversations about how if you only write once a year, you're not a writer. Um, those are judgments that we're not passing here, but we do suggest that your writing, um, skill will improve if you do it throughout the year as opposed to waiting once per year. So be proud that you have started. Kaelyn: 45:17   Absolutely be proud of what you've done. Rekka: 45:17   If this is your first, you've done projects, you have started, you know, hopefully you love it, hopefully you discovered your passion. If not, that's also an important thing to learn. If you found who are writing a draft kind of sucks. And I don't like doing this and like, you know what, and just you can just keep being a reader and feel no shame about it. You've discovered something about yourself and your, you know, where it's worth investing your time. So, um, you know, that's also a good thing. You can learn a lot about yourself in NaNoWriMo. You can also create a draft that maybe has a spark of something that you feel could develop into a full manuscript that you can send out on query or submission, but you don't do it right away. So, uh, yeah, 50,000 words too short to submit, at least to genre fiction. Kaelyn: 46:03   Most places aren't even - Rekka: 46:04   And almost definitely a need of some revising and attention. So, you know, you probably needed 1,667 words one day. And so you wrote about some coffee shop scene that doesn't even develop character. Kaelyn: 46:17   Rekka, do you need coffee? Rekka: 46:19   I always need coffee. Kaelyn: 46:20   It's a lot of, there's a lot of coffee shops, scenes here. I feel like you're trying to tell me something. It's fine. Rekka: 46:27   I'm trying to tell you that I always need coffee. Kaelyn: 46:29   It's fine. We'll get you coffee. Rekka: 46:30   For the record, I always want more coffee. Kaelyn: 46:33   So, um, well on that note, maybe we should go get you some more coffee. Rekka: 46:38   Okay, fair. But yeah, just to wrap it up, you know, like what is national novel writing month. It is a fully worthwhile community event that takes place online and in local writing groups. And there's probably a, you know, a region near you that you can, you know, go lump yourself onto and participate this year if you haven't before. If you don't have a region near you, you are absolutely invited to my region as like an expat or something or something like that. Kaelyn: 47:05   [laughs] An expat? Rekka: 47:05   Um, you can come find the region, you know, USA, Connecticut, Fairfield County. Okay. And you are totally welcome to come join and right remotely in my, you know, NaNoWriMo. Kaelyn: 47:17   I mean Rekka is doing it this year. Rekka: 47:19   So you know, if you're like, if you're unsure anm hey if it's your first time and you're inspired by this episode, let us know. We'd, we'd love to hear that. Kaelyn: 47:26   Especially if you end up joining a Rekka's writing community. Rekka: 47:29   Yeah. If I have an influx of people, yeah I will, that would love to know which ones are people who came in from the, from the podcast. You can tweet at us too, all through November. Let us know how you're doing if you were listening to this and inspired this. Kaelyn: 47:43   I think uh, Rekka will certainly be tweeting about this and how she's she's doing. Rekka: 47:47   Oh, so I should just touch on this real quick. Um, there is a category of NaNoWriMo participant called the nano rebel. Kaelyn: 47:52   Oh boy. Rekka: 47:53   And that's kind of what I technically am because this year I am trying to work on a manuscript that I already started earlier this year. Kaelyn: 48:02   [gasps] Rekka: 48:03   So I have 30,000 words of a novel, but I am going to write 50,000 more okay. Through the month. Um, heck if I can finish my draft in the month. So here's, here's my, my personal experience that month that I told you that was my first as a municipal liaison and I had no trouble staying ahead of my quota. And I, I didn't even say this, but I finished early. I finished six days early with 85,000 words of a. Kaelyn: 48:32   For those of you listening who haven't figured this out already Rekka's, not a person in the strictest sense of the word. We're pretty sure - Rekka: 48:42   I might just be a floating ball of plasma. Kaelyn: 48:45   We're pretty sure she's not carbon based. Rekka: 48:47   So, um, yeah, so I finished that draft 25 days, you know, 85,000 words, Chi-ching, aren't I awesome. I also rewrote that entire thing like four times and that became Salvage. Kaelyn: 48:59   Yup. Rekka: 48:59   So, um, so your over achievement in NaNoWriMo does not instantly, you know, spell success for your story. You, you, even if you are a writer all year round, and if even if you're a writer all year round, you probably will end up revising this thing a heck of a lot before you want to show it to anybody. So, yes, um Salvage was my 2016 NaNoWriMo project. It was 85,000 words after 25 days. And then it was revised several whopping times that probably took years off my life and came in at 163,000 words when it was done. So neither of those were 50,000 and a as complete stories. And I'd started with outlines and I, um, you know, saved this project for that month kind of thing. Great. Well I think that's really fantastic thing to do. So it's all about the community. Honestly. That's my exact part of NaNoWriMo and my use of it has changed since 2016 I write year round now trying to create new drafts of things. Rekka: 50:10   And very frequently I find that my scheduling just doesn't let me set aside like one specific month as determined by other people. Um, but I'm still the municipal liaison. I still love it. I still love going and working on whatever I'm working on with people doing, you know, 12 write-ins a month instead of the usual two that my, my community does. So it's so much fun. If you don't hinge your future writing career success upon your ability to write a Submittable draft in one month, then it's just hanging out with a bunch of people who love writing just as much as you do. And I definitely recommend it. Yeah. So, um, you know, I, I've learned a lot this episode. Um, hopefully you did too. And if you're, you know, if you're going to take part of, let us know, we'd be very interested to uh, to follow and cheer you on. Kaelyn: 50:57   Yeah. Cheer you on and see what, see what you come up with. Rekka: 51:00   And fold you into my community. Kaelyn: 51:02   Yes. Rekka: 51:02   Yeah. So this has been another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing, publishing and everything in between. You can find us on Twitter at WMB cast. We are also on Instagram at WMB cast. You can find our old episodes@wmbcast.com and if you have a buck or two to chip in to help us manage this podcast and uh thank us for our time. If you, especially if you find this, uh, as a very valuable resource, please come to patreon.com/WMB cast. And if you do not have financial support that you can grant us, you can still help us out a lot by sharing episodes that you enjoy with a friend who would also enjoy them. And, um, the easiest thing is just retweet our episodes when you see them pop up on Twitter. Kaelyn: 51:46   And, uh, also leave us a rating and review. Rekka: 51:48   Oh yes, yes. Probably the most important part. Kaelyn: 51:51   That's the most important. Rekka: 51:52   Which it always feels like the biggest ask of people. Like, could you please go say a nice thing. Kaelyn: 51:57   It doesn't have to be long. Rekka: 51:58   Just say what you like, you know, say like Kaelyn's voice. Kaelyn: 52:02   God, I hate my voice. Rekka: 52:03   Say you also like coffee. Say you're going to join a NaNoWriMo with us this year. So yeah. Um, ratings and reviews on iTunes. Help Apple. Find other listeners for our podcast, which is what we want. We want to talk to everybody. Kaelyn: 52:14   Everyone. Rekka: 52:15   Because we're extroverts somehow. Kaelyn: 52:17   Eh. Rekka: 52:18   All right, everybody, we'll talk to you in two weeks.    0

Nina Meijers discusses FoodBytes! (San Francisco event showcasing startups disrupting the food and agriculture space) and former FoodBytes! alumna Claire Schlemme, CEO & founder of Oakland-based Renewal Mill that is fighting food waste by upcycling okara.Transcripts:Lisa Kiefer:This is Method to the Madness, a public payer show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer and today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of Foodbytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based and alumni startup of Foodbytes Renewal Mill. Welcome to the program.Nina Meyers:Thank you.Lisa Kiefer:I'm particularly interested in what's coming up next week with Foodbytes, but first of all, Nina Meyers, tell us what you do for Foodbytes, how it got started, what's the history and what's the problems that you're trying to solve.Nina Meyers:Sure, happy to and thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. Foodbytes quite simply is a pitch competition and networking platform for sustainable food and AG innovators. So it started four plus years ago. We're actually about to do our 15th Foodbytes, which is in San Francisco, which is where it all began. So it's founded by Rabobank. Rabobank is one of the largest food and agriculture banks in the world and in North America, our clients are some of the largest and mid sized food and AG companies. We started to see that we're working with a lot of our corporates and they're facing a lot of challenges in innovation where we're all faced with this idea that we're going to have 10 billion people on the planet by 2050. We need to feed those people and we need to do so efficiently. There's lots of environmental challenges and there's a lot of startups that are starting to create nimble ways and test and experiment and are basically building technologies and products that are solving those challenges.So we, four and a half years ago said, we want to do something that's just for food and AG. There's lots of pitch opportunities out there for tech startups. There's lots of things that are cross-disciplinary, but we said, let's bring our knowledge to the table. Let's bring our corporates to the table and investors that are just looking at food and AG start to create an ecosystem where those startups can make the connections to help scale their technologies and on the converse side of that that the corporates can start to build relationships and really start to think about these ways that innovation is happening to bring it to their own businesses.Lisa Kiefer:Tell me how it operates. Is it a competition?Nina Meyers:Yeah, so it is a competition in its most essential form. We look through hundreds of applications. We score them and we come to 15 startups that we select to come and pitch from all around the world and we're looking at on the product side, on the tech side, on the agriculture tech sides. We're looking at like AG tech, food tech and food products and they basically have a two day experience jam packed, but we basically bring together our network of mentors in the room, experts in legal deal structuring, branding, PR and they have intimate mentor sessions with them. They get to build camaraderie and relationships with one another as the entrepreneurs. They get to practice their pitches for the judges that are going to judge them the next day and they really have this full day of just like, it's kind of like a mini business school. Learn as much as you can.Lisa Kiefer:Do you find that many of these startups don't have business skills?Nina Meyers:I wouldn't say that. I think it's like you're just trying to build your business day in and day out and you have to focus on that and this, we're doing this one day kind of takes them out of it a little bit and that they're like, "Oh I've been a tech company. I've been really focused on how do I build a relationships with corporates or how do I build the MVP of my technology, but I wasn't thinking about the brand. I wasn't thinking about how I should structure my series B round when I'm fundraising, when I'm just in this infancy of my seed stage." They start to just have a lot of information around them.Lisa Kiefer:It would seem like creativity doesn't have to go hand in hand with business skills. I mean getting the right people together.Nina Meyers:To an extent. It depends on which entrepreneur, which startup, but I would say that they kind of say, "I took a day out of my life, my building, my business life, but I got to get all these different intros and different insights and also of course the insights from the other entrepreneurs that are there who are facing similar challenges, building similar businesses." So they do that and then there's a pitch day, which is a traditional pitch competition. There's hundreds of people in the room. It's focused on investment, but it's also focused on Rabobank bringing our corporates into the room so that they can pitch for these potential partners.There's a lot of media there covering it to see what's kind of the cutting edge of food and AG innovation and then what we started with was this pitch competition. Now it's built into two days and we started to build a continuous community around that. We say, "Hey, do you want to meet with X, Y and Z?" They're really interested in thinking about partnering with you. We have a database of thousands of startups and we're always thinking about how can we continue to build relationships?Lisa Kiefer:Do you sometimes do that with those who maybe didn't make it, but they have a great idea? Maybe they don't have the right skills but you match them up with somebody else?Nina Meyers:Yep, absolutely. So we have a database of thousands of companies that have applied, but we also, we have 250 now alumni of the platform. We're looking at everyone who's ever sort of come across our radar who is an innovator in this space. So that's what happens over the two days, but we kind of say that it's a discovery platform, but it's also like the beginning of a relationship where Rabobank can kind of be this connector, be this matchmaker, be this champion for both sides of-Lisa Kiefer:Tell me about the judges. How many and who are these people?Nina Meyers:They change. Every food rates has had a different grouping of judges. I think we've had something like 75. It's probably closer to a hundred and mentors, but essentially they're some of our sponsors and partners. They're legal experts who work with startups to help them structure their deals and figure out how to engage with investors. They are actual investors in need of a CPG space or on the tech side. They are sometimes policy experts who are really focused on sustainable food policy and-Lisa Kiefer:So some academics?Nina Meyers:Yeah, academics. Exactly. So literally we've had judges sort of from all across the board. We've also started having an alumni come on as a judge to sort of speak from that first hand perspective of this is what happened when I was there. We have-Lisa Kiefer:That's a great idea.Nina Meyers:Yeah, we have Abby Ramadan from Impact Vision who is an alumni of our platform and she's been very involved. She's also based out here. We want the judging panel to be able to provide varying expertise.Lisa Kiefer:Does it always happen in the same city?Nina Meyers:It's global. We've been in San Francisco the most. We've been in Silicon Valley the most. This is our sixth San Francisco edition, but we've been in Australia. We've been in London. We've been in the Netherlands, New York. We're headed to Chicago in September. Oh, we were in Boulder. We were in Austin, but yeah, we're-Lisa Kiefer:So how many times a year are we talking?Nina Meyers:So we were doing three to four for awhile globally for 2020 and 2019 we're doing two so that we can really focus on doing more and providing more value for everyone in our ecosystem and the in between.Lisa Kiefer:So this year you have how many participants?Nina Meyers:We have 15 companies.Lisa Kiefer:And two are from the Bay Area?Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:One of them I'm particularly interested in. That's SnapDNA.Nina Meyers:Yes. We talk a little bit about some of the challenges that the companies are solving and one of them is sort of this idea of transparency. It's this idea of we all know about recalls that are happening in food all the time and there's a lot of opacity around what happens from the fields to your plate or wherever it comes from. So there are companies, there are a lot of innovation in this space that's happening around food safety and pathogen detection. So that SnapDNA is one of those companies that's really creating a real time test for folks in the food supply chain to get that information on whether food is safe or whether it has certain pathogens and we've seen a number of different sort of innovators come through that are focused on this, but this is something as a point I just made that's very, very well event to the corporate focus in the room.Lisa Kiefer:That can save so much money.Nina Meyers:It's about efficiency. It's obviously about safety. It's about consumer trust, which we know consumers want safer food, more sustainable food, healthier, more nutritious, cleaner and they're willing to pay more for it as well. So this is something that's important to all those players.Lisa Kiefer:Okay, and the other one is Planetariums and they're out of Palo Alto. Do you know much about them?Nina Meyers:Yes I do and the Planetariums is an up cycling company, which what does that mean? So it's and Claire I'm sure will talk more about this, but it is a waste stream that's up cycled into a new food essentially. So they are taking defatted seeds, which are a byproduct of the vegetable oil process and they are basically making that into a very nutritious protein rich flour. So they just announced today that they got, that they just raised a $750000 seed round and one of their investors is Barilla, which is the largest pasta producer in the world. So for a company like Barilla, to just give you an example is looking at this up cycling space and saying, "Yeah, of course we make pasta out of wheat, but we know that consumers want different things. Consumers want chickpea pasta. They want gluten free pasta. They still want traditional pasta, but let's look at ways that we can really provide something that consumers are starting to relate to.Lisa Kiefer:That's interesting. I've had a couple of your alumni on this show and one of them was Andrew Brentano who does cricket protein.Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:And the other people were in perfect produce and they also, we're trying to save money by getting rid of waste in the food marketplace.Nina Meyers:Yep.Lisa Kiefer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of FoodBytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based Renewal Mill. So I want to kind of shift over here to Claire Schlemme and Claire, you were an alumni of Foodbytes a couple of years ago.Claire Sclemme:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:We got up to the point where it's talking about judging. You made it to the finals.Claire Sclemme:Sure.Lisa Kiefer:What happened?Claire Sclemme:So as Nina mentioned, it's really it was a two day event for us. So the first day before the actual pitch competition, we had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different experts in different fields, which was, which was really great. So I think going back to that point, even with some business experience under our belt, it was a lot of really quick concentrated information that we were able to get from that day, which was excellent. So a lot of touching on all these legal issues, packaging issues, marketing issues, so really being able to touch all those different points and then also being able to have a pitch in front of the judges before the actual competition was also-Lisa Kiefer:So like a practice pitch.Claire Sclemme:It was a practice pitch. We got feedback on it, which was great. We could incorporate the feedback into our pitch for the next day, which was also very helpful and it really-Lisa Kiefer:Maybe you should tell us about your company.Claire Sclemme:Absolutely. So, so I'm the cp-founder and CEO of Renewal Mill and Renewal Mill up cycles byproducts from food manufacturing into high quality ingredients and products. So essentially we're building a portfolio of ingredients that are all being sourced from different byproducts. So the first-Lisa Kiefer:Like what?Claire Sclemme:So the first ingredient that we brought to market commercially is called Okara flour and it's made from the byproduct from soy milk production. So it's basically taking the soybean pulp that's generated when soy milk is made. We dry it, mill it and turn it into a high fiber, high protein, gluten free flour. So that's one example. There's a lot of other other places in the food system where this type of waste is happening. So particularly in food manufacturing waste is a really good place to be looking at food waste because it's kind of low hanging fruit in terms of being able to attack the food waste problem.Things coming out of a food manufacturing facility are food safe already because they're in this facility and they're often very concentrated in their scale because it's food production is pretty concentrated. So you have the ability to hit that economy of scale that you need to make a profitable business or make a business that can make sense. So we're focused primarily on these fibrous byproduct streams. So anything that's coming from really coming from that first step of bringing in anything from the field, the fruits, the vegetables, the beans, things like that and you get a lot of fiber rich byproducts because a lot of what we're processing out of our food system right now is fiber.Even though that's the one macronutrient that western diets are very deficient in. So we're starting with Okara. Okara production in the US is very concentrated actually. There's just a handful of major production facilities. So it's a strategic starting point for us from that point of view. From there we're looking at other byproducts of nondairy milk production. So within this big world of fibrous byproducts, we're looking specifically at these nondairy milk byproduct streams. So the byproducts coming out of almond milk production, oat milk production, that's where we're going to be headed at next.Lisa Kiefer:So anything with [holls 00:12:31].Claire Sclemme:Exactly, yeah.Lisa Kiefer:So you're up before the judges and you know your company well. What happened? What did they ask you? Give us the scenario.Claire Sclemme:That's it. That's a great question. So a lot of the feedback, the feedback always helps you kind of see things, obviously from outside eyes that haven't heard your story a million times. Basically a panel with different backgrounds be able to weigh in on things that are causing confusion for them or things that didn't quite come across.So really being able to make sure that we can really hone in on the right story that we want to be telling and making sure that it's coming across that way and being received that way by the judges and also making sure that we're presenting all the information that somebody would want to know. So making sure that we've addressed issues like competition in the field or kind of what our growth strategy is and making sure that we haven't left something kind of major out that a judge would want to see. So that was very helpful and I think it was also just helpful to get a sense of what the space is like and it's a pretty big event with quite a few attendees. So it's nice to feel comfortable on the stage and in front of the judges [crosstalk 00:13:35].Lisa Kiefer:How many minutes are you up there?Nina Meyers:It's three minutes now. So as far as-Lisa Kiefer:Wow, that's not much time.Nina Meyers:[inaudible] competitions, it's pretty tight, but the judges also ask questions after the companies go. So that it's like another layer of sort of engagement and that's-Lisa Kiefer:And do they get materials ahead of time?Nina Meyers:Yes. So they spend, obviously they're with each other the day before, but they also get materials many days in advance and they now they have meetings with some of the startups. So Claire participated two years ago and we've really continued to evolve what the programming looks like as people. We always get feedback. So the entrepreneurs say, "I actually want more time with investors that are, I know I'm going to meet the right investors." So we're doing actually an investor power hour for the first time this time around where we're strategically matching them with one or two investors and we're doing, it's not a speed dating because it's like 20 minutes, but basically meetings with those specific folks whose investment these align with what the startups are doing.Lisa Kiefer:Is the networking what they win or do you actually get funding?Nina Meyers:There isn't direct funding as a result of Foodbytes, but there are a number of prizes. One of the main ones is for all the three winners is that they, Rabobank hosts a huge summit in New York at the end of the year. So December and all of our corporate clients, so big food and AG companies are there and the winners across all the events from that year get to come and pitch and have targeted meetings with the corporates that are relevant for their businesses and they have a few days where they're just really targeted and meeting with folks that can potentially help them as partners. So that's one main prize and then a lot of our sponsors who are, like we said, experts in many different fields, there's also consultations with them so that they can get five hours of legal consultation on how to structure their deal. They can get PR consultation and branding consultation on how to build the best investor materials and DAX and present their brand in the best possible way.Lisa Kiefer:Claire, what was it you found to be the most useful out of winning this competition?Nina Meyers:So we weren't the winners from our cohort. We were in the finalists but actually kind of going back again to all the people that we meet during the two days, that was a very valuable thing for us that made the participation in the event very worthwhile for us. So we actually continued to have some conversations with some of the lawyers that we met there to talk about some of the legal structuring, some of the agreements that we were currently in the process of structuring and we also had continued conversation with folks that were very knowledgeable about packaging for food products because there's a lot that goes into making sure that the product fits all the legal regulations and the requirements. That was great to have both of those connections coming out of Foodbytes.Lisa Kiefer:Once you get involved with say a VC or some sort of funding source, do you ever worry about losing your company's mission? That it will begin to sort of move away from you?Claire Sclemme:Yeah, that's a great question. So actually one of the things that we did when we first founded the company thinking about that very point was that we incorporated as a public benefit corporation. So we wanted that to be really built into our mission and so we structured that into the type of business we actually were and one of the pieces of kind of feedback that we got at the very beginning was that maybe you don't want to do that because you might be closing yourself off to investors that aren't interested in investing in a benefit corporation and we said, "That's exactly why we want to do this, because it essentially is going to kind of self select the types of investors that we're looking for." So that was kind of the first layer and then the second of course is making sure that when we're talking to investors that we do have that mission alignment as we're taking on investment.Lisa Kiefer:Getting back to you, Nina, you've done this for several years now. What trends in agriculture are you seeing pop up from the startup companies? I mean, you talked about some of the problems in the AG industry. What are you seeing overall?Nina Meyers:Yeah, well a major trend. I'd say a cross food tech, AG tech and CPG as is this idea of waste mitigation. So up cycling is one avenue in which that's happening. Another one is of course packaging. We're seeing more and more edible packaging. We're seeing more compostable packaging, plant based packaging. We have a company that's pushing in Foodbytes called Coremat and that's exactly what they're doing. They're making compostable, plant-based packaging that's basically-Lisa Kiefer:That's awesome because all these cities are now saying it's too expensive to recycle.Nina Meyers:Exactly and from a regulatory perspective that this sort of clampdown is increasing. It's happened in Europe, forcing lots of innovation in the packaging world in Europe and it's starting to happen here. That's one massive trend and huge need that startups are really looking to solve and obviously an incredible opportunity for collaboration on the corporate side of things as they start to realize we really, really need to be focusing on it. It's happening [crosstalk 00:18:31-Lisa Kiefer:Why are you giving me a plastic bag?Nina Meyers:Why are you giving me a straw? Right, exactly. So that's one place where we're seeing a lot of innovation and then on the waste mitigation side as well, right? Stopping waste before it can happen. So more and more technology companies are saying, let's use data and technology to stop waste before it can happen. So a company like [Winnow] who's come through our platform, they basically have a scale for food service and back of house at restaurants that weighs waste as it's going out and then gives restaurants a better picture of their wastage so that they can decrease that. That's the-Lisa Kiefer:What's the incentive for someone to reduce their waste at the restaurant level?Nina Meyers:Money. They save restaurants globally $25 million a year and they're not that big yet. I mean they're just starting out. So it's money.Lisa Kiefer:It sounds like you've put together a lot of qualitative data.Nina Meyers:Yes, we, like I said, we started with a very, very small team and over the last year or so we've built up the team like I said. So we've just brought in a data analyst who is amazing and we're sort of at the tip of the iceberg for what data are we sitting on and what are we saying? But yes, we have a really good picture of trends that are happening. That's one major, major trend that we're seeing. The other one is sort of just the environmental impact of food-Lisa Kiefer:Climate change?Nina Meyers:... Production, of climate change and also to hand in hand with that that consumers have more and more knowledge of that and are demanding better, cleaner products.Lisa Kiefer:Yeah, look at the Midwest right now.Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:All the flooding and that used to be our bread basket.Nina Meyers:That's when it has to change and startups are really heeding that call on the plant based foods side of things as well. Just if we're talking about packaged foods in general, we're seeing so much innovation in that space. We're seeing at least 40% of the companies that apply that have a product that apply to Foodbytes are in some way related to the plant based space. To sort of talk about some of the companies that are pitching coming up in San Francisco we're seeing new and novel plant based proteins. So we have a company called [Tali] and they are making waterlily seed puffs. So we see the puffs as like a huge category in the food product world, but this is a new type of puff. It's basically bringing in an heirloom varietal.It's gotten more protein, more nutritious. They're doing some really interesting flavors. So we're seeing companies like that who are bringing this plant based protein view to snacking. We also have a company called Gem and they basically have the first FDA regulated supplement product, food supplement. It's for women by women. It's made from algae and a number of different plants. Real food. It's clean food. So we're seeing things in that type of space. I was just at Expo West, which is the largest natural foods show in the country and I think it's 1500 exhibitors, 90000 people.Lisa Kiefer:Where was it?Nina Meyers:It's in Anaheim. It's 90000 people. So it's very, very intense and there's a lot of companies that are doing very similar things. There's the plant-based trend just continues to grow year over year. So whether that's new algae products, that's lots of cauliflower products, you see the confluence of a lot of trends.Lisa Kiefer:Are any UC Berkeley professors or policy people judging this year?Nina Meyers:Not this year, but next year we're going to make it happen.Claire Sclemme:Oh excellent.Lisa Kiefer:Can anyone go to this?Nina Meyers:Yes. It's open to the public. We really want people there who care about these issues, who care about sustainable food and AG, who want to see what the innovators at the bleeding edge of sustainable innovation are doing. Next Thursday, the 28th of March, starting at 2:00 PM, it's really an opportunity to see these 15 startups pitch, to engage with them and see their products and technologies, have some delicious food and drinks and if you want to get into food or if you're a journalist or if you're a student and this is where the world you think you want to go into, we absolutely encourage you to come. If you're an investor or you're a food corporate and you're trying to figure out what's next, we 1000000% encourage you to come.Lisa Kiefer:And you have a website?Nina Meyers:Foodbytesworld.com. Instagram is Foodbytes by Rabobank. We've profiled all the companies who are going to be pitching. There's lots of content. Claire's on there somewhere. So check us out on Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and then Foodbytesworld.com is where you can get tickets to come and see us next week.Lisa Kiefer:And Claire, your business is located where?Claire Sclemme:Oh, we're in Oakland.Lisa Kiefer:Okay, what have your challenges been since you participated in Foodbytes?Claire Sclemme:Oh, that's a good question. Our biggest challenge I would say is that, so working in the byproduct space, we're really a bridge builder between the production and then bringing that into the market. We have less control over being able to scale in a way that other companies might be able to have as they're creating products. So we're really bound to the amount of byproducts that are coming out of certain facilities. So being able to match that production with the sales is really, I would say one of our biggest challenges. So it kind of swings back and forth from having more demands than we have a production for to having more supply of the ingredient than we currently have sales force. So it's kind of bouncing back and forth as we try to strike that perfect balance as we bring these ingredients on board.Lisa Kiefer:And are most of your sources local?Claire Sclemme:So right now they are. So our first source is in Oakland, which is why we started out in Oakland and why we're based there. So our first partner facility is Hodo Foods and they're a tofu manufacturer. So the first step of making tofu is making the soy milk and so that's where we're basically harvesting the Okara from is from Hodo and our next two facilities that we will likely be using as our sources of production are also in northern California.Nina Meyers:When you sort of spoke about what do they get out of this, the alumni who come through our platforms have raised a combined 550 million. I believe it was something like 150 last year. So even though it's not directly a prize, this is what we've seen as the companies who've come out of who we've chosen, who we've selected, this is how they're moving forward and getting that investment to scale their companies.Lisa Kiefer:You must be checking the failure rate of these companies as they-Nina Meyers:Yes.Lisa Kiefer:... they leave Foodbytes. What is the failure rate?Nina Meyers:It's under 10% because we're doing really like a lot of due diligence in the process of picking the ones that we think are really going to be successful. It's relatively low. It's lower than the average.Lisa Kiefer:Do you have a business background?Nina Meyers:I actually went to college in upstate New York at Skidmore college. I studied at a liberal arts school and I had was working in a sustainable restaurant, a farm to table restaurant the summer after college and my Mom is a chef and so I grew up around food. Food is my whole life and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next when I moved to New York during the recession in 2009. I started working for a restaurant company in New York in the creative department. I got sort of my foot in the door there and started working on marketing and design for the restaurants.So that was really a sort of honed my skills there on the marketing side of things. Started to realize through being in New York that what I really cared about was sustainability in food and agriculture and trying to figure out what to do next. I then went onto work for Food Tech Connect, which is a site of record for food innovation essentially. We did a lot of events in this space and meetups and consulting and hackathons, which is really all focused on sustainable food and agriculture. So I was there. I was working with startups directly. Spent about four years there and then we started working together with Rabobank to build Foodbytes out from its infancy.Lisa Kiefer:Claire how did you get into this pat of the world?Claire Sclemme:Yes. So my background is actually in environmental management. So I have in my masters in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry. I had primarily actually been involved mostly in the space of sustainability and energy and so I'd worked at a renewable energy startup in India and worked with UN climate change, but I started to realize how important the food system is in the space of sustainability and I, kind of my first transition into into food was actually co-founding a juice company in Boston where I was living at the time. So we started as a food truck and we were connecting farmers to folks in the city through juices and smoothies and then in that process saw how much waste is created when you're juicing. It was really kind of like this moral issue.At the end of the day we'd sourced all this great produce from these farmers and it was all organic. It was mostly local. You'd spend a lot of money to buy all this produce and we're throwing out a huge amount of it at the end of the day, ll that pulp that's left over from juicing. On the the other side, of course we're selling the product that we are making, we're selling at a price point that's pretty high for the, it wasn't a super affordable food for much of the city and so those two pieces together kind of where you know really struck me as a challenge and that was a space that I really wanted to continue working in after I left that company.So when I had really just a fortuitous conversation with the owner of Hodo Foods in Oakland, the owner of the tofu factory and saw that he had this challenge with his byproduct that he was producing, which was very similar to what I had seen at the juice company, but at this much bigger scale and that it wasn't just a Okara, it was lots of different opportunities and lots of different sources of these types of byproducts. That was really the beginning of Renewal Mill was looking into how we can solve both food waste and also increase affordable nutrition in the food system.Nina Meyers:Claire really pioneered this space and now there's a company that's much younger than you, but it's called Pulp Pantry and they're doing, they're solving the problem that Claire just outlined. It's like entrepreneurial serendipity. They saw the same problem and they're making value added snacks out of juice pulp.Lisa Kiefer:Wow, you should all join forces and become the next Nabisco.Claire Sclemme:I know. Exactly, exactly.Nina Meyers:[crosstalk 00:28:19].Lisa Kiefer:[crosstalk] better.Nina Meyers:That's exactly what Foodbytes wants to have happen.Claire Sclemme:Yeah.Lisa Kiefer:Well, was there anything else that is coming up with Foodbytes besides this conference next week?Nina Meyers:Rabo has a whole other food and AG innovation platform called Tara. It is basically the next step in the cycle for startups to engage with Rabo after Foodbytes. That's what Tara is all about. We're going into our fourth cohort and applications are open now. Tara is like, how can we do the best possible matchmaking for startups and corporates? So applications are open now. That website is Taraaccelerator.com. They're open. They close on April 26th. So any startups, anyone you think is interested, you can learn about the corporates that are participating to see and so you can learn more there.Claire Sclemme:In addition to kind of all of the structured support that's coming out of Foodbytes, I think the other piece that was really valuable to us was actually meeting the other companies that we're pitching and there there's been some valuable connections that we've had in terms of the the business and actually finding uses for our flour with some of the other companies that have been on the platform, but also just really to talk to other entrepreneurs and be able to just talk about some of the other challenges that you're facing from a business perspective and also from a personal perspective as well. So it's a really, I think it's a really great community of entrepreneurs that are being brought together as well.Lisa Kiefer:Well thank you so much for being on the show.Claire Sclemme:Thank you.Nina Meyers:Thank you for having us.Lisa Kiefer:You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks. [music] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So December is a hard month to make content! Schedules get so busy with work and family obligations! This week